Not sure what to think of this.

 

I would really like to know how they worked out the yearly membership costs.

They are the same group that think that the current linux kernel as to worry about 283 patents, where about two thirds of them are held by Linux non-friendly companies like Microsoft.

 

Potential Corporate SCO Defendants

For those organizations threatened with legal action by SCO, the Legal Defense Center is the one, central source for objective information regarding common issues faced by all potential SCO defendants. Based in Washington DC and comprised of a carefully-selected Panel of highly-specialized Intellectual Property legal experts fully-briefed on the intricacies of the case, the Legal Defense Center provides unmatched legal and defense resources. Membership in the program is $100,000 annually and provides resources to its members that would cost in the millions if developed independently.

Linux Kernel Developers

Individual contributors to the Linux kernel gain access to the full resources of the Open Source Legal Defense Fund including guidance on how to best protect and defend their own intellectual property rights. They also receive $25,000 in legal protection from OSRM if they are named in future lawsuits involving their contributions to the Linux kernel. Membership for individuals is $250 annually.

BBC-article: link

 

Bank of England officials "shut their eyes and turned away" instead of clamping down on fraudulent activity at BCCI, the High Court has been told.

Liquidators of the collapsed bank are suing the UK's central bank for about £1bn for "knowingly or recklessly" failing in its supervisory role.

They are acting on behalf of 6,500 UK-based depositors, who lost money when the rogue bank was shut down in 1991.

The Bank of England says it plans to defend itself "vigorously".

Gordon Pollock QC, for the liquidators, said the Bank "deliberately ran away from seeking to find out sufficien.

 

More background information: link link

Wikipedia entry: link

 

Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank. At its peak, it operated in 78 countries and had over 400 branches and claimed assets of $25 billion.

It was embroiled in the world's worst financial scandal in 1991. It was found to be involved in money laundering, bribery, "support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies;... the commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; illicit purchases of banks and real estate". The bank was found to be effectively worthless. $13 billion was unaccounted for.

Investigations in the United Kingdom (Lord Bingham) and the United States revealed that BCCI had been organised "to avoid centralized regulatory review... [with the objective] to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection".

The liquidators of BCCI, Deloitte & Touche, filed a lawsuit against Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young which was settled for $175 million in 1998. A further lawsuit against the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi was launched in 1999 for around $400 million. BCCI creditors also instituted a $1 billion suit against the Bank of England. After a nine year struggle due to the Bank's statutory immunity the suit was accepted and went to trial in January 2004.

(Source: Linus posting to the kernel-ML) spent half an hour tearing part of it apart for some journalists. No guarantees for the full accuracy of this write-up, and in particular I don't actually have "original UNIX" code to compare against, but the files I checked (ctype.[ch]) definitely do not have any UNIX history to them.

 

The rest of the files are mostly errno.h/signal.h/ioctl.h (and they are apparently the 2.4.x versions, before we moved some common constants into "asm-generic/errno.h"), and while I haven't analyzed them, I know for a fact that

 

- the original errno.h used different error numbers than "original UNIX"

 

I know this because I cursed it later when it meant that doing things like binary emulation wasn't as trivial - you had to translate the error numbers.

 

- same goes for "signal.h": while a lot of the standard signals are well documented (ie "SIGKILL is 9"), historically we had lots of confusion (ie I think "real UNIX" has SIGBUS at 10, while Linux didn't originally have any SIGBUS at all, and later put it at 7 which was originally SIGUNUSED.

 

So to me it looks like

 

- yes, Linux obviously has the same signal names and error number names that UNIX has (so the files certainly have a lot of the same identifiers)

 

- but equally clearly they weren't copied from any "real UNIX".

 

(Later, non-x86 architectures have tried harder to be binary-compatible with their "real UNIX" counter-parts, and as a result we have different errno header files for different architectures - and on non-x86 architectures the numbers will usually match traditional UNIX).

 

.. link

 

Lawrence Lessing and (friends): "Free Culture audiobook"

 

Lawrence Lessing is one of the few lawyers speaking out against software patents and bringing sense into the P2P piracy discussion. His latest book Free Culture" was released to the world as a printed hardcover as well as a free download under a Creative Commons license.

 

His book came out on Thursday, March 25, 2004. On Friday, A. K. M. Adam asked a simple question: "Anyone feel like recording a chapter of Lawrence Lessig's new book?" By Saturday, contributions were coming in from around the world. Get the mp3s from here.

 

/. review of the book. The last paragraph of the review:

Lessig understands this. One of his most persuasive arguments is that the current law becomes more marginalized as it becomes increasingly less fair. Prohibition of alcohol corroded the law and now the increasing prohibition of fair use is eroding respect for copyright.You only need to travel a few blocks from the Mitchell court house to end up in dangerous regions of Baltimore where the marble and the pomp can't do much to protect you. Lessig, the lawyer, knows the law can only work when it is fair and equitable. This new book is a strong and passionate argument for how we can restore some sanity to the system and restore our faith in copyright law. Some people think that Lessig is trying to "smash" the copyright system, but I think he's just trying to restore its ability to function.