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

REAL Purpose

[kkirk007]

I know it's been said before, but...
SCO's real purpose behind this lawsuit is not to get money, but to publicize itself in hopes of finding a larger company to buy them.
SCO's business hasn't been so great lately, and...they're just a little desperate at this point.

I know that there isn't SCO code in Linux because

[DanThe1Man]

....LINUX DOSN'T SUCK!!

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!

Re:Code Red for Open Source?

[Anonymous Coward]

This allegation really underscores a primary issue of closed source software - it's not out for public review, and hence, it would be VERY difficult to validate these claims. For all we know, SCO's code is a rip-off of Linux or some prior open-source code that Linux was a beneficiary of. SCO never published their source and there's nothing outside of SCO (or maybe IBM, if there was some kind of agreement) to validate the claims. The trouble is, we can trust neither of those parties to present untainted copies of the relevant code as both could have altered timestamps or copied in code. There's also the fact that some processes in software can just really be done in one optimum way.

This is a good reason software should not be considered "published", hence copyrightable, unless the source code exists in some human-readable means in some organization outside of the "software publisher" (who truly publishes nothing), a place the courts could seriously look at as proof of the existance.

A way that might serve as a valid stopgap would be the generation of an MD5 hash of each source file and submitting that to some trusted agency (Library of congress?) for another digital signature and timestamp to be added, proving the date of creation to some legal standard so that these allegations could be backed with proof. We'd know the plaintext was validly signed by the LOC and that it existed at the time alleged to.

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...

Feh.

[BJH]

Has anyone else seen the comments McBride has been making lately? Here's some choice quotes from news.com.com.com.com's unbiased and uninflammatory article, "Code Red for open source?":

"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.

Please note that he has refused to release examples of this.

In addition, he said, "We're finding code that looks likes it's been obfuscated to make it look like it wasn't UnixWare code--but it was."

Please note that he has also refused to release examples of this, too.

"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."

Yeah, that's a great excuse to not actually give any evidence of the accusations you're making - tell people that 'the Linux community' will try and sanitize every existing copy of the source code to all the versions of the kernel containing this supposed SCO source - which, he says, has been in the kernel for 'several years'! Perhaps he missed the bit where his lawyers briefed him on the GPL and how it lets anybody have a copy of the source code - including SCO itself! Is he really suggesting that SCO lacks the ability to keep a copy of all currently extant versions of the Linux kernel to use as evidence? F'chrissakes, the md5 checksums of Linus's kernels are public knowledge - if anybody tried to 'sanitize' a particular version, it'd be ridiculously easy to prove that it'd been changed since its original release.

"This is not about 10 lines of code, it's about 20 years of extremely valuable intellectual property we're trying to protect...Am I supposed to lie down and not say anything about it?" McBride said. "There's a certain point here where you stand up for what's right and let the chips fall where they will."

Gotta love that last line... McBride wouldn't know "what's right" if it came up and bit his ass.

I can't even begin to express my disgust for a company that insults, intimidates and sues the very people who have made it possible for SCO to distribute their own version of Linux. Crawl away and disappear, McBride - you're a liar and you know it.

Any evidence yet?

[FFtrDale]

Last I heard, IBM was asking SCO to state specifically what code they were alleging that IBM had used, and IBM had gotten no answer. Today's story still has IBM describing SCO's allegations as "unsupported." If the nice folks at SCO can't back up their claims, are they just betting that the effect of the news stories on their business ("no bad publicity") will be greater than the losses they'll take for filing a frivolous lawsuit? What am I missing here?

IBM and Linux Shall Pay!

[f0rt0r]

I found the code that matches up exactly, the top five matches are ( drum roll )

5) for ( int x=0;x lt 10;x++)
4) while ( x lt 10 ) {
3) #include stdio.h
2) #include math.h
1) int main( String args[] )

Number 1) shows up in every .cpp file! Linux developers will pay for this blatant violation of SCO's IP rights!

Note: for some reason the board wigged out with greater than and less than signes, so I had to leave those out. lt = less than

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?

Barratry

[shepd]

I'm pretty sure any lawyer that helped you with this would be charged with barratry, or for vexatious litigation.

I'm not sure if individuals can be charged with something similar. You'd have to look it up. :)

Note that the charges you are laying can still have some merit, but doing them in an attempt to subdue the defence isn't legal.

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: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...

IBM's Open Source Guidelines

[scottme]

IBM has a comprehensive and stricly-enforced internal set of guidelines that any employee who works on OSS projects, whether on IBM's time or on his/her own time, must read, understand, and certify compliance with. It's a condition of employment, even. And there's an approval process that must be used (and I quote):

whenever an IBM group wants to:

• start or join an OSS project with the intention of contributing code to the project and/or maintaining the code base;
  
• include third party OSS with an IBM product or service;
  
• ship some or all of an IBM product in source code form under an open source license;
  
• publish the source code for a reference implementation.
  

IANAL, but it seems to me that there must be a defensive line against the SCO suit in the mere fact that it has promulgated that policy. Of course the existence of the policy is no guarantee that it is going to be adhered to 100%, but in the (unlikely) event that SCO is able to establish that some illegal copying of their material did take place, the corporation can hold its hands up and ask what more it could have done to prevent it.

Re:Released or reimplemented?

[Anonymous Coward]

While IBM has incorporated some of their code into Linux, none if it has been from SCO.

IBM's operating system, AIX, has some code from SysV, for which SCO owns rights, but the code they've ported to Linux (such as JFS) are property of IBM.

SCO is probably trying to muddy the issues - because AIX contains both code that has been shared with Linux and code that SCO owns rights to.

However, considering that SCO has never specifically pointed out what parts of IBM's contributions to Linux supposedly violate their agreements, they have zero credibility.