SCO v. Novell: stick a fork in them, they're done

It's official: the jury ruled in SCO v. Novell that Novell owns the copyrights that SCO was trying to claim. That pretty much puts paid to all of SCO's dreams of a litigation-lottery win in the IBM case too. IBM's not inclined to settle, and pretty much all that's left is IBM's counterclaims against SCO. SCO has a few scraps of claim left, but all the evidence they're presented put together doesn't amount to enough to make a porn starlet's bikini.

Here's the actual jury verdict form.

Browser process models

Everyone's praising IE8 for it's new one-process-per-tab model. It's got many advantages over the threaded model used by most browsers, including the fact that a crash of one tab can't take other tabs or the browser down. What most people don't seem to get is that the multiple-process model isn't new with IE8, and in fact the threaded model was one adopted only over the strenuous objections of everybody else. You see, threads exist for one reason and one reason only: on VMS and Windows (which was designed in part by the guy responsible for designing VMS), creating a process is expensive. You need threads in those OSes because you can't create a lot of processes quickly. But Unix had cheap process creation from day one. You needed another thread in Unix, you forked off another process. Threads weren't needed. But everybody in the Windows community kept braying about needing threads and why didn't Unix have them, oblivious to the fact that they already had what threads did in the fork() call. So Unix finally, reluctantly, adopted threads with all their pitfalls. And programmers used them heavily when processes would've been more appropriate. Until the pitfalls finally became too much to live with, when they went from just driving programmers nuts to causing problems for the very users who demanded them in the first place. So now we're back to where Unix was 25 years ago, forking a new process when you need a new thread of execution.

aseigo on new MS/Novell deal

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/08/microsoft-and-novell-reaffirm-pact.html

aseigo has some comments on MS's new deal with Novell to buy more Linux support coupons. I have to agree with him. One thing that has bothered me with MS's activites is their nebulous claims about their IP that's supposedly infringed upon by Linux. My first reaction is "I'm from Missouri. Show me.". Exactly what intellectual property does Microsoft claim to own that's being infringed upon, and exactly what in a Linux distribution infringes upon it and how? Lay it out and let's get it resolved. And yet Microsoft won't do that. They play coy, dodging around saying exactly what it is they're accusing Linux of. And my immediate reaction to that is to think that they really don't have any claim that'll stand up to public scrutiny, that if they had to actually lay it out all they'd end up with is "We got nuthin'.". And that makes me immediately suspicious of any deal that supports them in this. When someone's running a scam (which is what a false claim to get others to pay you is, a scam), there's only two kinds of people doing business with them: marks, and accomplices. I probably want to avoid both.

Artistic License is a copyright license after all

In the Jacobsen v. Katzer case, the trial court had ruled that the Artistic License (the open-source license under which the software involved was distributed) was a contract, not a copyright license. The Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit has overturned that ruling. The case is convoluted, because it originates not out of a copyright dispute but out of a patent issue. The copyright aspect came up out of the patent portion of the case. But it's good news nonetheless for open-source software. One of the standard arguments by open-source detractors is that the GPL and similar licenses are just contracts, subject to the vagaries of contract law, and violations of them have to be pursued as contract breaches. Now it's possible to hold up this ruling and say to them "The US Appeals Court disagrees with you.". Among other things this affects are the ability to recover costs. In a standard breach-of-contract suit the plaintiff, even if they win, is expected to bear their own costs except in unusual circumstances. In copyright-infringement actions, though, the law grants the prevailing party a much greater right to recover their costs and legal fees. This makes it easier for open-source authors to find lawyers willing to help them with copyright enforcement.