Slashdot Mirror
SCO Claims Kernel Contains UnixWare Code
ergo98 writes "SCO has increased the intensity of the lawsuit with IBM by claiming to hold indisputable proof that copyrighted UnixWare code found its way into Linux, violating the rules of both camps. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen: SCO refuses to divulge the code in question, however they promise to reveal it in court shortly."
SCO is back at it, begging IBM to buy and assimilate them...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The fact that a) they were looking for it and b) found it, leads me to suspect it might (assuming it exists at all) be SCO or someone at SCO.
That's the beauty of open-source. It's wide open, and well documented.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
One would think that SCO has enough version control to know what they have, when they got it and where it came from. That would be assuming alot with them though.
Repeatedly over the past few days, they have provided a moving target as to what they they are claiming as thier IP. First it was IBM, then it was the OSS Linux community as a whole, and now they are saying it is the distros.
How typical. A bunch of dumbasses that could never have corperate direct now cannot even give thier litigation a sure direction for one day.
Note to SCO: Go back to drinking your Provo Girl beer, watching forest fires and making bad Linux distros. This is turing into a joke for you that you will NEVER recover come.
You will not own the community, you sure as hell won't IBM, and if I was IBM, I sure as would not want to purchase a company full of directionless assholes.
Give it up guys. All your linux are belong to us should not be anyone's mission statement.
"Lithuanian gutter weed or blunt from Portland...which do think the Blazers like?"
Even if this is true, shouldn't they have contacted Linus and had him remove the offending code? I'm sure he would have.
Since they are claiming Trade Secret status on the System V code, isn't failure to perform even basic attempts (such as contacting Linus) to minimise the impact of this leak enough to void the Trade Secret status of their code?
The more SCO speaks, the less credible this lawsuit sounds.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
...or do the stock quotes at the bottom of the article provide the best commentary on this issue?
I'm sure there are hundreds of others who've had their code "liberated" without their consent.
Are you saying you've liberated someone else's code for an open source project? I know I have not, and I've not seen any evidence of this having been done in the Linux kernel.
Where's the evidence?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
So they can slam OSS, but what about going the other way? I've heard of software stealing GPL code in part and in whole, making modifications, and not releasing the source again. Some have been caught, I'm willing to bet a whole lot more haven't been.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I love this quote:
> "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."
So you don't want us to fix this so-called infringement? Most companies do a cease-and-decist before a lawsuit, allowing the accused to make changes. If this infringment HAS cost them a billion in damages, wouldn't you think they would want the infringement to stop right away? They could still make their case in court and use the same so-called evidence to show that previous infringment caused the damage, but not allowing the accused to fix the problem just shows that it's not the infringement they care about. It's just a means to getting money.
He is obvious trolling with quotes like:
Moderators who moderated this up: Get a clue.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Shrug and keep doing what they do? I really don't see, regardless of legality of it (if it is even true), people just tossing away as much work as they have put into linux. SCO is desperate for money or a buyout and they are making things much worse for themselves now by alienating their customers... They won't exist much longer no matter what the end result is (buyout, flush, etc.)
Shadus
This story has been posted about probably a dozen times now without any evidence included. Do you suppose you could hold off on posting new stories until either the evidence is made available or the suit is dismissed/won/settled? As it is now we're just seeing the same responses posted over and over again.
Thy HAVE to disclose it prior to trial. They will have to give it to IBM. IBM can then find the author and determine the truth.
Moderators on crack again (when it was marked as 'insightful,' iirc)
It is completely legal to write your own software. It's completely legal to use the same metaphors when solving the same problems. It's even legal to "clone" an interface when such interoperatibility is a high user requirement. Can you imagine the chaos if every vendor had to come up with new names and flags for programs like ls(1), cc(1), find(1), etc.
What's illegal is copying code without permission. That's not cloning, and the results can't be copylefted since the punitive author doesn't have the right to release the code.
And as for the idea that all OS implementations are just ripped off from commercial products, have you actually looked at the quality of commercial code lately? Haven't you heard of company after company after company switching to Linux and open tools after realizing that they were regularly spending 20% or so of their time fixing files corrupted when the app or system crashed, cleaning up after viruses, cleaning up the mess left by bundled malware, etc.? Even if some mad Microsoft employee sneaked out with the source for Word or Outlook and ported it to Linux, a lot of us would still keep far away from it because of the profound flaws in the applications.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
1. I would find it hard to believe that SCO can prove that IBM put such code into the kernel (if indeed it exists there at all).
2. I would find it reasonable to believe that SCO put the code into the kernel itself as a poison pill (if indeed it exists there at all).
MORTAR COMBAT!
This is the typical last ditch effort to save another worthless company before it goes belly-up. The sad thing is IBM will of course win (which is good), but SCO will file for bankrupcy before IBM can win an countersuit for damages. This is the way it always works. Rather than admit fault with their business model (or lack thereof) the turn to litigation to make a final attempt to make money. Pitiful.
What SCO clearly do not understand and what the judge hopefully will, is that there are many common algorithms that when implemented, may have identical code. For example, if you were to have 100 coders, all with similar education, and told them to impliment Bubble Sort, I'd bet you'd venture afterwards that 70-80 of them plagerized somebody's code. While I cannot begin to speculate what kind of algorithms were implimented in code SCO claims was stolen, there's a very strong chance the similarities are coinincidence.
A situation like this arose in a couple assignments in computer science courses I've taken. This one professor I had, who was super anal and also did not understand this principle, accused myself and some of my peers of copying each others' code. His evidence for our "cheating" was that our programs all had some almost identical code save for variable names and some functions. Now, the kids I was accused of helping to cheat or cheating off of were people I had never before interacted with until we found ourselves in the prof's office. However, the professor had done the usual thing of teaching basics, here's some algorithms, here's how you do this, here's how you do that... and because some algorithms are so intuitively implimented, the product can look the same. I mean cripes, how do you expect every student to do mutexes or handle deadlock in completely unique ways? Some things have one correct way or being done!
We explained this to him numerous times, but it seemed with every assignment, different segments of the class were being accused of cheating. Unfortunately for some, they were not able to properly explain this phenomenon.
Either SCO is really dumb or they fully expect the judge to not understand it either.
Join Tor today!
SCO released a linux distribution.
At least the kernel was released under the GPL.
I would like to see how they explain that IBM GPL release of code is much more damaging then their own release, under the GPL, of that same code.
The fact that SCO has licenced others to redistribute this code under the GPL should make it pretty hard to get damages for others doing the same.
Common sense? Common sense like:
"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."
How do you launder open source code that is spread across the internet like so many grains of sand at the beach, there is no cleaning that up. Wake up and smell the money AC.
Fear is the mind killer.
Stallman had the balls to write his own code. He didn't need to steal it. Why would his "followers" do any different?
I also wonder if the code in question was actually BSD or public domain code that both SCO and Linux adopted.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Claiming to have copyright of something you don't is a felony. So the devleoper in question is in deep kaka. As for Linux SCO is going to have to prove intent (which they won't be able to) so I can't see them not winning.
But remember they are suing IBM. So what they really need to show (and what the lawsuit claims) is that IBM was the one who took the code and put it in the kernal not just some SCO developer. IBM doesn't distribute Linux. The lawsuite mentions there was code which IBM and SCO had joint access to as part of project Monterey which is now part of Linux (JFS). So to win they are going to need to show that SCO had JFS before IBM (100% provably false IMHO).
I know I'll get modded down for this, but the hot link in this story and the previous story on the subject are identical except for a positioning flag... I'm surprised nobody else has noticed.
I totally agree with you, lots of errors on the IBM suit side and I hope you are right about personal liability for Officers, incl Insider issues based on stock transaction close to the suit being filed.
My point was a little different, This Error of not trying to mitigate the damages is pertinent to all future suits. If indeed there will be some.
Did you notice in the filing by IBM yesterday they was a comment about timing. The estimate is TWO years before a court date will be set. SCO will be out of money by then. Just look at the Rambus idiots, and what a toll on their cash position all the litigation has caused. Rambus started from a position of strength, not like the SCO clowns that is up against the wall, and just killed off their business end of things.
Help fight continental drift.
...even they are openly distributing their own IP through Linux under the GPL, what right do (sp.) they have to sue other companies for doing the same!?
None.
They don't even have the right to sue other companies for distributing SCO's own IP if they put it in. Releasing anything under the GPL (assuming you have the legal right to do so), is ensuring that it will be distributed.
I personally believe that SCO will being to adopt the concept that actual code may not have moved over, but concepts that they believe fall under their IP rights. SysV stuff especially. Chunks of kernel code could resemble SCO's code at least in style and possibly perfectly in some places because they are both implementations of SysV concepts. As long as SCO doesn't have pages of copy-pasted code to show us, they'll have a very hard time disproving the idea that kernel developers have similar code because they mimick SysV.
Another thing I don't think anyone has brought up... how can SCO prove that the code they produce in court to compare to Linux's is actually UnixWare code? They're talking about laundering Linux code, it would be much easier for them to toss chunks of code in to UnixWare, or not even actually put them in at all, and just pretend it was theirs all along.
I think the big debate isn't over copied code, but whether or not implementing SysV without code-piracy is under SCO's IP rights.
Food for thought...
Actually the parent code was up until LESS THAN 256. Therefore loop from [0,255]. no problems with the code.
Everything SCO has ever done has been either something someone else did that they bought and put their name on, or something that someone else did that they found a way to mimic. I must apologize to all the former SCO employees I know (particularly Dave and Dave) because I'm sure you did good work... But I stand by my statement.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why would SCO cause themselves more difficulty by using a legal strategy that ultimately would cause them more harm then good?
If SCO was looking to get bought out, specifically by IBM, then threatening IBM with such a lawsuit might make sense. The problem is, SCO was betting on IBM not calling SCO's bluff. If IBM does, SCO is screwed, although current lawsuits aside, it looked like that was going to happen anyways.
The reason that SCO is pursuing this case in the first place is that they are doomed. They rely primarily on proprietary UNIX licenses (OpenServer and Unixware) for x86 hardware to survive and anyone with half a brain is making the easy migration from SCO UNIX to Linux. In the meantime SCO has to maintain not one but two proprietary UNIXes with a development team smaller than RedHat's, and they haven't even got a version of their software that runs on Itanium or Opteron processors. Not to mention the fact that they are already losing money with no relief in sight.
In short, SCO is screwed.
However, they realized that they could alleviate some of the hurting in the short run by running a FUD campaign against Linux. If they scare enough of their current customers into thinking that Linux has intellectual property problems then they might retain some key accounts for another round of upgrades. Some investors might even believe that they have a chance of making real money with their lawsuit, and this would give SCO managers a chance to cash in some of their SCO stock while it is still worth more than the paper it is printed on. That is what this circus is all about. SCO knows they aren't going to win. Heck, they aren't even *trying* to win. The whole thing is nothing more than an elaborate con job.
RedHat and friends could countersue for damages based on their ridiculous claims, but this isn't likely to make them any money. After all, if SCO had money they wouldn't be trying this stupid stunt in the first place.
Another good point about the stock transactions. That's more on the SEC side of things but I certainly hope that happens as well. I agree with your point regarding future suits just adding this is one of many blunders which appears you already knew so...
As for the cash position I agree with you but I don't think SCO has any intention of making it to trial. They wanted IBM to buy them out to avoid this. The problem for SCO is this is turning into good publicity (at least among techies) for IBM. Among non techies it might be harmful short term since many of them are highly worried about liability issues. Long term it might be quite good as it could resolve some underlying legal issues.
These guys (SCO) sound like they hired the old Information Minister from Iraq
It sounds a bit more like the statements from the US government.
1: Claim you have proof of IP theft
2: Refuse to show proof
3: Sue
4: ??buyout offer??
5: Pretend IP theft was a non-issue all along.
Has anybody else noticed that the only distributions that SCO is
even looking at are those that actually are making money?
This appears to be nothing more than a money grab targeted at a portion of the
industry where they are failing. One of their execs. (probably the CFO)
asked himself one day
"How are we going to make any real money of this linux thing?"
"Sue big blue and any other company that is doing it right!, thats the ticket!"
I believe that IBM will end up litigating them into bankrupcy then aquiring all of their assets.
Upon which they should can McBride and his crew.
> Ummm, they said they are prepared to present examples in court.
> So are you less suspicious now?
Nope.
Saying is one thing, doing's another. They can keep saying whatever they like, and outgas FUD into the stratosphere. But until they actually show that proof, and also prove that they are not the ones who stole that matched-up code, I for one will remain skeptical.
> Why would SCO cause themselves more difficulty by using a legal strategy that ultimately would cause them more harm then good? Most likely they have proof, or they wouldn't have said anything.
Yes, we all know that the plaintif always wins a lawsuit, because no one would be so foolish as to file a suit when they didn't have rock-solid proof in their briefcase.
> Hell, Stallman believes all code should be free. Why wouldn't one of his followers steal code given that philosophy?
A) Are Linux kernel hackers "followers" of RMS?
B) Does RMS advocate stealing code?
C) Which is the better way to put egg on the faces of closed source software shops such as SCO, to steal their code or to write your own code that does the same thing better, and give it away for free?
Your argument makes a great example of what is known as "special pleading". Hopefully the court will want facts rather than silly arguments such as yours, and SCO's "Linux couldn't have matured so fast if someone hadn't been stealing our code".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hundreds of people have slipped in copyrighted code to the Linux kernel. The whole thing is copyrighted. But anyway ...
I have on several occasions seen junior programmers at proprietary software companies take code off the net or out of a textbook, and try to build it into a proprietary product (e.g. they need to do an FFT, so they get one out of "Numerical Algorithms in C"). This is because they have no clue about the difference between "the source code is published" and "it's public domain". Such codes get ripped out when found, or licenses are negotiated when it's too hard (at least at ethical companies),but it does happen.
The point is, it does happen that proprietary code contains illegally copied software, so SCO had better be careful what they allege.
Interesting point, but many issues are left open.
/., companies tend to take such things VERY seriously when they're talking to a judge.
First is the one that people have already pointed out: The released binary is a de facto checksum of the source code. If the code compiles to be identical to the binaries they released years ago, then the source is unchanged.
Then there's the fact that SCO did release the source code--to companies (like IBM) willing to pay for a license and sign an NDA. There are several copies of it floating around out there.
Then there's the question of honesty. It's one thing to lie to the public. It's another thing to perjure yourself (or your company) in court. I imagine SCO has signed (somehow) copies of their source code saying in effect, "this is an official copy of our trade secret code as of such-and-such a date." These are legal documents, and much as we might like to think otherwise on
Fundamentally, this is exactly the same as any other copyright/trade secret claim. Biotech companies rely on their researchers' signed and dated notebooks to prove their work (or prior art).
As far as your LoC idea, it's another breakable step--people are bribable, plants can get hired to destroy/alter records, etc. etc. It's an onerous step that's not going to help any honest companies, nor stop any companies truly dedicated to evil. It just causes more beaurocracy.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Or, maybe it's something like:
! Save all registers.
push eax
push ebx
push ecx
push edx
jmp somewhere
"Hey, wow, we have that in our code too! And it's not just a minor copying, because they used the same comment!"
C and assembler have a much smaller vocab (orders of magnitude) than English, and accidental things like this go on in English all the time.
Also, they're comparing two unix-based kernels.. don't you think similar code would show up? After all, both are derived (either directly (SCO) or indirectly (Linux)) from the same original operating system (duh!).
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
When SCO (nee Caldera) distributed Linux under the GPL, there was an SCO authorized distribution of the previously stolen code under the GPL.
At the very least, this indemnifies *everyone* past the first rogue, and arguably makes it impossible for SCO to call the code back.
That wouldn't surprise me, given the IP powerhouse that is IBM. But I also bet that the settlement will not be on terms favorable to SCO! IBM has a herd of lawyers ready to dig into a "discovery" feeding frenzy, keeping a sharp eye out for SCO infringements of IBM patents, source code, etc. SCO's suit reminds me of a kamikaze raid: it seldom sinks the target, but always takes out the attacker!
ENV flame="on" "Exactly, the fact they aren't prepared to even present a single example of this makes me very suspicious." Ummm, they said they are prepared to present examples in court. So are you less suspicious now?
In court, behind closed doors, if the code has found its way into any OPEN SOURCE software, obvisouly many people will have access to it, so its now worthless to keep it a secret, its not, revel the problem lines of code, if the Linux user community makes changes to the offending program, then thats self implication! if not, well its still right there for anyone to read!
"It would be magnitudes easier for SCO devels to steal code from the Linux kernel (even unintentionally) than for the Linux kernel to steal code from SCO. " SCO had a working relationship with IBM on the Monterey project. Obviously IBM then had access to SCO source. SCO is now claiming persons within IBM took said access to SCO source and used it in some Linux component.
yes, and linux is all open source, meaning ANYONE has access to the code, including those SCO goones, only a FEW people at IBM had access to SCO's UnixWare code, making it FAR less likely it was leaked.
"Anyhow, as some have already mentioned, who's to say that the code lines in question weren't already in the public domain prior to them even being in SCO?" The Judge at the court hearing.
Only if he was paid off by an unnamed company which owns the rights to UnixWare, called SCO, oops, that sliped...
"I'm doubling-down on IBM if they want to play a chicken-and-the-egg fight in this suit." I'll take a bet that IBM settles the case out of court. i got $100 here that says SCO either gets laughed out of court, trys to delay the hearing, looses, and retries the case on a techinacality, or simply gets smashed into 1986 by IBM.
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
I wonder, then, if someone could turn around and sue SCO for infringement of the GPL -- it would at least force them to reveal the code to the plaintiff, who could then make a determination as to whether that's the case.
If it turns out they did put GPL'd code into their proprietary code... now *that* would be justice: in sueing for copyright infringement, SCO winds up "losing" its entire base of source code to the public domain.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
Hi,
There have been a couple of comments about how Caldera has already distributed Linux kernel so they cannot claim IP theft etc.
I think we should be careful that Microsoft et al. should not put a spin on this like "See, they got involved in GPL software and lost their IP rights. We have been saying IT companies which produce original work should stay away from GPL if they do not want to lose their IP."
We have to make it clear that SCO/Caldera did not get screwed because they touched GPL software but they have simply agreed to share their IP and now claiming someone stole it, or something along these lines.
ato