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Today's SCO News
joebeone writes "Linus has commented on the SCO v. IBM suit saying "SCO is playing it like the Raelians" and that he will withhold his judgement until the code in question is shown in court. He has also recommended that former slashdot editor, Chris DiBona, be appointed to a panel offered by SCO to examine the evidence." Businessweek has an interview with SCO's CEO. The Open Group would like to remind everyone that SCO is only one of many in the Unix world.
OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint by Eric Raymond, President of The Open Source Initiative. Do we really have to say more, than what have already been said?
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Exactly.
but is that liability passed on to every user of the infringing derivative work?
No, it isn't.
No matter how much you or SCO's CEO wishes it to be, there is no liability passed to the end user, period.
Wouldn't make any sense or would it? Just because some vendor is guilty of a crime, suddently all users shall be guilty of that crime, too? What nonsense.
Just one of those fun legal quirks.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Damn, but I wish I had followed through with my 'dumb' idea to remortgage and dump the cash into SCOX! 'Idle rich' is such good job title.
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
The article is incorrect. The actual SCO OpenServer certification status is:
s .h tm
1. SCO OpenServer does not hold a Unix 98 cert, AIX does.
2. SCO OpenServer does not hold a Unix 98 cert, True64 does
3. SCO OpenServer does not hold a Unix 98 cert, Solaris does.
4. SCO OpenServer does not hold a Unix 95 cert, AIX does
ad naseum...
infty. SCO holds only a 95 cert for Unixware which it bought (and certified for the bought code, nothing later on) and for which the Open Group holds some of the trademarks anyway.
More info on:
http://www.opengroup.org/products/cert/certprod
So SCO has no legal right to call their flagship product unix anyway. Openserver is not and should not be allowed to be called Unix.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
This months issue of a US linux magazine (Probably "Linux Magazine", but I'd need to go home to check) has a pretty favorable review of SCO Linux in it.
The problem is that magazines are put together quite a while before they actually are released, so the information in them can be out of date by the time people actually see it.
The May issue of a magazine usually comes out in April. It probably goes to the printers 6 weeks before being released, so that would put the magazine being created in each March, before the lawsuit.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?mode_u=off&mod e_w=on&site=www.sco.com&submit=Examine
Stefan
Take a binary release of the date in question and compile the closed source in front of witnesses. The code in question should compile to the same binary. Of course you need a trustworthy source confirming the date of the binary.
From the GPL:
The implication is that the offending code will be removed and rewritten to make it non-infringing if at all possible.
Basically, it's the same thing that would happen if infringing code were found in a commercial product, except because the GPL allows anyone to redistribute the product, this possibility must be written into the copyright license.
Actually, there are a number of user-land utilities in the kernel source tree. Try doing a
grep 'include.*stdlib.h' -r
in a recent source tree. (Ignoring the hits from the Documentation directory.)
Eli
Suppose some of us believe SCO is lying. What's involved in "shorting" their stock?
SEC rules probably make this more complicated, but I think this is a pretty good simplification. Shorting stock is basically selling stock you don't have, with the intention of buying it back later (at a lower price). So you borrow stock from someone else and sell the stock. So how do you borrow stock? (Stockbrokers, please correct this as necessary...) When you do a "short", your stockbroker borrows shares from one of his other customers that has that stock. That stockholder probably does not even notice that his stock has been borrowed, and if the occasion comes up that the stock is needed, then your stockbroker will have to buy the stock immediately so that the stock "lender" is covered. This is one of the dangers of selling short, since a volatile stock may need to be re-bought any time the actual stock owner wants to do something with it, which may be RIGHT NOW. Or it might be some time that is really invonvenient for you, since the price is not where you want it to be. Tough luck. If you sell short, and the price goes up, you could be liable for many, many times your investment. Your stockbroker will probably hold the cash proceeds from your sale as insurance against this sort of thing. Compre this with simple investing, where you buy a stock and the worst case scenario is losing all of your investment. But if you sell short, it can get much worse if things go badly for you.
A dingo ate my sig...
The law suite is with UnixWare 7 _not_ OpenServer.
Going on means going far, going far means returning. Tao te Ching
Microsoft had issues with licensing code for their SQL Server product. They told their customers not to worry, their customers believed them. Then Microsoft loses the battle and the customers are exposed to potentially huge fines and fees. I say that is worse than any of the current mess with SCO. Someone needs to make sure that this is brought up to counter any anti-GPL FUD that might be flying around. Sagent Vs MS Story
Among others, David Boies.
I don't want to guess what he bills. $400/hour? I bet he bills his paralegals out at more than that.
This months issue of a US linux magazine (Probably "Linux Magazine", but I'd need to go home to check) has a pretty favorable review of SCO Linux in it.
That's the June 2003 issue of Linux Journal, page 78. And I didn't think it was "pretty favorable". It was as neutral as possible. The part about the delays in the sendmail security patch was not at all favorable.
The May issue of a magazine usually comes out in April. It probably goes to the printers 6 weeks before being released, so that would put the magazine being created in each March, before the lawsuit.
The final draft was submitted to the magazine about a week after SCO announced its lawsuit, but most of the writing was before that.
I know this stuff because I wrote that article.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
They seem to find SCO's claims as "questionable," but are warning that end users might in fact be sued. Despite calling it a "remote" possibility, their recommendations could hold back the deployment of Linux.
One of their recommendations is "Minimizing the use of Linux in 'complex, mission-critical systems' until the dust clears on how valid SCO's claims are." How long is that going to take?
Gartner to users: Don't take SCO suit lightly