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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.""
OSI is ISO backwards. Conspiracy.
OSI Papers notwithstanding, all it takes is a tipply judge to cause a lot of headaches for everyone from RedHat to Yellow Dog. In any case, Microsoft wins. Their line...go with the smart, non-litigated choice...Windows XP. Now with Software Assurance!
So, not matter what happens, open source will survive. GNU/Linux may suffer, but not other systems.
The SCO law suit will probably go down in history in the same category as the stupid congressmen that bad-mouth the GPL. Namely, the trashcan.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
open-source advocate Bruce Perens:
g =f d_nc_1
http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-1007758.html?ta
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.
smd4985
SCO's complaint is factually defective in that it implies claims about SCO's business and technical capabilities that are untrue. It is, indeed, very cleverly crafted to deceive a reader without intimate knowledge of the technology and history of Unix; it gives false impressions by both the suppression of relevant facts, the ambiguous suggestion of falsehoods, and in a few instances by outright lying.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I believe the key is what "derived" means in the context of that graphic. Yes, Linux uses UNIX design concepts and structures, but that's true of all the OSes in the graphic; to that extent, they're all related. Solid lines indicate direct inheritance of code. The off-to-the-side bit reflects the fact that Linus' original project was built from scratch and didn't use code from the other family members.
WRT the use of BSD tools, I suspect this was a judgement call in producing a readable graphic describing major influences. Show all interactions and the page is an unreadable mess, (possibly resembling the profile of a gnu?).
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
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?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
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:
- Piss off pretty much the entire *NIX community with threat of lawsuit.
- ???
- 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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
2: Every piece of "FUD" about the GPL will be proven--it IS a viral license, that can irrevocably infect your code without your express wishes.
Actually, in this case it doesn't matter what open license it is. If the license used was the BSD license, SCO would still be losing their "intellectual property" because the source would still be there for everyone to see. Thus, we need not worry about the "viral FUD" if the above point is brought to attention.
If IBM had the legal grounds to base a countersuit on one (or more... probably more) of their numerous patents, it would take a very, very long time to prepare these things in an airtight way, not like what SCO has done with their haphazard and amateurish nonsense.
One thing's for certain; no matter what hapens, IBM will make sure their rebuttals and countersuits are extremely well supported and factually correct, probably with the help of many, many highly paid expert witnesses.
I'm expecting them to try to prove a point in court, to legitimize their new business model, and to open up future revenue streams for cooperation (they need to clear EVERYONE of this nonsense, or else an entire industry [the one they created by embracing Linux] might disappear).
It would do better for their bottom line in the long run to prove their business model is sound, and to legally fuck their competition (i.e., SCO) than just outright buying SCO; it would then look like they are covering something up.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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.
"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.
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.
photoplankton
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?
Of course not. Only when a corporation purposely distributes code does this become an issue. They may not knowingly distribute it, but they purposely distribute. There's a lawyer term that relates here, due diligence, that basically means that a corpoartion has a duty to their stockholders to make sure they aren't doing something stupid by a purposeful action, such as releasing trade secrets under an open license. If SCO really did purposely publicly license trade secrets under an open license, even unknowingly, there may actually be grounds for a shareholder lawsuit against SCO for not being properly cautious about such a public licensing. Note that this would be a bad thing for Open Source in general, as most companies don't have the resources to properly examine, what, 5 million lines of source code for the software in a normal linux distribution. And therefore the proper "safe" response may be to not use linux, even internally.
Yes, the GPL is viral. It is meant to be viral. Stallman did that on purpose. No, it cannot infect your code without your wishes. But it can without your informed intent, if you are not properly careful of what you are doing. Again, due dilegence.
Actually, assuming SCO has a valid case in this lawsuit, I don't really see a problem with both viewpoints on this...
If IBM really did release SCO IP in kernel patches, then IBM is liable for violating a NDA, and there should be consequences for that.
However, at the point that SCO (or Caldera after they bought SCO) released that IP in their own linux distribution, liability for other users/distributors stops.
That (assumed) window between IBM releasing SCO IP, and Caldera (as SCO owner) releasing that same IP under an open license, makes for some interesting possibilities for legal rulings for other distributors.
Oh, and I like your sigline, but really... Cadbury creme eggs *are* heavenly.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?