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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."
Does anyone know if they have a legal leg to stand on? Are they pursuing software patents?
Doesn't this entire SCO suing [insert vendor name here] for using the UNIX IP remind anyone of the days when AT&T was getting in Berkley's face over using the UNIX IP - then Berkley rewrote the entire BSD so there was no AT&T UNIX code in there?
I don't know about Windows or MacOS, but I don't believe Linux or Open/Free/NetBSD use any copywritten UNIX IP code in their kernels. Do they?
Anyone know which patents these are? SysV has been around a long time, and AT&T sold it a long time ago, the patents may not have a lot of life left in them.
It seems to me that OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD are derived from 4.4BSD Lite -- which I believe is covered by the original BSD license. It would seem to me that trying to pursue something like that legally would simply be a great waste of time and money.
That being said, it does sound a bit like SCO has given up trying to make money the honest way and brought in the land sharks...
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
David Boiieies, hero of the Linux folk! God bless him, he went up against evil Microsoft!
Now, he's a pariah. Bad David, Bad!
I absolutely adore this. It's quite funny.
You're even hypocritical enough to say "if you can't compete, sue"! Nevermind that Sun, Netscape, and the various states' attorneys lived by the same mantra when they went after Microsoft.
This is great. I love it. I hope they tear a swath of destruction across your beloved Linux vendors. It's only fair, since you all cheered him on when he went after MS.
Where's my knife, I need to cut through the irony.
So he defended Napster... That ended well. He fought Microsoft... Does that count as a win? He worked on Al Gores case in the Florida voting fiasco... Good job on that, too.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
SCO: Here hold my beer while I show 'ya somethin'. Hey, everybody watch this! .
BLAM!
SCO: Damn, I missed my foot. Here, lemme try that again . .
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
SCO: There, that's better. Now I'll never be able to walk again!
"This is great. I love it. I hope they tear a swath of destruction across your beloved Linux vendors. It's only fair, since you all cheered him on when he went after MS."
No, not everyone.
I think that the DOJ case against Microsoft was motivated mostly by envy, greed, misunderstanding, spite and grandstanding. I think it sets a horrible precedent for allowing the government to decide matters which should be left to the market. (Trivial example: like whether and to what degree a web browser should be entangled with an operating system). I am not a fan of Microsoft software, and I don't think tax dollars should be used to pay for source-secret software, but I don't think Microsoft is evil.
Microsoft has done some things I think are bad, some of which are worthy of legal remedies, but that's beside the point I'm making here, which is that there is no single "pro-Linux" viewpoint on the Microsoft persecution / prosecution in which Boies was involved.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Except for those Linux systems which don't use sysvinit, I guess you mean. I think Gentoo, for instance, uses something other than sysvinit. There's no real reason other distributions couldn't as well. sysvinit isn't part of the linux kernel, it is just a piece of software; you can put anything you want in /sbin/init.
Most people don't like the idea of what you are saying. Someone made something to make money!!!OMG!
Just because you have been getting it for free does not make it yours to take. Apply that to mp3, software, or patents.
God forbid your boss walk up to you and say "you know I should not pay you for your work."
Think about all the overtime you work, do you think you should be paid for it? There ya go, someone is stealing from you and you let it happen does that make it right? Should you try to find a way to get your due money? Is that wrong?
Sorry, I don't have a problem with them doing this.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
I was going to mention this. I wonder why they haven't figured this out already? Caldera's "OpenLinux" was GPL software.
Another thing that got me was the article's mention of "older versions of Windows" having BSD code. If I am not mistake, isn't the current NT/XP software still running off of some BSD-based network code?
As everyone else is saying, look at his track record. His cases seem to be presented with questionable tactics, not fully exploring the ramifications of what he is arguing for, and attacking the case on one tiny point, missing a bigger picture. I remember reading a lot about his work for Gore, that he was so focused on certain demands in the case that he missed arguing for other things he could have won. For the Microsoft case, he was obsessed with the browser issue, missing many points related to Microsoft's behaviour in the bigger picture.
For such a hugely hyped lawyer, he manages to make swiss cheese of the most open-and-shut cases. Now if they had hired Johnny Cochran, I'd be concerned...
Obviously SCO, but who uses that? More to the point, I think it would be in our best interests to avoid using (and especially paying for) any products from their parent companies and the parent's subsidiaries. In other words, we should avoid the whole corporate tree.
Caldera is the owner, right? And what about it's subsidiaries? Don't they have an embedded Linux biz, Lineo or something?
What these guys are doing is way worse then Amazon, and we (well, some people, not me personally) are boycotting them.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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?
It seems to me that this is an opportunity for us open-source geeks to put our money where our mouths are.
Love is no longer WITH Caldera/SCO, and hasn't been for months now. SCO's abrupt change of strategies (including emphasizing Unix rather than Linux)is the direct result of their new president.
And as lame as we might think this move is, I don't think (yet) that they really intend to try to collect direct payments. I think they'll use this as leverage in future negotiations with other software companies. If it stands up in court, you can't deny that it's a nice carrot AND stick to have when dealing with partners.....and competitors.
That said, if they really DO try to collect revenue, then yes, there should be some kind of market retaliation against the company. And parts of Linux would simply have to be re-written (using different concepts) to replace the infringing IP.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"I certainly will never use anything from them ever again."
Hmmm. Let's say they are going after patent infringement and were to be successful on all fronts (M$, BSD, Linux) then the only way you can use something not "from them" is possibly Old Line Unices or maybe VM or maybe VMS or some rather Siemens offering. A small and clique-laden market.
Anybody know if SCO owns a piece of the action on any closed Unices? VM is possibly safe, I don't recall SCO ever playing with Big Blue. What about VMS... was the SCO influence at DEC restricted to just their 'nix?
Could it be "you can run but you can't hide?"
who fucked up Al Gore's chances in the Florida recounts.
He's the unsung villian who turned Al into a laughingstock. If Boies had advised a statewide recount of ALL counties even a week after the election, he would have got it, and would have turned the election. Instead, he wanted just a few handpicked counties, something no one could go along with.
Of course, Al did follow his advice. For the want of intelligent legal advice, a kingdom was lost. Just in case you go through a divorce, don't sign until you're released from the debts (credit cards you don't want to pay. Boies isn't the only stupid lawyer admitted to the bar.
Actually, there are patents open on *nix: the famous example is patent no. 4,135,240, the setuid patent (this link may work), filed 1973, granted 1979.
I don't know if there were any post-assignation grants of ownership to the patent, or if Lucent (nee Bell Labs) still owns it.
A press release from SCO states that Boies, Schiller and Flexner has been retained in an advisory capacity, which isn't unusual when a company is trying to determine an IP strategy. We often forget that lawyers are often used for things other than suing people (such as, uh, determining under what statutes one may sue, who one may sue, contracts to enforce terms over which one may sue ... I'm not helping my case here, am I?). The press release (and this story) indicates that the UnixWare and OpenServer libraries are affected. Unfortunately, their "Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart" is one of the least useful displays possible, since it appears simply to be the "History of UNIX" chart with some colored lines added. Hopefully, a full clarification by SCO will be forthcoming.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
The real story is that Maureen O'Gara and LinuxGram deliberately spread the false rumour about SCO. The only reason I can think of is that they must dislike SCO.
h tm
If you read O'Gara's article carefully she says that she presumed that SCO was going to go after Linux users. She only talked to one person at SCO who thought the idea was retarded. He said going after Linux users would be "suicide." After that most people would probably decide they had presumed incorrectly but O'Gara likes to go with the most damaging thing she can presume even if it's wrong.
The day after the article SCO said: "SCO has no desire to take legal action against fellow Linux vendors."
But the rumour had already spread. Stupid reporters took O'Gara's speculations and said, "It was reported that SCO was planning to sue Linux users."
Here is a factual article:
http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b01162003.
I knew this guy when he "worked" for Franklin Covey (see bio here: http://www.sco.com/company/execs/dmcbride.html ). He ran the e-Planning group, trying develop things from online planners to FC's desktop planning software.
I should say, "ran into the ground." Everything he did sounded nice on the long project plans that he and other around him made, and were full of COMPLETE FREAKING BULLSHIT, every time.
Darl McBride is a total symbol of all that is wrong with the tech world, especially during the dot-bomb era.
He knows dick-all, but sounds real good and smooth to other suits.
He was really hot on WAP (if that tells you anything!) and thought that people would pay to be able to check www.franklinplanner.com (FC's online planner - seemingly now not working) via their cell phones.
Dumb!
By the way, he also bought that technology (for the online planner) from two guys who were basically Cold Fusion script kiddies for $10,000,000 ... I spent some time talking to the guys who had to rewrite all the crappy code (non-componentized, no db abstraction, etc. etc. non-optimized). Those script kiddies must have laughed all the way to the bank.
I mean, can you believe it - buying an online planner! A good coder can whip up a basic one in a week solo!
Then they spent $250,000 - a cool quarter of a mill US - turning it into a Flash planner ... so it would feel like a desktop app on the web.
Maybe not such a stupid idea, but they executed it as a total one-off, again with no componentization, etc., so that their strategy (to customize this calendar for big corporate clients) was totally impossible.
Then his big plan was an app that aggregates all your data (mail, web, documents, contacts, etc.) into one big portal-on-the-desktop application. I forget the name of the company that he did this with, but again it was a total freaking failure.
FC stock, which had been trading at about $30 in the '98, '99 years, dropped like a stone ... not just because of Darl, of course, but almost certain contributed to by his total freaking cluelessness about anything technical that could actually make (as opposed to burn) money.
The one group of people that did get rich while Darl was at FC was the lawyers ... they had an insane contract with some top firm, running at something like $15,000 monthly retainer.
For what is anyone's guess.
But this really makes sense when I see he's now running SCO. Those dolts are so far gone their exit strategy is to sue the whole world. Maybe they invented the if statement or something, too.
Rest assured: with Darl McBride at the head of SCO they won't make anything innovative, new, good, or money-making.
But I supposed the lawyers are still going to be fine.
Unbelievable ... I never expected him to turn up there.