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SCO Threatens to Press IP Claims on Linux -$99/cpu
Tangential writes "New story on LinuxBusiness week says SCO is about to mount an effort to get all Linux sites to pay a per cpu license for so-called patent violations."SCO has been proposing to charge users $96 per CPU for a so-called one-time System 5 for Linux software license to protect their systems from SCO-enforced patent issues if they ante up as soon as demand is made." They've retained David Boies (DOJ prosecutor of Microsoft) to handle the legal issues." Note: I've been unable to substantiate this - which are fairly incendiary claims. Further updates as more is heard.
I had no idea it was April 1st. But judging from the last 2 slashdot stories, it must be. This one and the "Science Project Quadruples Surfing Speed". Yikes!
How to win friends and influence people.
POKE 36879,8
SCO, after it's buyout from Caldera and then becoming SCO again, has generally behaved favorably towards Linux and the Linux community, even to the point of incorporating Linux functionality into Caldera/SCO Open Unix 8 through a Linux Kernel layer. If SCO's business model has previously included making money off Linux, it would be an act of either desperation or spite to suddenly demand royalties.
Also, isn't SCO still owned by Caldera, and SCO in name only?
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
"Ransom" Love, indeed
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
GNU is not Unix.
Linux is a "Unix-like" operating system. Anyone who has ever done system programming for a Linux system could tell you that although it is close to the SVR4 conventions (such as in the acclaimed O'Reilly 'lion' book) it disobeys many of them because it's not quite System 5 compliant.
Is this really happening or is it early in the morning and I'm a sucker to a hoax?
The site's chugging a bit, so here's the full text. And kids, if you're going to post the full text, post it as a/c for crying out loud. Whores.
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Informed sources, who would only talk on the guarantee of anonymity, say SCO has been proposing to charge users $96 per CPU for a so-called one-time System 5 for Linux software license to protect their systems from SCO-enforced patent issues if they ante up as soon as demand is made. The fee would go up to $149 per CPU if SCO had to wait through a so-called 99-day "amnesty period" for its money. Users of SCO Linux would get a free System 5 license. They would also have the free right to run SCO Unix apps on Linux.
Sources say the scheme, which pretty much sounds like a protection racket - we won't sue if you pay - isn't engraved in stone but an undated weeks-old draft SCO press release that details the plan and was read to us has been quietly making the rounds. At press time, we got word that a major player, believed to be IBM, thought it had dissuaded SCO from going through with the idea.
A usually reliable source swears a SCO executive told him that SCO has hired the redoubtable David Boies, who prosecuted the Microsoft antitrust case for the Justice Department, to press infringement claims not against users but against the other Linux distributions. Presumably this means Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and maybe even SCO's United Linux partners SuSE, TurboLinux, and Conectiva.
It is unclear whether SCO envisioned the free System 5 license it's been proposing to bundle with SCO Linux extending to its United Linux partners or simply saw it as a SCO differentiator.
SCO would base any claims it makes on the Unix patents and copyrights that it acquired when it took over the Santa Cruz Operation. Its press release claims it "owns much of the core Unix IP" and that it has the right to enforce it.
The Santa Cruz Operation of course bought Unix from Novell, which in turn got it from AT&T. Unix was written at Bell Labs when Bell Labs was still part of the phone company. It is unclear whether the alleged IP is unassailable and that valid patents or copyrights actually exist or that the Unix libraries are actually in Linux. Reportedly there has been a lot of patent research going on in the Linux community lately and there are supposedly serious doubts SCO has much of anything.
SCO CEO Darl McBride was in England or en route home and did not return calls. Other SCO execs declined to comment; neither would Red Hat, SuSE nor major ISVs also familiar with the situation.
SCO's director of marketing communications Blake Stowell finally found a phone and confirmed that SCO was talking to Boies, described in the press release as SCO's "IP advisor," about how best to monetize its IP, but denied that it had retained him yet or that its plans were fixed.
Stowell also denied that SCO would target other Linux distributions, basically suggesting that it would be suicide for SCO to do such a thing. "Microsoft would love to see that happen," he said. Instead Stowell suggested that SCO would take out after other unidentified operating systems that drive something from Unix and hinted that that might mean Microsoft itself since Boies was involved.
Potential SCO targets said patent demands and encumbrances are explicitly outlawed by the GPL, the touchstone of the open source/Linux movement, and any move by SCO against the Linux distributions would make SCO a pariah. They claim the protection scheme itself would be the end of SCO. The open source community regards patents with haughty distain. Naturally there are fears that accounts on the Linux threshold will be spooked if SCO, which is playing on known IP concerns, starts making demands.
The situation is fraught with irony considering that open source people have figured it would be cash-rich Microsoft that took out after them brandishing its patent portfolio, not one of their own.
Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik publicly fretted about his worries that Microsoft will eventually take Linux to court for patent infringement at a Linux gathering only a month ago (CSN No 479).
Red Hat says it is so concerned - despite the fact that it's against patents and signed a petition to the European Union urging the EU not to adopt software patents - that it has "reluctantly" taken the "defensive position" of assembling its own patent portfolio. To mitigate its intellectual inconsistency, it says its patents can be used for free for any GPL work. Licenses, however, would be required for any closed, proprietary use.
SCO, on the other hand, needs the money. Its tiny Linux business is a disaster and there's little doubt that the company, founded by ex-Novell CEO Ray Noorda, would be out on the street by now if it weren't for the Unix operating systems it got from Santa Cruz.
Meanwhile, Boies' track record since the Microsoft case hasn't been anything to write home about. He wasn't able to save either Al Gore or Napster and actually a lot of the tar he managed to dip Microsoft in rubbed off with Microsoft's subsequent appeal and settlement with the DOJ.
Is it just me, or has everyone else noticed a lack of information about this. What does the patent cover? What software does it apply to?
In fact, is there any information other than SCO wanting patent royalties for some undeisclosed software?
I was horrified to read that SCO was planning on charging $99 per cpu! Thats outrageous!!
You can imagine my relief when, reading further, I see that its $96/cpu.
Unconfirmed sources say that a confidential source, while taking a shit, heard an anonymous executive talking about a meeting with a person who will be unnamed (possibly Jenna Jameson), and at that meeting, the discussion was about the dire financial situation of the company ( the word 'fucked' was heard repeatedly ).
Or maybe someone was commenting about a movie he rented last night.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
If this is indeed true - does this surprise anyone?
It has been said time and time again that SCO/Caldera (and to some extent UnitedLinux) would end up bringing the worse part of proprietary systems (like moronic licensing policies) to Linux. Now it's finally here and we can go ahead and stick a fork in what used to be a pretty good company.
Looks like the decision makers at SCO/Caldera have Ransom Love on the brain.
Some people complain about Red Hat's "market dominance". I guess some companies are just content in making decisions that are so stupid, that they're making it easy to dump their product. RH is going to wipe the floor with what's left of SCO. Who in their right mind would pay per processor fees for linux?
It's interesting reading that IBM was actively "dissuading" SCO from carrying out this threat.
IBM has an enormous number of software patents that probably cover every operating system on the market. IBM, unlike SCO, understands that for software companies software patents are like nuclear weapons. They are useful as a deterrent, and useless for anything else.
There's a story, possibly apocryphal, about how a Microsoft lawyer contacted IBM's legal department, informed them that they had a patent that IBM's operating systems infringed upon, and set up a meeting to discuss royalty payments. The IBM legal team supposedly showed up with a pile of hundreds of patents that Windows infringed on, and that was the end of that.
I suspect that this is the nature of the dissuasive force being brought to bear by IBM.
This seems to be a useful side effect of large companies like IBM adopting Linux. They serve as a certain form of protection against this sort of shakedown racket, at least from by actual software companies.
The only companies that are able to enforce software patents with impunity are those companies that don't actually manufacture software, like PANIP This highlights the destructive uselessness of software patents -- they are only capable of benefiting companies that don't produce software, in other words, lawsuit factories like PANIP.
Oh yes, they also benefit the patent office to the tune of millions of dollars a year -- a destructive racket in and of itself.
From scratch, clean room development will protect you from copyright, but it is no protection from patents.
Ooooooohhhh! How scary! The man who split Microsoft into two companies! And ensured that Albert Gore assumed the US Presidency!
Given Boise's track record, we can all sleep well tonight.
Until I see some citations, I'm a bit skeptical about these claims. If it does turn out that the Linux kernel is violating a solid patent, is there any reason why the code couldn't just be tweaked to not violate the patent anymore? While a "real" company might not be willing to do this, the kernel developers have demonstrated a willingness to overhaul major portions of the kernel code and I'm sure any problems could be routed around fairly quickly.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
See if I pay it. Wanna take me to court? Okay, do so. I'd rather pay an attorney than hand money over to you.
And if everybody takes this tact, they'll back off. These cowards from Caldera/SCO have been waiting to do something like this for a long time. I don't trust them and never have.
Of course, they won't sue me, an individual user. They'll sue RedHat, as the story says. They'll sue SuSE. They'll sue Mandrake. Let's see them sue the Debian Project, while they're at it and get the EFF involved.
Until I hear that this is false, I'm boycotting SCO.
Off to look through the debian packages to find ones contributed by Caldera and remove them....
I read this section to mean that if SCO has patents that Linux implements, and 'the community' doesn't already have an unlimited eternal royaltay-free license to use these patents, then the Linux people are right now, regardless of whether SCO tries to pay up or not, legally obligated to remove the implementations of these patents from the Linux code. As far as i'm aware, there have been in the past concentrated efforts to find and remove submarined patents that accidentally wound up in GPLed software, no? What patents of this sort could SCO have?
At any rate one would imagine that SCO would not be so stupid as to demand individual $97 patent licenses from a group of people that (1) is at the moment their core target market (2) has a long-standing tendency to boycott people who do things like demand money for submarine patents (3) would probably not even pay the $97 fees, as they also have a long-standing tendency to not mind stealing from anyone they believe to be screwing them over. (I call (3) "civil disobedience", personally, but that's probably just spin on my part.)
And SCO would have to demand this money from individual users-- it would be impossible for SCO to demand it from vendors, becuase were SCO to start demanding licensing fees from anyone at all regarding patents of theirs inside the Linux kernel (which i assume is where these patent violations would have taken place), all existing linux vendors, including SCO, would be under GPL section 7 immediately legally unable to distribute Linux to anyone at all! (Not permanently, of course, as i find it highly unlikely any defendable SCO patent, once discovered in the linux kernel, would remain there any longer than a span of hours.)
Either way, assuming that SCO is in fact this stupid, and assuming that SCO actually does own patents that the linux kernel violates but that no one in the free software community has ever noticed, i think i'll wait until i read this on SCO.COM to pay any attention to it whatsoever.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
How do we make SCO an example to the world that this is a very bad idea?
I know! From now on, nobody buy their products!
Oh, wait...
The Berkeley system distribution (BSD) evolved out of AT&T UNIX. When push came to shove, the courts ruled against AT&T - the IP rights for BSD rest with the University of California. I can't imagine any IP in the original Unix that doesn't have a counterpart in the Berkeley codebase.. and the BSD license grants everyone the rights to use that IP.
Furthermore, Microsoft would likely be a large offender of any patents. NT has a POSIX subsystem. Pretty much all of the Unix concepts (processes, pipes, files, yada yada) are present in Win32, heck, in any OS. If SCO really wanted to milk money out of this, I'd be astonished if their first move wasn't to buzz around Microsoft and catch a large cash settlement. Or attempt to be purchased.
My bullshit meter is blowing chunks.
Demanding a per CPU fee from Linux users and/or distributers for alleged patent infringements would be the single most stupid thing SCO could possibly do.
This actually reminds me of the time (1987) IBM launched their MCA bus based PS/2 line. IBM then reportedly demanded a 'per system ever produced' fee from clone makers wanting to license the MCA technology in order to make clones/compatibles. Unsurprisingly, a few months later we had the EISA bus, a few years on the MCA bus is extinct and the world runs on PCI. Strategic blunders like these have killed off large corporations in the past.
Then again, if the real target is a certain software marketing outfit a bit further north on the US west coast, the process might reveal a few more skeletons in various corporate closets. That might of course turn interesting if you're into that sort of thing.
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
I'm sure Microsoft likes what it's hearing today, but it's not stupid enough to get involved.
Why? Because it's in still in court trying to settle it's antitrust case. All a judge (or Sun, or any one else that is "Sue MS" Happy) would have to hear is that MS is involved (in any way I might add) in preventing Linux from being sold in a market that MS dominates, and all kinds of hell breaks loose.
Because if this, Microsoft will not even think of getting close to this case, let alone touch it.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Bell Telephone Laboratories was issued a patent in 1979 for the setuid (set user ID) bit in the Unix file system. This patent was no doubt transferred along with the rest of "Unix," from AT&T to Unix International to Novell to SCO.
This patent was never enforced, and should have expired by now. Hypothetically, there could be some other similar intellectual propery "landmines" in the very specification of Unix-like systems.
Just FYI; the story sounds like FUD to me.
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But the GPL requires not only the freedom to redistribute, but to distribute arbitrary derived works. So really, the above should read "... would not permit royalty-free distribution of arbitrary derived works". But this is clearly nonsense: If I added one-click shopping to GNU ls, I would not have a license to distribute the result. So by section 7, nobody can distribute GNU ls under the GPL.
There are many other scenarios in which the claims of section 7 are rendered absurd. Consider the impact on those outside of the jurisdiction in which the patent applies; the hypothetical rogue nation that outlaws GPLed software; the employee whose contract prohibits him from contributing to certain free software projects. The requirement that "all those who receive copies directly or indirectly" be able to exercise their GPL rights is ludicrously onerous.
Regarding the parent's main point: I certainly believe that SCO itself is prohibited from distributing GPLed software on which it has patents, unless they also give everyone a free, perpetual license to the patent for GPLed software. Otherwise, they would not really be giving others the freedoms that they say (via the GPL) they are giving. Since they have distributed Linux, that alone is enough to thwart the rumored patent attack.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
I've got a couple of PCs at home that mostly run Win98, but sometimes run Linux, and some at work too. OK, so maybe the Business Software Alliance could come around demanding to see what I'm running at home, but they won't get within 100yards of where I work. Secure underground bunkers with multiple card-access locks on the grounds of an airport. I must admit it would be kind of funny to watch the Pinkerton rent-a-cops call out Homeland Security to detain the BSA goons...
Count the downloads, maybe? Nope, that won't work either. I've downloaded some distros I've never used, and I've seen burned copies of downloads passed around and copied by multiple people.
So, again, who counts how many cpus any given person is running Linux on? My boxes at home are behind a firewall doing NAT and hiding all the usual ports, so good luck fingerprinting that...
He says it himself that he knows it would be suicide, and hints that it might actually be Microsoft who is the target.
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
No, this is yet another reason why SOFTWARE patents are bad, bad, bad. In the realm of physical devices you need to be specific enough about your device for the patent to be enforcable so there is usually an alternative implementation that can achieve a similar goal without infringing. For example look at the way that AMD was able to basically clone the Intel cpu's over the years, they could make another cpu that could take the same inputs and give the same outputs but which did not infringe on Intel's patents.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Well SCO aka Caldera is an enterprise with a long Linux tradition. I may dislike it more than like it, but this is more a question of taste and preferences. Anyway, one shall take into consideration that SCO, today, combines one of the oldest Linux distributors + the most traditionalist Unix developer.For such a company to come up and try a suicide move like the one shown in the article is rather irrational. True, there have been such cases, when companies change hands and new management gets nuts and the company burns to flames. But, as far as I remember, it was Caldera who bought the remains of SCO. Considering that this company was created by one of the most mature figures of software, and a full-hearted anti-MS partisan - Ray Noorda, I really wonder how serious this story can be.
Besides, the story itself, is full of foggy statements. Many already referred the strange chain of anonymous sources that broke things to the newsrooms. But there are many other foggy moments.
First is the price tags - 96, 99, 149 per cpu. For anyone who knows how Linux is deployed, one can really wonder how they could be planning for such BS.
Then we read: Users of SCO Linux would get a free System 5 license. They would also have the free right to run SCO Unix apps on Linux. So... Are we talking about Linux or SCO Linux?
Then, we have this weird statement on pressing charges: Presumably this means Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and maybe even SCO's United Linux partners SuSE, TurboLinux, and Conectiva. If I'm not mistaken, TurboLinux is a Japanese comapny, SuSE is from Germany and Conectiva is from Brasil. Well, patent systems behave differentially in different countries. So, the best that SCO could have done was to commit harakiri as its partners would probably broke the alliance and it would force Caldera to fight in three different countries.
And the most weird of all statements would be this one: SCO would base any claims it makes on the Unix patents and copyrights that it acquired when it took over the Santa Cruz Operation. Its press release claims it "owns much of the core Unix IP" and that it has the right to enforce it. Well, if it owns much of the core of Unix, then not only Linux but the whole *NIX world would be in danger. Considering that this was once a matter that was partially and painfully settled down between Bell and Berkeley, considering that even Windows has a little bit of Unix inside, considering that lots of standards and protocols are based on Unix, considering the tens of Unices around, this would be double harakiri for SCO. So it is very weird to consider that anyone at SCO could ever seriously think the way it is shown on the article.
So it is very probable that the article is either someone trying to get some sensational points in yellow journalism, or this is a well elaborated FUD test to see how people react.
If one cares to see SCO site, they still are well determined in their Linux moves. And this adds an argument to the fact that probably this article is just some cheap provocation. No matter that I dislike SCO/Caldera, I have to recognise that someone is playing dirty against them.
They're like the buzzing of an insignificant group of retarded flies who keep demanding attention when they have nothing noteworthy.
Here's a plan.
Sounds like fun. I call dibs on the SCO Ethics Manual.