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To: Spaulding
Your comments sound vaguely manufactured. Though reasonable in tone, they are largely inaccurate and misleading, if a bit condescending.

To state definitively that Linux was ported rather than created would require knowledge available to either Andrew Tanenbaum (were linux a port of minix) or Dennis Ritchie (were linux a port of UNIX). Both men have stated that what you said is false, i.e. they have stated that linux is not a 'port' of either of those operating systems. Since they wrote those operating systems, a reasonable reader would have to believe them and not you.

It is no more clear how you can state definitively that linux is not a kernel; that the term must refer to a package that includes compilers, utilities, etc. What you said was true of UNIX as licensed by AT&T, but Mr. Torvalds, who owns the linux trademark, does not distribute a product containing compilers and utilities, nor is he involved in their licensing. A charitable reading of your comments is that you were trying to sound expert while not quite knowing what you were talking about, and being a bit sloppy with words to the point of being wrong.

Your comments concerning "attacks" on the University of Wisconsin report questioning the security of Linux are misplaced. I say that because there was no reference to any such thing in the article. Thus your sentence introducing them makes no sense, except as evidence that your comment here was manufactured somewhere else and "ported" here without adequate context-checking. The paragraph appears to be a ruse used to introduce gratuitous comments about "security," and to deliver the payload phrase "Microsoft is leading" to people who struggle daily with viruses, trojans, adware, and other manifestations of Microsoft's leadership in the field of operating system security.

Let's learn a little bit about SCO. This is not the same company that "was one of the few alternative sources to DEC, IBM, SUN, and HP." That was the Santa Cruz Operation, now called Tarantella Inc. The Santa Cruz operation sold their UNIX business in 2001 to Caldera Systems, a company that had gone public on the promise of becoming "the next Red Hat" as a linux distributor. They were failing miserably at that, and in fact there is a shareholder class-action lawsuit against them concerning their IPO. Caldera's one claim to fame is that it had purchased the carcass of the old Digital Research, including the rights to DR-DOS. It used this to sue Microsoft, and to collect a sum estimated to have been in the neighborhood of $120 million.

Whether referred to as Caldera, or their new name "The SCO Group, Inc." this is a company that has never made a profit from operations. It is a lawsuit factory masquerading as a software company. By saying that their case looks strong to you, you have told us that you are completely ignorant concerning the case and the proceedings so far. In fact their various opponents are moving toward summary judgement against them on nearly every front. The judge presiding over the IBM and Novell cases has expressed his doubt as to whether SCO even owns the copyrights they claim to have.

You are probably not the right person to be explaining this to other people.

51 posted on 06/15/2004 6:57:21 PM PDT by Nick Danger (With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.)
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To: Nick Danger
They even have an Idol, the penguin.

You are probably not the right person to be explaining this to other people.

Why not? Sounds exactly right, to me.

55 posted on 06/15/2004 7:13:17 PM PDT by Golden Eagle
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