IBM does billions of dollars in Linux buisness annually.   SCO began it's campaign of derogation against Linux and IBM in 2003.   Some estimates say that at it's peak the SCO matter slowed Linux adoption by as much as 20%.   Do the math.

SCO asserted IP rights against Linux which appear baseless.   As determined by a court, SCO does not own the UNIX rights it asserted as being infringed by Linux ... as well as never having demonstrated that Linux infringes them in any way.    All of these are reasons for damages and specifically identified as such in the Lanham Act.

There is also strong evidence that CEO Darl McBride and chairman of SCO's Board of Directors, Ralph Yarro, personally knew that SCO did not own the copyrights.

IANAL, but given the Utah court's Aug 10 2007 ruling, and the multiple public statements by SCO officers, including McBride and Yarro, Lanham damages look like a given if asked.

RedHat has similar claims, though certainly for a lesser amount.

No SCO reorganization plan should be accepted by the court which does not account for this potential liability.          All discovery in the IBM suit is complete and a trial would be scheduled within months of the suit being unstayed.    The "certification" of SCO's liability in this matter is only MONTHS, not years away once SCO emerges from the protection of the bankruptcy court.

Justice and judicial economy in this matter can be served only by denying any present reorganization plan and unstaying the IBM trial so that a dollar amount of liability can be determined.    Otherwise, with very high probability, SCO will return to bankruptcy court a year or two after emergence but with a liability that no possible reorganization or refinancing could ameliorate.

(to be published http://the-brights.net/community/forums on The Chinese Room Thread,   http://www.zensden.net , and as a diary at http://www.ip-wars.net  The Chinese Room revisited.)

Can I play too?

I realize I'm way behind on my reading so don't have all the academic lingo nailed yet.  But ...

The first question is can one have consciousness without self awareness?     I think not. (ha ha) but would welcome a contrary argument.   Then self awareness is a necessary but not sufficient condition - my computer is quite "self aware" and adapts its inner workings considerably depending upon its inner knowledge of its own state.

For Darl and Ralph the news is very bad
A patent troll will make Big Blue mad.

Blue Gene will calculate that the world must see
What happens to those who claim Linux IP

In Debtor's Court SCOX is already broken
Their executives hides will make a perfect token.

That being so, I got myself a PACER account and began pulling down the filings each weeknight and giving a brief rundown on the docket action on IV and copied to Y.   But there were long stretches where there was no news, and I wanted to reassure my audience that the dockets were being looked at even if there was nothing new in them.   But it gets pretty dull to say "no news tonight" over and over again.

Now over on Y before Yahoo lost its corporate mind, we were a large collection of strange characters.  Occasional verse and poetry popped up, so when I ran into long stretches of no news it occurred to me to spend a couple minutes composing some throwaway doggerel to amuse.

zensden is hosted on a dedicated server at IPOWER (well, has been, and hopefully will be just long enough for me to move it elsewhere).   My partner and I had originally had some of our client's work at IPOWER servers as well.  We moved our clients off when they were down for three days last year.   I shrugged and figured that an occasional outage of a couple days wouldn't bother me much for my casual development work - there were widespread power outages in California at that time.   But it's been five full days this time and if there are mitigating circumstances I haven't heard of them.   I'm pissed.   I'm more pissed about the long hold times total lack of any real salient information coming from IPOWER than I am about the outage itself.

Friday night, when posting my usual docket entries to the message board and trying to shove in a few more interesting docs from the SCOX bankruptcy dockets, I found the site was down giving multiple errors.   I ssh'd in and found I could not write any files.  The last message in the log was a Drive Seek/Complete error.  

I have a life so after half an hour on hold Friday night, I gave up.

Saturday after being on hold 15 minutes I tried their live chat. Never mind the grisly, garish color, it was 15 minutes more before "Chad Smith" (I almost believe it - whoTF would choose THAT for a pseudonym?) came on line.   All I got from him is "we do not assist with problems with dedicated servers ... please contact your system administrator".   Well after 20 years as a professional Systems Programmer and Systems Admin this systems admin is at a complete loss on how to deal with a hard disk error from three thousand miles away, especially with the assistance of a poorly trained monkey on the other end of a neon pink chat screen.

Another half hour later (my phone was still blaring out their inane hold music) when someone did finally pick up II explained the situation again was  told "they would try to reboot the server and if that didn't fix it I would have to pay for someone to fix it (which in their generosity, they promised would be refunded if it turned out to be a hardware problem and not a configuration problem).

I bit my tounge, since I had a scrape of that last log message, and said OK.

Sunday afternoon, The IP address was not even pinging now. I figured they had done the bounce, which naturally failed.  I called back.  No there was no other news attached to the ticket, could I try back later?

Late Sunday night.   They had indeed tried to reboot which failed with a disk problem.  Real big news, that.  At least they weren't trying to extort more money from me now.    Remember that at this point the box had been down two full days.   I was told that I would hear from them in 24-48 hours.

Tonight, 48 hours later.  The box has been down since Friday (It was working Thursday ... I had posted to my message board that then).   I was on hold an hour and a half before some useless jackass picked up the phone.    He said they're "running behind" on service to  dedicated servers.  He said I should hear back from them in a day or two.

IPOWER's web site says they're having a sale on web hosting.  Gee, doesn't their sale look just yummy?

I think I've found another company as incompetent as SCOX.   A pity they're not a publicly traded company, I'd love to short them out the wazoo.   I only put zensden on there after I had moved all my clients off, so everything from my business and the software I've developed has long been safe, but, (time to kick myself!) my most recent zensden backup is months back. ( I do have the ybsnarfz tables saved somewhere, though finding them may be a headache.   I want my server back long enough to get the zensden posts, then I'll be moving elsewhere.

In the past when such a decision was made, I was usually told to start looking for another job ... or would already have been handed my hat.  But my current employer claims they want me to stay on.  Maybe this time it will be different (pause, looking out the window to see which direction the asteroid strike will come from ... my inner cynic says "keep looking, it's faaaaaaaar more likely.").  Well says I to my boss, then I'm going to need Visual Studio Pro and some training classes.   To my surprise VS and MSDN were installed on my work box a week later, and they paid for the training classes with no friction at all.

On Fridays I usually wait until much later to check because the MoFo team in particular has a nasty habit of late filing.  But on a hunch I checked early tonight (I'll check back later to see if the MoFo's are doing the moonlight filing as well).

-------

Novell

http://www.zensden.net/Documents/SCO-v-Novell

It's over.  Today, 10 August 2007 Judge Kimball issued his rulings on the SJ's in SCO v Novell.

You can get the gory details at http://www.zensden.net/Documents/SCO-v-Novell  Document 377 is today's big ruling.

In large, Novell most of them, including the most important.

And of course I have not the slightest reason in the world to believe that anyone empowered at any level is listening or will listen to what I write.

I despise software patents.  I haven't yet seen any good reason for them.  Certainly I understand and recognize the value of software being part of a patent for a specific piece of hardware, but not when that same hardware absent the software has many other valid uses.  Very little could lighten my day better than waking up some day and reading that the Supreme Court has issued a ruling which will generally invalidate software patents.   There's even a little hope from recent rulings that SCOTUS may someday do this.

But today, as the US laws and courts stand, software patents are real and enforced by the Federal Courts.  We F/OSS advocates cannot just pretend that they don't exist and have no meaning.   Certainly those collecting prior art, documenting obviousness, and building portfolios of patents to bargain against F/OSS threatening patent holders are to be applauded, and I encourage them to continue.

I had played with ruby a little bit in my prior gentoo installation and don't recall having much trouble getting it installed.    A couple of months ago my box died taking my main disk with it.  After replacing the dead cpu fan, I needed to get up and running again shortly so I just loaded FC6 on it after determining that the data was fragged but the disk sound (no fsck could not recover it).  I've meant to go back to gentoo, but haven't found a round tuit.  This evening's adventure is just one more reason I need to go look for one.

Well I've been playing with ruby again, and gronk!  database connectivity failed.  Seems DB drivers are not part of the package.  Ho hum, yum, yum.  Nope, the ruby drivers are not in the repos, nor in any rpm packages I was able to find.

The documentation I did find might as well have been written by MS (well, it wasn't that bad - it actually worked once you learned the missing assumptions).

My ruby install (1.8.5) was working fine.  And I had installed the developer tools gcc, etc (I thought I had installed everything, which is my default whenever I install Fedora, but read on...). Likewise my mysql and postgresql installations were working.

I fiddled around for about two hours before the obvious hammered its way into my brain.  I'll spare you the tedious details of how I discovered the solution, but here it is:

(as root for the yum's and install stages, preferably not elsewhere, but it's your box)

yum install mysql-devel
yum install postgresql-devel

For whatever reason, my "everything" install of FC6 did not install the files in these packages.   So naturally my attempt to build the DB drivers for ruby failed.  Once I installed the devel packages things proceeded with only ordinary pain.

Fetch mysql-ruby from http://tmtm.org/downloads/mysql/ruby/ and choose the latest version. Currently 2.7.3
Untar.
cd to the mysql-ruby-x.x.x directory.
ruby extconf.rb config --with-mysql-config=/usr/bin/mysql_config
make
make install

Then the similar dance for postgresql:

Fetch the ruby-postgres-x.x.x.tar.gz (0.7.1) from http://ruby.scripting.ca/postgres/
Untar and cd to the ruby-postgres-x.x.x directory
ruby extconf.rb config
make
make install

Now you're ready for the magic.  Actually I did this first, but it doesn't seem to matter.

Download the dbi package from http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-dbi/
Untar and cd.
ruby setup.rb config --with=dbi,dbd_mysql,dbd_pg
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

NOW your ruby DBI.connect should work for both mysql and postgresql.  It does on my box. I'm annoyed that none of these key packages are setup for gems yet.  And that the documentation was fragmentary.  But, it was "good enough" that I could finally see through what was needed.  

HTH

I've read some of the articles on "renewable" energy sources.  But with my rather dated scientific knowledge I seriously doubt that however heroic the efforts any combination of renewable energy technologies can give this world what it needs most desparately - power to provide a comfortable standard of living for all the world's peoples.  

I tend to see the US's current adventurism as little more than a desparate attempt to maintain access to the dwindling reserves of oil.   Shameful.

Workable fusion might be discovered next month ... or it might not happen for another fifty years.

The only real solution I see is nuclear power and lots of it.  Western commercial reactors have an amazing saftey record. (I gravely misdoubt the alarmist scenarios constructed around TMI; Chernobyl - an abysmal primitive design pressed into economic service for political reasons - simply should not have been allowed to happen - I've no idea what did happen as to recrimination but people should have been hanged for allowing it to happen) and even a handfull of catastrophic failures per century is better than the cold slow death of civilization I forsee without it.

I doubt the US any longer has the political will to do what is needed - a crash program, NOW, to begin construction of new plants - and a lot of them - doing things "right" involves planning for
displacement of ALL non renewable carbon energy sources in the next 50 [ideally less] years with additional surplusses to account for growth of the population and economy.  If we wait until heating oil is rationed and have nationwide scheduled brownouts to conserve it will be too late.

Are any countries actually doing this on a scale that could make a difference?  A brief bit encounter with google turns up an OK for new construction in England and discussions of new plants in China, and even the Bush administration has sent up a flyer but no nation I'm aware of has announced any program - or even plans to discuss such - on the scale I believe the situation calls for.