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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.
Amicus Curiae - what the hell does that mean? Is it latin for Anonymous Coward?
Averment 41
Shared libraries are by their nature unique creations based on various decisions to write code in certain ways, which are in great part random decisions of the software developers who create the shared library code base.
It's interesting to note that SCO considers the decisions of programmers to be basically random.
some points are raised, some good and some bad for IBM, specially in the 2nd question
They answered:
We are definitely not allowed to cut and paste proprietary code into any open source projects (or vice versa!). There is an IBM committee who can and do approve the release of IBM proprietary or patented technology, like RCU.
I don't see how this is "bad" for IBM. It shows that they are actively protecting any proprietary interests to the point that they actually have a committee.
but some interchange of ideas could have been happened if a developer of one team talks with one of another.
Again they replied:
Having solved the problem once, our non-Linux peers can help steer us without spelling it out for us, allowing us to still develop solutions that can then be open sourced.
Again, IBM seems to be keenly aware of the cross pollenation issue and actively taking steps to avoid any issues. It reads to me like it's all pro IBM?
The real reason is that SCO is dying, and wants to be bought out by IBM, thereby knocking up the final share price for their investors.
Got it?
[FUCK BETA]
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.
Remember the movie Dogma by Kevin Smith? Here's the rundown of it.
"A female decendant of Christ and two unlikely prophets are called upon by Rufus, an unknown 13th apostle, to stop two angels, that were cast out of heaven, from unknowingly erasing all of God's work by restoring their souls by entering a new church. Restoring ones soul by entering a new church is a part of the Catholic Dogma, and by restoring their souls the angels could reenter heaven thus revealing there is a loophole to return to heaven. This would prove God was not perfect and upon proving this all of God's work would immediately be erased."
If IBM buys SCO outright or from the smothering runins, IBM will gian the rights to UNIX and may also chose to release it under GPL. If someone decides to use the UNIX kernel using GNU O/S, it will become GNU/UNIX.
GNU's Not UNIX/UNIX???
This contridiction will bring calmady to the IT world and bring end the free software movement (including GPL).
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
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...
One trivia point: SCO's SMP implementation was not written by SCO but was licensed from Corollary.
Two more i386 ports that ESR has forgotten about: Altos (later purchased by Acer). I was one of the engineers that ported SCO 3.2.0 (or was it 3.2.2?) to the Altos 1000 (see Google groups for info). The second is the "Sun 386i" 80386 computer which everybody seems to have forgotten about. Again, see Google groups.
IMHO the only thing of value SCO was to contribute to Monterey was the X server.
I believe that from a legal standpoint AIX is licensed SVR3 code (although having seen AIX kernel code, SCO OpenServer and UnixWare source, and "pure" virgin SVR3 code I can attest that AIX is a complete overhaul and bears no resemblence to pure SVR3 (or SVR4) except in the bowels of STREAMS).
full disclosure: ex-SCO employee who worked on all kernels including Monterey prior to Caldera.