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LinuxTag To SCO: Detail Code Theft Or Retract Claims
RoLi writes "Heise has a story (The babelfish translation sounds like a speech from Yoda, but the important facts are translated correctly.) about LinuxTag taking legal action against SCO. SCO will either have to retract their claims, disclose their "proof" (if it exists) or be fined. That's certainly good news."
Update: 05/26 17:25 GMT by T : Reader Fizz points to the more understandable LinuxTag press release (in English and German), and adds: "The notice, dated Friday, May 23, maintains that SCO Group is sowing uncertainty among the community of GNU/Linux users, developers and suppliers."
This feels like the OJ trial... boring, pointless, everyone knows the verdict... unless we put too much media coverage on it... then we'll all of a sudden have a surprise twist at the end of the trial... for ratings... it's all about the ratings...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
What kind of pull do they have? I mean, I'd certainly like to see SCO "shit or get off the pot". But other than the letters, what can they do? Are they a German EFF (or is the EFF an American LinuxTAG)?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
The problem with this is that forcing SCO to disclose evidence in a civil trial before the appropriate time will harm their ability to make their case against IBM in court. Now, I assume that SCO has sued IBM in the US, but that this action is happening in Germany, but I would imagine treaties between the US and Germany would prevent a German court from doing anything that harms SCO's case in the US.
Basically, the worst that could happen is that the German court might enjoinder SCO not to make public statements in Germany about their US case until it's been decided.
If SCO ignores the German suit, how long will it take for them to be fined, and how big will the fine be?
If they produce documents in the German suit, will they be available in the US suit against IBM? Or can they stick to their original timetable for releasing docs here in the states?
It's amazing -- I didn't think it would be possible to dislike SCO any more than I did after I had to work on their OS a few years ago, but here we are. They pulled it off.
I mean... SCO claimed code theft and they will have to prove it... DUH!
....
It's more than that. In Germany, intimidating your competitors with unfounded threats to harm their business can amount to unfair competition and again in Germany there's a law against that. The threatener can himself become liable. IMO it's the kind of law we could use in other countries too
Unfortunately under the law (US) they have every right to hold back evidence until sometime just before the trial. Their close lipped nature, given that this (the copyfight infringement) could be so easily proven, is what is fueling the speculation that their evidence is weak and they are just doing this to be bought out.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
That it is hurting LinuxTag's source of revenue through what LinuxTag considers to be anticomptetitive practices. They (I guess, I don't speak German, nor Babelfish) that further state that SCO's seemingly baseless allegations are bringing Linux's viability as an enterprise platform into question via intimidation of lawsuits to linux adopters/customers.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
I'd like to know why IBM hasn't counter-sued SCO yet. If a small company can make abuse the legal system, you'd think a big company could abuse it a lot more.
SCO bought Xenix from Microsoft. Does anybody know whether Microsoft retained any commercial interest in SCO?
Every day... I keep wondering, why do we have to even *think* about SCO until they come forward? The age old saying, "don't feed the trolls", comes to mind...
But for a bit more informativeness, I don't hear about the few software releases that have strong Caldera/SCO bonds, even as a new release, or a revived tool from way back then: OpenSLP, CSCOPE (gee, cSCOpe, advogators will kill me) and something similar (not trivial) which eludes my mind just now...
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
I think that is an incredibly oxymoronic statement. If the public disclosure of evidence threatens the merits of a civil lawsuit, the grounds of that lawsuit should be questioned...publicly.
Yet another infinite while() loop in the legal code?
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
The members of the opensource community are like a hive of busy bees. We need to realize that worker bees carry a sting.
Here is how to utterly stop anything like the SCO legal action in the future.
Each individual in the open source movement needs to file a small claims law suit not only against SCO but against the individual lawyers working for SCO. These people have defamed us, and they need to learn that they do well to leave all of us alone.
It is impossible to fight thousands of law suits filed in hundreds of different courts. The expense is huge, and failure of the other side to respond results in a summery judgment against them.
While each suit might be small - a few thousand dollars - the end result is a disaster for someone like SCO and their lawyers.
It appears that the warnings were delivered to the German arm of SCO, leading me to speculate that they were cautioning German companies who use Linux of possible culpability much as SCO has been doing in the US. I fail to see how disclosing their evidence can harm SCO's ability to to sue IBM. (They are required to provide the evidence to IBM prior to trial anyway.) What it will do is harm their ability to take advantage of the FUD their suit is causing. It also allows the Linux community to immediately get started in rewriting any code in the unlikely event that some part of their claims actually have merit.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Richard Stallman
"Linux is a copy of UNIX. There is very little new stuff in Linux."
Linux kernel forum
I'd like to see a date put on this. Anyway, Stallman's position has, for a long time, been that the Linux kernel is only a stopgap measure until the HURD reaches the appropriate state of perfection (although he seems to have relaxed that stance a little lately).
"I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."
Richard Stallman, Free as in Freedom, Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software: O'Reilly (2002) at p. 72
And what, exactly, are SCO trying to imply with this? In case they didn't notice, he said "friend", not "multi-billion-dollar corporation". I fail to see how it has any bearing on their case against IBM.
"The whole GNU project is really one big hack. It's one big act of subversive playful cleverness..."
Richard Stallman, Revolution OS (DVD)
Now, this one's just plain old misrepresentation (intentional or not). RMS's use of the word "hack" here corresponds to the second sentence - i.e., a clever piece of work. It would seem that SCO thought he meant it to imply a giant tangle of spaghetti code.
Bruce Perens
"This is becoming a tradition. I go there and break the law every year in the name of free speech."
Bruce Perens, explaining his plan to demonstrate how to modify DVD technology to attendees of an Open Source convention.
Again, I fail to see how DVD copy protection has any bearing whatsoever on SCO's case against IBM.
"We have to remember that Linux is a follow-on to UNIX. It's not just a UNIX clone. It's actually a UNIX successor."
Bruce Perens, mpulse magazine, December 2001.
This is a bit of a strange quote to put up - perhaps they're trying to imply that Bruce was saying that Linux builds on UNIX, but I suspect what they really wanted emphasize was the "... a UNIX clone" line; i.e., while it might currently be more than a clone of UNIX, it is at the core just a UNIX copy, perhaps in more ways than one.
Summary: Yet more FUD. Thanks, SCO, now please disappear off the face of the Earth.
>>I keep wondering, why do we have to even
>>*think* about SCO until they come forward?
Because they are effectively customers of open source solutions saying that they could be legally responsible. All the bewan counters will ask, is could this have been avoided using MS?
I think the SCO quotes page makes SCO look bad rather than Linux. It is the sheer desperation of the tactic. The quotes are clearly taken out of context.
Attacking minor figures inevitably makes you look small. Whether justified or not, Bush made a major error calling for a boycott of the Dixie Chicks, it made him look like a small minded bully. He should have laughed it off. A President with real class would have called them up and talked to them in person.
I think the problem here is that SCO has burned its boats on this one. They have no future in the Open Source world and probably little future in the Unix world either. It seems pretty certain that there will be only Linux and OS-X left as viable O/S in the UNIX world in ten years time. Every other UNIX will be a legacy platform on minimal life support. Eventually they will become Linux subsystems the way VMS is becomming a Windows NT subsystem.
The problem SCO has with its litigation strategy is that the Linux world is global. Most EU countries have pretty severe penalties for false allegations of copyright infringement. It is pretty easy to put a party on notice to substantiate its claim or shut up. It is not that hard to do in the US either. It takes a minimum of two years to get a civil case to trial, but there are evidentiary hearings before then and the courts do everything they can to get matters disposed of without a trial. So while it will be two years before the case gets to trial, SCO is going to have to be specific about its claims very soon, it may even be a condition of getting to discovery.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
SCO now has to fight on two different battlefields. One is the IBM case to which US law applies. This can take quite a while, and maybe that is exactly the purpose of the whole case, because they may want to keep the FUD up as long as possible. And since we know how bizarre US law can be, this could take a long long time.
The other battle is fought in Germany, and here the rules (read the law) are different. The German court could really put a lot of pressure on SCO to open the questionable code ASAP, and this could have a huge influence on the case with IBM (or even make it totally irelevant), because it may show really soon if the "stolen" code exists or not.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
1st of all:
Linux Tag *is* damaged if Linux loses reputation.
2nd:
This kind of thing SCO appears to be doing (falls claims and statements) actually *is* 'wettbewerbswidrig' (roughly translates to 'comerce opstructive') and thus plain and simply illegal in germany. And Linux Tag need not even be directly affected by it to have a reason, if not to say the lawfull duty of filing a notice to german officials that SCO is acting 'comerce obstructive'.
A 'Einstweilige Verfügung' ('temporal decree') could actually force SCO Germany to publish proofs for the supposed violation or officially back down from their claims/statements and even publish a suing partys 'Gegendarstellung' ('counter statement') in the media releases SCO Germany controlls (Websites, corporate flyers & publications, etc.).
With the Linux Tag being a rock-solid institution in the country with the highest amount of linux-users per capita (even high-ranked politicians and officials attend the linux tag) this is not just far from insane, it's also quite conclusive and weighs pretty hard in favor of the OSS community.
Aside from that, if you ask me, I see a major ass-chewing for SCO at the horizon. Not just in germany. I was bound to become one of their customers, but 650 $ for their United Linux distro and now this shurely asks for serious trouble from *everybody* in the *nix world.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Nobody ever discloses any evidence before discovery. Ever.
are you sure about that?
Don't be too quick to assume the moral highground. Linux devs are just as capable of cheating and failing as any other person. Bear in mind, SCO is *not* saying everything that has ever been added to Linux is a ripoff (although the press is definitely allowing that impression to be taken). They are claiming they shared IP with IBM's AIX team on the Itanium, and the "chinese wall" between IBM's AIX and Linux team's leaked. That's certainly at least in the realm of possibility.
So, both sides are potentially wrong. SCO, MS, the rise in SCO's stock, and the press are all using this to indict OSS in general, as if everything in the kernel is lifted. The failure of the MS-Apple lookalike lawsuit is a precedent showing copying look and feel is A-OK. And the "SCO is Evil" crowd is naively believing it's impossible that the Linux Itanium code submitted by IBM is 100% free of code "inspired by" IBM's AIX team -- that is easily discountable by seeing the code, but it is certainly possible!
Gartner *would* say that since they are in bed with MS.
Umm... you mean the same Gartner that says companies should drop IIS immediately?
C'mon, just because you disagree with one particular position of an entity doesn't mean they are allied with MS. Hell, the IIS anti-recommandation is a big reason we are able to force some of our third-party vendors to use Apache (and ammunition against any internal departments that try to force IIS-only solutions).
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
They are up to more than suing IBM. They are threatening every user of Linux and every seller of products and services based on LInux. If SCO were only talking trash about IBM then I would agree with you. At this point, they have threatened pretty much everybody and are doing damage in the process. They should either document their accusations or be made to pay in some way for the damage their trash talking is doing to Linux development and business.
If they sent me one of their cease and desist letters I would tell them to either substantiate the infringement in detail (no bullshit NDA either.. I didn't sign anything to use Linux now did I?) or go straight to hell and shut the fuck up.
These days patents are pretty much a rubber stamp. If I decide that I want to patent some sort algorithm they taught in CS101 and manage to get it rubber stampped by the PTO, I can then use it to extort money from companies that don't want to take the risk of litigation. Even large companies will often settle rather than take the risk that some uniformed judge or jury will decide against them, especially if the settlement cost is less than that of retaining a lawyer. Extortion using the legal system is still extortion, and claiming that people who use the system like this are being robbed of something is wrong-headed, dishonorable and argumentative.
NDA protected IP is a bit of a different beast. It doesn't give you quite the same legal extortion capabilities that the patent system does. Someone can think up the idea on their own and implement it without worrying about your IP... Normally. Because normally you have a small developer base and it's easy to remember who's seen NDA protected IP versus who's inputting into your code base. Given the clever developers working in the Linux kernel and the rapid development process (I've never seen a commercial product that evolved as quickly as the Linux kernel does) It's equally as likely that someone in the kernel developers group came up with a perfectly logical implementation of something that SCO has NDA protected as it is that someone in IBM violated an NDA to add something. There's a lot of stuff in programming that follows similar lines. Claiming that a common pattern is theft is as reprehensible as extorting money from a company with a trivial patent.
Quite frankly, as a programmer I don't really have the time to be looking over my shoulder every time I think up something new and somewhat clever. Given the quality of patents granted based in the stories in this forum over the years, I'd be more inclined to say that patents themselves are theft. Perhaps once they weren't but since they've been approprated by corporate America, their original purpose has been perverted beyond recognition. I would suggest that the easiest method of solving this problem is to prevent a corporation from owning any patent or copyright nor contractual obligations applying to them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?