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SCO SCO SCO!
Still more links on SCO's assorted allegations of copyright infringement. They say they're going to sue Novell. Software analysts refuse to be part of the hoax - also some good quotes from Linus here. SCO and UNIX: a Comedy of Errors. Salon has a story on SCO too, but sadly it's not available to read freely. And Wired has an old story which I think sums up the SCO claims pretty well.
It so happens that this "Free Day Pass" is, today, sponsored by Microsoft.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
Salon has a story on SCO too, but sadly it's not available to read freely
Salon gives you a "Free Day Pass" that allows access to all of the content if you are willing to sit through a 15-second ad.
There is an enormous difference between an expert programmer sitting down with a pile of textbooks and disjointed segments of code to write out an operating system from scratch, and that same programmer downloading the operating system intact from a public network.
---US District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise ruling in the AT&T/BSD lawsuit
Why has nobody mentioned that SCO lost their courtcase against LinuxTag? They are gagged.
3 -0 00/
The german branch of SCO has taken down its web site. Hans Bayer, SCO's executive director in Gemany confirmed that this measure was taken as a consequence of Friday's injunction of a German court against SCO
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/odi-02.06.0
SCO wasn't able to support their claims that Linux has infriging SCO IP in it. Isn't this kind of important? It pretty much proves that SCO cannot support their claims.
I submitted this story already. Can a few other people do it as well?
NOBODY in the US media has picked up on this.
Lawyers against Linux
A software company launches a billion-dollar suit against the open-source operating system's biggest backer, IBM -- and only succeeds in underscoring Linux's strength.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Farhad Manjoo
June 3, 2003 | If you ask Chris Sontag, a vice president at the SCO Group, how his tiny software firm decided to launch a billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM and became, in the process, the most reviled name in the open-source programming world, he'll tell you that the whole thing started rather innocently. Sontag says that SCO did not go looking for trouble with fans of free software; instead, trouble found SCO. In January the company, which makes most of its money from the sale of Unix and Linux operating system software, embarked on a routine review of its business holdings. And during the review, "we identified some concerns we had in terms of our intellectual property."
Specifically, the company determined that some source code in Linux had a lot in common with code in Unix -- and SCO says that in 1995, it purchased rights to all the original Unix source code from the software firm Novell. In other words, SCO believes that Linux, an OS that can be freely copied and modified by anyone, is illegal. Linux is, SCO says, "an unauthorized derivative of Unix." If SCO's accusations are affirmed in court, the millions of companies and individual users who have increasingly built their lives around Linux over the last decade might have to start scrambling for an alternative or face costly penalties.
But that was not all. During its examination of Linux source code, SCO says it found that it could trace what it believes was Unix code in Linux to one of its longtime partners in the Unix business: IBM. Sontag says that SCO immediately tried to notify IBM of copyright violations in Linux, but "we effectively got no response." So on March 7, SCO filed suit against IBM, alleging "misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract." In its complaint, SCO claims that IBM took parts of SCO's Unix code and illegally inserted the code into Linux. Last month, to warn end users about its findings, SCO sent about 1,500 corporate Linux customers a letter saying they could be in legal hot water if they continued to use Linux, which SCO told them was "developed by improper use of proprietary methods and concepts."
SCO's war on Linux has become a hot topic in open-source circles, inspiring heated discussions on developer listservs and almost daily posts on Slashdot. Opinion in these forums, as well as among more dispassionate industry observers, runs about 99 percent anti-SCO. Nobody believes Sontag's story, and it's not hard to see why. SCO's version of the history of Unix and Linux -- as the company has explained it to reporters and as it outlines in its legal complaint against IBM -- comes off as a one-sided and self-serving account. Critics say the company misstates and exaggerates its own contributions to Unix, and SCO has yet to provide a single example of infringing code it says it has found in Linux.
Daypass sponsored by
Microsoft
Industry watchers have attributed SCO's actions to economic desperation. The firm's products have not been doing well recently; the company lost about $25 million last year. SCO now has a stated goal of trying to make money by selling licenses to its Unix intellectual property, and critics see the IBM suit as perhaps only the first of many litigious efforts SCO will attempt. IBM intends to fight the case, but SCO may hope that escalating its rhetoric will make business for Linux companies so difficult that they'll cave in -- either by paying SCO licensing fees or buying the firm out.
The strategy is not entirely illogical, and SCO's efforts have met with some initial success. In mid-May, Microsoft, which considers Linux its main software rival, made headlines when it decided to purchase a Unix license from SCO. The sum Microsoft paid for the license was not disc
1) You're accusing people of putting your secret code into the Linux kernel.
2) You'll show me the secret code in question IFF I sign an NDA.
3) The code for Linux is freely available.
What's in the secret code that I can't see by looking the kernel source?
From what I see, the purpose of the NDA is so that you can't tell other people what the offending lines are, because then they could fix them and SCO wouldn't have a case.
All you're allowed to do is look at their allegations and tell the public "yes, I agree that SCO has a case" or "no, I don't believe them".
I believe the injunction only applies to SCO's German subsidiary. Maybe this is why www.sco.de has been blank for several days.
SCO's German website is down. A German court had ordered them to stop telling that Linux contains stolen code or to pay a fine of 250,000 Euro. And since everybody at SCO is now busy fighting lawsuits, the had no time to remove only the FUD from their webpage. Consequently they removed the whole website in order to follow the court's order.
Oh, and a German artice about this can be found here
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
I dunno. I thought this was funnier when I read it last Friday.
A real Rebel Yell. Best summory I've seen so far.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The German branch of the SCO Group removed their website from the internet. According to Hans Bayer, Managing Director of SCO Group Gmbh, the measure is in response to the Preliminary Injunction issued on Friday. The Injunction prevents SCO from claiming Linux contains, or that Linux users could be liable for infringement upon, the Intellectual Property of SCO Group. SCO's internaitional site is still available via www.sco.com, or through 216.250.140.125, the IP addresss formerly associated with www.sco.de/www.caldera.d. Likewise, https://www.sco.de points to the USl site.
Netware NDS (and NCP in general- Netware Core Protocol) will be sold as a service(s) to run on Linux. They also are fostering major support with Netware 7 (the kernel will be Linux based): http://www.redhat.com/partners/press_partner_novel l.html
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0414novlinux.htm l
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,590629,00.asp
You're right on the money. dBase III was a great product, and they released dBase IV as a follow-on. They expected great things for it. Everyone did.
But dBase IV was the buggiest piece of shit of the times, and by the time they got it straight it was 1990. Since dBase III was from 1985, that meant that for FIVE YEARS Ashton Tate was standing still. If dBase IV had been usable from the start, they might have had a chance. But in the meantime, a little company called Fox Software came out with FoxPro which was compatible and had many more features than dBase III. Ashton Tate couldn't survive and they were gobbled up by Borland.
The interesting and ironic part of all of this:
1988 (September) Ashton-Tate sues Fox Software. In december 1990 the suit filed by Ashton-Tate against Fox Software and Santa Cruz Operations for alleged copyright infringement of the dBASE language is dismissed in court.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Article here: http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_965_1.asp
Essentially, a judge threw out on summary judgment Meade's claim of patent infringement on its computerized telescope systems.
The judge believes just because a software works alike does not make it automatically infringe. According to the article, the judge said[Celestron's] "Go To telescopes do not infringe on Meade's patents under the "doctrine of equivalents."
This decision must make SCO shudder, as it was summary and never reached a jury.
You can check out the insider trading here. Darl owns about 8100 shares since 10/02. If you follow the above link, you will see the CFO has made a few sales worth a little over $30,000. There were also 175,000 shares purchased slightly before SCO announced their lawsuit against IBM last March.
I'll go put my tin hat on and go to bed in my padded room...
To quote Dvorak:
Then IBM (or SCO, or somebody) will have to define what those "certain aspects of the kernel" are, and they will be replaced by code written by people who have never worked for IBM or SCO. If IBM wants to maintain a "SCO-Fork" of the kernel, more power to them.
Ask me a difficult one next time.
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
All I've got to say about it is.. ... Fairly entertaining," said Torvalds. :-D
I love what Linus was quoted as saying..
As for what he thinks of SCO's actions, Torvalds in an e-mail interview compared the fight between SCO, IBM and Novell Inc. to bad TV. "Quite frankly, I found it mostly interesting in a Jerry Springer kind of way. White trash battling it out in public, throwing chairs at each other. SCO crying about IBM's other women.
Now there is a man with his eye on the ball
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
"IP" is a generic term, and doesn't refer to any specific section of law.
Nobody is contesting the copyright in unix.. and if SCO has the copyright, or at least the right to enforce them, then that still stands.
THe "Trade secret" elements of Unix are what are not viable.. you can't pretend to have a "secret" That everyone has known about for more than a decade.
Linux is protect by only Copyright law, and there is no reason to invalidate it.
He's talking about AT&T vs. UC Berkeley. Although Unix was copyright by AT&T, much of the code was contributed by the community. AT&T even took BSD licensed code and put their own copyrights on it. The result of that lawsuit was that four files in BSD had to be rewritten, and AT&T had no IP claims to the rest of BSD. There's not much Unix technology in System V source, that's not also found in BSD, which makes it public knowledge and not trade secret. Any claim of copyright or trade secret derived from owning the ancestral AT&T source is diluted by that lawsuit settlement.
WTF?
Buying them out is exactly what they want.
The most satisfying outcome, by far, will be to watch them jump up and down crying blue murder until their day in court, at which point they are told to go fuck themselves, and their share price drops off the scale.
Anything else is better than what they deserve.
By the way, if you want to tell the managing director of SCO Australia what you think of him, his mobile number is: 0419 660 016 SCO
SCO is essentially saying "you stole something from my house when you came to visit the other day, but I won't tell you what you stole so you can give it back to me, because it will affect my case against you for burglary". Which is bullshit. The only excuse is to spread FUD about the legality of using Linux without a license from SCO. The code they claim has been copied will become public knowledge either during or immediately after the court case.
Even if SCO manages to lure the judge into sealing the evidence (which would be extraordinary, seeing as the code is already out in the open, and giving out information about which code is theirs would be the only way for people to avoid violating their rights), IBM will still need to be able to see it, and will still be able to rip the code out of Linux and release a "clean" version, people will go from there.
So there is NO reason for them to withhold at the very least the information about which specific files they believe contain their code except to try to blackmail people into paying for their licenses, which, again, is something I don't exactly think will help their case.
An English article about the injunction order can be found at ExtremeTech. If you wish to submit the story as well, think about linking the English site instead, as the Slashdot editors seem to refuse articles with too many links to German Heise articles and Babelfish translations.
Well, the court case they lost was actually not the one by LinuxTag, but another one by Univention. Uninvention only requested the German SCO branch to be ordered to stop spreading FUD (hence only the German website is offline), LinuxTag also requested SCO itself to be forced to stop spreading FUD in Germany. I haven't heard anything about this case, so it is probably still running.
I also did so yesterday. Anyway, even if the events in Germany are less interesting for other countries than I expected, for the discussion in Germany it is really great that SCO has been ordered by a court to stop spreading FUD.
It takes an average of 4-6 years for economic policies at the elected federal level to take effect. This current recession has its roots in the dot-com bubble and the Clinton era, just as Bush Sr's recession (which was hardly a blip for most folks, as I recall) was more Reagan's fault than anything else.
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
Actually - NetWare 6 has been out for quite some time (Support Pack 3 for it was recently released)and NetWare 6.5 is in beta.
.Net).
:)
Novell, although much maligned by many here on Slashdot, actually has much to offer to the Open Source community, and appears to be slowly gravitating towards Open Source - apparently NetWare 7 will offer NetWare services via Linux:
http://www.computerworld.com/networkingtopics/ne tw orking/os/story/0,10801,80497,00.html
To move this a bit more on-topic - I doubt that Novell's Unix patents and IP are worth more to Novell at this point than their efforts to remain viable as a player in networking in general while retaining such, since they paid for them.
And, to postulate just a bit (and go off-topic again) - I believe that the increasingly more-important realm of heterogeneous network integration and management, and the services related thereto (something that Novell has encouraged by releasing native versions of NDS for not only NetWare, but NT, Linux and Solaris)*will* become the next battleground for all network software and hardware companies (MS has attempted to address this, in a short-sighted fashion, by creating Active Directory and
As such, I suspect that their defense of their Unix patents and IP is merely pro forma - not a bad thing in itself.
However, I expect to hear much more from Novell in the future as they complete their transition.
Discounting them at this point (especially on OS "religous" grounds) would be a huge mistake - one could argue that Novell Directory Services (NDS), as a mature, stable DS platform, widely available, and soon to be even more so, could be the straw that breaks Microsoft's back as MS attempts to stop the trend towards choice in network server platforms at all levels.
Novell, I think, conceeded that battle long ago with regards to their native implementation of NetWare, and has made an admirable, if at times muddled, effort towards what I deem the future of networking in general - the management of disparate resources, regardless of platform (and, eventually, if they are sufficiently foresighted) underlying infrastructure, to the benefit of those that adopt it.
Novell calls it "OneNet" - and I think that they have finally "got it", in a way that MS simply cannot (for they have too much to lose) and at the risk of being ridiculed for so obvious a statement: "It's about the Network" - and has been, for quite some time. And, more importantly, about the network and it services, its availability, its reliability and its security.
So, to wrap this up, and on a purely nostalgic basis: I saw glimmers of this in NetWare v4.x - does anyone remember NetWare for OS/2? I ran such a server on my work desktop, as a budding network geek many moons ago - and remember the panic that ensued when my manager saw a server on the network at our office for which he could not account... and I remember his surprise, and admiration, when he saw what I had done with the lowly 80486 PC on my desktop.
I ran NetWare for OS/2, as a process on my desktop PC, and leveraged it for various things to my company's benefit (our mail server, for one, until we could afford to buy a seperate box for it).
Once I had overcome my "hatred" for NetWare v4.x in general - it was a completely different paradigm for networking, and I hated it at first simply because I didn't understand it, couldn't fix it, and it went against the grain of all the NetWare v2.x/v3.x servers/networks I had installed in the past.
Once I "got it" - I came to understand that it was the future of networking - from the viewpoint of someone that had to maintain it and provide services for users, and that THAT was the most important thing.
Later, I attended a Novell conference that merely served to reinforce my understanding - at the end, we were shown a native implementation of NetWare, running atop Windows 3.1, fresh from Novell's geeks
It was a wo