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SCO Threatens Red Hat and SuSE
Guy Smith writes "CRN reports that SCO will target SuSE and Red Hat with lawsuits after they are finished with IBM (providing that IBM allows them live). To quote Sco, "There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done." They seem bent on destroying the Open Source community and they deserve to hear the community's opinion on the matter."
As of today, SCO's market cap was 37.1M USD. On 28 February, Red Hat's cash and cash equivalents was 55.4M USD. Therefore, yes.
Contact SCO and tell them what you think of their buisness methods:
1-888-465-4689
1-800-726-8649 (Support)
801-765-1313 (FAX)
Or if you perfer the personal touch you might want to BCC these people:
jant@sco.com, rr@sco.com, sco@schwartz-pr.com, andrewk@sco.com, anz_info@sco.com, rhondap@sco.com, bstowell@sco.com, skunkware@sco.com, jkj@sco.com, patrickm@sco.com, phatch@sco.com, polska@caldera.com, louisi@sco.com, murray@sco.com, maindesk@sco.com, rogerv@sco.com, alf@sco.com, asirotin@caldera.com, alee@sco.com, rickpo@sco.com, kathyp@sco.com, deanr@sco.com, evanh@caldera.com, jls@sco.com, dfp@caldera.com, carlsa@sco.com, kieramy@caldera.com, belal@caldera.com, rhondap@caldera.com, jlw@caldera.com, bobs@caldera.com, petrs@caldera.com, robertl@caldera.com, jgale@caldera.com, tim.rose@caldera.com, wynnw@caldera.com, tbird@caldera.com, andyb@caldera.com
Personally, I think that MS has about as much chance of getting FTC approval to buy SCO as I have of seeing pigs flying down the street. If MS did do so and won the lawsuit, it would prove that it is a monopoly, since it would then own the base patents for all current OSes (the Linuxes, the Unixes, Mac OSX, Windows).
It would be like GM trying to buy Ford.
The original poster is correct. Remember, Red Hat has a sweet pile cash from their sales of stock ot the public.
... $64 million. That's right, customers are paying more real money to Red Hat than they are to SCO.
Spend a few minutes on http://finance.yahoo.com and you will see:
The SCO Group (SCOX) has a total market capitalization of $38 million. That is how much money it would cost to buy all the shares of SCOX, 12 million shares, at the recent price of $3.20 per share.
Red Hat (RHAT) has a lot of cash in the bank (actually, in "long term investments") from their two stock offerings. Red Hat has about $230 million cash in long term investments, short term investments, minus ALL their outstanding debts. That's as of November 30, 2002. I'm too lazy to find more recent balance sheet figures.
Red Hat's market capitalization is a lot more than its cash. Its market cap is $1.07 billion.
So the original poster is correct: Red Hat has more than 5x as much cash as SCO's entire market capitalization. And on top of that, Red Hat's market cap is several times bigger than Red Hat's cash.
Lastly, if you want to compare revenue, Red Hat had revenues of $91 million in the last 12 months. SCO
Here's a mirror to the article:
Link 1
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
It's not so simple as "copyright infringement." According to SCO, IBM has a license with them to distribute a version of UNIX, because they have a license to use SCO's (basically irrelevant) code base. Not the code base that SCO is selling. They're talking about the original code from Bell Labs, that every derivative of UNIX is based on. (excluding BSD, which was already sued, and already removed every trace of the original Bell Labs code).
Now, IBM has their AIX team. Whatever relationship their code has to the original Bell Labs code, AIX is now light years ahead. None--I repeat, NONE--of the "improvements" to Linux that SCO is suing over were present in that original code base. So basically they're claiming that IBM's license to the original Bell Labs code gives SCO ownership of all the improvements IBM made.
That is effectively the entire claim of the case: SCO owns AIX, even though IBM developed it all by themselves. I'm guessing if the license actually came close to saying what SCO is now claiming, IBM would have ripped out what (very little) Bell Labs code was in AIX a decade ago.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
http://www.caldera.com/scosource/ip.html
This contains links to the complaint and 5 exhibits. If you're going to write to SCO, you really ought to RTFDocs.
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
What if some substantial (either quantity or quality) amount of their proprietary code has made its way into the Linux source? If IBM put it there, should they not be punished for doing so? If RedHat et.al are making/made money from it, shouldn't they pay royalties? I know that SCO is the popular bad guy right now, but what if they have a point, does this still make them bad?
:)
SCO is not claiming IBM put actual SCO code into Linux. They are claming that that IBM took concepts/techniques/whatever that were trade secerts and gave them to linux developers. They claim that this is the only thing that could have made Linux what it is today.
I hope SCO's CEO ends up as IBM's CEO's pool boy. SCO wants someone to come along and buy them out to shut them up, but I hope IBM crushes them and we all get to watch them go bankrupt from deliberately pissing off their entire customer base. Then, when they do, IBM or Redhat can buy SCO's IP for a song
Reminds me of my favorite hockey cheer:
Awwwww...see ya asshole! You goon!
Life is too short to proofread.
And all these years I thought that AT&T owned the OS
Not exactly.
BSD was based on version 7. Over the years the AT&T and BSD codebases diverged quite a bit. Many UNIX vendors including AT&T copied bits of the BSD codebase back into their implementations of the AT&T codebase. The BSD TCP/IP stack is probably the best known of these.
Flash forward to the early 90's, BSD 4.4 is released, AT&T sues BSDI and the University of California for copying it's source code. After much lawyering the case is eventually settled and the handful of files that still contain AT&T source are removed leading to the 4.4-lite release.
In the interim AT&T has sold the UNIX source code and trademarks to Novell. A couple of years later Novell sells the UNIX code to SCO and donates the UNIX trademarks to X/Open. A few years later SCO sells its UNIX OS businesses to Caldera and Caldera changes its name to SCO.
So the current batch of idiots isn't really SCO but Caldera who has managed to get it's grubby hands on the old AT&T codebase.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Depends on how you look at it. I do realize that Linux was not built from Minix source. However, I believe Linus had access to Minix source at the time. *that*'s the part that counts.
;)
As I said in another post recently, everything else is just legal trickery anyway
--ZS
-- sigs cause cancer.
"But M$ would never actually bribe another company to sue (and threaten to sue)"
So? Caldera (now SCO) won $200 mill from Microsoft in a lawsuit settlement over DR-DOS, and this was just a few years ago, not ancient history. They're hardly the people I'd expect to do Microsoft's bidding, but then stranger things have happened.
CRN Interview: SCO CEO Defends $1 Billion Lawsuit Against IBM
By Paula Rooney, CRN
Salt Lake City
1:10 PM EST Wed., Apr. 23, 2003
Darl McBride, president and CEO of The SCO Group, recently met with CRN Senior Writer Paula Rooney to discuss his company's $1 billion lawsuit against IBM over IP violations. IBM will respond to those allegations in its court filing by the end of this month.
CRN: Why did SCO Group file a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM?
McBride: At the end of the day, our most prized asset is our ownership of the Unix OS. And that's what IBM said they'd obliterate. It's a punch in the nose. You can either take flight, or fight for what's right. We're the 200-pound weakling and IBM is the 2,000-pound man. But this is about misappropriation of trade secrets and contractual violations. We have 30,000 licensees of the Unix OS. We've always been very open with the source code to any institution that wanted it, whether it's a university, government or a corporation. If they turn it to commercial use, there are royalties. In our contract, it states that licensees must use their best efforts to protect our source code.
CRN: How many licensees pay royalties to SCO Group now?
McBride: A lot of people are getting the source code, but not a lot are paying royalties now.
CRN: What components does SCO allege IBM donated to the open-source community?
McBride: I can't answer that right now for legal reasons. It will be discussed in court. But we're not talking about insignificant amounts of code. It's substantial System V code showing up in Linux.
CRN: When you decided to license the source code libraries last fall, did SCO Group approach IBM on this?
McBride: The open-source guys were cool with it. IBM wanted to keep IP issues under the rug. They said not to talk about IP. And they talked about source code libraries. They told us if we didn't retract it, IBM would stop doing business with us. IBM threatened us and told us if we didn't back off, life would be ugly.
CRN: But some would claim you are trying to destroy the Linux industry.
McBride: No. Whose making money off Linux? Red Hat barely had its head above water and it's right back down again. If you look closely, a lot of the Linux distributors have gone out of business on this model. You have to ask, who is making money? And it's IBM. IBM is making money on boxes and IBM Global Services. If you're this company, don't you have an interest in the operating system being commoditized because there's more money in hardware and services? Linus Torvalds regulates the trademark and determines what goes in and out of the kernel. So who is the policing agency that checks the code and makes sure there aren't IP violations? Linux doesn't have IP roots. If it's true that IBM has violated, let's get some roots in the ground on this.
CRN: Have you talked to Red Hat?
McBride: Yes. We approached Red Hat [about licensing source code libraries] and they thought [our claim] was interesting. They said they'd talk about it, but then called back and said we'll pass [on licensing the source code from SCO]. [Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew] Szulik said copyright issues scare him. But Red Hat has had a free ride. In its IPO filings, one of the warnings to investors stated clearly that Red Hat may be violating IP and one day they may have to step up and pay royalties. Why not? Every time I ship a copy of my operating system, I pay royalties to Novell and Veritas. There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done. But we're focused on the IBM situation.
CRN: How much of this stems from Project Monterey? [Project Monterey was a joint venture between IBM, Intel and SCO to produce a Unix-based cross-platform operating system.]
McBride: IBM walked away from Project Monterey, and they told us if we didn't like it, sue us. That took two years out of our life. IBM took chunks out of Monterey, a derivative of AIX, and gave it away. Y
Do you mean BSD, or FreeBSD/NetBSD?
BSD predates SYS5 by quite some time. Back before UNIX was "productized" (I hate that term) they actually were pretty free with source licenses, and Berkely picked one up. They did a lot of good work, including adding insignificant things like virtual memory, which they actually picked up from Mach. There was the fork for a while, then eventually they joined again to make SVR4.
Are these for real?
Yes. Microsoft has acknowledged the authenticity of these documents. Halloween I, II, III and VII are real;
[VII is the one I cited.]
M$ has openly acknowledged that several of them are, in fact, true leaks of M$ memos. I don't have a specific link for that document but someone probably does - ESR says it is and I think it's too boring and buzzowrd compliant to be fake.
But feel free to show us as wrong.
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
Oh, but they did mention one little area. SCO said it was simply impossible for Linux to have achieved such strong SMP support without one of two things:
1) A strong development platform.
2) SCO source.
They seem to have forgotten that Caldera gave Alan Cox a dual processor machine so he could write the Linux SMP code in the kernel.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
That is to say that even Red Hat several years ago (1999's IPO filling) knew they may have IP issues in the future. SCO is not threatening Red Hat, SuSE or Grandma's Apple Pie despite some people's reaction. McBride is simply saying that the fears Red Hat had in 1999 are accurate, not because of anything they did, but because of IBM's arrogance.
Further, the Slashdot post makes the statement "They (SCO I guess) seem bent on destroying the Open Source community." What a stupid statement especially since McBride says specifically:
Since when is the Open Source movement 100% dependant on IBM? Open Source grew and flourished for years before IBM got on board, and it would do fine without them. Sure, if IBM looses OSS projects may be much more careful about where they get their code, but is that a bad thing? The GNU folks don't thinks so.
The best word on the subject was what McBride said himself:
Unfortunately for McBride the
Pat, from Slackware, mentioned that Slack has *always* been profitable.
The oldest and most tried and true Linux distribution is still going strong today. But I supposed that one could argue about calling the one-man project a "company" in the same sense as RedHat.
Never-the-less, Pat's always made money off of Slack. Considering that it has always been stable, reliable and sensable, theres no need to guess why.
BSD is not based on Version 7 but on Version 6. BSD1 was out in March 9, 1978, UNIX Time-Sharing System Seventh Edition (V7) was out in January 1979. Look at http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html for more information on what is based on what including Linux. And it was Novell who settled with the BSDs because they had bought UNIX from Bell Labs after AT&T were found a monopoly.
Also SCO after being bought by Caldera opened up the old UNIX source code.
Also the CEO of Caldera was the CEO of SCO any way so it is really is SCO any way.
You also just made the venodr of the software very happy (especially if there are not that many of their sites that use sco) since that means that there are less configurations to support. [could be why they were so eager to get you to use the linux version]
I know of several companies that had sco versions of software that had changed to Linux versions.
One even offered their existing SCO users "free" feature/product upgrade and a "free" 3 months of additional "prime" support...
--
Time is on my side
Remember that AT&T still holds some rights (they use Version 10? on some of their phone switches). AT&T and Sun have an agreement where Sun has as much rights to the Unix trademarks and source code as anyone else and Sun paid Novell (I think) for an unlimited redistribution license. There is also the license stream from the AT&T terminal spin off compnay and at least 5 universities have orignal licenses that have "unlimited" rights to the IP. Tacking this down will bring many skeletons out of the closet. When its over, the courts will have proof that SCO has less of an exclusive right to the IP than they thought they had. Since this is all public, may its time to short the stock.
I think what he meant was, Linux existed before IBM had anything to do with it.
Linux is increasingly used in embedded systems, without the usual init task, daemons, or user space utilities. It is still referred to as "the OS" in those cases, as opposed to "the applications". Embedded systems considered to be "OS-less" are usually far more limited in terms of features. Linux implements the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), which surely makes it an "Operating System".
An OS usually refers to a collection of code that does a number of the following:
- hides the hardware and
presents an API to the user applications
- manages memory allocation
- manages CPU allocation
(launches and kills tasks)
- allows tasks to
communicate with each other
- runs in the CPU's
supervisor mode and handles CPU and memory
protection
- provides a file system
- provides networking protocols
- provides user-level
applications to interact with the core OS,
such as the GNU utilities
- displays web pages
There is no strict limitation to what constitutes an OS. The term is historically loose.Just chop out the datetime string, like so.
The authors can't revoke the license; it either remains valid, or it's automatically revoked due to a violation (the authors could perhaps sue to enforce such a revocation however).
In any case, simply suing IBM is not a violation of the GPL; are there any actual violations taking place, such as not publishing source code to modified binaries they distribute?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I may be way off her, but doesn't a virus give genectic code (DNA or RNA) to the cell that instructs it to create more virii, and because of this the cell either dies from not maintaining itself or explodes because its walls can no longer contain all the virii?
Haven't linux distros been using SysV-style stuff since BEFORE 1995, you know, when SCO got the rights to UNIX from Novell? It's not their code in SysV anyway. It has all been rewritten to "act" like SysV. Plus, if they technically "own" UNIX, could they not sue because the entire base for Linux distros "mimics" the UNIX environment?
I dunno, I see this lawsuit as baseless. It is being done by a company that is going under and is merely an attempt at reaching the surface of the water for one last breath of air.