Blackmoor Vituperative

The list of scumbag hackers who try to break into my server just keeps growing. It’s really just too unfortunate that their failure can’t carry some sort of immediate, painful, and potentially lethal penalty. Anyway, I updated the site statistics.

After what seems like an eternity, someone is finally putting the smack-down on SCO.

On Friday, Novell Inc. filed its Answer in the U.S. District Court in Utah to The SCO Group Inc.‘s claims that it, and not Novell, owned Unix’s copyrights. Novell also filed counterclaims asking the court to force SCO to turn over its Unix licenses royalties to it and to attach SCO’s assets to ensure that it can pay Novell.

(from eWeek, “Novell Goes for SCO’s Throat”)

If you haven’t been paying attention to the SCO vs. Linux soap opera, there’s a pretty good summary called There’s No Business Like SCO Business on the site IT-Analysis.com. That article also has some interesting tidbits pertaining to the automobile accident in which Princess Diana of Wales and Dodi Fayed were killed.

The usual suspects on this one are, the British Royal Family (of course), MI6 (naturally), arms manufacturers (remember all those anti landmine activities of Princess Di?) and the CIA, which foolishly revealed that it must have been involved by denying that it had anything to do with it (it really did – can you believe that?). Of course there are unusual suspects too – these include the Cult of Diana (a hang over from Roman times given new life by Diana’s death), the Jews (maybe they qualify as usual suspects, but on this one, I personally think it’s a little North-By-South-East) and black magicians, who as we all know, are wont to arrange ritualistic car crashes in Parisian underpasses.

(from IT-Analysis.com, There’s No Business Like SCO Business)

I found a great site which walks you step by step through setting up Fedora Core 3: Fedora Core 3 Installation Notes. This is the clearest, most complete walkthrough I have seen so far. Well done, Stanton Finley, whoever you are.

While I’m at it, here’s a very helpful how-to for setting up a Linux server on a home network to connect to your broadband provider’s SMTP server. Marvelous!

Windows patching: cheaper than open source?

Excerpt: “And if you believe that, Microsoft has a nice bridge in Brooklyn it would like to sell you.”

It’s no secret that I think that intellectual property law in the USA is broken. Here’s another example, from Red Hat’s Fedora Trademark Guidelines:

Fedoraâ„¢ is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc. and may only be used with Red Hat Inc.’s express permission. Except as provided herein, you may not use “Fedora” or any confusingly similar mark as a trademark for your product, or use “Fedora” in any other manner that might cause confusion in the marketplace, including in advertising, on auction sites, or on software or hardware. Any party wishing to use the Fedoraâ„¢ mark may do so as long as they meet two conditions:

1. They must only use the Fedoraâ„¢ mark in association with the original Fedoraâ„¢ code found on the Fedora Project website (see http://fedora.redhat.com/) without modification; and
2. If they charge a fee for the CD-ROM or other media on which they deliver the Fedoraâ„¢ code, they warranty the media on which the Fedoraâ„¢ code is delivered, thus ensuring that the recipient receives a usable copy.

This same permission applies to such other Red Hat trademarks as are included in the authorized Fedoraâ„¢ distribution, such as RPMâ„¢. Except as expressly stated herein, no other rights are granted to use any other Red Hat trademarks, specifically including the RED HAT® and “Shadowman” logo® marks. Absolutely no exceptions.

There’s only one problem with this: Red hat does not own this trademark. The Fedora Project at University Of Virginia and Cornell University has owned this trademark since 1998:

Fedora is a general purpose repository service developed jointly by The University of Virginia Library and Cornell University. The Fedora project is devoted to the goal of providing open-source repository software that can serve as the foundation for many types of information management systems.

The software demonstrates how distributed digital information management can be deployed using web-based technologies, including XML and web services.

According to the Fedora Project web site:

The Cornell and Virginia teams have taken a number of steps to try to work with Red Hat regarding use of the name Fedora™. At this date, Red Hat has refused our request to withdraw its trademark applications and reverse its claims of usage restrictions on the name. Cornell University and the University of Virginia are now considering various legal options in response to Red Hat’s actions.

Referring back to the Red Hat Fedora web site, I found an email address for trademark isues: trademarks@redhat.com. Unfortunately, mail sent to that address bounces, with the following message:

This email address has been deactivated. Email sent to this address IS
NOT RECEIVED by a person at Red Hat….

At this point, the smell of rat becomes unmistakable.

I happen to like Red Hat, and Red Hat Fedora. I run Red Hat Fedora on my server at home, and on the development machine at work. I have no grudge against Red Hat. But what they are doing here is wrong, and they appear to know that it’s wrong.

I am reminded of the arguments used by those who support Drug Prohibition: that certain chemicals are dangerous, not necessarily in themselves, but because they incite the people taking them to commit criminal acts. IP law in the USA has become so toxic, so perverse, that it corrupts those who come into contact with it. Red Hat is not the criminal here — Red Hat is a victim. That does not absolve them of guilt, but it does mean that they need more than to be punished and to make restitution: they need counseling, and they need to break free of the toxic addiction that has driven them to commit such despicable acts.

And we, as a society, need to do something about the cause of this cancer eating away at our creative and commercial future. A good start, if you are interested in that sort of thing, is to read Lawrence Lessig’s blog.

The big news at the LinuxWorld conference is that OSI is planning to trim the ridiculous number of OSI-approved open source licenses down from 50 or so to around 3. Personally, I think that’s a good thing.

There is a natural impulse to create a new thing even when there is no need for one. I think that’s what is at the root of this current situation. I’m certainly not immune: once upon a time, I was one of the people who wrote the October Open Gaming License, or OOGL, which was supposed to be to role-playing games what the Apache license was to software. You’ve probably never heard of it, and for good reason. There were already other open licenses which were completely adequate for gaming. Why invent another one? The OOGL never caught on (it was actually used only once, as far as I know, in a game called Four Colors Al Fresco), and eventually we (the people who wrote it) realized that it just wasn’t worth the effort to keep track of yet another license. We stopped using the OOGL in 2002 (switching to the exceedingly cool Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license), Woodelf (the author of Four Colors Al Fresco) did the same, and eventually we took the OOGL offline entirely.

Most other open source licenses should do the same. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, even if it is pretty cool to say, “hey look at this wheel: I made it myself”. So I agree with OSI on this one.

(Incidentally, any mention you see of the OOGL which makes it sound like that license is still in use is either woefully out of date or the work of some net loon with an axe to grind. Feel free to correct them, if you’ve some free time.)