Slashdot Mirror
SCO's Real Motive... A Buyout?
psykocrime writes "Acccording to this article in ComputerWorld, CEO Darl McBride of SCO has finally discussed the possibility of a buyout by IBM in public. Among other things, McBride says:
"I'm not trying to screw up the Linux business," he said. "I'm trying to take care of the shareholders, employees and people who have been having their rights trampled on." and
"If there's a way of resolving this that is positive, then we can get back out to business and everybody is good to go, then I'm fine with that," McBride said today in an interview with Computerworld. "If that's one of the outcomes of this, then so be it."
Also, yet another computerworld article indicates that most of the press and analysts who have been invited to take part in SCO's "public review of the infringing code" have declined... apparently due primarily to concerns over the terms of the non-disclosure agreement SCO is asking them to agree to. Linus in particular has said "no way" to signing their NDA to look at the code."
Without publicity, they'll wither and die more quickly, so why don't we choke off their oxygen feed by ignoring them?
Get your own free personal location tracker
cheap web hosting dragon action figures
Given that Caldera (SCO) previously gave away the source code for System V, and that early code was given away in a book that Caldera eventually approved, and the SCO licensed Unix to Lindows.com, which distributes it under GPL, the only code that could be in question is very new code - basically the Monterrey project. Given that McBride has stated that they are main interested in Linux Kernel 2.4 it should be easy to track down all IBM additions/suggestions for additions and remove them/modify them.
However, since Lindows has a license and they are distributing Linux Kernal 2.4 under GPL,it seems that SCO has already lost the battle due to their own actions. So it may not even be necessary to remove the code, since even SCO distributed it under GPL!
Almost like John Fogerty (from CCR) being sued for plagerizing himself
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
Is not an operating system I would recommend to any of my customers to buy and run on their servers.
..
..
I have worked with this piece of **** OS and I can say one thing. Datacorruption.
Real case:
SCO UnixWare with veritas filesystem runs Oracle.
Box crashes --> Oracle data corruption.
These boxes crashed a lot (several times a week)
We called SCO support who blamed Oracle
Oracle desperatly tried to find the problem. It was a known bug, in guess what? SCO UnixWare.
SCO did not allow Oracle Server to open the files with directIO, that is circumvent the filecache in the OS. By design it should but in this case it did not, it was a bug in the Operating System.
SCO did not even bother to check their bug database and blamed Oracle who, thank god, found the problem.
I guess that SCO is desperate to make money. Wait who has the money? IBM is rich let's sue em
I really HAD another userid
Among other things, McBride says: "I'm not trying to screw up the Linux business,"
Oh really? Then could Mr. McBride please explain why I hear things like, "SCO to Linux Users: Cease and Desist" and "SCO delivers a warning"?
Sounds to me like Mr. McBride is trying to make up for the self-hurt caused by his company's own arrogance. What better way to ruin your competitor than by scaring the shit out of their users?
I for one (like probably everyone here) hope they don't get bought out.
I hope they get ridiculed and made an example of... let this be a lesson to other companies that it's unacceptable to behave this way.
This is just all so laughable.
No it wouldn't. The UNIX code allegedly used in Linux would be EVIDENCE that contract term were violated. IIRC, it is this alleged contract terms violation amongst other illegal acts that is at the heart of the suit, not whether there is UNIX code in Linux--a point that seems to have fallen by the wayside. The code is merely evidence; and it is this ghost-like "evidence" that SCO claims to have that is causing SCO to look like a bunch of buffoons. "We have evidence, but we really don't want to show it. But it proves IBM violated our IP."
As I have said before, changing or destroying evidence doesn't change the fact that a crime was committed.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Then why did SOC send threatening letters to 1500 corporations telling them their were IP issues in Linux when:
- SCO doesn't own the IP and
- The lawsuit is a contract issue that can ONLY apply to IBM, especially once the offending code (if any actually exists) is revealed and written out of Linux.
The letter was nothing short of blackmail - give us money or we'll keep throwing turds into the punchbowl."that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Any chance IBM's legal team could string together SCO's actions of the last couple of weeks and make a case that SCO was trying to blackmail IBM? Maybe there's a RICO case here.
Any chance? IBM's lawyers are among the most dangerous people on the planet. They have a huge stockpile of Patents of Mass Infringement, and a budget that would make the Special Forces weep. Companies like IBM and Xerox (and others) quietly do huge amounts of research, and patent it all. Most infringements they don't care about, because they simply cross-license IP from their allies. Most of the them exist for one reason: so that if anyone sues IBM for anything, they can respond with total disaster, a big smoking crater where your NASDAQ listing used to be. "Yeah, we infringed one of your patents, sorry about that, oh but you infringed about a hundred of ours, you have 20 seconds to come out with your hands up and your pants down."
The one threat that IBM faces here is setting a precedent by buying SCO outright. They won't want to do that unless backed into a corner because it might encourage others. It's more likely that they'd buy Novell.
SCO (which is to say, McBride) should learn to shut up before they ingest their entire leg.
Asked why SCO has suddenly started looking at these issues now, after years of declining revenues at his company and the increasing popularity of Linux, McBride said SCO had few options in the late 1990s as Linux began surfacing in the business computing world. "Even if you potentially had a problem [with concerns about Unix code in Linux back then], what are you going to do?" McBride asked. "Sue Linus Torvalds? And get what?"
You would get the infringing code, which SCO has previously claimed is what enabled Linux to succeed in the market, out of Linux. SCO, of course, according to its previous statements, would then succeed because it contained all the *cough* enterprise characteristics that were required to succeed.
So which is it, McBride? If Linux would have been unable to succeed without the alleged SCO IP, then action in 1999 would have allowed SCO to succeed on its *cough* merits. If Linux was able to succeed without the alleged SCO IP, then you have just contradicted the statements in your court filing (not that that was a very accurate document, now was it?)
If I was a shareholder, I'd be mightily concerned about the total inability of SCO management to stick to a single, credible story.
Seriously, though, has anyone ever sat in on a case where something technical was involved? I sat on a jury where some scientific evidence was presented, and I know the entire presentation went right over the heads of almost everyone on the jury. Fortunately someone on the jury knew enough to get the judge to ask a question about some aspect of the evidence; the answer of the expert witness pretty much demonstrated that he was misrepresenting some of the results of his tests. I always worry about there not being a clueful person involved in technical cases, because people can make really irrational decisions when they're swamped with stuff they don't understand.
Hopefully the fair use of and/or similarity between two works of literature provides a good model for the judge to use to make a decision. I would hate to see something like this get screwed up because it was presided over by a judge that can't set the timer on his/her VCR, let alone make sense of kernel code.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Linus, and anyone else, who wants to compare the SCO code (Copywritten, possibly but unlikely full of SCO's "secrets") to linux (which anyone and his dog can see anytime with no hassle) need to sign an NDA. Why?
The same reason that sco hasn't told us what code is infringing. If we put aside the fact that SCO's unix products are all the worst crap I've ever had to use, and that it's extremely doubtful they had any secrets, and just assume they DID have some secret method in there that had some value...
They can't just say "They stole our scheduler code!, on lines 12345 to 12500 of the 2.4.15 kernel!" Because... then everyone would KNOW The secret, and it would not be a secret anymore.
When people start discribing the Linux community as a business you know what they are about.
Linux isn't a business. IBM is a business, RedHat is a business, Slackware and Debian have a business aspect. But Linux is a code.
This dosen't mean anything malicous in itself. I've just noticed often people will say "The company that makes Linux" or "The Linux industry".
There is in fact a Linux industry but that industry dosen't reflect the whole of Linux. There isn't a "company that makes Linux" there are companys involved in the creation of Linux but there has never been a single company responsable for the whole ball of wax.
Not Like Microsoft for Windows, Apple for MacOs or AT&T for Unix.
What it means is that the person is thinking only in terms of business as if everyone has a proffit motive for anything they say or do.
I submit (and I'm going to say this is sand not cement that I have for the foundation of my clame..) that SCO is looking at Linux as a compeditor and simply desided that there is stolen code in Linux.
SCO need not so much "prove it" to us but the least they could do is tell us what code is stolen. We could replace it quickly enough and it'd be over.
And he said it right... SCO is out to protect it's shareholders. Not SCO's intelectual property.
They have NOT proven anything yet they keep seeking payment from Linux users.
I don't think SCO knows it's clames are bogus. I think they actually believe thies clames are valid. But they don't know what code is stolen and if they'd check I think deep down they know they won't find any stolen code.
SCO has presented us with an argument that is simply "Linux now has features found in SCO Unix. The only way this could happen is if Linux got code from us."
That's not true.
SCO expects us to accept that alone as proof. But it's not any more proof than to say:
A Zigu Di rock fan steals donuts from a 7-11
Jack Du is a Zigu Di fan... he must be the crook.
There is more than one way to solve a given problem and more than one person who can find a solution.
SCO won't put it's money where it's mouth is.
They won't point out the offending code.
What's to stop SCO from pointing at some random code and saying "Thats it.. thats ours"?
Easy...
SCO: "See this thats ours..."
Linus: "Ummm no I wrote that myself."
SCO: "Oh right.. well that's ours"
ESR: "Thats BSD code..."
SCO: "Oh sorry... THAT..."
RedHat: "Is covered in RedHat patent xxxxxxxx. We liccesned it for open source use only. Your using it you said so your villating our IP fork it over...."
SCO: "I mean this..."
IBM: "We wrote that in 1933 to solve a defect in 'Mega 1+1=2 delux' it was taking more than an hour to add 1+1..."
SCO: "Umm this?"
Ghost of Lovelace: "Sorry thats MY code.."
SCO: "Well THIS is deffinetly ours."
CmdrTaco: "I wrote that."
SCO clames the code came from IBM. But if they finger code randomly they'll likely find code that IBM never touched.
SCO is seeking to discredit Linux and boost sales for it's failing product.
If I were forced I'd switch to BSD.. not SCO.
Or if a commertal Unix I'd use Solarus.
I don't actually exist.
IBM won't buy SCO because that is not how billion dollar corporations deal with IP terrorism. You don't appease small terrorists.
Why is SCO's action "IP terrorism"? Because its fundamental purpose is to destroy the remarkable social capital that the GNU license and Linux have created--the trust and co-operation of a global collaboration.
The fact SCO claims economic motives rather than ideological ones or corporate bloodlust or something doesn't matter. They are *trying* to make people suspicisous of sharing source. (AOL is doing the same thing with Nullsoft).
We will see increasing attempts to make people suspicious of "counterfeit GPLs" because terrorism pays right now.
In the long run, the social capital and trust our community has invested in Linux and GNU will have to be divided up in order to survive this sort of attack. Information may want to be free, but having a critical amount of it invested in one place invites attack. Like Napster.
The correct communal resopnse on *our* part (not to this particular attack, which is bogus, but to the swarm of them we will now get) is a more defensive posture in which the "web of trust" established.
Think of Linux and the GPL as the "gold standard" of the free software community (the thing everyone trusts). SCO and AOL are trying to panic us into thinking it is counterfeit, and engineer a corporate "bank panic" so they can mop up. They won't succeed, but they *will* decrease peoples trust in gold and drive its price down a little bit.
One response--the wrong one--would be to create a central repository of "valid GNU software" with a central agency, which would indemnify users of free software. This is the wrong approach because it makes free software quasi-proprietary--takes out the viral component of the model.
Another wrong solution is to try to make code use traceable by requiring the developer to publish deltas, not just source. This is wrong because it creates a high transaction cost (not viral, because it is not free).
The right response is to create numerous, smaller, "webs of trust" so that the whole interlocking structure is harder to attack. This is what modular kernels like the GNU/Hurd or Flux project do. Distributions will have many components, mixed and matched, pulling from the same communal pool. By spreading the IP over many projects and users, we can create the same P2P defence that is being used for the same problem in the music arena. There is no central server or even large server (Linus, IBM) to attack.
One way to solve the problem of counterfeit money is to eliminate the central authority. If everyone prints money (it's all counterfeit), then there is no one to attack. In the long run, the answer to terrorism is diversity (along with a solid defence of the "big" communal targets like Linux and the GPL).
This pushes the question of how you can trust money (software licenses) into the P2P area. You build small webs of trust that leverage the "gold standard" but in the long run do not depend on it at all. Probably, we will go through a "Bretton-Woods" stage of managed trust, before going for the free-for-all.
But. We *must* get to the free-for-all stage, or in the long run we will be hostages.
"Hey, you copied 100 lines out of our code!"
"Uh... those 100 lines define POSIX standard XYZ, and there really is no other way to write them"
"But you still copied our code!"
(end cynicism)
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
'McBride said: "We're not going to show two lines of code. We're going to show hundreds of lines of code" that allegedly violate SCO's intellectual property...' - hundreds of lines of code, is that enough to prove the SCO's claim? According to some sources, SCO would have to have not hundreds but thousands lines of code to show as violation of their UNIX rights (5-10% of the total would be the minimum). Since Linux's kernel contains several millions of lines of code, say it is 3mil, then 1% would be a whooping 300,000 lines of code. In addition, there would have to be a coherent and not haphazard way stolen code was implemented into Linux. So, SCO is nowhere near of proving their case even if hundreds of their lines of code might have gotten into Linux.
IP was invented for the sake of lawsuits.
"It's sort of like somebody stealing your car, and you hunt them down and you find them, and they say you can have your car back, but there's no penalty for that," McBride said. "If there's no penalty for stealing property, then where are we?"
Yeah, it's exactly like someone stealing your car. Except that you still have your car, so nobody actually stole anything from you except revolutionary ideas such as including tires, windows, doors, and a bumper. It's actually much more like me building a car in my garage using GM parts, that GM was currently offering for free, then suing me becuase I made a better Sunfire than they could, after they're technicians donated the tools and parts I built mine with.