Slashdot Mirror
More on SCO vs. IBM Lawsuit
Colin Stanners writes "SCO has held a TeleConference and put up a page with information on their lawsuit against IBM. The key phrase (from their complaint) is: '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.' Their page also includes a Q&A, presentation, and exhibits, although these are mostly licensing agreements and not code." Bruce Perens had an interesting comment on the situation, more than one group is trying to organize a boycott, and Newsforge has a story based on SCO's press conference this morning. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
"It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code"
Umm SCO is no gem in the rough. My opinion Five years ago Linux was a better choice then that of SCO.
Sounds like Penis envy to me.
Sorry, it was the dedication of thousands of programmers and millions of testers that made Linux what it is today.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Everyone who has installed SCO (any type or version) in the last year raise your hand.
I don't think there is much of a point in boycotting a company who has clearly turned away from producting anything and now simply exists to litigate based on its IP.
-Peter
Maybe I can sue SCO for $1B when my sendmail gets hacked. SCO SUCKS!
The market has been "boycotting" SCO and it's crap for years, not like there needs to be a special effort.
:) And we can do this *legally* :-D.....
hehehehe Isn't that the truth.
Better yet--
Why not have everyone send them letters of complaint, requesting a response. Do this repeatedly....
$0.37 is not much to each of us, but adding up all the postage and processing labor would likely cause a much higher cost (and lost oppertunity) to them.
In otherwords, lets apply the principles used in DDOS to saturate their mailrooms
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It's fairly obvious to me what this is all about; Linux is stealing UNIX marketshare, so SCO is going to do everything it possibly can to discredit it's competitior. It's typical FUD. Unfortunately for SCO, they're too late. IBM has made too much money from linux to allow a little gnat of a company like SCO push it around. Even if this lawsuit isn't thrown right out of court, it'll be proven in short order that none of the code to the linux kernel comes from SCO's IP. ipso facto, IBM can countersue SCO into oblivion.
At least, that's how I see it.
Despite millions of years of evolution, human beings, taken as a group, are still stupid, panicky animals.
But I hope Bruce and others won't lose time pointing out the implications for people who want to participate in programs like MSFT's "shared source". They open themselves up to later lawsuits if they later develop or distribute anything technologically related, even if it isn't textually derived from the original.
It is an interesting counterpoint in case Microsoft wants to use the lawsuit in any anti-linux campaign ...
What's going to happen to SCO's intellectual property when it croaks? Who will buy it? I think the ancient unices that they own are of great interest. I'd love to see those in the public domain, but that's probably wishful thinking.
Why would IBM *buy* SCO? If they released their product under the GPL, couldn't IBM just take a distro and re-release it as "SCOSUCKS" under the GPL? Couldn't anyone? What would burn the top brass at SCO if after this lawsuit (clearly aimed at them just trying to cash in), someone took their distro and made it successful.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
SCO is basically claiming, much like AT&T did Long Ago WRT BSD, that the AIX source code is wrought with a mix of SCO's licensed code, as well as IBMs internal AIX code.
Based upon statements by IBM executives, IBM seems to be, essentially, raiding AIX to implement high end features into the Linux kernel. If they do so, then any SCO IP within AIX may be transferred into the open license of the Linux kernel.
IF THIS IS THE CASE, the SCO may very well have a valid claim here. The facts on whether SCO is a good Unix, bad Unix, good company, successful company etc, is irrelevant.
So, SCO is taking this claim to court to clear it up. IF SCO is correct, then further erosion and disclosure of their IP MAY harm SCO, so that's why they want to slow or stop the process quickly.
IF SCO is incorrect, then it's all a waste of time, but it does give IBM a clearer path to help Linux move forward using legacy techniques and technology already developed for AIX.
They're probably hoping IBM will buy them out for a couple million dollars in an effort to avoid bad publicity, and then the SCO managers can retirs in luxury. The sad thing is, it might even happen
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
I've never seen SCO Unix (is that what it's called) anywhere. I wonder if it would be better for our community to kill SCO with kindness? I'm considering writing to SCO (in my own name) asking for information on their products. I won't put anything in my letter about a protest or about this issue at all. I will just ask them to send me some details. I wonder what the effect of hundreds of thousands of people doing this would be. At the very least it might make it difficult for them to identify real would-be customers.
Is this legal? Is it a good idea? Would it have any effect at all?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Argh.. We still sell and use SCO OpenServer 5.0.x in many customer sites. We integrated Cleo's SNA/SDLC/3270/HLLAPI/??? product into ours on SCO years ago and it's hard to move away from it now. Can anyone suggest a good Linux alternative? Our application runs fine on Linux without the SNA integration. So if we can do it some other way, no more SCO! That would have made me happy before they went and did this :)
p
Cleo SNA product:
http://www.cleo.com/products/gateway.as
Can all the SysV and other SCO stuff be removed without killing Linux?
Yes
The future will require a large degree of interoperability. IBM customers do not want AIX or Linux. They want AIX and Linux. This is going in the direction where I should be able to depend on IBM big iron working productively with Sun big iron. (Which has nothing to do with IBM and Sun liking each other;) There is enough force behind Linux that whatever IP SCO had, there's always another way to do things, and SCO gets cut off and isolated. It's like owning a lot of land where the railroad decided not to go.
Not necessarily.
If the code they are claiming infringes on their rights is new code that isn't in any of their distributions, they're not sucked into a GPL vortex retroactively. If that were the case, and in fact if it proves to be the case, I can see all sorts of businesses taking another look at the risks of releasing GPL'd code.
Quoted from the article:
They _know_ that this will hurt IBM much more than getting an non-disclosure agreement with SCO over some lump of dollars.
But their argument that Linux could not hav been developed with such a speed compared to UNIX is rather weak.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
IANAL. However, I am trying to read through the exhibits SCO provided on its website. I have not looked at all of them, but I couldn't resist passing this on. Their exhibit C is a letter of understanding between AT&T and IBM which re-writes some of the clauses of the contract and license in an earlier exhibit.
I would point people to the 4th page of the pdf file, which addresses clause 7.06a of an earlier agreement. It reads in part:
"LICENSSE agrees that it shall hold SOFTWARE PRODUCT subject to this agreement in confidence for AT&T. . . . Nothing in this agreement shall prevent LICENSEE from developing or marketing products or services employing ideas, concepts, know-how of techniques relating to data processing embodied in SOFTWAR PRODUCTS subject to this agreement, provided that LICENSEE shall not copy any code from such SOFTWARE PRODUCTS into any such product or in connection with any such service and employees of LICENSEE shall not refer to the physical documents and materials comprising SOFTWARE PRODUCTS subject to this agreement when they are developing any such product or service or providing any such service. If information relating to a SOFTWARE PRODUCT subject to this agreement at any time becomes available without restriction to the general public by acts not attributable to LICENSEE or its employees, LICENSEES obligations under this section shall not apply to such information after such time."
Now, I've not glanced at exhibits D and E and have not read completely exhibits A,B and C. However, this clause, if not overridden in D or E, would seem to me (remember IANAL) to give IBM the right to use IP embedded in licensed code to produce other code or services. It would even seem to allow people who have worked with licensed code to work on the new project so long as they do not refer to licensed code or documentation while working on the new project.
So, even if IBM took SCO intellectual property and placed it into Linux, so long as they didn't copy SCO owned code or look at while working on the Linux code, it seems to me that it would have been perfectly legal under the contracts for IBM to co-opt SCO owned IP and place it under the GPL in Linux.
Anyone read it differently?
So, let's get this straight.
So either Canopy doesn't know what's going on, or is pretty hands-off, or they have no qualms about using one business in a way that would hurt or kill off one or more of their other viable businesses. Either way, they aren't a good company to work with.
Kind of like the dilbert comic, "The net-net at the end of the days is we owe ourselves 3 billion dollars."
-Adam
The case is worse than you think. There are all sorts of factual inaccuracies in the filling.
For example they make a great deal out of the fact that Linux = Linux + Unix; to show that the intent was to steal Unix intellectual property. As a side note Linux is a pun on Linix which was an abbreviation for Linus' Minix and SCO owns no Minix intellectual property.
They refer to Stallman as a former MIT professor.
Where it is not just factually untrue they often are highly misleading. For example they talk about SCO intellectual property as part of the Monterey project and then have quotes from IBM indicating the version of JFS in Linux is from Monterey project. The clear intent is to leave the reader with the impression that JFS came from SCO and was stolen by IBM.
Unlike the other two mistakes (which might just show negligence is preparing a court filing) this one is clearly an attempt to mislead the court.
Similarly they have multiple sections outlining the fact that the probability of someone randomly creating libraries compatible with the SCO OpenServer Shared Libraries are close to 0; which hints but never states that Linux is compatible with the SCO OpenServer Shared Libraries.
I think a very good case can be made for summary dismissal. As for IBM winning in court there won't be a problem. If this is the best claim Caldera has they really are in deep trouble.
Thought you all might be interested in this article.v iewer.asp? a=695
http://www.sourcemagazine.com/articles/
"In 1979, brothers Doug and Larry Michels founded the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) as a UNIX porting and consulting company using venture capital from Microsoft..."
"Microsoft acquired a 25 percent share of SCO, which at the time gave it a controlling interest. While SCO handled the actual development and added some enhancements of its own, Microsoft handled the marketing of the product, which it touted as the "Microcomputer Operating System of the Future!""
It appears that SCO has helped themselves to
r y0 1.html
t io n.ppt (slide #4)
Éric Lévénez's unix family tree, possibly in
violation of the "you can freely use this diagram
for non-commercial purposes" line at the bottom
of the page.
compare http://www.levenez.com/unix/
with
http://www.sco.com/scosource/unixtree/unixhisto
http://www.sco.com/scosource/SCOsource_Presenta
I guess "What's mine is mine, and what's yours
is negotiable" rings true at SCO.
--chuck
Here's the relevant section:
That's all well and good, but it blatantly ignores a couple hard truthes of the marketplace at the time:
- The architecture of the Itanium is so different from x86 that SCO's knowledge of previous Intel architectures was either useless or an active hinderance to development.
- By May 2001, it was obvious to anyone paying attention to that Linux was going to be the OS of choice among the early adopters of Itanium. A significant percentage (20% at least) of all Itanium-1 processors produced were going into compute clusters at academic HPC sites like NCSA and OSC (my employer), and those sites were all using Linux on their Itaniums. (NCSA bought their Itanium gear from IBM, IIRC.)
I think this suit is going to come down to SCO needing to prove the sentence italicized above, including identifying the trade secrets that IBM supposedly misappropriated. I have to think that's going to be extremely hard to prove, especially given that IBM wasn't even substantially involved in the Linux/ia64 port. (HP did most of the heavy lifting there, I think.)Personally, I think Bruce Perens is right -- SCO is trying to get someone with deep pockets to buy them, whether that's IBM, MS, or somebody else.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Weren't they trying to help IBM port AIX over to x86 or Itanium (forget which) at one point? The project was called Tarantella before the name got dumped onto another project.
Also they just got certified for IBM DB2 on sco recently so they need to be careful or IBM might just forget to ever certify them again.
Here's some of the misconceptions they have:
In their brief, one of the points they make is that Linux was originally created for not-for-profit uses:
I don't know for sure about what Linus was thinking, but I know for certain that GNU was intended to be used in commercial, for-profit applications. Stallman has repeatedly stated that people can GPL stuff and sell it. His analogy was with legal help: you pay a lawyer to write up a contract, but then you can give the contract to a friend in a similar situation. You pay once for the lawyer to write up the contract; the lawyer doesn't get royalties every time you use it. OTH, your friend would be wise to at least run it by a lawyer before using the contract to make sure it fits his/her situation. You can produce GPL'ed software that way, too. You can offer custom GPL'ed programs for a fee. The GPL has ALWAYS been intended to be applicable to for-profit programs.
Free of charge, yes. Not-for-profitt, no. I can sell GPL'ed code for a gazillion dollars if I want. Of course, the first person who buys it can then put it on an ftp site and distribute it to the world...
All GPL'ed software is copyright property. That's the only way the GPL works.
And then they go on to claim that IBM is trying to "destroy the economic value of UNIX (paragraph 90)." Um, guys, Stallman's intent at the outset was to destroy the economic value of all proprietary software.
I just hope that IBM's lawyers don't let them get away with such huge misconceptions. I really hope IBM can squash this suit like a bug (oh, wait, is that a good analogy? IBM... squashing bugs...infinitely growing bug lists... hmmm...))
Acronyms Obfuscate
From the compaint:
Except for SCO, none of the primary UNIX vendors ever developed a UNIX "flavor" to operate on an Intel-based processor chip set. This is because the earlier Intel processors were considered to have inadequate processing power for use in the more demanding enterprise market applications.
Hmmm.... I guess that Solaris x86 doesn't count?
Prior to IBM's involvement, Linux was the software equivalent of a bicycle. UNIX was the software equivalent of a luxury car.
And SCO UNIX was the equivalent of that Mercedes Sportscar until you discover that it had a really cheap transmission in it and 2 cycle lawn-mower engine....
Nother interesting point which regardless of accuracy should give Shared Source advocates pause is:
Based on other published statements, IBM currently has over 7,000 employees involved in the transfer of UNIX knowledge into the Linux business of IBM, Red Hat and SuSE (the largest European Linux distributor). On information and belief, a large number of the said IBM employees currently working in the transfer of UNIX to Linux have, or have had, access to the UNIX Software Code.
It seems to me that this suit is interesting because as a derivative works suit... This is very dangerous for Microsoft and its shared source initiative. So the idea that this is good for Microsoft is actually very misleading. Normally, lawyers will usually take a "play it safe" mentality where unless victory is quite likely, suits are often discouraged. Particularly in expensive areas like copyright or patent laws. So the fact that SCO has moved into the DMZ of copyright law is significant and could redefine where the DMZ is. In fact their presence there, if they lose would be a severe blow to their ability to pursue other suits. So if IBM wins, this is a victory for all of us.
Now as to what can be done:
1: Can the FSF get involved?
2: If so, cvan we all donate to them?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I find that it's a common mistake among people who don't understand law very well to confuse the copyright status of a work with its license terms.
For an expensive IP lawyer to make this mistake in a complaint shows lack of attention. My guess is that SCO can afford only so many hours of the high-priced David Boies, and they ran out of their legal budget before Boies got to that part. So they got some cheap clueless intern to fill in the part about "GPL software cannot have a copyright owner."
If they are producing shoddy work like this in the complaint, then IBM will overwhelm by sheer force of numbers if nothing else.
Another thing you can do to any company you don't like is to buy 1 share of stock. Then they have to send you reports all the time, and ballots when there are shareholder votes. The ballots come in self addressed stamped envelopes which you should always send back voting a straight party ticket against the reccomendation of the board.
If you happen to live nearby you could probably even go to some shareholder meetings and get some free refreshments er somethin.
I don't know if SCO is publicly traded though.
Let's look at it from a different perspective.
...
... go figure
--SCO wins, stock goes up -- management cashes out and drives the company down the drain; they have a lot of practice in this matter
--IBM get's fed up and buys out SCO, stock goes up-- management cashes out and doesn't give shit.
--Bunch of spamers on stock web sites spread fud about how valid SCO's arguments are, bunch of idiots buy their stock, the stock goes up 40% in one session
well
the management knows the company is going nowhere with their crappy software, they can't follow their fellow brothers of Enron, WorldCom and others because there is nothing to steal, so they've found out other way to make money.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]