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SCO Group Hires Boies After All
pitr256 writes "So it seems the SCO Group has decided to
hire infamous Anti-Microsoft lawyer David
Boies after all. This comes upon reversal of the SCO Group statement
according to Chief Executive Darl McBride of having not engaged Mr. Boies
to take legal action against our fellow Linux vendors. Now, CNet
News is reporting that not only is SCO Group investigating the Linux vendors
but that it is also going to investigate Windows, Mac OS X, and the BSD derivatives. So if your technology can't win on price
and performance, break out the lawyers and sue everyone. Does anyone else see
this as the end of SCO (Caldera) like I do? I certainly will never use anything from them ever again."
FreeBSD includes software compatibility layers (such as Linux, etc.) that also includes some System V shims and code that could be targetted by SCO. I believe the kernel module that could be in question is svr4.ko along with the stuff under /usr/src/sys/svr4.
NetBSD and OpenBSD may also have the same code or code derivatives in their base system's source.
I believe it was 4.4Lite that was the result of the BSD vs. AT&T court case, which in itself was a re-write to be "clean" of any AT&T source code... or at least clean enough for AT&T to allow it's distribution. I could be wrong though...
SCO owns the IP for System V. Linux uses several concepts from the System V design, not the least of which is the Linux init system which is a direct take off of the System V method.
I believe that is the case, but FreeBSD (and possibly NetBSD and OpenBSD) include a System V compatibility layer that allows programs to use System V calls via shims and a kernel module. That could be the code that SCO is aiming at.
All the BSD's based upon 4.4BSD-Lite (which is all of them) are safe from any action by SCO....UCB was sued by AT&T in the mid '90s....the lawyers went through the code and the BSD's have the legal documents to demonstrate that they dont have any SCO code. Windows and Linux and others may have some issues here.
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- Have a great time with your money!
Methinks they've been reading to many slashdot Profit! postings. They callit SCOx. Their SCOx Sux. Just shows that they can't think of anything new to bring to the table.SCO is not going after every Linux vendor, only those distributing the two libraries without SCO's permission.
To me, this is all just FUD, and is being blown WAY out of proportion.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
You might be able to make some far-fetched trademark argument about Unix look-and-feel, but what a patent covers is a set of succinct (or sometimes not-so-succinct) claims. Ie, "A system, with provision for input and output to a terminal, that ...."
I'm unsure of what exactly SCO's patents cover, but many of the fundamental characteristics of unix look and feel are more than 20 years old, e.g. the patents would be expired by now.
We might have to worry about some things, like System V-style shared memory, possibly being infringing. But it's not really possible to get a patent on the concept of a "unix-like" OS.
patents only last for 17 years from issuance of patent, or 20 years from application for patent, whichever expires first.
Actually, it's whichever expires last according to 35 USC 154(c)(1).
But if Rep. Mary Bono has her way, she'll probably introduce a bill like this to "harmonize" patent terms with copyright terms.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Er... half-right. Caldera sued MS and won: back in the days when you had a choice of which DOS to run Windows under, Microsoft put a lot of effort into making Windows MS-DOS specific, in order to wipe out the competition. Since doing that is illegal, Caldera got a big pile of MS cash in an out-of-court settlement.
Having said that, Caldera split in two - one half was 'UNIX' things (their Linux distro, the bits of SCO, etc) and the other was DOS/embedded, so it seems the part doing the suing this time is not the half that beat MS previously... (Which, incidentally, seems to have disappeared; DR DOS has been sold to these guys.
Not true. As was pointed out in a previous post, patents expire 20 years after application or 17 years after issuance of the patent, whichever comes last.
So you can have applied for a patent way back in 1969, but if you delay issuance of the patent until, say 2000, you can hold the patent until 2017.
It is not uncommon to apply for a patent, and hold up the issuance by deliberately slowing down the process (lots of legal wrangling, etc.) until your methods become widely adopted, and then suddenly move to get your patent issued. This is called a "submarine patent", because the application is hidden from the general public until issuance, so your methods can become a standard since people don't know they are patented!
One of the many problems with current U.S. patent law.
(IANAL, but submarine patents have been discussed extensively on Slashdot before.)
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Apparently the problem is the copyright on some libraries used for the SCO Xenix/Unix emulation. Which are no longer present in most Linux distributions.
These libraries might have been used in Windows NT. But even if they were, MS had probably had the right to do so, since they owned Xenix and licensed it to SCO.
I suspect that the real agenda here is to manipulate their stock price by convincing investors that they're going to get a bunch of licensing revenue. The fact that the licensing revenue will never actually be recognized is irrelevant to such a plan.
My Personal opinion is that this is a tempest in a teapot by someone who doesn't know history or the agreements that they purchased along with the IP from SCO.
Note entirely true. 4.3BSD NET2 had some USL code in it. That's what the 1995 lawsuit was about. The various BSD projects replaced their 4.3NET2 based code with 4.4LITE code which was explicitly covered by the AT&T/UCB agreements. Part of that agreement was that a certain number of files that were alleged to contain USL code were explicitly released under the BSD license.
Chances are good that someone saw these copyright notices and failed to read them far enough:
Notice the "reproduced herein with the permission of" in there.
...Since it makes a lot of things clear.
From the CNET article: "If you pull down (Mac) OS X you'll see a lot of copyright postings that point back to Unix Systems Laboratories, which is what we hold."
From the O'Reilly link in the parent post: Soon after the filing in state court, USL was bought from AT&T by Novell. The CEO of Novell, Ray Noorda, stated publicly that he would rather compete in the marketplace than in court. By the summer of 1993, settlement talks had started. Unfortunately, the two sides had dug in so deep that the talks proceed slowly. With some further prodding by Ray Noorda on the USL side, many of the sticking points were removed and a settlement was finally reached in January 1994. The result was that three files were removed from the 18,000 that made up Networking Release 2, and a number of minor changes were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add USL copyrights to about 70 files, although those files continued to be freely redistributed.
Meaning: The reason why those USL copyrights are in OS X is because the code was taken from FreeBSD, which took the code from 4.4BSD-Lite, which had permission to do so from Novell, the owner at the time of the copyrights. That settlement is still legally binding, even if the ownership of the USL code is now SCO. Looks like SCO has no case against the BSDs (nor against MS or Apple, who use BSD code in accordance with the BSD license.) Linux, I wouldn't be sure about, but I always thought Linux never had any AT&T/USL code.
There was one patent on the original AT&T unix, and that was over setuid mechanism, #4,135,240. At that time software patents were explictly not allowed, and therefore the whole patented mechanism is described in mechanical terms. This patent has of course now expired.
According to Yahoo Finance, SCOX has a market cap of 16.4M. Can't the FSF try to buy them and then release the IP to the community?
Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily work that way. Market capitalization (cap) is what it would cost at present values to purchase every share of the company that is publicly traded. In a perfect world, you would just buy up all those shares at that price. You then own the company, call for a new election of board members, vote your shares (your vote's weight = your percentage of ownership) for new board members who then order the CEO to change what he's doing or get fired.
However, there are a couple of snags to that plan. One is that once people know that you're trying to buy up the whole thing, they start demanding more money for their shares because they know you want them badly. That's why takeover attempts are always launched quoting a price higher than current market value.
More important is that the # of shares on publicly traded markets doesn't necessarily equal the number of shares in the company. A company can make some small minority of the company's total shares (say, 25% publicly traded) in their IPO and keep the rest in the hands of private investors (or owned by the company itself). So if this is the case, you can buy up every public share of the company, but you still don't control it. You'd have to examine the company's SEC filings to get the answer, but I'm guessing only a minority of SCO's shares are public.
It seems to me that this is an opportunity for us open-source geeks to put our money where our mouths are.
I think we open-source geeks are, in general, badly in need of a few "gut-checks" to see if we are willing to put our money where our Slashdot flames are. ;-) Sadly, this doesn't appear to be a good opportunity.
"95% of all Slashdot
Honestly, with all the hard work put into slashdot by Taco and all the others, it is frustrating to see people throwing it back in their faces; in this case they've been helpful enough to provide this control, and nobody even bothers to look!
By him blocking off black voters, who would statistically have voted for Gore, he offset the vote. So no wonder the recount by the media showed that Bush won. Also, since "Dubya" is the media's best friend, I wouldn't trust thier fucking vote recount as far as I could throw it.
Before you go telling people to get over it, why don't you learn the facts.