OSI vs SCO

the jackol writes "As expected, the OSI's just given the SCO vs IBM case a bite with this position paper. "SCO has never owned the UNIX trademark. IBM neither requested nor required SCO's permission to call their AIX offering a Unix. That decision lies not with the accidental owner of the historical Bell Labs source code, but with the Open Group.""

Comments

GPL the best bet

[deanj]

The best bet for this whole thing is that SCO did their own Linux and released it. Since they did it under GPL, the cat's out of the bag. ...At least from this point on...or rather, the point they released it on. They've pulled their Linux since then.

Question is, can they sue for release of software BEFORE they released the now GPL-ed SCO code in their Linux distro?

Re:GPL the best bet

[Zocalo]

SCO did their own Linux and released it. Since they did it under GPL, the cat's out of the bag.

Nope. This is wrong, and keeps cropping up again and again here and elsewhere. *Caldera* did their own Linux and released it under the GPL. SCO (the original) produced and sold commercial UNIX under several names. Caldera then bought SCO (again the original) and it's IP, and still under the name Caldera helped to start the United Linux directive. Up until this point, under the leadership of Ransom Love, Caldera "got it".

It would then appear that Ransom Love left and the lawyers took control, which is the point where they "lost it". Caldera became the current SCO, and the dubious comments about UNIX vs Linux started to fly around. The comments then became more legally inclined, finally culminating in the suit against IBM.

I'd guess that SCO started to come up with the prospects of the lawsuits after Ransom Love's departure. As they built up their "evidence" (which has yet to be publically documented in a satisfactory manner), the comments grew in the level of vitriol and FUD content. Presumably this increase was as the lawyers became more confident they could pull off their intended plan. Whether that plan is simply to be bought out, or they actually believe they can successfully sue IBM is a matter for speculation. As far as I can tell, all we can say about SCO's current plan is that it seems to be:

1. Piss off pretty much the entire *NIX community with threat of lawsuit.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

What step 2. is, remains to be seen, and I really hope it doesn't lead to 3.

On an unrelated note, what I want to read at this point is a frank positional summary by Ransom Love who is becoming somewhat conspicuous by his "absense" through all this mess.

Re:GPL the best bet

[DASHSL0T]

3. Already seems to be working. MS and someone else (even if for dubious reasons) are now licensing from SCO.

Also, their stock went up 40% (!) yesterday on the MS news. It also was about double from when the lawsuit silliness started *before* yesterday. So SCO stockholders are making money, that's for sure. At least if they bought at a low. Even if they didn't, they have dramatically reduced their losses. The next best thing to making money is to lose less money. :)

As for the GPL, I really do not think it holds water if somebody misappropriates your code, inserts it somewhere in linux and you unknowingly release it. But, IANAL. If the GPL does stand up and is declared valid in such a case, you can expect large companies to avoid it like the plague. They will not want have to vett every line of code they distribute under the GPL against every line of code in their proprietary portfolio to make sure somebody, somewhere, didn't insert stolen code.

Please note, I am not saying SCO's claim is valid and anybody took/used anything inappropriately. I am just saying that I don't think the "GPL defense" will stand up in court, and *even if it does* that may have worse long-range effects anyway. A lose-lose. :(

Re:GPL the best bet

[denisdekat]

I am not a legal expert, but if you are proven to be negligent about any business data, last I checked, you are at fault really. For example. If I listed all of my customers on my website, I could not sue an ex-employee for using my customer list to do sales, since I make it public and available to all.
I do not see how SCO could claim proprietary information on something they released under GPL.
However, this country seems so corrupt anything is possible.

a good explanation from....

[smd4985]

open-source advocate Bruce Perens:

http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-1007758.html?tag =f d_nc_1

He doesn't outright say it be he is almost implying that certain monied interests (M$?) could be indirectly funding the whole SCO effort to spread FUD about Linux.

If you don't read anything else, read this...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

One is that, despite misleading claims implied on SCO's web pages by phrases like "exclusive licensing", SCO does not own or control the Unix trademark. As we have previously observed, that trademark -- and the privilege of suing IBM for relief on a trademark-violation theory -- belongs to The Open Group.

Furthermore, SCO is barred by the terms of the GNU General Public License from making copyright or patent-infringement claims on any technology shipped in conjunction with the Linux kernel that SCO/Caldera itself has been selling for the last eight years. Therefore, SCO may accuse IBM of misappropriating SCO-owned software to improve the Linux kernel only if that software does not actually ship with the Linux kernel it is alleged to be improving!

Finally, SCO is barred from making trade-secret claims on the contents of the Linux kernel, not merely by the fact that the kernel source is generally available, but by the fact that SCO has made the sources of its Linux kernel available for download from SCO's own website!

Re:If you don't read anything else, read this...

[PhilHibbs]

Furthermore, SCO is barred by the terms of the GNU General Public License from making copyright or patent-infringement claims...

I'm not sure I like where that line might lead. By that logic, if someone decides to mirror a Linux distro on their servers as a public service, not knowing that it contains code that has been stolen from them, they lose all redress. If I were a large organisation offering free mirroring space, such as, say, The University of Manchester (I got that from gnu.org's list of mirrors), I might think twice about continuing to do so. It gives credence to what I previously disregarded as Microsoft's FUD about the 'viral' GPL.

Microsoft linkage

[moehoward]

Considering the history of SCO in the mid-late 80s, you have to wonder how closely MS and SCO remained linked at the executive levels. Gates really liked UNIX and MS had their hands in the mix in that time frame. Gates is technical and understands why Unix/Linux is powerful and he actually liked working with it. SCO took over all the MS aspects of their initiative (sort of) back in the 80s/early 90s.

I suspect that their is more here than meets the eye in terms of collusion between MS and SCO. I could see MS picking up SCO if they can damage Linux in the process.

To spell it out, here is what I'm suggesting (IMHO): I suspect MS and SCO execs are acquaintences. I suspect that MS execs tugged on the SCO execs to make some troubles for Linux (starting with the IBM thing whenever). I suspect that they have a big bag of such issues with which to harass Linux vendors. I suspect that MS will enter the Linux/Unix arena in the next 3 to 5 years, possibly through an aquisition of SCO.

Question: Was SCO part of the anti-trust suits and related suits against MS? If so to what degree?

Re:Saw this on Google News a while back

[fw3]

As much as people daydream that IBM is "on our side ... not because they have some kind of conviction that OSI is morally good

Err well making money is arguably morally good.

SCO is far less trying to fsck over linux than IBM, yes they've made noises toward the Distributions, but a primary thrust of their suit is to revoke IBM's Unix license. Even a very small likelihood of that happening will grab the attention of people running AIX.

Naturally we expect IBM to address this with the court and if the court considers it likely they will prevail, then IBM will be allowed to continue shipping AIX.

The reasons I think SCO loses this case, amplifying OSI's discussion:

• AIX as a kernel is the Mach microkernel, (derived from BSD not SysV) and among unixes it's the one which outwardly seems to have the most rewriting. The same kernel and hardware have been the basis of os/400 for half a decade.
• AIX as an OS mostly uses bsd-flavored commands (and only adopted sysV-style init as Linux's SysV-style became the lingua-franca)
• IBM is supporting thier Unix clients by building linux compatibility on top of the (far more solid) AIX kernel. This means middleware. Does anyone doubt that IBM has done a GPL-free interface? No way do I believe they'd risk opening AIX source by directly incorporating GPL.

Basing AIX on Mach didn't come cheap. For instance AIX took longer than it's competitors to get 64-bit clean for the same reasons that the Hurd (also Mach-based) just got set-back a year, the 32bit limitations are in the microkernel, not the bolted-on subsystems. One thing they bought with that investment, however was a very strong position in the event that SYS-V's inheritors ever wanted to raise this particular ruckus.

Personally I'm hoping SCO gets tapped for IBM's legal fees when they inevitably lose this case. The only winners I can see are SCO's lawyers, and perhaps to a lesser degree microsoft and Sun.

Great paper

[little_blaine]

This paper is a gem. It provides a good history of unix and unix-like OSs, and in my mind it establishes that SCO has no claim to the UNIX trademark. SCO willfully misrepresents itself as a much bigger player in the enterprise market than it actually is, for the purpose of claiming bigger damages. My favorite quote:

Examination of SCO's 10Ks reveals that, even were we to assume that every dime of their revenue came from the enterprise market, their 2002 share could not have exceeded 3.1% [5] This is at the level of statistical noise.

Way to go for stupid choice of quote

[Anonymous Coward]

"SCO has never owned the UNIX trademark. IBM neither requested nor required SCO's permission to call their AIX offering a Unix. That decision lies not with the accidental owner of the historical Bell Labs source code, but with the Open Group."

Well, this is quite true, but it's a trivial offhand swipe at SCO that has nothing to do with the court case. SCO are claiming breach of contract and copyright infringement, not trademark infringement.

The OSI position paper is actually pretty good, and almost any sentence picked at random would probably have been more relevant than that one.

How about:

SCO alleges (Paragraph 57): "When SCO acquired the UNIX assets from Novell in 1995, it acquired rights in and to all (1) underlying, original UNIX software code developed by AT&T Bell Laboratories."

SCO neglects to mention that those rights had been substantially impaired before its acquisition of the ancestral Bell Labs source code. [...] ten years ago at a time when Linux was in its infancy, the courts already found the contributions of other parties to what is now UnixWare to be so great, and Novell's proprietary entitlement in the code so small, that Novell's lawyers had to settle for a minor, face-saving gesture from the University of California or walk away with nothing at all.

Or:

SCO's claim to own the scalability techniques certainly cannot be supported from the feature list of its own SCO OpenServer, a genetic Unix. The latest version advertises SMP up to only 4 processors (a level which SCO's complaint dismisses as inadequate), no LVM, no NUMA, and no hot-swapping. That is, SCO is alleging that IBM misappropriated from SCO technologies which do not appear in SCO's own product.

Interesting reading

[BennyTheBall]

In case you haven't come across it yet...This article by Bruce Perens makes a good reading.
The title kind'a get you thinking... "The Fear War on Linux". It seems pretty clear that the only one who might benefit from this is Microsoft. Really fitting for their strategy of FUDing Linux out of existence. Is this just a convenient turn of events for the Redmond guys, or a truly Machiavellian charade orchestrated by them since day one?

Btw, could someone explain these clearly out-of-context quotes?

Sue SCO for slander and libel

[Black Copter Control]

We might actually have a legal precedent as the first class-action libel suit.

Reading thru the OSI document, it became clear to me that the SCO suit and surrounding PR are an attempt to do to Linux what the USL/BSD suit did to BSD a decade ago -- that is stall it's adoption in a cloud of legal FUD.

For those who are not aware, back in the early '90s Unix Systems Lab (the inheritor, at that time, of the bell labs IP in Unix) sued the BSD people over their attempt to split off the BSD code from the Bell Labs IP. At that time, they had realized that the BSD code base had very little code that had actually sourced with AT&T and decided that it was time to excise what was left of the AT&T code and go their own non-proprietary way. USL was indignant at this abandonment of fealty and attempted to sue the BSD group back into compliance.

As the OSI paper succinctly puts it: "The suit was settled after AT&T's request for an injunction blocking distribution of BSD was denied in terms that made it clear the judge thought BSD likely to win its defense." -- (and after Berkeley's threat to counter sue AT&T over their own violations of the BSD copyright and license).

Many people, however, credit the current popularity of Linux -- at least in part -- to the legal cloud that the AT&T suit placed over the BSD codebase -- at about the same time that Linus released the early (and relatively primitive) versions of the Linux kernel with the GNU utility codebase.It is believed that a number of people decided that it was easier -- legally speaking -- to throw their lot in with the clearly IP-intact Linux than to risk getting caught by the BSD license debacle.

As a result, Linux is now the dominant Unix-variant OS OS, and the various BSDs -- which started with a much more stable and mature codebase are now holding a relatively niche market space.

SCO's suit along with their rather bombastic and (as shown by the OSI document) seriously misleading and unfounded PR claims seem intended to create precisely the same kind of 'chilling environment' around Linux. The fact that Linux is just about to get into a serious head-on fight with Microsoft for control of both the server market and the desktop market may be either coincidental or part of a conspiracy.

Although SCO's legal filings have a limited immunity to claims of slander and libel, to the extent to which they have repeated those claims in press releases, public statements, and letters, they are not. Those public and semi-public statements appear to be a large part of SCO's 'legal' campaign, and open them to some serious libel claims.

I honestly believe that it would be appropriate for the Linux community to seriously look at suing SCO over the insulting, degrading and clearly untruthful statements that they've made about us. The intent of those statements is to degrade the image and financial value of the work of the Linux community, and if they're allowed to stand, they may succeed in doing so to a greater degree than they already have.