Slashdot Mirror
SCO Sues IBM for Sharing Secrets with Unix and Linux
bstadil writes "The information is still sparse but the expected lawsuits from SCO over Unix/Linux patent infringements has been filed."
SCO is asking for a billion dollars. News.com and Forbes are also covering the story.
When they hired Boies, you knew they meant business. But they are sueing someone with very deep pockets. I wonderhow deep SCO's are?
"Some claims, though, have more potential merit, Eunice said. One is that creating Unix on Intel processors needed expertise that SCO developed but IBM lacked, Eunice said."
(this was from the news.com article)
If IBM lacked it, which I doubt, I guess we can all be thankful that Linus had the expertise needed to create a Unix on Intel processors. What an idiot.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Good one Caldera.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
"IBM is affirmatively taking steps to destroy all value of Unix by improperly extracting and using the confidential and proprietary information it acquired from Unix and dumping that information into the open source community," the suit said. "IBM's tortious conduct was also intentionally and maliciously designed to destroy plaintiff's business livelihood and all opportunities of plaintiff to derive value from the Unix software code in the marketplace." - hopefully IBM wins this one and shuts SCO the hell up.
/. with AIX team working on GNU/Linux, does anyone else remember? This is going to be a tough battle, I hope Caldera loses it.
Linux's rapid maturity--for example, growing up to work on large multiprocessor servers--is evidence of the presence of Unix intellectual property, the SCO suit said. "It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code, methods or concepts to achieve such performance, and coordination by a larger developer, such as IBM," the suit said.
- cool. I guess these allegations have only to do with what IBM has been adding to the GNU/Linux code. Will it be possible to prove that there was no contamination, especially if the former AIX team was working on Linux software? I remember, maybe a year and a half ago, there was an interview on
You can't handle the truth.
You're talking about a company that is on it's death throes. Sure, they might be able to get a chunk of goodwill, but without a viable product to sell, they can't convert that goodwill into cash.
The edict of running a public company is to make money. The executives are dutybound to squeeze every last dollar out of what they can before they go under, and rest assured, go under they will.
Unfortuantely, what will happen is that in the liquidation, the IP will be sold off to another company and they, too, will see what sort of money they can squeeze out of it. I bet it's PanIP that buys the IP... any takers?
Given that project Monterey was about developing a commercial UNIX for Itanium, and given that IBM abandoned SCO and produced AIX5L for Itanium and discontinued it shortly thereafter, I really do not know what SCO's beef is.
Project Monterey had nothing to do with x86. So what if IBM is pushing Linux on x86.
Now if IBM produced its own Linux distribution for Itanium, and SCO saw some of its Monterey source in the distro, SCO might have a claim.
At least some of the claims just don't pass the sniff test.
When AIX came out in 1990 or so, it was so different from SVR4 that competitors cried "AIX isn't UNIX". IBM really did a huge amount of kernel work and had all sorts of administrative features borrowed conceptually from the mainframe that were lacking in UNIX at the time. Journalling filesystems, logical volume management, etc. just for starters. The toolset for managing AIX was (and still is, to some extent) quite different from other UNIXes. I think IBM kept the SVR3/4 APIs but re-wrote
most of the code below it back in the late 80s.
You know you have a weak argument when you start seeing claims like this:
Added Sontag [SCO SVP], "When they (IBM) started utilizing the same engineers that worked on the Unix System V source code and the ultimate derivative of it in the form of AIX, they have
effectively been applying our methods and concepts, even if there isn't a single explicit line of code" that shows up in Linux.
Believe me, there are a lot of methods and concepts that UNIX (System V/VII,SVR4) stole from predecessors, and continues to steal! Where's the suit from the MULTICS guys against AT&T? Citing executive's handwavings generalizations about leveraging UNIX expertise makes for a pretty weak legal case (and PR case imho). Monterey always had too much hand-waving for me to get enthusiastic about.
However, the issue of IBM allegedly re-creating versions of SCO libraries using SCO's actual code sounds interesting. SCO binary compatibility is actually something somewhat valuable that SCO should fully defend if it was unlawfully infringed upon via trade secret leakage rather than cleanroom reverse engineering. Still, if I remember correctly, most of the SCO/Linux binary compatibility stuff was done by some guy at SCO (Avi Tevananian or something like that? I'm butchering his name, sorry.) SCO was working on Linux binary compatibility before IBM even knew Linux existed. So to speak.
As far as infringing on how to run Linux on Intel, clearly Linus managed that without anyone's help. Now running Linux on IA-64, or perhaps some particular acceleration technique used by SCO might be grounds for a decent case depending on the particular evidences involved. I guess we'll see.
With revenues less than Red Hat, and a business model going nowhere, a legal approach makes sense for SCO. IBM can afford the lawsuit and probably route around it better than, say, Intel could route around Clipper chip infringements in existing products. If it lays clearer guidelines for Linux IP, so much the better. I guess that's what I'm hoping for. As a betting man though, I wouldn't bet on SCO for this case. Unless there are more rabbits in that hat.
--LP
Nah, I'd rather see SCO get crushed in court. If people find out IBM basically paid-off SCO by buying them out, you'll see all kinds of nutcase lawsuits coming out of the woodwork claiming "patent infringment" by people hoping to get money thrown at them to go away.
The line needs to be drawn.
Suing Red Hat may have been the one way to get Slashdot geeks off their ass and actually physically protesting somewhere. A giant PR disaster is not a good way to cash out on a dying company. Suing a megacorp in hopes of winning a modest settlement is. A company like IBM has money, but suing them for 1 billion is really throwing down the gauntlet. They could've settled for a couple of million, but IBM will make an example of Caldera for this insolence.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
But this is a fraud, "intellectual property" is not a free market property right.
You might have had a point in the day when the cost of manufacturing a product vastly outweighed the cost of designing it. In the beginning, car designs were very simple, but it didn't matter, because no-one without vast amounts of capital could afford to build a factory, so the design was safe.
Nowadays, the cost of designing a product - be it a piece of software or a new drug - vastly outweights the cost of manufacturing it. Software in particular can be duplicated very cheaply. Therefore we need a structure that makes it possible to obtain a return on investment - and note that I said "possible" not "certain" - in development of a new product. That's what the patent system was designed to do.
But there is an attitude among free software people that can be summarized as "I freely choose to make no money from my software work, therefore everyone else must be denied the right to make money from software". That's the thinking behind the GPL. It might work from the ivory tower of a MacArthur Foundation grant at MIT, but it isn't viable in the real world.
Remember, IBM makes it's money on hardware. It doesn't care about Linux on ideological grounds, it merely wants to cut the cost of shipping hardware.
They're suing over breaches of NDA and License to Unix code that SCO claims IBM had with them. Patented stuff- in the Linux kernel (Otherwise why would they be harping about SMP systems?).
And, they have the unmitigated GALL to say that Linux systems purchased from them have no issues because they have the license bundled in with their distribution licenses. That is a GPL violation, pure and simple. Either there ISN'T a patent issue or there is- if there is, then the patented stuff has to go bye-bye or have a GPL compatible license. SCO's not claiming to have licensed the alleged tech that way in their press releases.
No, this is SCO commiting corporate suicide in the most public, painful way possible. Picking an IP fight with IBM is not one of the wiser things to do- and to set the stakes so that IBM HAS to do something about it rather than settle simply and easily is downright insane. IBM is all about IP and is pretty much anal about IP handling- with theirs and their partners'. If they don't countersue with their own infringement suit (thus getting the whole mess dropped- SCO can't afford a legal battle on two fronts...) they'll prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's nothing to SCO's claims. And that's just the lawsuit part of this whole mess- the bad blood they just earned with the community just torpedoed themselves, UnitedLinux, and anyone that associates themselves too closely with SCO.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I haven't yet read all 300+ comments here, but so far I haven't seen *any* supporting SCO. Do any of you really know what's going on here? It is quite possible that IBM did rip them off. If SCO shared proprietary code with IBM under contractual restrictions, and IBM went ahead and violated those restrictions by putting that code in other products, then IBM is in the wrong. It doesn't even matter if the code is covered by patents or not, all that matters is what the two companies agreed to on paper.
I for one hope that whoever is truly at fault gets nailed, be it IBM or SCO. I believe that agreements should be honored. That's something that corporate America cares little about, especially if a buck can be made by ignoring an agreement. If IBM truly blew off a legitimate agreement, then they should fry. If IBM really believes SCO has no rightful claim to the intellectual property in question, then they should not have signed an agreement with SCO. It could well be that SCO is lying/embellishing/hallucinating, but maybe they're not.
On an aside, back in the 80's and early 90's, I worked on a port of SCO Unix to a proprietary platform. What people have been saying here about SCO's "quality" is true. Their OS was crap. I can't count how many bugs in the kernel we had to fix. We even had to completely rearchitect whole subsystems. When we were done with it, it was fairly passable, but it took man years. The most appalling thing about their code was the third party SMP implementation they bought from some other company. It was truly horrendous. I believe it did improve over the years as the product matured, but obviously not enough to keep them alive.
SCO was a popular platform for Unix on Intel. It was a private company, microsoft had a 20% shareholding, but it wasn't quoted on the stockmarket. It had been like that for years.
Suddenly (about 1995): they announced that they wanted to float on the stock market, all sorts of reasons given but one side effect was that it meant that the major shareholders (the directors) would be able to 'cash in' on their shareholding by selling to Joe Shareholder. Quite unfortunately for the new share holders, Linux started to bite into SCO profits soon after float and it never really recovered.
I have no doubt that the SCO directors had no idea that this ''new phenomenon called Linux'' would have any effect on the SCO sales & thus share price; they were only involved in that sector of the market and so would never have heard of Linux, and even if they had they would not have been able to predict the future effect on the SCO share price; it is quite coincidental that they sold their shares to the general public just before the value started to crumble.
In the begining cars designs were not very simple, but their construction was fairly crude, and venture capitalists were coming out of the woodwork to pour money into "the next big thing," and thus literally hundreds of car manufacturers sprang up virtually overnight and IP wars ravaged the land and stunted development for years because whatever one of these hundreds of manufacturers made the other could duplicate in matter of days.
You are falling into the false premise that the way things are today is the way things were back then, when cars weren't made in factories but by a few skilled men in barns. Kind of like Apple was in the early days.
For the most part things take millions to develop and thousands of man hours these days not because it actually takes that, but because the men and dollars are available, so they get spent. If these men and dollars were *not* available pretty much the same work would get done. The main difference is that it would get done faster and cheaper by a few skilled men instead of the hundreds of mediocre ones, and the attendent layer upon layer of middle managment sucking out most of the dollars of any project.
Eli Whitney's cotton gin was "stolen" and in production by copycat companies before Eli had even gotten it out of the demo phase.
Eli never patented anything again in his life, believing that some ideas were simply "to valuable to be owned."
He was right.
KFG
sPh
If most (or all) software were Free, then redundant development would occur more rarely, and only when the programmer thought he could do a better job, not just an equivalent one.
Do you work with many programmers? All of them think they can do a better job, and all of them will try to reinvent the wheel from scratch on every project, if you let them. I remember we once left a programmer alone for too long, he invented a whole new language to script his bit of the application! Now he could have embedded TCL (which is what TCL was designed for), he could have exposed a COM interface and used VBA, he could've reused something else, but he didn't.
Look, Canopy Group is an investor in several technology companies. One of those companies is out of control, and should be penalized. However, going after ANYONE that has an investor in common with SCO is out of control.
Trolltech is a privately held company, but they likely took this investment prior to SCO's decision.
As a previous poster mentioned, Canopy owns 5.8% of Trolltech. You're going to attack the other 94.2% of Trolltech shareholders because of an unrelated business's actions happens to have as an investor someone that owns 5.8% of their company?
I have a lot of respect for you as one of the leading intellectuals in this movement. However, as a small business owner, I'm terrified of what you are saying.
My company has small holdings in several of our clients. They OFTEN take courses of actions that I don't like. If you were to attack another of my clients because of what one of them did, because I was a shareholder in both? I don't think that you are being at ALL fair.
If you believe that the Canopy Group is behind this behavior, than I would suggest an announcement that ANY privately held company that takes investment capital from them (from this point, not retroactively), will be shunned. However, Trolltech did NOTHING wrong, other than take an investment from a company whose other investment did something that you don't like.
I have a third party with an ownership stake in my company. The relationship had been rocky, but quite frankly, I couldn't afford to buy them out, even if they were willing to sell. If you organized a boycott of me because of something they did, I'd be floored.
Unless you are prepared to coordinate the fundraising to buy the Canopy Group out of Trolltech (and any other company that you are prepared to boycott in your crusade against this venture capital firm), back off. You're being extremely unfair to Trolltech, who has done nothing but provide amazing software to their commercial clients (of which we are one, albeit for only one developer) and FREE software to the open source community.
Your imagination about Canopy attacking GNOME is fascinating, but they are a MINORITY shareholder. They cannot cooerce Trolltech management. Deal with Trolltech based upon Trolltech's actions, not the actions of a third party.
Imagine if you were being held personally accountable for the actions of a second cousin through marriage? I don't imagine you'd like that. Same for Trolltech and SCO.
Alex