Slashdot Mirror

I've said it before, but they told us to expect it. Remember Halloween VII?

If you don't, Halloween VII was a leaked memo from MS dated Sep 2002. It was a survey report, discussing what types of FUD were most effective, and where FUD was backfiring.

"Linux patent violations/risk of being sued" struck a chord with US and Swedish respondents. Seventy-four percent (74%) of Americans and 82% of Swedes stated that the risk of being sued over Linux patent violations made them feel less favorable towards Linux. This was the only message that had a strong impact with any audience.

And later:

Messages that rely on an abstract discussion of intellectual property rights are not effective.

The discussion of IP rights needs to be tied to concrete actions.

• The OSI response
• Novell's letter to SCO
• Bruce Perens' comments here on Slashdot

SCO execs should fear Linus's wife, not Linus. Tove has been a nation karate champion in Finland
six times.

"[Darl McBride, SCO's chief executive stated] that unless more companies start licensing SCO's property, he may also sue Linus Torvalds, who is credited with inventing the Linux operating system, for patent infringement."

Why won't he sue Richard Stallman, while he's at it? After all SCO has said that whole programs were copied ("stolen" if your will) and we know that Linux is a kernel (and quite monolithic at that), not a bunch of programs.

*sigh*

Hey! Darl!!! Can you hear me?! Will you please finally read this? Pretty please?

from www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html:

"SCO's history of non-performance in the enterprise market is not only consistent from long before the beginning of IBM's involvement with Linux in 1999-2000, it predates the 1991 origin of Linux itself. SCO/Caldera's claim that IBM's behavior with regard to improving Linux's enterprise scalability did it harm should be evaluated in the light of the failure of both incarnations of SCO, over more than a decade before that, to even seriously attempt to be competitive in the enterprise market."

So, the most specific reference they've made to the infringed code - "very high-end enterprise-computing technologies" is one of the easiest to refute.

The thing is that SCO claims IBM broke contract and put System V code into Linux whitout which Linux would not be the big-time player it is today. That as you've pointed out they can sue for. But taking a look at OSI's Position Paper I think we can see there is not much that can be stolen from SCO's code to better Linux.

• office suite
• browser
• mail client
• operating system

At first, I think "Okay, they could legitimately need a license for either of SCO's Unix products". Then, I realized something: Both of SCO's Unix product lines are completely inferior to every other form of Unix on the market. SCO's one strong point--uniproccessor speed--is surpassed by the BSD-licensed BSDs, which Microsoft has been legally borrowing code from for nearly a decade.

A far more believable reason to license this code is to make a political statement: that you support IP as a barterable asset instead of a development/creation incentive. MS made their fortune under a distribution network that mimics the idea of IP-as-asset.

This perspective is profitable but on extremely shaky ground right now As quoted, "[s]ince other software vendors who depend on software licenses haven't been exactly falling all over themselves to support our position, seeing something that supported it was welcome." In other words, this lawsuit is their first good opportunity to throw their support with another party to support this idea. Unfortunately for MS, it's also a pretty pathetic opportunity.

The best part about this is that MS didn't have to buy the license at all. They tried it, then they bought it to support a company they (conditionally) respect. Bloody pirates.

I also set up POPfile on my laptop a few weeks ago, with similar results. In addition, I've started using it to sort my personal e-mail into various inboxes in Outlook, some of which I allow myself to read at work (family correspondence), others of which I hold off on (such as solicited advertising from sites like amazon.com) until I'm on my home connection.

On a related topic. Does anyone know a good Open Source alternative to Outlook? I want it to have an e-mail client, address book, to-do and notes and sync with my palm pilot (I use Windows XP).

If you think that ESR is "finally" getting things in gear, then you haven't seen his OSI Position Paper. The initial draft of this was released 4 days after the initial lawsuit.

Those of you who have read it awhile back may want to look again. A fair amount has changed in the past week or so.

OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint by Eric Raymond, President of The Open Source Initiative. Do we really have to say more, than what have already been said?

Sheesh, it's amazing how much the SCO PR department has in
common with M$ PR department. They both must read slashdot and
then formulate their responses accordingly.

When this law suit first came out, I dismissed it as rubbish.
Then I started to think about it, and I got a little worried
there was some truth to it. Then I read the OSI
Position Paper. I don't worry about this too much any more. The
OSI position paper makes some very compelling points, which SCO
hasn't addressed yet. In many cases they simply won't be able
to address them.

I'm not suprised that SCO has an opinion that this doesn't hurt
their case. Of course they'd have that opinion publicly, no
matter how pissed they are about it privately. Ultimately the
only opinion(s) that will matter are the judges.

Did you notice that hughes deflected and had no opinion on a
more questions than he answered? I suspect he is right about
the fact that the GPL can't make code free if the original
author didn't make it free, however the fact that they as the
original authors *were* distributing it under the GPL
complicates that claim greatly.

Of course that is all supposing there is any merit to their
claim that Linux contains enterprise code from SCO in the first
place. That is a claim that I and many others are dubious of in
the first place.

It wouldn't surprise me if SCO had been lifting code from Linux. It'd be just like when AT&T was lifting code from BSD.

What I don't understand is how they can claim they own SMP when

1) Unix didn't have SMP until a year after Linux
2) SCO's unix products still don't have SMP

Source? Go here

Now repeat after me.
I will not post trolls on Slashdot.
I will not post trolls on Slashdot.
I will not post trolls on Slashdot.
...

In case anyone hasn't already been beaten over the head by this, the two licenses are very different and serve different circumstances and individuals. There is no right or wrong here, just two great licenses.

Summary:

GPL=Free software must remain always free.
BSD=Free software should be free even to not to be free.

Correct license? Whichever you prefer or suits your project better.

Other alternatives? Sure, but trolls don't care. ;-)

"Linux is a copy of UNIX. There is very little new stuff in Linux." Linux kernel forum

Stallman didn't say that. He quoted Larry McVoy who said that.

"I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect." Richard Stallman, Free as in Freedom, Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software: O'Reilly (2002) at p. 72

That quote was taken completely out of context. What Stallman actually said was:

"I'm looking beyond what the existing laws are to what they should be...I'm not trying to draft legislation. I'm thinking about what should the law do? I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."

In the interest of brevity, even that's not in complete context. Stallman is basically saying if you were to thinking about what the law should be, and someone proposed the current copyright law, the current law would not merit much thought.

The final Stallman quote,

"The whole GNU project is really one big hack. It's one big act of subversive playful cleverness..." Richard Stallman, Revolution OS (DVD)

sounds like meaningless babble. I don't know what the heck that's supposed to mean. Maybe if SCO put it in context it would make more sense.

Bruce Perens

"This is becoming a tradition. I go there and break the law every year in the name of free speech." Bruce Perens, explaining his plan to demonstrate how to modify DVD technology to attendees of an Open Source convention.

In a show of civil disobedience, Bruce was planning to circumvent the region controls on a DVD player. He was planning to get arrested so he could put the DMCA on trial. His employer, Hewlett Packard, was afraid that they could be held liable for his demonstration, so they asked him not to do it. In the end, Perens cancelled the demonstration since it would defeat his whole purpose of HP was sued.

"We have to remember that Linux is a follow-on to UNIX. It's not just a UNIX clone. It's actually a UNIX successor." Bruce Perens, mpulse magazine, December 2001.

From the magazine interview:

What does the open source mean to development of devices within the mobile Internet?

We have to remember that Linux is a follow-on to UNIX. It's not just a UNIX clone. It's actually a UNIX successor. UNIX was invented by the phone company and it was very streaming-oriented. No one used the word 'streaming' in 1970, but if you look at the way UNIX works, it's all pipes and filters, and that's streaming.

It's a very good operating system for telecom, and branches out to streaming media and sending video, etcetera, where these things will happen over third generation wireless. Linux fits there very well.

So Perens was referring to the original AT&T UNIX and its stream-oriented foundation. What SCO fails to mention is that they do not have a claim against Linux based on the original AT&T code base. As Eric Raymond pointed out so well in the position paper, AT&T attempted to enforce their intellectual property rights, but ended up settling out of court by paying the defendant's legal fees.

I'm reading in the paper where ESR uses a graphic to illustrate the relationship between the various Unixes/workalikes, and I'm a bit confused -- why is Linux way off to the side disconnected from everything else when a largish part is composed of BSD tools and another largish part is derived from Unix?

As everyone in the Open-Source world knows, Microsoft has tried FUD before. It has failed miserably, in part due to the overwhelming antagonism towards the Microsoft brand. Remember Halloween, anyone? While SCO, admittedly, is not doing much better, Microsoft wants to do what they can without proverbially 'getting their hands dirty'.

My 1.5 cents

Unfortunately they would have the same success as Apple had suing them since Linux and Windows does not share the same lineage. Although SCO has little chance of winning their suit, buying SCO would bring them closer to perceived respectability.

There is a very good paper by Eric Raymond from OSI about the SCO-vs-IBM-vs-world case.

http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html

There is no real effective Unix IP for SCO to license.

Microsoft's SFU and Interix products are in no way depended upon the IP that SCO holds, quite the opposite in fact - Interix/SFU actually owes more to the GNU-project.

Microsoft is just effectively bankrolling SCO's lawsuit. The EU Commerce Commission,the USA Federal Trade Commission and DOJ Antitrust should also look into this given Microsoft's recently disclosed anticompetitive predatory practices.

Hell, release it under the BSD license (which microsoft _loves_) or under any other license, and you've just made your proprietary code public.

Why doesn't SCO tell us what part of the source are in violation? Simply because these parts don't exist.

SCO is either paid for spraying FUD (by MS) or will be payed for stopping spraying FUD (by IBM, simply because the damage this FUD is inflicting is higher than the sum SCO will want to shut up) - or both.

So please don't consider SCO seriously, they don't have a case.

(1) I am no karma whore
(2) Check with these folks

Yes, it is. They have patents, which they plan to enforce, namely with regard to multi-processor stuff.

If you have a source that suggests copyright (NOT TRADEMARKS) can be revoked by lack of due diligence, I'd definitely like to see it

Any due diligence issues might play out in a penalty phase, but in terms of guilt and innocence, it's irrelevant.

There have been a jillion articles on this thing, including with SCO officials, so it's not a matter of more data. They claim that both patents and copyrights have been violated.

Patents supposedly got leaked through IBM's AIX collaboration with SCO. Copyrights supposedly did because they claim that a lot of pre-IBM linux developers were privy to unix code that they were NDA'd from using elsewhere.

That's where it currently stands. Much of this was in the articles attached to this discussion, which you might have considered reading first.

"Unless Linux violates IP rights, it will fail to deliver innovation over the long run."

http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween3.php

• SCO themselves loaned an SMP system to Alan Cox so that he could implement SMP in the Linux kernel.
  
• SCO claims that the Linux community couldn't do scaling with > 4 processors without access to Unix intellectual property. However, Linux can do this, but SCO's OpenServer and UnixWare products cannot. So according to SCO, the Linux community stole SCO's IP so that they could do with it something that SCO was not able to do.
  
• The Bell Labs Unix code, of which SCO is now the owner, is not capable of SMP.
  

To get an idea of what SCO is playing at, be sure to read the OSI Position Paper on the SCO vs. IBM Complaint by Eric Raymond. It's truly enlightening.

These type of leaks traditionally occur around Halloween, don't they?

Slashdotters defending DRM... am I crazy or am I the last sane one? I'm not sure sure anymore.

Slashdot continues to get more mainstream readership, even getting mentioned in print articles these days. As a side effect of this visibility, the activity of astroturfers has increased -- notice that the pro-MS AC(s) tend to have the same writing style and logical fallacies. When other readers put them in their place, a handful UIDs dog pile one or two posters with ad hominem attacks or the "you-just-don't-like-Microsoft" (appeal to emotion?) attack. Microsoft has a long practice of 'turfing in it's marketing:

• MSFT paid Gartner to publish MSFT material as Gartner's
• fake "grass roots" letter writing
• another fake letter writing campaign
• paid for people to hang out in AOL forums
• paid for people to hang out in ZDNet "talkback" forums
• paid for people to hang out in CompuServe forums
• MSNBC doctored Wall Street Journal material
• Stuffed an on-line ballot box
• planned to plant fake op-ed pieces in local newspapers
• funded favorable think-tank whitepapers
• 'Astroturf' PR campaign exposes Microsoft goals.
• Joseph Menn. "Lobbyists Tied to Microsoft Wrote Citizens' Letters." The Los Angeles Times; Aug 23, 2001; pg. A.1 (print)
• Windows Outstuffs Linux in Poll
• Dead People, Fake Letters, Support Microsoft - Report
• Dead people rise in support of Microsoft
• Microsoft employee's move against AOL backfires
• The Freedom to Innovate Network - an 'Astroturf' Organisation

Also, right now MS is in a panicked marketing blitz. notice all the product placement on the tech sites. The embarassing stuff just disappears from the top page less than a day, but the press releases sit there for weeks.

It makes sense. Most Windows users have both Windows and Office because it's what the OEMs had installed on the machines they bought, nothing more or less. Most of these are either apathetic or know nothin else, so they will not write. Others are pissed off at the low quality, made worse by Microsoft treating security and stability issues as PR issues -- How many times have you heard "computers" crash from BSD, Novell, QNX, Linux, or OS X users? Or is it just the MSCEs? Most remaining clients could go easily over to OS X or one of the Linux distros and the next IT boom would start, like the previous one, without Microsoft.

In short, they need DRM to survive the summer and few, except for MS and RIAA staff

You may re-publish this message or excerpts of it.

FALSE OPEN SOURCE REPRESENTATIVE CALLS FOR EUROPEAN SOFTWARE PATENTS

A false or misled "open source representative" has signed an industry resolution calling for the EU to allow software patenting, which has been sent to members of the European Parliament. Copies of the resolution are here and here . The European Legal Affairs Committee holds a plenary vote on software patenting this Wednesday, and may have been influenced by the false representation.

Graham Taylor is director of Open Forum Europe, an organization that is purported to work for broader acceptance of Open Source. Taylor has appeared at various trade shows in Europe, saying reasoanble things about Open Source, for the past year. Open Forum Europe is a division of IT Forum Foundation and InterForum. InterForum's membership includes a number of large companies that have a vested interest in the promotion of software patenting in Europe. Mr. Taylor's sponsor organization is well connected with the EU government.

I would encourage Mr. Taylor to evangelize Open Source software, something he's done successfully for a while. However, he does not have the credentials to represent the Linux, Open Source and Free Software developer communities, especially when he contradicts our extremely strong opposition to software patenting. While Mr. Taylor has been visible as a public speaker, it does not appear that he has any engagement with Open Source projects and developers, or that he brought this matter up with representative organizations such as the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and Software in the Public Interest. No legitimate Open Source representative would think of taking this sort of position with government without first holding a public consultation with the developer community.

Software patents could be fatal for Open Source software in the U.S. and Europe. Since we do not collect royalties from the distribution of our own software, we have no funds to pay royalties to patent holders. Rather than sue us to collect money, expect patent holders to sue Open Source developers to restrain them from distributing their software or carrying out further development. Companies that produce proprietary software would bring that sort of suit to kill us off as a competitor.

While we can sometimes work around a patented algorithm that we know about, the Open Source developer is not able to defend himself from patent infringement claims, even invalid ones. In the U.S., the cost of a patent infringement defense often exceeds US$500,000. The Open Source developer, an individual working on his own time, won't have the funds to defend himself. He will be compelled to settle with his accuser, regardless of the merits of the case, in order to preserve what assets the plaintiff deigns to leave him. The copyrights of his own software won't be among those assets.

We are especially threatened by royalty-bearing software patents that are embedded in industry standards. In many cases, it is impossible to achieve compliance with a standard without infringing upon the patented algorithms that are specified by that standard. Standard compliance is critical for interoperability, and thus software patents in standards can make an un-communicating island of a Linux system. For example, the IEEE 1488 FireWire standard is encumbered by patents that apply to the software interfacing to it, and a patent r

I agree, I first used Free software in 1987, at least Emacs, GCC, and a pile of BSD software. GCC was already considered one of the leading compilers out there, and the BSD software considered the way to go when it came to networking computers. It was at Carnegie Mellon, and they were just finishing up phasing out a TOPS network for a predominately BSD-licensed Unix network with a lot of home grown bells and whistles called Andrew.

In 1987, Sun Microsystems, the "young upstart" company of the data center, was shipping all of their Unix servers and workstations with SunOS, their own take on BSD Unix. They were beating established companies by strategic use of heavy cost cuts both in hardware and in software, partially by co-opting large amounts of Free Software code for their commercial ends (mostly BSD software).

By 1995, Fortune 500 companies were already seeing Linux in their companies. 1994 also was the year that the Free/Open/NetBSD codebases were truly freed of all the prior legal complications, increasing the freedom and popularity of those systems.

Free Software was certainly a very real and growing part of the American computer industry in the 80's and 90's, and the author does his readers a disservice by ignoring this.

Open Source? That was a marketing term invented in 1998, not particluarly relevant for a book that stops in 1995.

Not Open Source, but free.

The phrase "free software", especially when used on Slashdot in the context of "free software community" or "free software subculture" as in sinergy's comment, typically refers to any program licensed to the public under terms that meet these four criteria, some of which require access to the program's source code. The set of programs covered under this definition almost completely mutually overlaps the set of programs covered by the Open Source Definition, which is descended from the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

In general, when somebody points out a fallacy to me (such as your "no true Scotsman" fallacy of definition), I go back and debug the argument. Let me express in more precise terms what I feel sinergy meant:

Given: Let a "free software license" be defined by the Free Software Definition published by the Free Software Foundation. Let a "free" program be a program published under a "free software license", and let a "proprietary" program be any other program. Let a "clone" of program A be another program B that closely reimplements the functionality of A. Problem: Find a "free" program in wide use that was not designed as a "clone" of an existing "proprietary" program.

"Open Software" is the slogan of the enemy camp -- commercial UNIX.

Eric Raymond gives an excellent in-depth analysis of the suit in opensource.org

Some counter points:

1) SCO claims ownership of code that was decided to be created by FreeBSD. There was a court decision in the 90s where SCO had to admit that it copied more of FreeBSD's code than FreeBSD copied from it. SCO initiated the lawsuit, and both sides settled. Since then FreeBSD has removed all the questionable code.

2) SCO claims theft of code in instances where its own employees contributed to the Linux kernel when it was known as Caldera.

3) SCO claims that Linux would have never reached certain milestones without IBM's help, but the milestones they claim didn't come from IBM's involvement with Linux.

4) SCO claims theft of features that SCO doesn't have capability. For example, SCO cannot be run on more than 4 processors today, but as of 2000, Linux can run up to 32 processors. Yet SCO claims that this was stolen from them.

5) SCO misrepresents IBM's role as a major and key factor in Linux development, but in truth IBM came late to the game in late 90s. By then Linux had acquired many features and capabilties that made it a great OS (Some of these SCO doesn't have). Even if IBM stole all the code that they contributed to the Linux kernel, estimates are that this is about 0.4% of the current kernel.

SCO accuses IBM of giving away SCO property that SCO never had in the first place. See ESR.

Open Soruce is a trademarked term involing the open source definition.

Glancing quickly through the links for the SW Ascimiation, I see no license for copying, modifying, or distributing code.

While independent derivations of similar projects would not be an infringement of copyright, taking and modifying this work without explicit permission, or license, by the author, is.

FSF Free Software and OSI Open Source are not labels applied to any code whose source happens to be available. They are terms which apply to specific works, for which specific reserved rights under copyright and other laws have been granted. Visit the Free Software Foundation's annotated list of licenses or OSI's approved licenses page for examples of Free Software and Open Source licenses. Links from these pages discuss terms and concepts underlying these licenses.

IANAL, TINLA.

One of the focus areas of the joint statement against spam by AOL, MS & Yahoo is the redesign of commercial email standards. It is critically important that the Open Source community rises to the challenge, and forms an alliance to ensure that the new measures for fighting spam are incorporated in open standards for mail delivery. It is the unofficial policy of Microsoft (see the "Halloween documents") to "enrich" open standards to combat open source software. The "war on spam" declared today is an important initiative, but poses the threat of ending the availability of open source email solutions. This could mean the end of free email if AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo are left in charge of email standards.

What message DID resonate with IT managers? The possibility of being sued for Linux/OSS patent voilations.

"Linux patent violations/risk of being sued" struck a chord with US and Swedish respondents. Seventy-four percent (74%) of Americans and 82% of Swedes stated that the risk of being sued over Linux patent violations made them feel less favorable towards Linux. This was the only message that had a strong impact with any audience.

Hmmm... the only thing that might work is very public lawsuits and threats about patent voilations and what begins to happen?

But M$ would never actually bribe another company to sue (and threaten to sue) the companies that represent the biggest threats to them just as a marketing ploy would they?

This was the only message that had a strong impact with any audience.

Would they?

=tkk

There are lots of differences. Try reading some. Basically, a lot of projects have their own little variations they want to throw in, so they release modified versions of popular liscenses. It's a mess.

Most proponents of open source and freely distributable software of all kinds recognize that commercial software also has an important place in the world. But the FSF does not. Its licenses are designed to discriminate, and therefore do not conform either to the Debian defninition or the OSI definition. This isn't a matter of ideology; it's a matter of fact.

The OSI doesn't agree with your 'facts', as the GPL is prominently acknowledged in their list of approved licenses. And rightfully so, because, other than you, the OSI *did* put a lot of thinking into their licensing approvals and the Open Source Definition. Perhaps *you* should get your facts straight first. Troll.

Optional as in you won't need it if you don't want to [use any new copyrighted works]

You assume that all authors would switch over to a digital restrictions management system. This may be true of the studios in the Motion Picture Association of America, but there remains a thriving community built around limited free sharing of copyrighted works, especially computer programs.

And if you claim that free software won't be allowed to boot on future computers, I don't find that substantiated. What I've read of the Palladium specification states that Palladium comes into play only when the system is booted with Palladium support turned on in the BIOS, and only for those processes that import palladium.dll. From Microsoft's marketing material: "A 'Palladium'-enhanced computer must continue to run any existing applications and device drivers." And the TCPA TPM FAQ (pdf) states that "The trust model the TCPA promotes for the PC is: the owner runs whatever OS or applications they want".

Try searching for open source and have to go through 10 pages of proprietory software to get to any relevant site.
Err -- the first three results are the OSI, GNU and SF.

I don't know why you're distinguishing between open source and Open Source.

"Open Source" has a definition; "open source" is just two words strung together to mean whatever you want it to mean at the time. Using vague terms doesn't strengthen any argument, except in the minds of the ignorant (I'm not calling you ignorant, mind).

Shared source is *not* open source. It clearly fails to meet the OSD definition. You may prefer free licences to open ones but shared-source is neither free nor open.

Carefully consider this, it could make or break your business if you do not proceed carefully.

Take some time out to read:

There is a lot more information on the topic, feel free to email me if you need a hand with anything

Open Source helps capitalism. These companies that have implemented, and then contributed any changes back into the community have saved time and money. This saving from not re-inventing the wheel benefits employees (who can spend more time innovating), managers, shareholders etc. Microsoft have no argument against Open Source (in terms of the development model, rather than technical advantages (if any still exist)), see The Halloween Documents

No contest. "The Ronald McDonald's chain was, and apparently remains, SCO's biggest customer."

SCO also gets tremenous points for being vindictive - a failed Linux business doing its best to sink the ship on their way out. It's fortunate for us that their best isn't enough.

Bruce

Oh come on. Microsoft is selling their world view right now on MSN, and yet a search for gcc java linux torvalds yielded over 5000 results, and hell, the 6th result is a link to the Halloween Documents. Unless you're assuming that 'Microogle' would be more censored than the current MSN search...