Slashdot Mirror
Do You Know UNIX Secrets?
ESR writes "You can help stop the SCO attack on IBM and the Linux community.
I'm looking for ways to prove that Unix trade secrets have been legally
nullified.
I want to know if you have ever had read access to proprietary Unix
source code (not just binaries and documentation) under circumstances
where either no non-disclosure agreement was required or whatever
non-disclosure agreement you had was not enforced. To help out, see my No Secrets page."
But then I'd have to kill -9 you.
/usr/bin/tput ${1:+-T$1} clear 2> /dev/null
"I know nothing... nothing!"
We're only gonna die from our own arrogance, that's why we might as well take our time...
This is the book which shows the roots of Unix: Lion's Commentary on UNIX 6th Ed. with source code
ESR's Match.com Love-Letter
;-)
I do the club scene a lot, some say I am a good dancer. I enjoy having a few drinks, usually ale or mead, and I have been known to cause a scene now and then...
Eric paused, breathing heavily. He'd never done this before and he wanted to make sure all of his best qualities were included in this email.
I am a geek, to be frank, and I enjoy hacking UNIX and maintaining Open Source programs such as Felchmale^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFetchmail and a bevy of FAQs regarding 386 sound internals and role-playing games. I've been doing this for 15 years though I've never held a job in my life.
Eric wondered if this woman he had found on match.com would be impressed with his talents. He decided to put more detail into the message.
I recently drove 24 hours straight, with but two stops for gasoline, from Pennsylvania to Kansas City in an effort to destroy my two arch-nemeses. I would have succeeded except that I blew a head gasket as I was about to shoot one of them from my moving car on Route 69. I am an excellent shot and love guns in general.
ESR pondered for a moment, wringing out his soaked handkerchief, and continued with his typing.
So what languages do you know? I fancy myself quite an accomplished amateur linguist and know Anglo-Saxon and Old Icelandic inside and out. I often compose little riddles in them for fun and mental exercise. In fact, I'll include one for you now!
Chewing on his tongue and squinting, Eric pushed his mind into overdrive and produced a beauty of a riddle on the spot:
Windeth I/Towarde the skye
I haveth eye/But blinde am I
Pleased with his linguistic talents, undoubtedly matched by no one, Eric then asked his potential love-conquest:
Can you guess the answer to that? In case you can not, the correct answer is "my erect penis." I hope you enjoyed that; I do this sort of thing all the time.
Eric exhaled slowly and rubbed his belly. It was growling and no doubt wanted its nightly bottle of Jägermeister. He decided to finish up the email in anticipation of the coming alcoholic stupor.
Well I don't want to make this email too long-- I have a lot of responsibilities in real life to deal with. My role-playing group is coming over and we are spending the next week holed up in the forest near my home in character playing out a possible scenario from Beowulf. I need to get dressed up and I can not find my bear-claw mittens.
Eric wondered how to wrap up the email, something that would hook the lady on him and make her want more...
I hope we can meet and have sex. Despite my cerebral palsy, I am a monster in the sack! Maybe you'll get to see for yourself, LOLOLOL!
Love,
Eric S. Raymond
I wonder what can be gained from having access to propietary Unix source. It seems that doing this would be illegal on its own.
When Sun gave away Solaris source code way back...did that maybe justify the cause?
-psy
Says:
UNIX? There is no UNIX. UNIX is a myth! Impossible to know UNIX secrets.
...
The legal portion is precisely to answer your question.
Help fight continental drift.
...will he shoot me?
What bothers me, is just as happened with the DMCA, there was some outrage after the fact. Very little antagonism on our part, and viola DMCA is now mandate.
If someone can stop SCO from forcing me to download OBSD, I would be eternally grateful
It's good to see someone with a NAME (like him or hate him, he's a well-known character) gets things in gear. I hope something comes out of this so this FUD stuff (& the whole lawsuit of course) dies a quiet death like it should. Just point out the f$#^*ing code (if any), and write around it.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
Will it help IBM if someone comes forward and claim they have gotten access to AIX source-code without an NDA in place? I can understand that if SCO have been sloppy with NDA's that that can help the case but if IBM, SUN or any of the other licensees have leaked trade secrets/source would that not rather help SCO?
the basic unix source code has been out there without NDAs for DECADES. TONS of people have access to it.. have you read the OSI position paper on the matter?
The "who" might be IBM. According to an article on The Inquirer, he might be employed by IBM:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9536
I also think that this might be the fastest way to win the case. Even while SCO's claims are ridiculous, they can pile up thousands of lines of code they would consider 'stolen' - answering those allegiations one by one can lead to a possibly endless debate (especially with their 'obsfucating to make it look like it wasn't stolen' line argument). What ESR does is to cut the roots of the problem.
In 1973, UNIX had a secret affair with MULTIX. The resulting child was put up for adoption, and the whole thing was hushed up.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
So let's get this... ESR wants to know where the NDA wasn't enforced. So he's looking for someone who's copied code from the Unix source tree into something else and got away with it. Isn't that what's called admitting your culpabilty? And when SCO serves papers on ESR for that information which he has garnered? Oh, you too can have your day in court. Woohoo.
ESR working for SCO lawyers, laugh!
:-)
Your comment reminds me of that archetypal childhood dream where you go into school naked, don't realize it, suddenly do realize it, and are totally embarrassed.
In your case, you're posting to Slashdot, having no clue of what you are talking about. I'm hoping the dream ends the same for you; that you'll come to the sudden realization of the extreme ignorance you displayed for everyone to see.
Don't be too embarrassed though; you'll be neither the first nor the last around here.
I think its safe to say i am speaking on behalf of ALL of /. when i say No.
WANT INFO ON A COUNTRY?
About unix and its history of lawsuits visit the wikipedia history page
The point is, it's been basically otu in the open for decades already... so yes, you can't take it and make a product with it... copyright prevents it.
But the source code to various versions of unix has been widely available to anyone who wanted it, and none of the previous copyright holders of it even really cared.
SCO cannot claim trade secret violations for somethign that has been common knowledge for well over 10 years.
Yes, 2 wrongs don't make a right, and merely taking something and publishing it doesn't make trade secret invalid.. but if I publish your trade secret stuff, and it gets re published for a full DECADE, you can't come in 10 years later and claim your "secrets" have been leaked.. it's not a secret anymore.
Next up: All your unixes belong to us.
Quickly followed by: in soviet russian the secrets have unix!
<insert Matrix "I know Kung Foo" joke here>
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The issue was contamination. If you had ever had access to the source, your work was potentially contaminated.
In the early-mid-late 80's, this was a very big deal (and partly why RMS is such a visionary). Even if it is hard to imagine in these daze of Linux..
If the claim is that the system needs to be stricken of all SCO *owned* code. Isn't the first argument: What code do you really own, what happened in the AT&T Case (open the court files) show us what needs to be changed BEFORE a lawsuit ever took place.
The technical community is VERY good at solving these sorts of problems. Even if we are talking 6-18 months time to rewrite all the sources they are claiming are in violation. That's much shorter than this court case with IBM is going to be.
Besides, even if they are not *really* in violation. And there are claims for both sides, if they were re-written, SCO loses their lawyer money, and we can go back to ragging on M$-Wintel-DMCA and the US court system.
SCO alleges that Unix is an animal that can only be touched by a pure virgin. While a noble ideal, when has to question how SCO can claim the Unix at all.
And for proof that something is going on here, I ask you to look at the GNU creature.
pope is the antichrist. catholic pedophile priest scandal: http://home.fuse.net/gospel
There is nothing wrong with displaying ignorance on /. What is wrong is not doing so anonymously.
Here
played Sgt. Schultz.
The only case in which access to source code would be of interest would be if SCO or its predecessors made the code available themselves, without requiring an NDA. That could be accidental (putting it up for FTP on a public site) or deliberate (publication in a book, sending it to a university research group).
In all other cases, access to it would probably be in breach of either NDAs or computer crime laws. For example, if you had access to SCO source code through your employer, you are covered through their NDA. If you made your own copy of it, you and your employer might be in a lot of trouble. If SCO or someone else accidentally left open an NFS mount with the source tree (as has happened in the past), you'd probably be guilty of computer hacking if you tried to access it. So, be careful of what you admit to.
Overall, I think people should just ignore SCO and go about their business until SCO comes forward with concrete claims. There is no need to spin our wheels or waste any amount of time on this right now. After SCO makes concrete claims, any reasonable judge should give the open source community ample time to respond, and SCO's secretiveness and unwillingness to let people fix whatever they are complaining about probably only hurts their case.
I was reading an article on another site bemoaning the things that IBM was denying to know in its brief, the gist of which was Linux itself.
This is actually to Linux's advantage. When SCO is forced to admit that Linux is a kernel and not a complete operating system, it will have to drop the allegations against what really is Linux.
The faster that happens, the better. The harm is in disparaging the trademark name Linux, which most people associate with the whole operating system. It isn't, and forcing SCO to remove that allegation keeps the name pure.
pope is the antichrist. catholic pedophile priest scandal: http://home.fuse.net/gospel
There are three problems here.
"under circumstances where either no non-disclosure agreement was required or whatever non-disclosure agreement you had was not enforced."
Problem #1: Just because it wasn't enforced at one time, doesn't mean the NDA is null and void- in fact, many/most NDAs specifically say "lack of enforcement does not nullify this agreement".
I'm looking for ways to prove that Unix trade secrets have been legally nullified
Problem #2: Disproving "trade secret" status is pointless(not to mention, unlikely to happen). It's still copyright SOMEONE ELSE, and YOU CAN'T USE IT unless they let you!
Problem #3: It's been said time+time again, there is no proprietary code that belongs to SCO in the Linux kernel. This project, therefore, is entirely moot, at least in regards to the SCO lawsuit...and it can only, in fact, cause damage, because you're implying there IS code that belongs to SCO that "we" need to find a way to justify its presence in the kernel...when in fact no such code exists.
By the way, why are people wasting time "helping" IBM? They don't need it, nor do they deserve it- they're "into" Linux because it makes them money, not because they wanna be friends, or they think it's "cool"...and with legal "help" like this, who needs SCO? Dispute the claims intelligently, boycott SCO, whatever- just leave the legal arguments to the lawyers, or you just might end up helping SCO...and IBM won't be the only loser if that happens.
I can hear the SCO execs and lawyers now: "See? They DID steal our code, now they're trying to find a loophole!"
Please help metamoderate.
Posing as ESR to try to get people to incriminate themselves is a pretty nice trick. But we're not falling for it!
Flat5
SCO wants to use the courts to attack us and claim control of the Linux code; let's make them rue the day they thought this was a good idea, by proving that they have no trade secrets.
clickyMain Entry: 2rue Function: verb Inflected Form(s): rued; ruing Date: 12th century transitive senses : to feel penitence, remorse, or regret for intransitive senses : to feel sorrow, remorse, or regret
Sorry to disturb y'all, I just love new words
The Sultan, having dutifully consulted with his palace sages, historians, and theologians, was finally convinced that nothing in the lore of his religion could guide him in the selection of a Network Operating System, and the conclusion was now clear to him, that though most computers in the Palace Administration should run under WINDOWS, yet the Harem Management must be served by UNIX.
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
I want to know if you have ever had read access to proprietary Unix source code (not just binaries and documentation) under circumstances where either no non-disclosure agreement was required or whatever non-disclosure agreement you had was not enforced.
;-)
Well obviously I have - I've taken sneaky peeks at the linux kernel source on many occasions
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Shouldn't that be GNU/Linux?
"I'm looking for ways to prove that Unix trade secrets have been legally nullified."
But why?
This would serve only to HELP SCO's case that people are running around with 'improper' code that they signed non-disclosure agreements that they have disclosed....
Exactly what the case is based on..
Don't give them MORE ammunition people.. its going to get ugly before its all over.... and download what code you can now.. for soon it may be gone... between this, DMCA, DRM, and patriot act.. OSS just may become extinct...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Since when having access to something is illegal. Stop trolling.
when I was in band camp...........
20 secs
Back in the mid '80's, when I was working for U S WEST, the Amdahl machine I and a bunch of other engineers had logins on had the /src files all open (read only).
I used my access to the source of that version of UNIX (UTS) source a lot to help me with the Xenix system I was running at home.
Thing is, my racall of this is flakey enough that I cannot provide actual dates that the source on the "PN1" machine was open (about a one year window, after we moved from an IBM to an Amdahl mainframe, probably around 1985-86).
I don't think that's good enough, though, to have any effect on the SCO v IBM case.
(I wonder if the fact that U S WEST used to be a part of the Bell System - I went to U S WEST from Bell Labs, Holmdel - possibly made us feel a "part of the UNIX family" so we didn't seem to be as strict about holding the source inviolate. I dunno.)
If Unix is in the public domain, perhaps Linux is merely a derivative work and shouldn't be eligible for copyright protection. I realize I'm mixing trade secrets with copyright, but who knows what effect this "fairness" argument could have on a judge if someone were sued for violating the Linux GPL.
This project, therefore, is entirely moot, at least in regards to the SCO lawsuit...
I think you understand the most literal level, but I think you're missing the logic. I think you're right, this doesn't have anything to do with the lawsuit. I think this is punitive . I think this is a side-project, to punish SCO for violating community standards, no matter what happens to the lawsuit.
As such the rest of your concerns are irrelevant, since as you yourself say this has nothing to do with the lawsuit.
This is a long-term project, to establish the danger of messing with the UNIX community, to make anybody else in the future who thinks they can milk money from the community, or that a lawyer-spasm is preferable to simply going out of business, think twice because they can expect the community to lash out not just in rhetoric, but with legal manuevers of their own. Textbook deterrence.
I'm not ESR and I don't know. But that's how I read this, and I think it's a great idea. May not go anywhere but if it works it's very poetic and appropriate payback.
The entire request is so completely ludicrous as to border on being outright stupid.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The NDA signs YOU!
During the times I was involved with actual Unix source code (mid 1970's to mid 1980's) for three different employers (UCLA, SDC, Tektronix) there was nothing similar to a nda. The school or company just agreed to not give source code access to non-"employees", and "employees" agreed not to give access to others who hadn't agreed to the Bell license.
Within those terms, there was a lot of access. At the yearly conferences (which later became USENIX) there was a typically conference distribution tape. That tape was a mixture of "new" things, and modifications to the Unix kernel or Unix commands. To assure that everybody was "licensed", when you first became a member you submitted a copy of the signature page of the license.
During that time we went from V6 Unix, PWB Unix, V7 Unix, to 2BSD (pdp11) and 4BSD (vax).
Sharing went both ways of course. A number of changes/new cmds from other groups became part of the Official Bell release.
That sharing was a factor in the settlement of the USL vs UCBerkeley lawsuit, that ended in the free availability of the 386bsd work.
I was at Bell Labs for almost three years in the early 1980's, moving over to AT&T Information Systems after the court ordered breakup of AT&T in 1984 or so.
They were pretty laid back then; I may have signed an NDA but I certainly don't recall it. I do recall the usual W4 and Insurance BS but an NDA doesn't stick out.
And yes, I had almost full access to the source tree. IIRC, only some arcane kernel stuff wasn't available, being crafted in assembly. But given the corporate culture I have no doubt it was somehow accessable, but because it was processor / architecture specific, I never bothered looking for it. Plenty of stuff to look at and learn from at higher levels.
Source code was available to any member of technical staff and since it was my second job out of Uni I had a ball. I even dl'ed some source to my Osborne I so I could read it at my lesiure.
In fact I didn't realise how special it was at the time to have access to Unix source code until maybe five years later when I'd moved over to Wall Street.
The Street was ramping up sharply on tech in those days, and Unix (think Sun, NeXt and SGI workstations) was the only game in town since PCs were still pretty underpowered.
I remember someone asking me a question, and I told him to "grep for it". He looked at me cryptically, and then it hit me.
No way to grep Dude - they's binary distributions.
A message from our sponsor
The guy has a valid point. Having ESR run into court with a bunch of proof that Linux developers had access to UNIX source code does not necessarily help his cause. SCO will be drooling over this information.
The University of Southern California had a project in 1981-1982 to port UNIX from a VAX 780 to the Data General MV8000 (from "The Soul of a New Machine") using about 20 grad students. To my knowledge, none of the students (including me) had to sign anything to work on the project, and we certainly had access to the full source. One of the other guys was Fred Cohen, who has been widely credited with coining the term " computer virus".
In soviet russia colonel compiles you!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
If SCO is having problems protecting their trade secrets, they should definitely talk to the Scientologists. They seem to think that scientology scriptures are TRADE secrets that have to be protected from the unitiated.
Leipzig Award
CNET News published an article on May 1st on the award of the Leipzig
Human Rights Award to Xenu.net creator Andreas Heldal-Lund.
"A critic of the Church of Scientology, Andreas Heldal-Lund, has received
a human rights award for maintaining his Web page despite repeated legal
attacks from church officials. Heldal-Lund, a Norwegian citizen who
operates the Operation Clambake Web site, is the fourth recipient of the
Leipzig Human Rights Award. Church of Scientology officials have tried to
silence Heldal-Lund by, among other things, asking Google and the Internet
archive site Archive.org to pull links to his site, claiming that material
on its pages violates church copyrights."
Message-ID: 3e471c14.0305011943.3198fb58@posting.google.com
I see no secrets. Code is regressed code and code is continually attempted to being supressed code. Code is expressed many different ways to do the same things. I compare the X86 assembly code or machine code of differing products and remarkably I do not see anything revolutionary as 99% of the subjective code is USING THE SYSTEM LIBRARIES OF THE UNDERLYING OPERATING SYSTEM.
The secret? They don't want you to know that they are pattenting the pattern of issued system-level subroutines and function calls. Thoever owns the patent of the system level routines being used, honestly and outright may enforce whatever license on the code being executed. Unix is not code, it is a phylosophy. Nobody needs to look at the "proprietary" code of a company's or competitor's Unix operating system because it's technological taxonomic name is the evolutionary phylosophy in question.
Phylosophies:
POSIX
Filesystem Design
Monolithic, Modular, and Mach Kernels
SVGA
IP
X Window System
Java
Perl
C
Threaded applications
Company-specific code:
Microsoft Wind(ows)
Tru64
QBASIC(K)
So, ESR, are you making the age-old mistake by asking whether Phylosophy is proprietary, or are you asking for people to violate their oath of silence to a company's intelectual secrets that put food on people's tables and often gives birth to greater phylosophies?
Yes, I know it was not the latter. It's good to hear that you also disagree with patents on actual code. I agree, anything written down is not patentable, such as Rice Crispy Treats(TM) and anything written in C, because of their pre-positional patenting to make them non-patentable(22), whilst X86 assembler and molecules are what everyone tries to patent.
Ah hell, anyone that patents stuff should just eat their own shit. Why don't we all just agree not to buy stuff that says you imply agreement of condtional use. Imagine if toilette paper said you imply agreement by it's use to pay IRS CORP an excise...
Where would I get one of these? At the Apple store? I dunno, they say life is priceless, and what with Steve Jobs' reputation for charging twice as much to get half as much, I'm not sure I could afford 2 x "priceless".
Now where the hell's my MasterCard...
I thought that only one that owned the Unix trademark and its secrets was Open Group..whereas SCO only owns copyrights to their own unix code..that happens to be recognized as Unix with and R because it passed Open Groups certifications..
it would not make sense for each certified vendor under the Unix trademark name to have its own trade secret rights that overlapped another unix vendor!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
wget -r http://www.caldera.com -O
If it is true that Unix code is in Linux, why are you trying to find legal loopholes to skirt justice? Linux is not going to die over this. You might instead use your efforts to track down people who have contributed Unix cod eto Linux so that the offending code, if it exists, can be rewritten, and we all can move on.
Vote for Pedro
The official history of Unix.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
In soviet russia, colonel is called Ïîëêîâíèê.
hehe, i don't know if that was a joke or if i'm missing the cyrillian (sp?) language pack, but it was funny either way, thanks!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Nobody can know what unix is. Take the red pill
Coding as much as he does, O'Neal does not look like an open source advocate who has had anything to do with the kernel development process. The pasty-white complexion, the rotting teeth, and the total lack of sentient light in those cold, dead eyes of his.... they glare at you pulsating from green monochrome displays. Someday, when he gets very old, I think O'Neal might say that no matter how far he went in life, how powerful he became, this appearance, as interpreted by so many others, prevented him from going even further, from going to the places where his talents belonged.
what about those old unixes that were once available from sco's website here:
(v5,v6,v7,v32,mini,sysiii)
http://www.sco.com/offers/ancient001/
do a google for "sco ancient" for more
Sure, this will probably get modded down, but honestly:
What makes any of us think that in this particular case, even our collective legal knowledge will add anything to the massive corporate might of IBM? IBM is a big boy and can handle their own legal problems.
What we, in our position in the tech community and world itself, should be focusing on is disseminating knowledge to the effect that companies need not regard this legal issue as something to stop the adoption of linux or other GPL/OpenSource material.
Personally, I support high-end dedicated linux print servers, and am making sure that all customers current or potential don't make this a concern.
Is he playing air guitar on his keyboard??
Problem #1: Just because it wasn't enforced at one time, doesn't mean the NDA is null and void
No, it doesn't. But if you can prove that the Unix-company in charge of those NDAs actually did not protect their trade secrets, that is very nice. If they released it into the public by neglect of their own NDA, they are at fault. Now if the signer of that NDA did anything wrong (regardless of sloppy enforcement or not), that would be another matter...
Problem #2: Disproving "trade secret" status is pointless(not to mention, unlikely to happen). It's still copyright SOMEONE ELSE, and YOU CAN'T USE IT unless they let you!
No, but you can write your own implementation of anything copyrighted (it's not a patent), something you could not legally do with a trade secret you have knowledge of. Now if SCO is claiming that IBM went copy-paste, you would be right. But last I heard they were throwing around FUD like "stealing ideas from proprietary SCO code and incorporating into Linux". To gather all information that was, is and has been publicly available, you show that there was in fact not a trade secret and so, nothing could have been stolen.
Problem #3: It's been said time+time again, there is no proprietary code that belongs to SCO in the Linux kernel.
So you say. SCO says otherwise. Which is why we're going to court, isn't it? Where the hell do you get the divine knowledge to know that noone anywhere ever fell for the temptation to copy-paste a little? Oh, right you've been listening to 10,000 posts to slashdot on how that *can't* be the case. Nevermind...
By the way, why are people wasting time "helping" IBM? (...) and with legal "help" like this, who needs SCO? Dispute the claims intelligently, boycott SCO, whatever- just leave the legal arguments to the lawyers, or you just might end up helping SCO...and IBM won't be the only loser if that happens.
SCO has threatened to sue Everybody(tm) right down to your favorite Linux distro, and if you're a Linux user, you too. If you want to pretend IBM is the only one that could get hurt here, think again. The SCO execs and lawyers are going "Damn. They're calling our bluff. Again. Better send out a troll to slashdot to keep them from counting the cards."
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...that the IP in question is going to be boot scripts written in #!/bin/sh, not something you'd need an NDA to have access to.
EASY! SCO released thier own version of Linux (Caldera) under the GPL. This version supposedly contained thier own SCO proprietary code they've been bitching about. That's why they pulled it immediately and are now completely out of the Linux distribution business: They screwed themselves and they know it.
I bet he wishes he had never wore THIS shirt.
Don't mod me, bro'!!!!
I'm never coming back to Slashdot again.
I've never felt more grateful in my life.
1) What is UNIX anyway? I thought it was trademarked by the open group, and a set of standards. If this is the case then can't ANYONE create their own UNIX, that abide by those standards?
2) X does not make up UNIX does it? I did not think the GNU tools did either, nor gcc. So this leaves out the GUI and anything attached to it. It also leaves out the 'UNIX-like' commands. So what is left? The kernel.
What parts or parts of the kernel does SCO think Linux is infringing? should be the first question. Then the second is where is the proof?
The same thing happened with BSD - USL/ATT/Novell years ago.
SCO's president and 85% shareholder is playing a dangerous game of winner takes all! His company is worth about the same price as a roll of toilet paper, and he knows it. It is going down. If he wins, and Linux is proved to be infringing, it may not be a case of just rewrite parts of the kernel, it may be a case of move all the drivers to the GNU Hurd or something. If he looses UNIX then may become an open standard that SCO losses all their license to. If IBM pays up then they are admitting that SCO is right and could loose AIX and SCO could get AIX AND Linux.
He has nothing to loose. I think the end result could be that people say screw UNIX like apple did and move to BSD.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Larry McVoy was born in Concord Massachusetts in 1962. McVoy worked for SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) which bought Unix from Novell and he worked for Sun. Both of these companies had a close tie with Unix. While at Sun, it became apparent to him that Unix was dying. McNealy, Sun's CEO announced that it was throwing away its version of Unix and moving to AT&T's "official" version of Unix. In an attempt to get McNealy to reverse his decision, McVoy set out to write the Sourceware Opearting System Proposal. McVoy urged Sun to give away the source code for its version of Unix. What may seem contradictory, he urged the Unix industry to adopt GNU/Linux. McVoy realized that the fragmented world of Unix was dying because there were many different flavors of Unix, all being maintained with duplicated efforts by many people. This lack of unity was costing billions of dollars and, ultimately, this cost was being handed down to customers. He estimated that Unix was costing customers between $600 - $3000 per seat, while Microsoft's Windows NT cost $150 per seat. What's more, he claimed Unix was stagnant and that users were getting less from Unix and more from Windows NT. McVoy's Sourceware paper, although never published, did make its rounds through Sun. It failed to convince management to reconsider its decision about Unix; in fact, McVoy believes it ruined his career. McVoy's insight did prove accurate as Windows NT pole vaulted to great heights in the corporate world, as proprietary Unix continued to dwindle.
Despite of this, Linux never caught on. Therefore, UNIX is dying.
Not a bad attempt at a troll, but I saw a few places that could have been improved. With practice I think you can improve (or get worse?). Overall, I give it a B-.
All that's needed is that:
UNIX source code has been used to teach university classes in operating system theory, but if the course materials made it clear that the information is confidential, then the circumstances import an obligation of confidence.
All most NDAs do is restate the legal principles of confidential information, and make it more clear that there is an obligation of confidence.
(*) or Freedomch, if you prefer
ESR needs to get a fucking lawyer. Going around asking people in a public forum if they had access to proprietary code years ago that they're not legally allowed to disclose is juvenile at best. This is another lame stunt that if the press hears about it, will make the Linux proponents look like even bigger jackasses than they already look like now. This is *not* how you go about working on a legal case. Even if he found some special code, IBM's lawyers aren't going to care. They're doing their own research, and I'm sure that they can't take the word of some raving fanatic with them into court.
I'm not sure what you're trying to do here, and I'm even less sure that you can necessarily help IBM. Even if you're successful in finding some people who had 'unrestricted' access to SCO's so-called trade secrets, this may not be dispositive of SCO's claims against IBM. Reason: IBM may have agreed (i.e., promised) to treat certain matter as trade secret matter pursuant to some contract that it entered into with SCO (or its predecessor, etc.). In such case, if IBM failed to respect the confidential nature of the matter, SCO may still have claims against IBM irrespective of the prior disclosure of the matter to third parties. (This all would depend on said contract.) Of course, such a thing would be IBM's problem (not the OSS community at large). (Nothing in this comment is intended to support or validate any of SCO's positions, claims or FUD; on the contrary, I say that SCO has nothing and is nothing.) Linux Wins!
Good show. I particularly liked the part " (although personally I think FreeBSD kicks ass all over it)" - it was a nice aside that will surely raise throbbing temples and may branch off into a small flame war in the thread.
So good show.
(Posted anonymously for obvious reasons.)
I'm sitting at a workstation here in my CS department computer lab reading parts of the Solaris source (a recent version). I didn't sign anything to be able to do this, I just happened to find it in a remote, out-of-the-way part of the filesystem. The permissions are such that anyone with an account can read it, although I doubt they were intented to be that way. I'm not sure if this includes the code for every piece of Solaris; I see just about all of the user-space commands and libraries, and some development tools, but I can't find the kernel source, and the directory structure is too confusing to look for it.
And just because someone inserts some term into a contract doesn't mean it's legally binding. In many jurisdictions you cannot, for example, sign away your basic human rights, nor can you agree to do something which is illegal. Those parts of the contract will be null and void. A clause stating that "lack of enforcement does not nullify this agreement" may itself be nullified if the law unequivocally says that lack of enforcement nullifies this sort of agreement, no ifs, ands, or buts.
That depends on what the basis of SCO's lawsuit is. Have you read the plaintiff's claim in full? Do you know for sure that they're not suing on the basis of breach of trade secrets and not just copyright alone? Proving that SCO's source code is no longer secret may well prevent them from using that line of attack, to which they may very well resort (if they haven't already) if a simple breach of copyright can't be proven.
Popular though that opinion may be among the Slashdot crowd, I'm sorry to say that it counts for absolutely nothing. The only thing that matters is what the judge and/or jury thinks of the evidence that will be presented at court. Remember that your average judge and jury knows absolutely nothing about writing computer code and open source software licences. A lazy or inadequately-prepared defence may lead the judge to conclude in the legal universe things which aren't necessarily true in the everyday-life universe, including and not limited to a ruling that the GPL is completely unenforceable. This might not help out SCO very much, though needless to say it would have interesting implications for the Free Software community.
Learn the alphabet, boy. ESR != IBM. SCO's lawyers will be thinking no such thing, but even if they do, it really doesn't matter (see above).
No, I don't use the word "rue" a lot, but I certainly know what it means!
Try going to college, it is very good in terms of vocabulary.
Bell Labs distribute APE, a POSIX copatibility layer, with their Plan 9 OS. Even if everything in APE was rewritten from scratch (was it? I don't know) it would be really, really hard to argue that this publicly distributed code was built without direct knowledge of what's inside the Unix system.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. This has everything to do with Linux, and nothing to do with GNU. If someone were referring to Linux when they should have meant GNU/Linux, that might have been funny.
In other words:
Linux == Kernel (where the SCO code may be)
GNU == OS + programs (different)
They are talking about Linux here, not GNU/Linux.
Found in /usr/include/asm/errno.h
/* Not a XENIX named type file */
/* No Xenix semaphores available */
,thanks for termcap/terminfo. No doubt, I wouldn't be able to post this without them.
#define ENOTNAM 118
#define ENAVAIL 119
I realize probably isn't what you're looking for ATM, but my speech and my beer isn't free, even as a US native. Of course, I've had my share of each, as far as I am able.
FWIW, it's good to see you here, and I'll probably sober up and be more useful in an hour or so. And
C|N>K
Remember the WTO?, others will eventually be required to follow suit with similar laws...
My comment about DRM killing OSS is the prediction that DRM will be required for all software and hardware to be legally released, and it will be a expensive process to have your product 'qualified'.. squeezing out all but the biggest corporations, and effectively killing OSS, as a by-product.
Sort of like ISO9000 type certifications are now in the manufacturing markets..
I hope I'm wrong, but just in case, im stocking up on source...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No. Read ESR's page on the legal issues. Trade secret law is like trademark law; if AT&T, Novell, and SCO have been sufficiently lax for sufficiently long about enforcing the NDAs, then it's too late to start now---they've already given up their trade secrets.
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
What if SCO programmers looked at Linux code, put some of it into SCO code, line for line.
Now someone else goes back and looks and goes, "Hey, there's SCO code in Linux!! Time for a lawsuit!"
How to say if this type of thing is happening?
Vip
Heh.
For some bizarre reason I went looking through my "freaks" list--the list of people who have marked me as foes. Most of them, I found, were people that I'd have disagreements with online but fundamentally and philosophically agreed with.
You are one such poster. I can't remember what we got on opposite ends over at some point, but nearly every time I see your posts, I agree with them. This is one such case.
ESR has done many things within the open source community, but every time he pokes his nose into the real world, he comes off sounding like a juvenile, immature, and clueless fanatic. This is a legal case, requiring legally acceptable evidence, obtained in proper ways. Asking an anonymous community of geeks is about as far removed from reality as one might get. No one--NO ONE--is going to seriously examine another Raymond Rant.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
This leaves SCO with a supposed copyright infringement claim. For this to be valid, someone must have taken SCO's code, and directly copied it into Linux. But again, SCO has not divulged where any infringement of this sort actually is. Their only defense for their silence falls on their "trade secret" argument, which as I pointed out, is voided by the fact that loss of these so called trade secrets is imminent anyways. So SCO would have nothing to lose by telling us where the copyrighted code is so it can be removed. Further, SCO has made references to code that was supposedly copied from SCO but changed so as to appear to be different, but if there were enough changes to it to cause it to appear that different, then it would not be a copyright violation. Copyright does not protect ideas, only the content. Further, copyright does not extend to ownership of derivative works. [1]
It is also worth pointing out that even if the so-called infringing code were removed, it would not reduce the damages that SCO could collect if their allegations have merit. That is, they could have legitimate claim to substantial losses due to their trade secrets becoming public knowledge, even if it was due to them revealing where they were in the kernel, because the code to Linux was already public. Another point of interest is that, according to my legal sources, the amount of a trade secret infringement claim should not ever exceed (by much) the net worth of the company whose secrets were compromised, measured at the most recent point in time before the secrets could have been stolen. This could date no further back than the date that IBM (the supposed source of the trade secret infringement) began its official involvement with Linux, so SCO could ask for an amount on similar par with their maximum net worth at any point since then. The fact that they are asking for so much more than this (by orders of magnitude!) means that it would be impossible for this to be a trade secret violation claim alone.
[1] This is, interestingly, the heart of MS's claim against the GPL, but can be shown to be inapplicable because the GPL does not affect who owns the copyright on a product, it only affects who has the right to distribute the copyrighted work (in the case of the GPL, rights to distribute are granted by the copyright holder only to those who will not limit the rights to further distribute the original work or works derived from it). If a person wants to make a change to a GPL'd work, but does not want his changes subject to the GPL, he can simply choose to not distribute his changes, and he's fine. Also, since copyright does not protect ideas, one can freely examine the source to any GPL'd product for the purposes of self-education, and then apply that knowledge to a new work that would not be subject to the GPL. RMS would probably loathe this loophole, but it can't be helped --- knowledge, once learned, is inherently free to use for the person who has it, and without an NDA, no copyright clause can govern what a person does with it once it is in their head.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Just a quick note. His name was Indigo, as in the colo(u)r. It is just his accent that makes is sound like Inigo. This can be seen when Andre the giant is looking for Indigo, he clearly calls out his name as such.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
I'll begin with a question....
Is ESR your wife, shrink, attorney, or priest?
(I think that covers all the exemptions from being compelled to testify) If the answer is "no" on all accounts, don't talk to him. He can in no way guarantee that you won't be compelled to testify at trial, or that you, yourself, will be safe from prosecution. This is just doing discovery for SCO's attorneys, pointing out individuals with names of people who could have tainted the Linux source. I'm of the opinion that they have absolutely no proof of this, why assist them in finding it?
I understand the community wants to do something here. There is, however, little we can do to help, other than keep our mouths shut. Want to help? Convert an AIX or SCO Unix machine to Linux. We don't want to show support for SCO in any way.
Then let the folks who sign their correspondance "Esquire" figure this out.
In the other side, you have no proof that Unix exist.
Do not stoop to the low levels of SCO. Of course geeks could do DDoS attacks. Of course lawyers can file frivolous and/or harrassment lawsuits. Just because both have tools doesn't make either of them right.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yea, like laywers don't come off as juvenile, immature, clueless fanatics everytime we hear them. At least ESR doesn't make his living getting rapists and murderers acquitted.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Only if you can show that they added something significant over the original. Putting the original text of "The Republic" through AltaVista's translator and changing one of the outputted words doesn't mean you can copyright that as a derivative.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This maneuver is clearly about nullifying "trade secret" status on the AT&T source of which SCO owns the copyright. Giving up trade secrets would be a huge liability for IBM - if someone had been shown the code without an NDA, then the cat is out of the bag, and there is no issue wrt trade secret.
This has nothing to do with a "copy-and-paste" type copyright infringement which may or may not have occurred.
Where did you get that.
Nobody is saying that you can steal... there is a difference between trade secret stuff and just "How we did that thing".
SCO is not "locking down their IP rights". THey are trying to assert IP rights they do NOT have.
You CANNOT claim to have a "trade secret" if everyone and his pet duck has had virtually unfettered access to it for TEN years. SCO did not have anything that EVERYONE did not already know, was taught in universities, etcetera.. that's the point.
This has nothing to do with RMS.
This is about asking if anyone in the past has had access, legally, to the unix source in any form where they did not have to sign NDAS, or where the NDAS were consciously overlooked by the rightsholder in the first place. Why? So they can help show that SCO is making baseless claims (which any idiot can see that they are)
The last MULTICS box was taken down just a short while ago; it was in use by the Canadian Defense Department until October 30, 2000.
A long standing joke in the corporate computing world is all the anti MSFT vitriol and how godly Unix and Unix like OSes are compared to it in terms of security. MULTICS used to enjoy the same poking fun at Unix in this manner:
And some summation of various MULTICS history information:
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Bascly this could turn it to a blood bath before it finshed. Check who ones what. It has already been proved in a court of law many times that copying header files flages are not a infringment. Only if you copy functions can it be a infringment. Basicly the infomation is linked into so many programs even in may cases the company even gave away a header file contain it for devepment that makes this viod. So the infringment has to be in a .c file somewhere or a inline function is a header file or it will not count.
BUT IN 1994 Novell who then fully owned UnixWare...From the Usenet Archives
Did Novell, who at that time owned the Unixware source, put some of the code into GPL'ed Linux to remain compatable with UNIX binaries?Time to dig up those old copies of Byte and PC Weekly.
I used to work for a company that had a source license for SunOS aka svr4. This software was internally available on an nfs share. Once I had a problem where uucp kept crashing and i had to use the source to find out what was wrong. My sun support guy freaked when i finally told him the name of the source file and the line number where their bug was.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
BUT I want SCO to put Linux out of its misery. I'm that kind of grrl.
It makes the Copyright statement from the terminfo file that ESR maintains seem oddly prescient. The statement is accessible on my RH8 system with (2nd line, last paragraph).
What's next? I predict Microsoft will sue Sun for Copyright infringement of
Did Novell, who at that time owned the Unixware source, put some of the code into GPL'ed Linux to remain compatable with UNIX binaries?
How many of the developers who worked on the Expose project also had access to the Unixware sources?
Did the developers who worked on the Expose project contribute changes to source code back to the community?
"In 1994, a group of Novell alumni formed Caldera Systems International with the backing of Novell's founder, Ray Noorda. Caldera was intended to be a Linux distributor, aiming at the business and enterprise market."
How many of the core Caldera Systems International developers also worked on the Novell Expose project? Did any of the Caldera Systems International developers also have access to Unixware sourcecode ?
Any Unixware source or methords which made it's way into Linux though these routes was therefore done with the implicit consent of Caldera Systems International, Ray Noorda and Novell. Also this would effectively kill any Unix trade secret based on the Unixware sources.
Every accused person in this country (USA, UK...)
has a right to counsel. Defence atorneys, especially public defenders, by making this abstract right into a reality, are among the most honourable people in society.
Or we could take your right and assume everybody accused is guilty. You fascist.
available online at the University of Houston - Universty Park at least in the years 1988-1989 without any sort of signed non-disclosure by students, faculty, etc....
ESR is married to a fiesty red-headed IP lawyer named Cathy. Maybe you should get a clue before trashing ESR and this strategy. I am sure that this will all make sense soon.
Things are seldom as they seem.
Have a look at Chuck Hansen's bion senRe trospective.html
http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/News/Ha
He found classified military secrets that were either unprotected (not secret) or accidentally declassified (even for days) and made a huge difference to the nuclear debate.
There are some hints about details here
http://www.voy.com/87202/887.html
but for most of it you will have to find his book at the library, or buy the CD version.
Best of luck ESR, you could be on to something.
RTFA. He's not looking for people who are culpable. He's looking for people who AREN'T culpable. People who were just given the code with no restrictions. He specifically stated that he wants situations where the mistake was made farther up the chain.
simon
home page
"Going around asking people in a public forum if they had access to proprietary code years ago that they're not legally allowed to disclose is juvenile at best."
RTFA. That's NOT what he's asking. He's asking for people who had access to the code and NO LEGAL OBLIGATION TO KEEP IT SECRET to please let him know about that.
A pattern of such access would maybe void the trade-secret status of the code.
simon
home page
Right on. Way to generalize. Seems to me that for every defense lawyer there's a prosecuting attorney there trying to put the defendant in jail.
Go back to your crack pipe.
You are one such poster. I can't remember what we got on opposite ends over at some point, but nearly every time I see your posts, I agree with them. This is one such case.
Heh, he's just a freak. He's on my freaks list too, and I don't know why. Although I usually don't enjoy reading his posts, I have no bitch against him. :)
Like what I said? You might like my music
Just don't by any products or services from companies based in Utah untill it's all sorted out.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
wishful thinking time was productive today, wasn't it!
IBM is getting screwed for working with AT&T, and did not violate the spirit of their agreement with AT&T and now they have to deal with some scum company like Caldera? Message: IBM, just don't mess with software companies, they are scummy, fuck em over with some free software and make hardware king again.
If your business model depends on trade secrets (aka closed source) you have NO recourse should those secrets be exposed. You may well succeed in court against those that expose the secret but you never get your secrets back again and your business is ruined.
As for copyright - that only protects the _expression_ of an idea _not_ the idea itself; a different expression is perfectly legal. If you want to protect the idea you need to use the patent system. But to obtain a patent you must describe that being patented - useless in protecting trade secrets.
SCO may well have a case that could be taken to court (but who really knows until the code in question is identified.) but no matter what the result, SCO as a Unix business is dead. Who would ever share code with them, or use SCO licensed code ever again?
Another related issue is that many open source developers have day jobs, and there are likely to be circumstances where it could be argued that the open source development work makes use of knowledge, skills and related confidential knowledge gained during day time employment (and is covered either implicitly as part of your fidicury duty with your employer, or by explicit provisions in your employment/ipr contract). I'm surprised that we have not yet seen a case on this, as I'm sure that it occurs.
Why doesnt the community simply buy SCO? The company is not worth that much, and if about 20-30000 people where to buy 200 USD worth of shares in caldera/SCO, we will gain majority control, i believe.
:)
So why doesnt we buy SCO and then GPL everything, hence also forcing IBM/SUN to GPL their works when their licenses expires!
fetchmail: incorrect header line found while scanning headers ...fetchmail: retained
Or, at least give us a way to override this!
I'm too sexy for you.
If you want someone to fuck a goat, you hire RMS, but if you're after a regular man-slut, then ESR is your guy
ESR I really don't see why you are looking around for people who might have seen the Unix source code. Everybody has seen a Unix source code. In order to prove in the court, that they don't have any trade secrets, and that the design of Unix has been in public domain, you just have to point out a couple of things. First and most important is BSD, which does classify as Unix (Not according to open group, but it qualifies as a Unix-like system anyway). BSD has already been cleard in court, so just pointing out BSD and the fact that anyone could have seen and used it's design should be sufficent. Then you can reffer to SCO's own publication of the Unix System 7 source code, which this time even qualifies as a standard-unix and the fact that it's source code has been available for a couple of years now is also sufficent. Add to this, a couple of Unix books with some source code in them, and the fact that the Unix design is teached at every computer sience college in the world, and you win the argument. You don't need to show that people have had access to Irix or Solaris or AIX, the AT&T Unix and the BSDs are sufficent.
--
(Yes, I sent this to Eric too):
You probably know about this, but just in case:
The book "Unix Internals- A Practical Approach" by Steve Pate ISBN 020187721X
is based on SCO's Open Server Release 5.
Whether it reveals any trade secrets or not I do not know, but it's probably worth a scan if you didn't already know about it.
-- Tony Lawrence
A quick search on Netcraft reveals that for example:
- The Whitehouse
- The FBI
are using LINUXSo is SCO planning to sue the US government next? (as well as governments from many other countries like Switzerland, Germany...)
Dammit, you made me cry.
Here I am, a new guy, trying to make a little joke and you had to go stomp all over it.
You are such a meanie.
I hope you're happy now.
...you should look into Setec Astronomy
Liberty uber alles.
If you accept source from anyone, then it is your responsibility to verify that that person has legal copyright to that source material. Having good intentions does not protect you. If Linux and other open source projects to not have audit trails to control and verify what and who they get that source from, then they are about to learn a rather painful lesson.
I know Kung Pao. Does that count for anything?
Mmmmm. Chicken.
Excellent post :-)
Yea, the prosecutors. Even worse. The guys who work hard to send innocent people to jail, and often don't even stop when they know the person is innocent.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The problem is, there is no such beast as "Intellectual Property". Instead, there are various aspects of law that cover (or if you like, create) certain types of IP.
Patent
Copyright
Trade Secrets
They are not claiming a patent infringement. They are not claiming copyright violation... and they are alluding that it is trade secret. Actually, they are being deliberately vague.
But you cannot claim trade secret about something that is not a secret.. that's the point.
If I steal the formula for coca cola, and start selling cola using it, or sell it to you, and you start selling cola with it, or even sell it to pepsi... yes, that is all illegal. You can't invalidate trade secret just like that, and all of us that are involved in giving away Coke's SECRET are in shit.
However, if coke publishes that recipe in a magazine, the cat is out of the bag. To be able to protect something with laws about trade secret, IT MUST BE A SECRET.
IF someone figures out by chance how to make coke, coke cant' sue. If someone reverse engineers coke, and figures out how to reproduce it, they can't sue.. their only avenue of protection is keeping their formula a secret.
If AT&T let the lions book out without proper NDAs and whatnot, or if they declined to enforce their rights under an NDA, knowing someone violated it, then they CANT say "anything derived or leared from that book is illegal". That's the whole point of trade secret.... if it was that easy to protect, you wouldn't need to keep stuff a secret.
So the point stil stands.. nothing about the source code to unix is a secret by any stretch of the imagination, and SCO certainly cant' clame that anything in the historic unix codebase is a proprietary secret that nobody else knows about.
If the methods used are not patented, and code was not actually stolen, SCO has almost no leg to stand on.
AT&T did due diligence on the Lions book. Everyone obtaining it knew it was improperly distributed. Anything derived from it was developed using UNIX trade secrets.
That's a big stinking pile of bullshit. We've heard elsewhere how the entire source code of early UNIX was available to select developers, and therefore didn't contain trade secrets. So it's perfectly possible for someone to have used information on UNIX to code various parts of Linux without leaking trade secrets.
Either you really don't know what you're talking about, you're trolling, or you're just a SCO shill.
Female Prison Rape in NY
I found this (possibly) offending line:
int i = 0;I certainly hope this doesn't mean linux as we know it is going down the tubes....
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
No, this is Comparing Apples to Oranges.
ESR is married to a fiesty red-headed IP lawyer named Cathy. Maybe you should get a clue before trashing ESR and this strategy.
I dated a lawyer once, so I'm pretty well qualified to tell you that your argument won't hold up in court.
Don't come crying to me when SCO names you as a defendant for violating their patent or they come after your employeer for violating UNIX licence agreements.