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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?"
Here is a mirror location for the letter. Click
...is fixing Dell comptuers now...
They're at our place about twice a month or more.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
LOL! You'll have pry my Linux from my cold, dead harddrive fucker.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
... 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!
"Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software. This process is designed to monitor the security and ownership of intellectual property rights associated with the code. "
Wait a minute. Someone designed the process by which commecrial software is built. Why hasn't someone patented it yet?
Vermifax
Logout
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
So SCO sold one this quarter?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I got here all I saw was a large blue
"YES!"
right under the question, "is SCO litigating itself into irrelevance?"
(It's actually part of an Intel ad, but hey...it's a good magic-8 ball to me).
This company reminds me of this article. What makes them think they have enough clout to even attempt this? They're going to bully IBM?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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!!!!
This is just a last ditch effort by a company that will be talked about in the past tense a few years from now. They are obviously angling to have someone buy them or pay them to shut them up. They're hoping IBM will think "hell, we could buy them and their patents for less than all this legal crap will cost". Going after customers (and how much you want to bet that the customers they go after will coincidentially be customers of a certain large computer corp, is just a way to enlist the customers into pushing said computer corp into resolving the issue quickly.
Personally I think AT&T/Lucent/Avaya should form a company and bring the Unix rights back home.
According to Netcraft, their site is hosted on a Linux webserver.
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.
I may be just as ignorant, but my understanding is that:
UNIX the commercial product was sold by ATT to SCO (or its precursor). SCO then licensed this source code to IBM for the development of their own products (AIX?).
The charges then alledge that IBM contributed to the Linux product by (directly or indirectly) submitting code additions to the OSS project before its first release.
SCO maintains that the code, if checked line by line, matches their original design and sometimes syntax. They claim that only IBM could have perpetrated such a thing, and that designing some of the algorithms was beyond the OSS project's stand-alone capability without IBM's help.
By showing that Linux is indeed a viable alternative to SCO UNIX, and that they are losing money based on the commercial installation base of Linux, they can claim that either IBM (1) pay them for the infringement or (2) a judge deem all Linux distro must license from SCO, or both.
To them, IBM didn't want to pay the license fees any more, so IBM starts to sell Linux as their *Nix solution, not the SCO-compile. This locks SCO out from at least IBM's fat check to them. This makes them unhappy. SCO claim foul play.
these are the facts as i understand them, but i write this to ask for clarification from everyone.
mug
Today, SCO filed a lawsuit against SCO for selling Linux based solutions with Unix properietery code that it had contributed to the Linux development project. The lawsuit is for irrepairable damages and seeks an award of $10,000,000,000 and legal fees. The CEO of SCO had this to say, "We expect a quick settlement to this case." He also added that "With the settlement money and our recouped legal fees, we can move on to other Linux / Unix distributors, such as Santa Cruz Operation or Caldera."
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Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
Not telling the world what the code is, is a legal blunder of the first order. This means that they have unclean hands, as they are supposed to try and mitigate the damage in order to receive compensation.
You can't knowlingly add to the damage and then ask for compensation incl Punitive damages based on same. Any suit against Linux vendor in the future can site this as an Affirmative Defense" and pretty much get the suit tossed on that account alone
Help fight continental drift.
I'm still waiting for SCO to provide ANY information as to why they feel their IP has been infringed.
:-)
To date they have used FUD as ruthlessly as Microsoft in the past. I wonder if they are not on the Micro$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
The problemo that they have though is that 'SCO' is really Caldera inc which in turn used to sell Linux. There is a big problem with distributing linux if you intend to get heavy on the IP trip. As Bill Gates observed, Linux was released under a viral license which in effect strips away most of SCO's intellectual property rights.
The only things that Caldera can enforce its rights on at this point is code that is in the SCO code base AND a Linux distribution AND NOT in any Caldera distribution that shipped after the SCO acquisition.
The other tricky problem they have is detrimental reliance. Oh and don't discount the fact that getting into an IP pissing contest with IBM or Microsoft or any of the really big players is suicidal for any technology company, those guys have more patents to fire back in self defense its not funny.
The only reason SCO is doing this is that its their last gasp survival attempt - get bought by someone big.
A much cheaper way to do the same thing would be to put the company up for sale on EBay.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
--
Twoflower
"Has it been revealed to the world yet exactly which code is in question?"
No, and for two primary reasons:
1) SCO's bluffing until the bitter end. There is no copyright infringement, and everyone in high level positions at SCO knows it. SCO's market exit strategy (to be bought by IBM) backfired in a huge way, and there is no way to repair the damage. If SCO backs off now, it will be destroyed by the SEC for gross negligence towards the shareholders. Everyone at SCO knows that IBM is going to destroy SCO, and are merely trying to hold off the inevitable for as long as possible.
2) There is no copyright infringement. When the trial starts (and it's a given that this will get to trial considering #1 above), SCO will have to produce something (and I guarantee it will be manufactured ala Microsoft). At that point, the jig will be up. SCO doesn't actually want to go to trial, but now the company has painted itself into a corner and will -have- to go to trial. This is a great big "OOPS!" on SCO's part.
"And what, exactly, happened to their statement that they weren't going after Redhat or Joe Linuxuser, but instead just IBM?"
SCO realized that IBM wasn't biting, and panicked. This is SCO's flailing around for anything and everything to halt its inevitable destruction.
I highly recommend reading ESR's comment.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
That may or may not be the case. However, SCO condoned all of this the moment they began distributing Linux themselves. While they could initially claim ignorance that this was going on, they could not claim so once the suit against IBM was filed.
It seems that they did not understand the full implications of the GPL when they filed their original suit against IBM.
However, the cat is now out of the bag. Any code that was in any kernel that SCO distributed after filing suit against IBM is now "in the public domain" and they can't take it back.
This just may end up being a test case for the GPL.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Exactly right. When AT&T/USL sued UC Berkley over BSD, they crippled BSD for a decade. Now they are trying to do the same thing to Linux. The AT&T vs BSD lawsuit introduced enough FUD and left a big enough cloud over BSD to drive commercial users away from BSD and make vendors license SysV "just to be safe". Even a strong BSD varient like the orginal SunOS has been supplanted by a SysV varient Solaris. I suspect that one of Sun's reasons in switching to SysV was to avoid legal issues, in addition to getting the "newer and improved" features of SysV. It is only very recently, with Mac OS-X, that BSD is finally coming out from under the cloud and starting to become mainstream again.
I find it interesting that the letter claims control over UNIX "methods". It sounds like they are contending that they have a lock over all "UNIX-Like" systems, even those with non-encumbered code because the ideas and methods are facsimilies of proprietery methods. I think they are actually saying that they have a monopoly on *nix-likeness. So regardless of the cut-and-paste issue with the code, they are still going to fight over the implementation itself. How they expect this to hold up in court is going to be interesting because the already "gave it up" when they cleared the BSD settlement.