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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."
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?
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?
I don't think it's patents, per se. Software patents just didn't exist in the days that most of what we now consider to be 'Unix' was written.
It's likely just plain-old-ordinary copyright and licensing issues. It seems that the argument would go that some people are using SCO software outside of the bounds of the license agreement that they originally agreed to.
I've heard some people assert that this means that SCO is asserting that they own 'ls', for example, and that nobody can use 'ls' without a license from SCO. That's only partially correct -- nobody can use *their version* without permission. But, that doesn't prevent the GNU people from writing 'ls' by themselves in a manner that behaves exactly like the SCO S/W.
I suspect that what they're really trying to target is people who use certain SCO software outside of SCO unix and aren't paying for the right to use it.
That being said, though, you gotta worry if a big chunk of SCO's revenue comes from lawsuits and not from new technology. It's 2003, for crying out loud -- how long can you milk 30-year-old technology?
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.
That, my fellow
The way I see it, if Caldera sues over any of their proprietary IP that they contributed to the kernel, etc., the terms of the GPL will govern (I hope
I suspect so. Caldera's active voluntary participation in development of various parts of the system, in its entirety, would probably preclude an attempt at enforcing copyrights that have become "tainted by the GPL." Here again, any IP infringement that was a direct result of Caldera's participation would carry an implied license under whatever license covered the particular system component that contained the IP.
Now, all bets, above, are off if they are going to seek enforcement of IP governing a part of the system in which Caldera did not participate. If the contested IP is merely copyrighted by Caldera and the developers can show that they did a true "clean room" reverse-engineering job, then Caldera will get nothing but legal bills and a LOT of bad press in the community. However, if the "independently-developed" infringing IP is covered by a PATENT, there is NO protection for the developers unless they can prove Caldera/SCO contributed that IP to the project.
Either way, I don't see how Caldera can POSSIBLY gain from this exercise. Many members of the OSS community are also in "buying official" positions out in the "meat world." Anyone want to let them know that if they pee in our Post Toasties(TM), we might just be inclined to return the favor by buying our respective companies' server software, etc, from their competition?
utter rubbish
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.