Linux-Advocacy Digest #629, Volume #31 Sun, 21 Jan 01 01:13:04 EST
Contents:
Re: Why Hatred? (The Ghost In The Machine)
Re: Linux is crude and inconsistant. (J Sloan)
Re: Linux is crude and inconsistant. (T. Max Devlin)
Re: Win2k vs Linux? Why downgrade to Linux? (The Ghost In The Machine)
Re: New Microsoft Ad :-) ("Ayende Rahien")
Re: Red hat becoming illegal? ("Ayende Rahien")
Re: What really burns the Winvocates here... ("Joseph T. Adams")
Re: A salutary lesson about open source (T. Max Devlin)
Re: Linux is crude and inconsistent. (T. Max Devlin)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Ghost In The Machine)
Subject: Re: Why Hatred?
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 05:01:23 GMT
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Charlie Ebert
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote
on Thu, 18 Jan 2001 03:31:48 GMT
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
>>In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Charlie Ebert
>><[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> wrote
>>on Wed, 17 Jan 2001 03:31:43 GMT
>><[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>>>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Nick Condon wrote:
>>>>Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Fine, I'll reword it just for you. Linux cannot replace Windows as the
>>>>> major OS of choice today.
>>>>
>>>
>>>Let me put an edge on this.
>>>
>>>
>>>Horse shit!
>>>
>>>You don't have a clue Fukenbush!
>>
>>I think E.F. is right on this one. Until some issues are addressed --
>>mostly in terms of ease of use out of the box -- Linux can't be
>>a direct plug-in replacement for Windows. (Remember that most businesses
>>can't swap out all of their infrastructure at once; they do it a
>>piece at a time.)
>>
>
>Utter crap! In the mainframe world this kind of move is done all
>the time. And before there were Windows and PC's people did things
>the old manual way with pen and paper.
If I remember the mainframe world correctly -- and I can't say I
have an awful lot of experience in the field -- there were two
makers, IBM and Amdahl, and one was doing copies of the other's
hardware. This makes a swap almost trivial. :-)
Mind you, Data General's in there somewhere, too -- and I have no
idea what they do, machinewise. Presumably they're a little
different, which means a recompile and/or reinstall. And then
there was Cray....
But this is not my area of expertise; my idea of a mainframe would
probably be on the order of a VAX 11/780. :-)
(And that wasn't a mainframe, anyway, just a big mini with the
blazingly-fast speed of 1 MIPS. We worked on two VAX 11/750s, each
of which was about half as fast, with 2.2 gig worth of storage (6 large
Fujitsu's, each bigger than a maxitower, 400 MB each, and *heavy* suckers),
and 8 megs RAM on the one, 5 on the other. Another machine we had
was a small PDP 11/34 with a 300 megabyte removable pack the size
of a washing machine (Memorex). Wow, times have changed; I now
have 1.5 gigabyte Syquest cartridges -- and those are old, too, and
the size of my hand...)
And then of course there's Sun, HP, and what was once DEC
(those are the ones I'm most familiar with, since my expertise
was primarily Unix desktop workstations, and before that, Apollo
DOMAIN nodes and VAXes and a stupid little PC-like 286 machine Daisy
put out before they got swallowed up by Intergraph).
I'll admit, swapping out one mainframe sounds like a bit of a job,
but doable. I'm not sure that an awful lot of installations are
still running in that mode, however; most of them are probably
going to be distributed PC's running Windows, with a server backend
somewhere, probably a mix of systems. (A few, such as my ex-employer,
had a fair number of Unix+X desktops.)
But then again, who would have thought that in the new millennium
the Federal Aviation Administration is still running on 1970's-era
hardware? The mind boggles.
>
>How did we get from pen and paper to the PC?
It's amusing to look at a pre-1950 dictionary for the word "computer". :-)
>
>
>>There is the possibility that a company might be able to replace
>>NT SMB providers with SAMBA servers [*], though; NT webservers would
>>then be replaced by Apache units, and the users switch from
>>Microsoft Outlook to a POP-based Netscape setup. Or perhaps
>>they use StarOffice.
>>
>
>
>It's much more than a possibility.
Indeed. Probably more reliable after the swapout, too.
>
>
>>Once the users are suitably conditioned, the central mail
>>system can be switched over from Exchange to sendmail or qmail,
>>and the long process of switching user boxes would begin,
>>probably department by department. The infrastructure will
>>have to support mixed-use SMB and NFS for awhile (easy enough
>>for Linux).
>>
>
>
>Suitably conditioned?
If you prefer, "weaned off of Microsoft Office and onto Netscape
or StarOffice". :-) In any event, I assume some retraining
is necessary.
>
>
>
>>It gets worse if some of those users are program developers.
>>It's not clear what would replace VC++, without retraining (I
>>can live with vi and gmake, but not everyone's so willing to
>>switch like that :-) ).
>>
>
>
>Well I guess you would use C++ then?
Possibly. Depends on the mix.
At my current employer, for example, I switch between C++ and Java,
depending on the project. I like and occasionally use Borland's
JBuilder; unlike J++, it doesn't require language extensions to
build GUIs, and it has the very nice (but a bit buggy) feature
that allows one to edit either the source code, or the GUI designer,
and modify the GUI to one's tastes. It even recognizes changes made
to variable names.
It also runs on both Linux and NT, as well as Solaris, HP/UX,
AIX -- in fact, any platform running a good Java JVM.
>
>
>>As for starting a new company -- probably best to do it right, and
>>that means using Linux. :-) But I doubt that company startups
>>are the bulk of new computer and/or OS sales.
>>
>
>
>I would agree with this one.
Yeah, but I suspect that so many get suckered. NT is easy to use
in small groups, for example -- one NT server, a few workstations
running Win95 and/or WinNT, and you're all set.
At least, it's easy to use -- if one's familiar with Windows.
A lot of people think they are -- after all, it's what most
people see at home, and they probably think "hey, I can do
that at work".
But it doesn't scale horribly well as a solution, I think.
Maybe Linux will change the way we think of things. I hope so.
>
>
>>So I think E.F. is right -- today. Tomorrow might be another matter,
>>especially if Java takes off (it's doing pretty darned well already).
>>
>
>
>To say that E.F. is right about anything or even truthful about
>anything is a slap to the human race all the way back to the
>birth of Christ.
>
>Your talking about a man who claims Windows is reliable and
>scalable and in the same breath says Linux isn't.
>
>Yet there are no SUPERCOMPUTER clusters built from Windows.
Actually, I suspect there are one or two, gathering dust somewhere.
I'm reminded of the much ballyhooed attempt to convert Hotmail
to Windows NT, for example. That's not quite a supercomputer
in the CPU-intensive sense, mind you, but it is (was?) a cluster
of some sort -- and it didn't work all that well, as I recall.
Useful? Probably not.
I suspect they'll try again with Win2k Datacenter or something,
and probably be a tad more successful (e.g., we switched from NT4 to
W2k on our webfarm and the reliability improvement was very nice,
although still not up there with Apache. But there's not a whole
lot one can do with .ASP code. :-) )
>
>Your talking about a man who claims that GCC is the compiler
>of choice for Windows developers.
E.F. likes GCC on Windows? Somebody's confused. :-)
(I certainly am, at the moment.)
>
>E.F. is one of the most mind boggling cases of twisted perverted
>thinking I've ever run into on the internet.
Oh, I dunno -- there's a character who used to hang out on
talk.abortion -- or maybe alt.abortion -- who actually liked
that one webpage (the one with the dripping blood and the
names of doctors on the "target list", crossed off as they were
killed and grayed out if wounded -- it made the news some time back
and has since been removed from the Web) and would gladly shoot
abortion doctors, given half a chance. Now *that's* twisted. :-/
And he's not alone, I'm sure. That's *really* twisted. :-(
>
>You could put a peice of white typing paper in front of the buffoon
>and he would hollar that peice of cardboard is black. Then actually
>get into an argument with you about it and proclaim his reasoning!
Well, one does need to turn on the lamp in the corner so that
he can *see* the white paper. :-) (OK, so I'm being silly here.)
>
>
>>>
>>>Charlie
>>>
>>>
>>
>>[*] A more likely scenario is that central disk service is provided
>> by something like a Network Appliances box, which would require
>> very little action to flip over to NFS, as I understand it.
>>
>>--
>>[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- insert random misquote here
>>EAC code #191 5d:19h:13m actually running Linux.
>> You were expecting something relevant down here?
>
>
>E.F. is a very special child with very special needs.
>E.F. should not be confused with an adult.
Heh. Now tell us what you really think about E.F.'s needs. :-) :-)
[.sigsnip]
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- the difference between a man and the boys is
the size of his brain :-)
EAC code #191 1d:16h:01m actually running Linux.
No electrons were harmed during this message.
------------------------------
From: J Sloan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Linux is crude and inconsistant.
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 05:02:08 GMT
Kyle Jacobs wrote:
> Rather than "fixing the mess" by integrating the projects, OR having the
> XFree86 team work on some unifying standards for itself, the Linvocates
> decide that "GUI's are just evil, and will never be perfect".
Typical nonsense from kyle - can you produce a single post
where a Linux user said anything remotely like that?
> GUI's are a mess under Linux,
Actually I prefer a Linux GUI - after all, I switched from windows.
I have a windows 2000 system sitting here, but I use the Linux
system 99% of the time, resorting to windows only when I have
to actually work on a word doc, which is not very often.
Not to say that there is no room for improvement, but to say
the Linux GUI is "a mess" is just plain idiotic.
jjs
------------------------------
From: T. Max Devlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Linux is crude and inconsistant.
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 05:09:52 GMT
(Sorry for the fragmented response.)
Said Stephen Cornell in comp.os.linux.advocacy on 20 Jan 2001 20:04:45
>T. Max Devlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
[...]
>> That isn't so much 'ironic' as it is 'false'. They became a monopoly by
>> monopolizing. Its illegal, and its soon going to be remedied. My
>> impatience is reflected, obviously, by the frequency with which I have
>> the urge to post to knock down fabrications like this.
>
>Well, my understanding is that, before `everyone' used Windows, there
>were two alternatives for the desktop: IBM compatible PC and Apple
>MAcintosh. The Mac was better designed, but because of Apple's
>monopoly on hardware it was more expensive; the PC was good enough for
>most people's purposes, and was cheaper because of the availability of
>cheap hardware.
>
>That's something I've only gleaned from reading posts on Usenet - at
>the time when this battle was being fought, I was happily working in
>an environment where every computer ran VMS or Unix.
Well, the hardware wasn't *necessarily* cheaper. The difference was,
yes, that you bought it at competitive prices, whereas Apple used the
old 'proprietary system' model. The difference between an IBM and an
IBM 'compatible' is more important than this 'far view' characterization
of the market would indicate.
What happened was, there were IBM clones, and IBM compatibles. The IBM
compatibles took years to die. The IBM clones eventually "ruled" for
the same reason the compatibles died: Microsoft's anti-competitive
business practices. From the consumers perspective, everything else
just eventually went away, other than "PCs running MS-DOS". As far as
their cognizance could possibly extend, this result was
indistinguishable from "the market" 'choosing' DOS. But now we know, or
should know, if we were paying attention, that it wasn't necessarily so.
Microsoft has *always* acted monopolistically; they pulled many of the
same shenanigans that got them the DOS monopoly back when they were
making ROM-based BASIC.
But even in the later DOS days, application developers still supported
cross-platform development. (Why on earth wouldn't they? What
profit-seeking firm purposefully limits their market?) By forcing
Windows on the market (illegally bundling it with DOS), they erected
"the application barrier" which still protects their monopoly.
>> >It's well documented that MS's tactic for maintaining its market
>> >position is by `embracing and extending' foreign technologies, so that
>> >at each step the most economically viable alternative for each user is
>> >to stay within the MS fold. It's a *locally* stable strategy (in the
>> >game-theoretic sense). This doesn't mean that what results is the
>> >best *global* alternative for customers.
>>
>> Economics isn't game theory.
>
>Actually, a great deal of economic theory is based on game theory
>(that's why Nash invented it). In this sense, a `locally stable
>strategy' means that eveyone is trying to do what is in their best
>interests, and the result of any one changing their strategy is that
>they lose out. Of course, theory and reality aren't the same thing
Well, yes, game theory is *related* to economics. ;-)
The point is, players who are subject to a monopoly are precluded by
that fact from engaging in a locally stable strategy to begin with.
Prices will always get higher, benefits will always decrease (rapidly
spreading out, in fact, to create costs outside the transaction with the
monopoly which wouldn't be borne if there were no monopoly).
>> There is no "best global alternative" for customers.
>> Misrepresentations of "the network effect" aside, the real world
>> truth is that the best strategy for customers is a non-global one.
>
>We're using `global' in a different sense - I'm talking about global
>(or local) in strategy-space, rather than space-space. What I mean is
>`the combination of players' strategies that proves the most fruitful
>for the players out of all of possible strategy combinations'.
But that is my point; the optimum strategy for any one player is going
to be contradictory to the optimum global strategy, by design. This is
what differentiates economic and game theory, I think.
>> And there needs to be alternatives (commercially available substitutes,
>> ie, not a monopoly) for even that to be possible.
>
>Go back and read my post again. At no point did I advocate a monopoly
>as being in the consumers' best interest.
Yes, I know, I apologize. I've been having this knee-jerk reaction to
people who seem to even hint at some sort of natural driving force
behind monopoly. I think you might have advocated, slightly and without
realizing it, a monopoly as being in the producer's best interest. That
might explain my response. I really haven't the time to try to
reconstruct things, but I did probably misconstrue you.
>I was merely arguing that
>MS can engineer the market so that a MS solution *is* the most viable
>for many customers, and this is a major contribution to the
>perpetuation of Microsoft's monopoly.
Well, of course they can. That's what it means to say they are a
monopoly, to begin with. *** Sorry. I'm a little testy, I guess. :-\
Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.
--
T. Max Devlin
*** The best way to convince another is
to state your case moderately and
accurately. - Benjamin Franklin ***
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Ghost In The Machine)
Subject: Re: Win2k vs Linux? Why downgrade to Linux?
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 05:10:03 GMT
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote
on 18 Jan 2001 04:48:21 GMT
<945sil$gcj$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>The Ghost In The Machine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>>I was in middle school (east coast lingo; that would be "junior high"
>>>for most other north americans) in 1982.
>
>> I was in college. Netscape? What Netscape?
>> Hell, we didn't even have a graphics-capable terminal, except
>> for a Tektronix emulator in a Vt100. It worked, but
>> it wouldn't have been too good for modern web browsing. :-)
>
>The first computer I laid hands on was around that time actually,
>and was a commodore PET. (I cant remember which model). We wrote
>BASIC programs that made little ascii rockets fly up the screen.
*chuckles* Yeah, that was about their speed at that point. :-)
Mind you, I still have a few Amigas -- nice machine for their day.
>
>> I will also note that RFC1945 (that's HTTP/1.0) is dated May 1996.
>> It's very hard to see how Netscape could exist without a protocol! :-)
>> Of course, HTTP might have been in use some years before it was
>> standardized -- but it certainly wasn't in use in my college years.
>> Not even Usenet existed in my college years; RFC977 is dated
>> Feb 1986. (Maybe in yours, yttrx, since you seem to be slightly
>> younger than yours truly. :-) )
>
>Well, I was in college from 1987 to 1995. Usenet certianly existed, and
>I accessed it through an account on a VAX VMS setup. Those days were
>alot of fun for me; the entire internet consisted of Usenet, IRC and
>NetHack. I actually didnt use any sort of graphical interface for
>anything until a couple of versions into Mosiac; and then it was mostly
>for looking at what I was looking at with lynx in the first place---
>subgenius propaganda. Remember what would happen when you fingered
>or emailed [EMAIL PROTECTED]?
Nope, I was in the commercial world at that point, and we weren't
on the Internet. :-)
(Side note: just tried it, got "connection refused". Apparently
they're under new management and don't like being poked. Oh well. :-) )
>
>Those certianly were some fun times.
Yep, and then the IBM PC came along and changed it forever.
That wouldn't have been so bad -- but then Microsoft came along
and spoiled it. :-)
[.sigsnip]
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- why couldn't Commodore market their computers better? :-)
EAC code #191 1d:18h:36m actually running Linux.
The Usenet channel. All messages, all the time.
------------------------------
From: "Ayende Rahien" <Please@don't.spam>
Crossposted-To: alt.destroy.microsoft,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: New Microsoft Ad :-)
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 07:05:32 +0200
Reply-To: "Ayende Rahien" <Please@don't.spam>
"Chris Ahlstrom" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Ayende Rahien wrote:
> >
> > Regarding hardware, NT can be a nightmare.
> > 9x, up until 2K, was much better than NT in this matter (and in this
matter
> > alone, I might add).
> > 2K is a breeze to install hardware.
>
> When I installed it, it did not auto detect the shitty AVA-1502AE/AI
> lite SCSI card that came with the Microtek scanner. I had to look up a
> guess manually.
>
> Just a contrary instance, not too important. I can't even get Linux to
> detect this crappy card, so I would eventually like to get a newer setup.
I'm not saying that 2K will install all hardware automatically, just that
it's much better than NT in this regard.
------------------------------
From: "Ayende Rahien" <Please@don't.spam>
Crossposted-To:
alt.destroy.microsoft,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: Red hat becoming illegal?
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 07:10:52 +0200
Reply-To: "Ayende Rahien" <Please@don't.spam>
"The Ghost In The Machine" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in
message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Just as yet another point of pedantry: the design of PostgreSQL, as
> I understand it, doesn't require one monster database file, but
> instead splits the problem up if it gets too big. However, I
> have not had a chance to test this -- and it's not clear it would
> have the performance you require anyway, since it's not going
> to help you in video processing; that's not its job.
> It fell down badly compared to my employer's Oracle database, anyway.
>
> Of course, to be fair, said Oracle database is running on a monster
> 30 (?) CPU SPARC machine with gigabytes of RAM and a fair number of
> spindles, consuming 30 megarows a day, each row containing
> about 100 or so bytes (and this with other processes querying
> it for various things, as well!). My dinky Pentium Pro 200 with
> a couple of 8 gigabyte SCSI drives and a PCI bus, while good
> for me, isn't going to come even close.
>
> But I was hoping... :-)
>
> (Also, my understanding is that this SPARC, big as it is, is tiny
> compared to some installations.)
>
> I'd have to rerun the benchmark, and my system's in a sorry state
> at the moment because of an outage related to the California power
> crisis, blowing away my system disk. Sigh.
>
> I'm curious as to how well a 32-node Win2k cluster could handle
> that load. Isn't that the market Microsoft's aiming for?
DataCenter could do it, I guess.
It can scale to 32CPU & 64Gb ram.
With SQL 2K, I would assume this is possible, never saw such a beast, nor
did I hear about any benchmarks about it.
Most of the benchmarks are at TPC's site, but they aren't meaningful, they
use clusters, while your Oracle is using a single computer.
I would also like to know how this can be done on wintel.
------------------------------
From: "Joseph T. Adams" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What really burns the Winvocates here...
Date: 21 Jan 2001 05:15:59 GMT
Aaron Ginn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
: Windows advocacy is the biggest waste of time. What's the point of
: advocating an OS that runs >90% of the desktops out there? Are you
: trying to convert that other 10% or what.
The Wintrolls are trying to come up with ways to convince key people -
primarily developers - to avoid switching to Linux just yet. Doing so
if successful would slow the demise of Winblows and give Mafia$oft
more time to perfect its plans to expand the monopoly via .NET.
The problem is, even the smartest Wintrolls are nowhere near as
informed or as intelligent as the average software developer.
Joe
------------------------------
From: T. Max Devlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: A salutary lesson about open source
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 05:33:52 GMT
Said Chad Myers in comp.os.linux.advocacy on Sun, 21 Jan 2001 04:01:30
>"Jim Richardson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
>news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>> On Sat, 20 Jan 2001 05:06:21 GMT,
>> T. Max Devlin, in the persona of <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>> brought forth the following words...:
>>
>> >Said Chad Myers in comp.os.linux.advocacy on Sat, 20 Jan 2001 01:19:54
>> >GMT;
>> >>
>> >>"T. Max Devlin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
>> >>news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>> >>> Said Chad Myers in comp.os.linux.advocacy on Sun, 14 Jan 2001 21:54:25
>> >>> [...]
>> >>> >Who knows how many back doors are in OpenSource software. It took them
>> >>> >6 months just to find this one in this product. There are thousands
>> >>> >in Linux that they're finding all the time.
>> >>>
>> >>> Lie.
>> >>
>> >>Not really. When the (false) news came out about Win2K having 65k
>> >>bugs, Debian's bug list had somewhere in the 12-13k area. And that
>> >>was just Debian alone. Yes, I know Debian != Linux, but some of those
>> >>were generic Linux related.
>> >
>> >But you don't know which. Nor is it accurate to say they're 'finding
>> >them all the time'. It didn't take them six months to find this one,
>> >either; it took six months before they looked. Once they looked, they
>> >found it immediately, because it is open source. Nor is the report of
>> >W2K having '65,000 bugs' actually false, though it might be regarded as
>> >misleading.
>> >
>>
>> Chad is lying again, debian's bug list included bugs for all packages in the
>> tree, things like apache, and emacs were included, as were gcc bugs. W2K's
>> number (whatever it's real value) did not include bugs in IIS &etc.
>> So to reiterate, Chad lied.
>
>Hmm, you know, it's ironic. When the 65K number came out for Win2K,
>it was a.) grossly inflated, b.) included feature requests and feature
>change requests c.) included other products and projects related to Win2K.
Hmm, you know, that's interesting. Because all three of those are
baseless suppositions that have already been refuted here. It was MS's
own number, it did not include feature requests (but "real issues"), and
it was exclusively the OS.
>Look, I'm not (unlike my counterparts) claiming that the Debian number
>was solid, hell it could be even 6k which is a little more realistic, but
>the fact still remains.
Which one? I don't believe you've posted any facts. Again.
>But basically, what we've learned here today, according to Jim is:
>a.) It's ok to lie about Win2K and completely misrepresent facts
No, that's what we've been trying to tell you. Its *not* OK to lie
about W2K and completely misrepresent facts, and we'd appreciate it if
you'd stop doing it.
>b.) It's not ok to take a concrete number from Debian's site and repeat
> it as fact
Again, you seem to have inverted the message. The number on Debian's
site is known to include all software shipped with the distribution.
>c.) Linux has no bugs and its absurd to assert that notion.
You are batting .000 here, Chad. One baldfaced lie after another. What
is wrong with you?
--
T. Max Devlin
*** The best way to convince another is
to state your case moderately and
accurately. - Benjamin Franklin ***
------------------------------
From: T. Max Devlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: alt.linux.sux
Subject: Re: Linux is crude and inconsistent.
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 05:44:22 GMT
Said Kyle Jacobs in comp.os.linux.advocacy on Sun, 21 Jan 2001 04:21:33
>"T. Max Devlin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
>news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>
>> > Last line of the page:
>> > Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
>> >
>> > =====
>> > Use of the trademark is encouraged but abuse of it has and will be
>> > prosecuted in court.
>>
>> Well, I'm afraid that wouldn't hold up very well, as this usage does
>> make Linux a 'weak trademark', despite the fact that it is abstract (and
>> only informative or descriptive for geeks by being similar to 'unix'.)
>> Not that anyone could make another OS and call it Linux, but you can put
>> "Linux" all over your own ads and packaging, and the ability for Linus
>> to stop you from doing that is probably inversely proportional to his
>> desire. IOW, he couldn't stop you, if for any reason he wanted to.
>
>Actually, he (Linus) can. He has openly decided NOT to. He owns the
>trademark, he has the RIGHT to enforce it, not the obligation to.
I'm afraid you don't understand. Trademarks don't work like that. In
fact, just the opposite is true: failure to protect a trademark makes
it... not a trademark. Now, you are right in a way, that Linus *could*,
but *doesn't*, prevent people from using the trademark. But that means
that whether he *can* prevent anyone is entirely theoretical to begin
with. And, as I've pointed out, you can't do that very easily with
trademarks.
>If for
>example, Microsoft made Microsoft Linux 1.0, and Linus actually gave a damn,
>he could (in theory) sue Microsoft for infringing on his trademark.
Indeed he could. And whether in theory or in practice he would win also
therefore remains theory. As it always will, because Microsoft doesn't
like the idea even more than Linus doesn't.
>Trademark law is NOT my forte. I can't even begin to theorize on the
>legality of such an action.
Well, I know a little bit about it, which is why I opened my trap.
Linus would have a very very difficult and expensive case in front of
him, I'm afraid. I would expect that fraud charges would be a more
appropriate and swifter mechanism for justice in the hypothetical case
you've described (assuming MS-Linux 1.0 wasn't actually Linux). His
trademark claim is, frankly, mighty weak.
[...]
>> Precisely. The ability to build and maintain an applications barrier
>> never did have anything to do with 'the network effect'.
>
>I again, don't see Microsoft sending programmers to make StarOffice a shitty
>alternative to Microsoft Office.
You don't know where to look. I see that as a mandate for all their
Office programmers.
>StarOffice has problems, lots of em. It
>is a terrible program.
Yea, I'm looking forward to having a choice between a variety of
terrible programs, again, instead of being stuck with just one.
--
T. Max Devlin
*** The best way to convince another is
to state your case moderately and
accurately. - Benjamin Franklin ***
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