Slashdot Mirror
Analysis of SCO vs. IBM
icantblvitsnotbutter writes "An excellent -- and clear! -- article over at LinuxWorld.com has a multipoint analysis of SCO's 40-page complaint (this is a brief?!). For all those IANAL's out there, here's something to sink your teeth into. On the balance, the outlook seems positive for IBM. Still, the parallel invocation of a contractural clause potentially nixing AIX lends some credence to claims that this is a just way for SCO to coerce IBM into buying them out..." Some old documents from a similar lawsuit have surfaced, and naturally ESR has his own take on the case.
I think they'd have a pretty good chance of ending up owning all of SCO.
Not that it's worth much.
I really hope Linus and Alan don't go the way of ESR and/or RMS - two of the craziest guys around IMO :)
I'm reminded of a few(!) years ago when I was reading about development on the Atari 8-bit computers. A columnist for Analog magazine wrote about how he could not divulge certain information about memory mapping of the 400/800 computers because of his Non-Discolsure Agreement - BUT - that if he found out the same information from a third party he could then treat said information as public domain, and then was not bound by the NDA.
I would be interested in knowing if the knowledge shared here had slipped into the public domain, because if so then NDAs do not apply.
IANAL
While I have no idea if SCO has a case or not, I see that many here assume IBM had nothing to do with making Linux enterprise stable, and scoff at SCO's claim.
Yet, if you take the time to google the web you'll find that IBM dedicated an entire internal group to Linux and hired several external companies during 1999-2001 with the sole purpose of making Linux entreprise strength (even Linus has said so).
Now, to be clear, this does not yet prove that any illegal transfer of technology took place (and I doubt SCO will be able to prove it, IMHO they are fishing hoping to find the smoking gun during discovery), but it does verify one of the main three claims from SCO.
These folks have pretty much turned on us. I spent a great deal of effort learning UNIX, getting my SCO CUSA, ACE, and Master ACE. SCO ruined that by no longer being competitive, not keeping up with technology, not marketing their products well, and mistreating their reseller channel. They got their asses kicked by a college student in Finland because they got lazy and stupid. It serves them right. I am now questioning whether or not I should have tried to become a dealer of their wares when I struck out on my own.
.001 per share:
e m
I'm finished when 'em. I'll support their products while my clients still have them, but as soon as the first opportunity to upgrade comes along, we're migrating!
Here is an excerpt about who the money grabbers are, and when they acquired for
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/s/scox.html
Here is my new policy:
http://www.dentar.com/index.php?scoprobl
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Hoe could they release a document with so many factual and grammatical errors? I would have thought the lawyers would at least do a little proofreading and fact checking.
Regardless, since UNIX was licensed to universities to study couldn't the concepts SCO claims were "stolen" by IBM simply have been studied by the Linux developers when they were in school?
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
Looks like that ownership may be a bit tainted. (emphasis added)
The suit was settled after the University threatened to countersue over license violations by AT&T and USL. It seems that from as far back as before 1985, the historical Bell Labs codebase had been incorporating large amounts of software from the BSD sources. The University's cause of action lay in the fact that AT&T, USL and Novell had routinely violated the terms of the BSD license by removing license attributions and copyrights.
The exact terms of final settlement, and much of the judicial record, were sealed at Novell's insistence.
Furthermore, Linux was already far more advanced and "enterprise ready" before IBM even touched it than SCO gives it credit for NOW.
I was using Linux on SMP machines before IBM ever came on the scene. IBM's LVM was turned down. IBM's JFS is probably the least used JFS in Linux, Reiser and Ext3 being the most predominant.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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.
Sun Microsystems needs to improve its marketing efforts for Solaris x86.
Not to mention that IBM released AIX/PS2 back in the early 1990s -- a version of AIX that ran on 80386 based PS/2 hardware.
It sucked to the extent that the hardware it ran on sucked. A big, bloated Unix kernel running on an 80386 with a maximum of 16 megs of memory and a 60 meg ESDI hard drive was pretty close to a non-starter.
This is not about UNIX!!! This is about PROJECT MONTEREY!!!
Monterey was a real, live, flesh and blood endeavor in which SCO and IBM partnered to write a new, 64-bit, proprietary Über-Unix on Intel hardware. SCO committed real, live, flesh and blood engineers to the project, and real, honest to goodness, cold, hard cash. IBM walked away from the table. The question is: How much SCO intellectual property did IBM walk away with, and how much of it found its way to IBM's Linux projects? If, through discovery, SCO can prove that a substantial number of IBM's Project Monterey engineers were re-assigned to IBM Linux projects, then SCO will have a reasonably solid foundation on which to proceed with the case.
This is no different than Intergraph's highly successful court cases against Intel, in which Intergraph proved that Intel had stolen substantial amounts of Intergraph intellectual property.
Google on Project Monterey SCO IBM
Google on Intergraph Intel
I'd really be interested to see what kind of damages SCO can prove. They may end up racking up millions in dollar of legal fees for a very small reward, if any.
Even the IBM/AT&T agreement is valid, I'd be surprised if IBM wasn't smart enough to isolate engineers with knowledge of SCO Unix source code from engineers assisting in the Linux development. I mean, c'mon, IBM has been in the computer industry since ENIAC and has been in business almost twice that long! Does anybody really believe IBM can't write a non-disclosure agreement and isolate its employees? SCO makes it sound like the 7,000 IBM engineers working on Linux are the only engineers IBM has, thus, IBM must have violated trade secrets! PLEASE! IBM employs hundreds of thousand of people and probably 10 times the number of engineers they have working on Linux.
Just because IBM has thrown some effort into Linux, doesn't mean they are tossing AIX out the window. It is probably a wait and see... if Linux really catches on, we can move AIX enterprises over and add Linux enterprises with the benefits of the GPL. IBM is now a service provider, and the reality is, the only way you make money with Linux is providing service.
It'll be interesting to see how much the lawyers end up making out of all this.
-Anthony
One of the major gripes of SCO is that Linux would not have been able to have SMP support if it weren't for IBM lifting SCO Unix code and handing it out for the kernel developers.
Perhaps they should read this article at IBM DeveloperWorks. This page pretty much explains why IBM decided to go the way of the fat penguin.
It should be worth pointing out this quote from the article:
Linux has had support for SMP waaaaaay long before IBM adopted it and apparently this was one of their reasons for adopting Linux. I also read in a magazine once (I think it was Time or Newsweek c.a. 1998 IIRC but someone please correct the datePlus there is also the fact that a year before IBM adopted Linux, they (among others)made large hardware available to Linux developers for testing and benchmarks.
0xB00F disappears in a puff of smoke...
The author of the LinuxWorld piece is doing advocacy, not analysis. SCO's case is far more subtle than most in the Linux community seem to think.
As an example, the author takes issue with the SCO's claim that IBM must have stolen SCO trade secrets in order to improve Linux by saying "OK, then, diff the code." It's true that such a diff would provide prima facie proof of violation, but there are plenty of violations which would not require any code to leak at all.
Suppose part of the validation test set for Monterey consisted of a stress test written by SCO and owned by SCO. That code wouldn't ever be in the final product, and it would certainly be SCO's intellectual property, shared with IBM in order to make Monterey work better. Let us further suppose that code was used in the Linux development work, and found a key set of bugs. (Don't tell me it isn't possible that it would have been -- developers tend to think of tools as just tools, and forget that they may be encumbered.) At that point, there would been a misappropriation of IP.
(Disclaimer: I have not ever seen any of the code covered by any of these agreements, nor have I ever seen any tests in the Monterey test suite, nor had any contact with any of the principals in this lawsuit. I'm merely criticizing the LinuxWorld piece; any resemblance between the situation outlined here and reality would be purely coincidental.)
I don't know the details of the "Unix contract" that IBM is said to have with SCO. According to ESR's brief, Unix vendors continued to buy licenses to the original AT&T/Bell Labs code long after that source code ceased to be relevant to the marketplace. If IBM bought such a license, it presumably would have been transmitted to Caldera, then Novell, then SCO.
He also points out that none of the "Enterprise Scalability Features" such as SMP, NUMA, journaling file systems, etc., are actually present in the original Bell Labs code bought by SCO. This is important, because SCO appears to be claiming intellectual property rights over all the features in all descendants of the original Bell Labs code.
Finally, the Novell case is strong evidence that there is very little proprietary code in the original UNIX. Again from ESR:
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Everyone here ASSumes that Intellecutal Property == Patents, but SCO's complaint is very clear that this is about Trade Secrets and vauge fuzzy know-how.
Avertment 84: "Prior to IBM's involvement, Linux was the software equivalent of a bicycle. UNIX was the software equivalent of a luxury car. To make Linux of necessary quality for use by enterprise customers, it must be re-designed so that Linux also becomes the software equivalent of a luxury car. This re-design is not technologically feasible or even possible at the enterprise level without (1) a high degree of design coordination, (2) access to expensive and sophisticated design and testing equipment; (3) access to UNIX code, methods and concepts; (4) UNIX architectural experience; and (5) a very significant financial investment."
Help fight continental drift.
Sales of the OS were FORBIDDEN by the 1956 consent decree that allowed the monopoly telephone company. It was not until the Bell breakup that they it was even legally possible to sell Unix licenses.