Many much more interesting things happened over the weekend. For example, the martian rover Spirit was fixed. Oppertunity rolled off it's lander, and the MyDoom virus unleashed it payload onto the SCO website.
And that last one is the one I feel like talking about.
I am absolutely FURIOUS at whoever wrote that virus. Don't get me wrong, SCO is clearly making a power play to try and abuse the market. So I'll talk about that for a bit and then move on to why I'm gonna clobber the guy who released the virus. On their (currently temporary) website, I've spent some time reading about what they're claiming in their lawsuit. Turns out that they are attacking the end users, not the distributers. Now it is clear that the dirstributers would be just as much in violation of their intellectual property rights as would be the end users. Red Hat, one of the major distributors, which isn't actually at risk with SCO's claim, in an effort to protect their coustemers, has countered with a suit placing some serious allogations against the SCO group, including unfair business practices and deceptive trade practices. SCO countered it by claiming that these are just "Red Hat is asking the Court to decide general issues between SCO and the entire Linux industry. "1 As of the last time I checked, the charges filed by Red Hat are not 'general issues', those are some serious legal accusations.
But lets talk for a moment about the specifics of SCO's claim. They claim that 3 segments of code where stolen from the UNIX source base, Non-Uniform Memory Access, Read Copy Update, and The Journal File System. Now, supposedly the theft is only found in the 2.4 and above kernels. But all of these compnents have been in the OS since version 1. This means that for some completely unknown reason, the Linux community spontaneously changed the core components of their operating system code (which had been working fine and often better that UNIX System V) back to the older UNIX System V code. And more than that, they did this on their code as it applies to ALL operating platforms (including the Power PC, whose processing core didn't even exist when System V was written and would be incompatible with the NUMA code from System V.) Maybe I should download the 2.24 kernel source and the 2.2 kernel source and compare them... I wouldn't be at all suprised that they are almost identical, which would clearly invalidate the SCO claim.
And if that wasn't enough, SCO is offering Intellectual Property licenses to people using the Linux kernel. So you can get down to the business of "Paying" them for the rights to use their binary code. Which BTW, they chare $199 for a CLIENT license for those three components. Let's pretend for a moment that they are telling the truth. That would say that all the claims against Microsoft for price gauging with their "Client" OS Windows XP Home are all invalid. Instead, Microsoft should charge $199 for the files VMM.VXD, and NTFS.VXD (Which are the virtual drivers that are the equivilents to what SCO supposedly owns in the 2.4 Linux kernel) and all the other parts should cost extra. Oh... And for a server like my dear Motoko, I'm supposed to pay $699 for it. Well I say piss on that! I can purchase a shiney new copy of Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server for a mere $1500 bucks and get a web server, file manager, shell, network operating system, hardware device drivers, web browser, server management tools, and 5 client licenses for Windows 2000 Workstation too boot. As such it is CLEARLY a blatent act at gouging on SCO's part, and to make matters worse, SCO is trying to gouge a market it doesn't even actually have a claim on.
GRRR....
However, let us now discuss this little MyDoom virus. As much as I would like to get my hands on the wise guy at SCO who would dream up such a stupid claim, I know full well that any attempt to do so would only lead to evidence to support SCO's claim. "Although the death of our dear friend is tragic, it is just proof that they're desperate. It's come to kicking and shoving. Liek a cornered dog, they're making their last grabs at whats left. But we won't let them." And that's all this stupid virus has done. And to make matters worse, it's lead to basic bounty hunting on this idiots head. In this fight, the last thing we need is myrtars. Welcome to the modern day, where dying for the cause makes you a terrorist and attacks against businesses lead to bombings not change. As the McDonalds coffee example show, the only way to change a business is with a multi-million dollar law suit. These little attacks will do nothing but galvinize the community and cause them to have less sympathy for our cause. As such it means we have to be civil about this and approach it from angles that are going to be effective, not destructive...
But every group has it's war hawk. And it will be because of them that we fail.
1 SCO | Scosource | SCOsource,
Deep breaths... Don't kill anyone... Killing makes things worse... Deep breaths...
Mood: Infuriated