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SCO Drops Linux, Says Current Vendors May Be Liable
Hank Scorpio writes "Well, SCO is at it again. I just received an email from their Developer Partner Program stating that not only are they suspending all future sales of their own Linux product (due to the alleged intellectual property violations), but they are also beginning to send out this letter to all existing commercial users of Linux, informing them that they may be liable for using Linux, a supposed infringing product. They mentioned that they will begin using tactics like those of the RIAA in taking action against end-users of Linux. This seems like it will be about as successful as the whole GIF ordeal a few years back. Where is UNISYS today? Is SCO litigating itself into irrelevance?"
... tune in at the Court to find out if SCO takes the fall. There are lots of people watching. If SCO falls, Linux will emerge from this with a lot a FUD put by the side as a very public failure to sue Linux out of existance fails.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
So, if I understand this correctly, they are sending out a letter, to Caldera's customers, telling them that they have are using a product that violates Caldera's intellectual property rights? Is there a possible suit for fraud there, as they appear to be revoking whatever licenses they gave when they sold Caldera Linux?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Great. SCO is giving Microsoft the best anti Linux ammo it could hope for.
This is a disaster. Balmer and Gates will trot this out as a major drawback to Open Source. IT is, if true, the living proof of the Intellectual Property issues hey claim for Open Source.
SCO is hurting Linux in the long run. It doesn't matter if this is the last gasp of a dying company. It's ample ammunition for anyone who hates Linux and wants to argue against it.
I can guarantee that we'll be hearing about Linux being riddled with IP violations for years to come, even if this is the one and only example to ever come to light.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
They didnt write it.
They claim that enough of the SysV code in linux was cut n' paste of their code.
Frankly, I think they could be right, and the zealots would be wise not to dismiss everything SCO says and does as stupidity.
I doubt they'll collect any damages. But they'll succeed in making linux look like a grey-market stolen piece of software and drive corporate adoption of it back 10 years.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Once again, such bullshit. Linux is 100% open source. If there are parts of Linux that are infringing, just indicate exactly where the infringement is. That they have not included this information either indicates that it doesn't really exist, or that they don't want to reveal just how small the suspected infringing area really is. We all know that if any actual infringing code was located in the Linux OS it would be gone and replaced with a non-contentious equivalent in no time at all.
Which is why SCO is being so deliberately vague about all of this. They don't want an infringement to be eliminated; they want it to stay in the Linux code base so they can screw over users of Linux.
This is an attack on a development methodology more than anything else. What they're saying is, unless you can PROVE the lineage of your code is clean, we're going to have to assume that it isn't.
I suspect that IBM's lawyers are going to be smart enough to know all this, and will be able to effectively disarm SCO's actions. If there are infringing parts of the code, these will be revealed in a public forum (the courts).
In the meantime, I suggest that the best recourse for a receiver of this letter is to repond, indicating that the entity known as "Linux" is actually composed of thousands of parts, each independently produced, and that SCO needs to provide information indicating which component is infringing.
Or just ignore their f'ing letter.
Well...
1. They said that the infringing code isn't in the kernel, so thus it may not apply to all "linux users."
2. If it does, then their own distribution would have contained code that violated their IP.
3. If it contained this code, then under the GPL all the other Linux distributers would be free to use it.
4. I'd sue them for harassment - without presenting any evidence or even exactly *what* infringes, they are issuing cease and desist orders. They are trying to scare people from using Linux. They are nothing but hot air.
I'm still waiting for SCO to provide ANY information as to why they feel their IP has been infringed.
:-)
To date they have used FUD as ruthlessly as Microsoft in the past. I wonder if they are not on the Micro$oft payroll considering their tactics.
Finally, I'm curious why they feel the end user of any Linux product "could" be legally responsible for anything. I downloaded a product used worldwide and has GPL licensing all over it. If we've broken the law then they are responsible to enlighten us.
Maybe someone should tell them Linus wrote the kernal. Or we could sit back and watch them flounder before death takes them.
FYI... I don't dismiss everything they say as stupidity. Occasionally they say something amusing and I'd mod it up to +1 Funny
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Who knows if they're right? They've refused to offer up the evidence. I think it's fair for the "zealots" to dismiss what they say until they see evidence, especially since this conflict has been ongoing for months now. How many times can you hear that SCO says you're infringing if they don't give you any evidence whatsoever before you ignore 'em?
/. would stop giving them the free press over it, but I know it's in their right, and I can freely ignore it too. (At least I know that my replying to this won't enhance their coverage, as I'm just a comment in the mass.)
I wish
Heh. Did somebody at Caldera^H^HSCO finally notice that they were violating the GPL by shipping Linux while claiming property rights against it?
The funny thing is, they've therefore stolen all the non-infringing code in the kernel, as it's from other people and they can only redistribute it by releasing their own.
(Assuming, of course, that there is any actual infringemnet, which seems unlikely.)
Expect increasingly shrill announcements as IBM blackens the sky with lawyers and SCO tries to give Linux a black eye to force IBM to buy them out before the case is thrown out of court.
Correction:
these are the allegations as I understand them. It's not yet proven in court.
The facts are that IBM became involved in Linux almost 10 years after Linux started, SCO then Caldera was already contributing and distributing to Linux long before IBM became involved.
Check this site to get a clue of the real facts:
http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
That's because Unisys is a $5.6B services company and your company is one of the ones contributing to that revenue. Congratulations! By all appearances, Unisys successfully "reinvented" themselves and the GIF patent battle doesn't seem to have harmed them at all. (For photographic images JPEG would have supplanted GIF anyway, and GIF still has a commanding lead in the annoying animated image market on the web. Despite its technical promise, PNG is still, after eight years, a fringe player.)
So, successfully extorting money from a dying patent and then going on to be a successful service company... yeah, SCO-Caldera would probably love to be the next Unisys. I'm aware the original story submitter was attempting to be ironic, but if he'd spent sixty seconds actually answering his own question about where Unisys is today he might have thought twice about it.
The only out they have would appear to be that they unknowningly released they code under the GPL and that therefore they have the right to revoke the license. That would be like Microsoft accidentally bundling MS Office with Windows XP. And then trying to tell me that even though the proprietary license says I'm entitled to install the software on one machine, that they are revoking the license and I am a software pirate if I don't wipe it from my harddrive. Something tells me they'll have a tough time convincing a judge of that -- especially with IBM's lawyers fighting them.
Just a few comments:
...
...
From Section 0: "Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software
patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free
program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the
program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any
patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all."
So if you distribute you have to grant everybody a free license
From Section 7: "If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent
infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues),
conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or
otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not
excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot
distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this
License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you
may not distribute the Program at all."
SCO realizes, the their lawsuit terminates their GPL license to the kernel
As an astute poster pointed out on OSNews, they cannot collect on any damages anyway.
They distribute(ed) a version of Linux under the GPL, a licence that legally permits people to copy and branch the code assuming they put it under the GPL. Unfortunately for SCO, whether or not they knew they were distributing their own IP under the GPL or not is irrelevant to the rather compelling argument that they did put their IP under the GPL, and now that they continued to distribute linux after they found the alleged infringements means that no court would declare that licence invalid.
They have knowingly distributed what is potentially their own code under the GPL for nearly a year now. The GPL licence should hold, infringement-free.
The ______ Agenda
The problem I have with this whole ordea, is that they have not pointed out WHICH patents are being infringed and what code. Why not just tell people what the code is and have it removed. No they want to take this tactic. Problem is that the result will be that people will switch to BSD / Mac or Windows and SCO in the longrun will loose as well.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Distributing your *own* software under the GPL does not affect your copyright ownership rights to it. SCO is claiming the code is copyrighted by them. This in fact would mean they are the only entity that can distribute it, under the GPL or any other license.
Except, of course that if SCO have knowingly distributed it under the GPL then anyone else also has the right to distribute it under the GPL - it doesn't prevent SCO selling it under another license, but it would mean everyone else has the right to continue to distribute it.
Distributing their own software under the GPL does indeed not affect their ownership of it...
But by distributing it under the GPL the buyer gets it under the terms of the GPL license which clearly states that they can copy it further....
So anything that was created by SCO and distributed by them under the GPL is now free....
By the terms of the GPL their patents are worthless (as far as they weren't already to old). The only case they might have is against IBM because of a breach of contract. And even that one is questionable.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
I suggest you read the GPL before making such claims. The tactic you're describing doesn't work because do distribute the Linux you have to release the code as GPL, meaning you allow anyone to distribute it too. Failing to do so is violating the copyright of Linus and all other contributors.
Besides, I think that just the fact that SCO distributed Linux (as GPL) should mean they have granted the right to use any code it contains. This means that even if originally the Linux code had been infringing on SCO's "IP" (which I doubt), they have already granted the right to use it.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
These threatened lawsuits migh also restrict SCO's ability to support their old Linux clients...
Right now, they're restricting the ability of people to redistribute the code that they sent out under the GPL. That's in violation of the GPL. This means that they now lose any rights to redistribute that same code.
This would include updates.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
"Not widely used" is a pretty good paraphrase of "fringe player." And anyone designing a public web site and willing to discard 10% of customers is also a fringe player.
For example, when folks began downloading massive quantities of music from various Internet channels, corporations realized that this posed a threat to their current methods, as did the CD to tapes, tapes to LPs, LPs to live performances, etc. However, the top management and boards of directors of these large companies have no imagination, no style, no tact, no nothing. They know only one thing... It is commonly known as "the bottom line." What it means is, "We have the inalienable right to eternal perpetually increasing profits."
To continue our example of the music industry, we will note that instead of seeking ways to make the changes work for the company, the aforementioned managers and directors (hereinafter idiots) want to maintain stability in a business that is inherently unstable. This stability is artificial and is achieved through litigation, just as the artificial monopoly provided for "intellectual" property is achieved through law.
The idiots abuse the legal system in order to maintain their bottom line and will continue to do so as long as the courts allow it. The RIAA does this. The MPAA does this. Now SCO is jumping on the "e-Litigation" bandwagon. Who cares anyway... SCO is yesteryear's news. The future is Linux. And if there is some code in there that belongs to SCO, which I doubt, then it is already done because once released in Linux, it will remain in use forever. There will always be some server out there, some desktop out there, some strange hack that will contain this code for lack of being updated to the next version, which is "cleaned" of the offending code. What are you going to do? Make Linux illegal throughout the galaxy because of this? Hang Linus for it? Or, figure that the code wasn't making you any money anyway and spend the would-be litigation funds on marketing efforts, on product line expansion, on research and development, on performing services for valuable customers... and on the million other things that SCO might do, in order to secure a good bottom line through honest, ethical, and otherwise positive and constructive means?
Oh, wait... Their bottom line demands that they abuse the court system, as if they're betting on a semi-fixed basketball game.
Unisys was notoriously difficult to work with. A few years back I worked at a large corporation on a product that, among other things, generated GIF files. We attempted to get a license from Unisys. Their demands were outrageous. The GIF file generation was a very minor component of a large and expensive software product but they wanted 10% of our revenue! Our patent attorney finally gave up negotiating and told us to go ahead and release the software, saying "If those a$$holes catch us, I'm sure they're infringing on some of our patents." Had Unisys agreed to more reasonable terms they would have had a steady revenue stream for the last six years.
SCO won't get far with this. IBM probably has some patents they can counter-sue against SCO, and they'll settle the whole thing out of court. Ditto for Sun and any other large company they might go after. And who's going to buy anything from SCO after this?