Robert Pogson

OK, I admit it. I am over-weight. Way, way, way overweight. My body has been telling me this for two years and this summer, I heard. I was watching snippets of Peter, Paul and Mary from Youtube and saw how they deteriorated and decided I needed to fight this thing. Last year, I had leg problems with calves cramping. This year a heel gave out. Too much weight.

I weigh 263 pounds today. I want to weigh 160 one year from now. I am going to seriously reduce intake and exercise (getting a stationary bicycle so the heel does not need to suffer more). I know from experience that walking helps me cope with stress on the job but the weight is preventing walking now so it has to go. I used to walk one or two hours daily to control weight but I cannot do that any longer. I need to lose 2 lb per week or about 7000 calories a week. I can reduce intake by 1000 calories a day or walk/exercise for hours every day. I will try a combination. Here is my chart:

Everyone and their dog has written about this, so here goes…

On Friday, August 10, 2007, Judge Dale A. Kimball at last ruled on the pending summary judgment motions that had been filed, briefed, presented in court and awaited ruling. The summary judgment is used to settle issues in the claims and cross-claims where the law is sufficient to make the ruling without a trial. The biggie in the ruling was that Novell did not transfer the copyrights to the SVRX source code that formed the “basis” of “SCOG v World” to SCO, SCOG’s predecessor in interest. SCOG had claimed in court, blurbed on the ‘net, and public forums and even wrote to 1500 large corporations that the code had been massively copied into Linux in breach of their copyright. The evidence accumulated on GROKLAW shows clearly that SCOG knew that they did not have the copyrights. For instance, SCOG asked Novell to transfer the copyrights to SCOG about 2003.

If that wasn’t enough, the court ruled that the licences sold to SUN and M$ were, in part, SVRX licences and SCOG owed Novell some money to be determined at trial. Since the licence fees were tens of millions of dollars this is problematic for SCOG because their liquid assets are only a few million.

After the ruling, SCOG sent a letter to partners promising to keep up the good fight. Here it is from sec.gov:
"EX-99.1 2 v33097exv99w1.htm EXHIBIT 99.1

"

This letter is a sad commentary on the human condition. Having spent many millions of dollars on litigation, knowing they had no basis for a case, and attacking Novell for pointing out the lack of copyright, politely and privately, SCOG is still in denial. The reason the court ruled that the copyrights were not transferred is that is what the contract says. The quotation given above is only a small part of the contract and omits a list of assets to be omitted including copyrights. The business that was transferred was being a licensing agent for Novell and developing and distributing more UNIX code. On top of that, in discovery, it turns out that “millions of lines of code” that were similar in UNIX SVRX and Linux were only a few files that define the POSIX open standard for a UNIX operating system. There are tens of millions of lines of code in Linux and most of it was written from scratch or legally contributed from similar projects. That was all discovered in SCO v IBM where SCOG insisted on and received truckloads of IBM’s code in AIX. SCOG had the UNIX SVRX code and the Linux code and could find no copying and they still went to court hoping to find something that IBM had written for AIX that got into Linux (which IBM could legally have done with their own code).

“This ruling has no impact on SCO’s ability to continue”

is a lie if Novell is awarded many millions of dollars that SCOG spent on the SCOG v World suits rather than passing on to Novell as their contract with Novell required.

” SCO’s primary business is not to litigate or to solely rely on outcomes in the court, but to rapidly evolve SCO’s technology platforms to meet your needs in the marketplace.”

is a lie as SCOG has spent many millions suing:

• Daimler-Chrysler, whom they accused of avoiding an audit even though they do not even use SCOG’s stuff any longer, Dismissed without prejudice.
• Autozone, whom they sued for using Linux, claiming that violated SCOG’s copyrights that we know now did not exist. Stayed, pending progress in SCO v IBM and RedHat v SCO.
• IBM, claiming IBM copied SCOG’s code into Linux, changing the claims to violating contracts, and operating without a licence after SCOG revoked it and Novell orderd them to leave IBM alone.
• Novell, for interefering with SCOG by demanding SCOG leave IBM alone and claiming the copyrights had not been transferred from Novell. SCOG was supposed to be acting as Novell’s agent and the contract explicitly enabled Novell to protect its revenue from the existing licences and not to make any new SVRX licences without Novell’s permission. The recent ruling shoots most of SCOG’s case down. Going to trial in September/October unless settled. This letter suggests SCOG is not going to settle.

and RedHat sued SCOG for interfering with business. That case is dallying. Business is fine for RedHat these days, unlike SCOG. RedHat can still argue that their business grew more slowly because of SCOG’s interference.

” actions needed to protect SCO, its customers and shareholders. ”

That’s a laugh. How is SCOG protecting customers and shareholders by killing the business? They had a good Linux distribution and killed it about the time they starting to sue users of Linux for violating SCOG’s imaginary rights. It is possible viable parts of SCOG could survive bankruptcy, but it is very risky. Customers will bail if they haven’t already to avoid a shaky supplier and where will that leave the shareholders? SCOX is trading below 40 cents. Some of those shareholders bought at $4 or more. Going on with the trial when they only have a weak claim left is a complete waste of time and more money. Ending it sooner would protect customers and shareholders by avoiding uncertainty. What the trial does do is delay justice for the folks who instigated this madness. The other cases depending on the outcome of the SCOG v Novell case are best dropped/settled, too. Novell has the authority to order SCOG to respect Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler, too.

No, this was never about protecting SCOG’s rights. It was an attempt to profit from the success of Linux by threatening the LInux community and taxing it. All the licence fees collected for using Linux were proceeds of fraud or extortion and SCOG could be sued for their return, which is as likely as Hell freezing. No good will come from this action except that the careers of some very poor businessmen will have been extended a few years while there was any doubt about the cases. They ran a company that only made money one year out of many, 2003, when SUN and M$ gave them millions, they extorted fees from EV1 and others and M$ sent SCOG a PIPE fairy with $50 million. That has been SCOG’s main occupation for years, now, but it will all soon end. They could have caught the Linux wave, but chickened out, only to play chicken with corporate giants.

Recently a troll prompted me to write about OpenOffice.org. I have been using it daily since 2002 with release 1.0 and I have used its precursor, StarOffice. There is a good article on Wikipedia about the history. I wish to add to that that my first download was memorable. All the servers I could find in North America were clogged, so I found one in Europe that was not. I installed my download on three machines by noon, while still doing my day job, teaching 1.0 did crash a lot… By 2.0, OO was solid and feature rich. In education, I have found the ability to produce PDF valuable. That other OS still does not have that native capability in its office suite… and they talk about interoperabity.

Objective tests of OpenOffice.org in use on real tasks can be found in a report published by the EU, Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU. Final Report. Nov. 20, 2006. They found that in most cases, OO was a tool of greater productivity than that other office suite.

OO is a huge application with more features than most of us will ever use. Some downloads are over 100 MB. I use it on terminal servers in schools. The huge size of it is not a problem on systems with lots of RAM. The first user to load it after reboot puts the files in RAM/cache and the next user does fewer reads/seeks from disc. That first load may take 7 seconds. The next user gets it running in 2s after a click. The moral is leave it running and you never have to worry about load time.

OO is highly configurable. I usually set up students with default configuration for English spell-checking as they type. There are all kinds of options like captialization of the first letter of a sentence. That bugs teachers a lot when they make up wordlists, but it takes only a couple of clicks to turn off that behaviour. There is abundant doucmentation from the “Help” menu and the website, OpenOffice.org at Support. I use the tutorials for some students. Most only need that for particular features like mail-merge printing, indexes or master documents. The user interface is otherwise pretty easy. Basic operations and templates cover most needs of students.

The thing that makes OO key for Linux on the desktop is that OO has a similar feature-set as the wildly more expensive product of M$. That makes Linux an excellent choice for anyone with thousands of seats in the IT system or anyone who cares about costs of installation. That would cover many businesses, schools, libraries, governments and homes. The world is full of Office documents and OO can open and modify most of them. Of course, Office 2007 is incompatible with the world with its OOXML format, but it is also incompatible with previous versions of OFFICE that cannot read OOXML. Rather than be forced to adopt new software to remain locked-in, freedom-loving people everywhere can rebel by adopting OO. This makes a lot of sense for most organisations. OFFICE 2007 is still not widespread and there is not a need for that to happen if we choose OpenOffice.org. We can always ask 2007 users to send us stuff in an earlier format.

Folks with stocks of earlier Word files may convert them with scripts such as this article describes. A few seconds per file can crank through a lot of files in one night… Once your files are converted to Open Document format, you are free of M$’s major lock-in, file formats that are incompatible with the rest of the world with each new release. On top of file-format lock-in, M$ is promoting repository lock-in with Sharepoint.

We have the good life, folks, a good OS, lots of apps, and OpenOffice.org.

Dell:

Dell provides hardware support only. Software support is available through Canonical and Linux Community.
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04 [Included in Price]
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04 with 30 days of Starter support [add $65 or $2/month]
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04 with 1 year of Basic Support [add $125 or $4/month]
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04 with 1 year of Standard support [add $275 or $8/month]

I cannot imagine anyone needing $275 worth of support for a pre-installed Linux distro as good as Ubuntu 7.04, but there are folks paying more than the hardware costs annually for support with that other OS so that number may appeal to those who want all problems to be solved by someone else. The 30-day number, $65, should comfort the timid but it eats up the price advantage that a Linux system should have. I have introduced hundreds of newbies to Linux and I doubt it took more than a few minutes to remind them not to double-click and so on to make the experience familiar. We just got on with the business of teaching/learning.

The support by Canonical is part of their service-oriented business plan and they are smooth and competent. I spoke with them at one point last year while designing an LTSP system. I did not need their support and our system was a little different from a desktop system and involved multiple servers so their programme did not seem to fit. As it was, I installed the system, acquainted users and coached a newbie sysadmin for a few days and left a manual. That was sufficient.

For Dell, Canonical’s participation is a marketable product and a comfort to customers who are not “enthusiasts”, the target in the USA. I suspect the “enthusiasts” tag was merely a smokescreen so that the move would not be highly visible to M$. No place to hide now, and the campaign has been expanded to Europe. Whatever sales of Canonical’s support Dell makes will in some measure replace lost revenue from added value from M$’s partners. We shall see in a quarter or two how it turns out.

Lenovo will provide its own support. They are less timid. They will support Linux themselves:

see Lenovo and Dell sneak Linux on to new PCs

“Lenovo will provide support for the operating system directly, the first time that it’s done so, it said, with Novell offering maintenance updates for the system directly to users. Previously, Lenovo had certified Thinkpads for use with Linux, but had not made the OS available directly to its customers. It announced neither pricing nor a specific shipping date.”

According to ZDnet, M$ has cut the price of Vista in China, ostensibly to “combat piracy” (newspeak for undercutting illegal copies). According to L. A. Mettler, the cut is more about undercutting Linux (probably RedHat’s support agreements).

The earlier XP cuts may have served to legalize copies and the Vista cuts probably do serve to undercut legal copies of Linux with support/consultation. That will not prevent Linux to spread by diffusion/free downloads/cheap CDs, but it may preempt some large conversions/installations which make the news.

I disagree with Mettler’s assertions that Linux cannot compete head-to-head with M$ on price in developing markets. Even if M$ gives away that other OS, Linux community, open standards, resistance to malware, networking skills, maintainability and the ability to run on older/cheaper equipment either as a thick or thin client forms an insurmountable obstacle to M$ that price/piracy cannot overcome.

In the developed markets, a lot of the old guard of M$ fanbois are soon retiring and Linux enthusiasts will take more responsibilities for IT, malware will not go away, and price does matter. M$ will have to cut prices sooner or later to avoid the collapse of monopoly. As long as they make enough money to afford selling all kinds of products (other than that other OS and Office) at a loss, they do not have to cut prices to maintain monopoly. The Vista flop will change that this year or next.

It does pay to advertise and the enthusiasts’ market has grown by that means but the purchasing departments of businesses, the CTOs and the like do not linger on these pages. IBM, RedHat and Novell have done some selling to business but Dell, Lenovo, Acer and HP are still on the sidelines. They make more money charging a markup on the M$ licences than they would on a free licence. Deals like Dell-Ubuntu work because Dell gets part of the action on selling Ubuntu support but the OEMs largely see Linux as a freebie that brings in no cash. We have to grow the market so the OEMs can see new business selling Linux boxes. Dell is expecting 1% of their sales to be to Linux enthusiasts. If demand rose to be a substantial amount, they probably would see it as new business and worth promoting. If schools and businesses that are now customers of Dell start asking for Linux and new customers do the same, Dell will take the hint.

The imminent murder of XP to promote Vista may well be postponed but income from XP is falling. After all, regular customers who are fans do not want to settle for second best and large customers already have XP installed, so they do not need any more licences. M$ will have a hard time raising the price of XP to match Vista so they will have to cut Vista everywhere, not just in China. XP was obsolete in 2001 and its long history of malware is well known. The world will want a replacement and we should tell them about Linux.

M$’s partners and fanbois who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, believing they are getting a good deal tying their wagon to the M$ monopoly, are painting themselves into a corner. As long as the monopoly is doing well, the joy ride continues, but we are into the endgame now. As hardware prices plummet, M$ is taking a larger piece of the PC pie and M$’s partners are being squeezed from every side. They have to compete amongst each other for the last penny while M$ gets $50 or so for that other OS and hundreds more for Office with a huge profit margin. No doubt many OEMs feel M$ is giving them a big enough cut now, but what will happen when one OEM starts taking market share by selling Linux? M$ has a history of messing with partners. Who will be the odd man out when M$ starts to squirm? Will the partners feel the need to cut out the share that M$ is taking by distributing Linux? Will partners be content to give away their products for free while M$ lives off the fat of the land and gives them scraps? Will M$ bless a select set of OEMs in order to punish dissent? What will the OEMs do when competitors do well selling LInux?

IT is at an interesting point. There are many fronts:

• FLOSS/proprietary
• Linux/that other OS
• ODF/OOXML
• OpenOffice.org/OFFICE
• AMD/Intel
• lock-in/freedom
• the end of “software patents”
• the world making its own software cooperatively/M$ and other proprietary software vendors raking in huge profits while others starve

There are dramatic changes on every front but price is looming as a deciding factor for most of the expanding markets and those parts of existing markets that seek freedom to use IT as they see fit