IBM Denies Charges of Unix Theft

ahooton writes "C|net is reporting that SCO has filed a lawsuit accusing IBM of theft of it's Unix intellectual property. SCO alleges this occurred because IBM released portions of the Unix system, owned by SCO, in to Linux." While the suit is nothing new, IBM's retort is. IBM asserts it is innocent of any charges of wrongdoing. Additionally, IBM is accusing SCO of trying to stifle Linux development through the use of the courts.

Comments

Well, if there is one GOOD thing I can say...

[Tokerat]

...it's "At Least SCO went after the big guys first."

There is no RIAA-suing-college-kids style lawsuit here. They went right after someone who could afford to defend themselves, instead of trashing say, SuSe and RedHat.

On the other hand, it's IBM, who probably even has a patent on human life for christ sakes. Therefore I doubt we'll be seeing much more of SCO, especially if this suit doesn't hold water.

Code Red for Open Source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another CNET article about the suit. It makes it clear that SCO is trying to make pure FUD:

McBride refused to detail which specific code had been copied but said there were several instances--"some of them go back several years, and others are recent"--and said the copying was "not minor." SCO, however, won't publish what it's found.

"We feel very good about the evidence that is going to show up in court. We will be happy to show the evidence we have at the appropriate time in a court setting," McBride said. "The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go."

Next he'll tell us there's weapons of mass destruction in the Linux code and the fact we can't find them just shows how diabolically clever the people who hid them were. Send the UN inspectors!

Linux: IBM's true universal adapter

[Thaidog]

The good thing is that right now you can run linux on IBM's zSeries, AS/400, RISC6000,... all the way down to a PDA. It's no joke to say that there is alot of money about to be made... That's the real reasonb for this suit...

UNIX license buyouts ?

[mj01nir]

From a different CNet article about the lawsuit:

"HP did a complete buyout of Unix licensing from SCO," HP spokesman Brian Garabedian said. "We have a perpetual license rather than per copy license for HP-UX...We don't believe we have any exposure to the SCO lawsuit."

Sun, too, bought out its Unix license, said John Loiacono, vice president of Sun's operating platforms group.

"We bought our Unix license out....We are unencumbered for all things," including Sun's version of Linux, he said.

And then in the linked article:

IBM did make one argument defending its use of Unix intellectual property, saying it has the "irrevocable, fully paid-up and perpetual right to use the 'proprietary software' that it is alleged to have misappropriated or misused."

It sounds like IBM believes that they have "bought out" its license as well. So ...:

1) Did SCO mislead IBM (and possibly HP, Sun, etc) with these license buyouts?
2) Is SCO trying to make everyone forget about the license buyouts?
3) Does SCO consider the buyouts invalid for some reason?

The whole thing is just weird. SCO is done. Even if they win, no one will ever trust them again. They could produce an OS that whipped any commercial or OSS implementation, but no one would buy it. Had they attacked a smaller, but significant target first (Sun?) they might have had a chance at getting bought out. But with IBM, I don't think they will bother, they'll just crush SCO. They have unfathomable resources. IBM could even afford to lose the case. Sun couldn't.

Possible community response?

[Viv]

Out of curiousity, has anyone ever considered the possibility of a group of people individually filing a claim in small claims court against a company that is doing something they don't like?

In this case, for example, what if we could mobilize a few thousand people who use Linux professionally to sue SCO for slander? Professionals who use Linux are risking their reputation on it; SCO saying that Linux uses stolen code reflects badly on the professional. If what SCO is saying is untrue, that's slander and is in fact causing damages, yes?

Now, here's the trick -- if 5000 professionals who are effected by this in the USA were to file claims in small claims court of say, $1000, then SCO would have to simultaneously defend 5000 cases, or risk losing $5 million in damages.

What kind of effect do you think that would have on a company of SCO's size? Catastrophic, I'd think. And what's nice is that since they're impuning our professional judgment without providing any truth, we should have a cause of action.

If this is doable, this could be a serious way for a large community such as the free software community to show extreme displeasure with companies that do stuff like this, and for it to really count.

Any lawyers or anyone with professional knowledge out there that can comment?

Just posted to LKML

[rf0]

"As somone who walked for SCO (or rather Caldera how it was called at that
time) I can tell you this is utter crap. There were very people actually
doing Linux kernel work then (and when the German office was closed down
all those left the company) and we really had better things to do then
trying to retrofit UnixWare code into the linux kenrel. Especially given
that the kernel internals are so different that you'd need a big glue
layer to actually make it work and you can guess how that would be
ripped apart in a usual lkml review :)

It might be more interesting to look for stolen Linux code in Unixware,
I'd suggest with the support for a very well known Linux fileystem in
the Linux compat addon product for UnixWare.."

Could be intresting :)

Rus

Re:What I hope this means

[arvindn]

What I hope this means, is that IBM will once and for-all put an end to this SCO FUD.

There's exactly one way IBM can do that: buy SCO. Sco/Caldera's logic is simple: they are a dying company, and they know it. So they want to make it as nasty as possible. If this gets to court, SCO doesn't have a whit of a chance (which is why they didn't go after the little fish first, BTW.) However, it might be the end of SCO, but it will be very costly in terms of PR for IBM as well. SCO's hope is that IBM will find buying SCO to be the easier way out. That's the best case scenario for them.

BUT. That would put an end to SCO FUD, but MS FUD will start right thereafter. (See, we've been saying it all along, linux is incapable of innovation, sco was going to prove that in court, but big baddie IBM was afraid of them and bought them out.) So its a lose-lose situation.

So, what if SCO is right?

[akorvemaker]

Just curious. It seems that all the comments revolve around how SCO is stupid and wrong and greedy and dumb and soon to be extinct.

What if they're not. What if they do have a genuine grievance. I'm not trying to be a troll or flamebait, just honestly curious. What impact would this have on GNU/Linux? Would people honor SCO's claims if they're proven right?

Re:What I hope this means

[jbolden]

They would still have to go to court. SCO does not intend to survive the lawsuit. The real issue IMHO is whether SCO execs have actually crossed the line into fraud considering how untrue some of the statement in the original were.

IANAL but it sure sounds like lying under oath to me.

Very confusing!

[minkwe]

"We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code," McBride said in an interview.

"In an e-mail discussion that took place 24 and 25 April, SCO-Caldera Senior Vice President Chris Sontag told MozillaQuest Magazine that there is SCO-owned code in Red Hat and SuSE Linux distributions. He also told MozillaQuest Magazine that the tainted code is not in the Linux kernel that Linus [Torvalds] and others have helped develop. We're talking about what's on the periphery of the Linux kernel.

Re:More News...

[geschild]

Now there's a defence worth contemplating: it's far easier to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that certain code existed in Linux at some point in time than it is to prove the same for a closed pieces of software. This works both ways: the closed source owners can show it was in an open source repository but will they be able to prove it was in their repository before that?

There's an oportunity for a countersuit based on breaking the GPL in there somewhere...