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.
"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
When Sun gave away Solaris source code way back...did that maybe justify the cause?
-psy
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 "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.
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.
It the difference between showing a signed petition with thousands of signatures, vs citing a poll that X% of the constituents is for or against somethng.
To run for office you need signed patitions not just a few pollsters saying you are popular.
Help fight continental drift.
HE WROTE the OSI position paper, you dimwit!
<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.
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.
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
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 ----
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.)
1) Claim that UNIX is an "open secret"
2) Surprised by cock
3) Beg for evidence to back up your claims
4) ????
5) Profit
(FYI The ??? is getting hired by IBM as a trial consultant.)
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'
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 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".
He has no case. He'd have to show that the IP holder knew about the failure to NDA and did nothing about it. If the failure to NDA was between a sublicensee and an employee, that wouldn't count as abandonment of the IP rights. The IP rights weren't ever abandond. Bell Labs did due diligence on the Lions book. The people who bought UNIX since have kept it close because really all they had bought was the IP.
And your metaphor with the polls is just silly.
The official history of Unix.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This the page you meant?
Doesnt this kinda invalidate the whole law suit?
Derivative works of public domain works are still elligible for copyright protection. West Side Story was a derivative work of Romeo and Julliet, does that make it any less copyright-able? What about the new translations of older books (Beowulf, etc.)?
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
I don't believe that the end justifies the means but people downloading OpenBSD would probally be the most positive consequence of this lawsuit.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
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?
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!
(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. 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'
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.
Nope, it's Inigo. Read the book (as it's been said in another post, it is a good read).
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)
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.
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
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.