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LinuxTag To SCO: Detail Code Theft Or Retract Claims

Posted by timothy on from the schadenersatz dept.

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."

5 of 531 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Isn't that the normal way? by waterbear · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 ....

  2. IBM counter suit by Citizen+of+Earth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:A lot better than all the speculation... by Chexum · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  4. Re:English translation of translated English by kien · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    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.
  5. Re:What about these comments by BJH · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.