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SCO Might Sue Linus for Patent Infringement?
An anonymous reader writes "[Darl McBride, SCO's chief executive stated] that unless more companies start licensing SCO's property, he may also sue Linus Torvalds, who is credited with inventing the Linux operating system, for patent infringement." It's right at the end of the story and it's quite a statement.
The Shakespeare character who said "first, kill all the lawyers" was a tyrant. He wasn't interested in killing the lawyers to stop stupid lawsuits, he wanted them out of the way so he could do whatever the heck he wanted.
A lot of patents owned by other people mention SCO as an example of a Unix system. That is by far the largest source of mentions of their company name in the patent database.
So, where's the ammo in Darl's gun? No patents. No copyrights for the stuff he said he owned. No trade secrets, as far as I can tell.
And then, to threaten Linus Torvalds as an individual sounds especially whiny. multi-Million-dollar corporation sues San Jose programmer who has made a life of giving his work away for free. SCO has descended to playground-bully level.
Karsten Self revealed this interesting tidbit from SCO's 10K report:
This is SCO's admission that Novell owns Unix System V, all revisions - that's what they mean by "SVRx", and pays Novell 95% of the royalties. SCO gets to keep 5% as administrative agent.That proves the Novell allegation.
SCO stock dropped from $9 to $6 today. I'm surprised it closed that high.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Actually, there's a team of people at IBM (and I'm sure a few other companies) doing exactly that.
What's that smell? Ah, that's my karma burning...
IBM, Linux, or the rest have nothing to worry about since Novell announced that SCO has no patents on Unix and Novell still owns the IP.p r03033.html
http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/05/
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Caldera acquired DR-DOS from Novell, which Novell got from Digital Research. While I agree with your main point, it's important for old geeks like me to clarify this sort of thing. DR-DOS was the legitimate descendant of CP/M (it's actually the renamed CP/M-86). If you know your MS-DOS history, you'll know it came from QDOS, which was Seattle Computer's unauthorized 8080-to-8086 translation of CP/M. So in a real sense, MS-DOS is in fact a copy of DR-DOS, not the reverse.
It's also worth giving credit where credit is due. Tetris aside, Caldera was really the first company that pushed concepts Linux users take for granted now like easy installs, file and network browsing, etc. They may have dropped the ball years ago, but they were the first "Linux-focused company" to put the ball into play. I don't consider the current SCO to have much to do with that Caldera, though.
"The bigger question is, why does SCO think it can sue IBM for putting stuff into the kernel that SCO doesn't even offer?"
0 0- August/000557.html
http://linux.rice.edu/pipermail/rlug-discuss/20
The SCO v. IBM case arises from Project Monterey, which was a joint venture between SCO and IBM to port Unix to IA-64 or some such thing. IBM eventually pulled the plug, and focused instead on Linux.
SCO's primary claims against IBM seem to be that IBM took code that had been either brought by SCO into the project, or (more likely) developed by/in conjunction with IBM as part of the project, and used it in its subsequent Linux development.
So, even though SCO's products didn't (don't?) have the enterprise features they are accusing IBM of "stealing" from SCO, it seems to be their contention that the Project Monterey work was intended to develop such features, thus the claims for breach of contract and unfair competition.
SCO claims of pre-existing IP violations in "every" Linux distro would have no bearing on the IBM case.
I'm sure that you know very well that trade secrets can't and therefore don't have to be put back into secrecy after they have been published. The only consequence is that the leaker (which would be IBM) would have to compensate the owner of the loss.
So Linux doesn't even have to be changed, they can continue to use the no-longer secret trade secrets anyway. The absolute worst-case of this suit is IBM being fined.
So please, "sumbry", put your lies and FUD elsewhere.
Andrew Tanenbaum, the guy who wrote the operating system for educational purposes; some people who have taken operating systems classes may remember him as the guy that wrote their textbook as well.
Actually, what's interesting is why Minix was written. AT&T had allowed the source code to UNIX to be freely distributed to universities, etc. Then someone realized that there was commerical potential in UNIX and they began restricting access to the source.
Because it's frequently useful to have a functioning model at which to look when studying a subject, Minix was born to fill the missing educational void created by the commercialization of UNIX. It was designed to be big enough to be a real operating system, but small enough for one person to pretty much keep in his head at one time. Linux was created because there were a number of people who wanted to pile stuff into Minix which Tanenbaum didn't want there.
Well, it's still trading way above where it was before all this started. Wall street pumped this stock up pretty much, and if any insiders are selling, I hope the SEC is taking notes. Looks like a pretty blatant pump-and-dump to me.
SCOX stock closing prices:
Feb-28-03: $1.85
Mar-31-03: $2.88
Apr-30-03: $3.15
May-19-03: $6.80 (SCO Announces UNIX licensing deal with Microsoft)
May-22-03: $8.89
May-27-03: $8.71
May-28-03: $6.60
I was *very* tempted to short this stock earlier today even though I've never shorted a stock in my life, and it looks like it would have paid off.
Grow up, people. Do you really expect to be taken seriously by investors when you post shit like: "SCO LONGS = F*CKING IDIOTS"
The last I heard from the SCO Information Minister was that three independent (yet unnamed) groups have reviewed the code bases and found similarities.
But this is getting really strange. Let's take a look at a few scenarios:
1) SCO has a patent, implemented by IBM, released as patch to stock kernel.
IBM gets sued for patent infringement, retracts patch from locations it's distributing it, noone can implement it without paying SCO.
2) SCO has a patent, implemented by IBM, submitted to Linus and part of stock kernel
If the offending patent is implemented in a kernel relased by SCO, they're SOL for the patent infringement because of the GPL. They may still be able to sue IBM for breach of contract, but the offending code and implementation could remain.
3) SCO has code lifted by IBM, relased as patches
Trade secrets are different than patents as they can have no expiration date, but if it gets out, you have no recourse. Which is why you don't see patents for Coca-cola. It's a trade secret. If you know the secret and ever divulge it, there's probably enough legal paperwork you signed to make you wish you were in pound-me-in-the-ass prison instead of the hell the Coke lawyers will send you.
4) SCO has code lifted by IBM, released as part of stock kernel.
Again, maybe they could sue IBM, but SCO has also released the offending code. Thus they would have no recourse against Linus.
So the only situation that could actually cause Linux grief is #1. But the patch wouldn't be part of the stock kernel, meaning that it would not affect all Linux users. But as has been pointed out before, SCO doesn't seem to have many patents. Certainly nothing they could sue Linus for.
What many people don't realize is that there are literally tens of thousands of bogus patents out there relating to all aspects of software, interface designs, methods of data communication, etc. The ugly reality is that the USPTO pretty much rubber stamps everything that comes their way without much review. If you look hard enough, pretty close to every substantial piece of code in existance, Open Source or proprietary, likely violates somebody's nonsense patent. While these bogus patents are rarely enforced, the SCO situation is proof that the danger exists, even at an 'unfounded threat' level. But as proprietary software empires fall to Free alternatives, we will quite likely see more of this nonsense.
p ://www.petitiononline.com/pasp01/petition.html
h ttp://www.freepatents.org/i nux.org/index_html?LANG=en
The long and short of it: our basic freedoms, especially speech, are being squelched by overzealous patenting. You cannot write software today without worrying about accidentally "re-inventing" or bumping into somebody's supposedly patented idea The modern patent system has decayed precisely into what Thomas Jefferson envisioned when he wrote: "..For to embarrass society with monopolies for every utensil existing, and in all the details of life, would be more injurious to them than had the supposed inventors never existed; because the natural understanding of its members would have suggested the same things or others as good." AND.. "the abuse of frivolous patents is likely to cause more inconvenience than is countervail by those really useful"
Software patents must be eliminated. All of them. They are a threat to free speech and expression. They are a threat to innovation. They are a threat to the Open Source movement. Software patents are by very nature trivial--something the USPTO is not supposed to allow.
With that in mind, here are some links to get you started on some anti-software-patent activism:
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/patents.html
htt
http://antipatents.8m.com/software-patents.html
http://www.researchoninnovation.org/patent.pdf
http://petition.eurol