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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.

45 of 687 comments (clear)

  1. SCO still packs a punch? by mao+che+minh · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It makes me take pause when I witness a company that appearently has no ammo keep entering into so many skirmishes against esteemed and battle proven foes. It almost makes me question the analysts that keep stating that SCO's claims lack bite.

    Would the team at SCO really keep pushing a lie, even though they know that by doing so they will face unspeakable countersuits after the trial(s)? I think that SCO is cleverly hiding an ace-in-the-hole, and it's going to hurt Linux and IBM badly. This is unprecedented: no company would ever commit suicide so blatantly and openly. I fear the worst is yet to come.

    HAHA, yea right. Had ya going there, didn't I? SCOX stocks plummet some more.......

    PS: fist post fools

    1. Re:SCO still packs a punch? by Angry+White+Guy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The only thing that I can see from the new litigation against Novell is that SCO is attempting to strongarm them into shutting up. Hell, at this point, I don't care that it will set a precident for lawsuits, I just wish that somebody would just buy SCO's collective asses and shut them the hell up. Hell, even Novell has enough capital to pull this one off.

      Interestingly enough, Sco is suing Novell just about the same time that Novell is about to release netware 6, complete with open source integration.

      I'm going to the store to buy lots of tinfoil, who wants a hat?

      --
      You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
    2. Re:SCO still packs a punch? by Angry+White+Guy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I agree, but sometimes the end justifies the means. Hell, I pledge that the first company that takes out SCO by any means necessary and forever dissolves this notion of not-free-freeware gets my undying support. I will use their products, reccommend their products, and defend their products to the best of my abilities.

      Who's with me?

      --
      You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
    3. Re:SCO still packs a punch? by Daniel_Staal · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What if it is Microsoft, with their own notion of not-free-freeware?

      --
      'Sensible' is a curse word.
    4. Re:SCO still packs a punch? by petecarlson · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I'm going to the store to buy lots of tinfoil, who wants a hat?

      You can't just make your own hat and expect it to meet FCC guidlines. Buy an approved Tinfoil Hat tm here

    5. Re:SCO still packs a punch? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I don't see why there's so much focus on a buyout. I'm sure SCO would be quite happy to stay as they are provided that IBM backs up a very large truck full of money to their loading dock.

      There is no way IBM can be taken down here, so the only way any IBM money will show up at SCO these days is for a buyout.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:SCO still packs a punch? by PugMajere · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In IBM's defense, their current policy with regards to patents appears to be, "If you sue us for patent infringement, we'll dig through our database and crush you. If you don't, we won't bother. Have fun."

      That might even have been stated by someone official - in any case, it seems fairly generous.

    7. Re:SCO still packs a punch? by Jason+Earl · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's not illegal to "diversify your holdings," nor is it illegal to sue IBM and hold a pile of press conferences. Plenty of companies during the dot com boom made a lot of money legally doing precisely the same thing. DrKoop.com had less chance of generating money than SCO, and no one got sent to the slammer for that debacle.

      All SCO management has to do is pretend that they really believe that they have a business plan, and then jump through the hoops the SEC has set up for the sale of stock by insiders. When the court case goes to trial in two years SCO will lose, but it will be very hard to blame management. After all, they hired the best (Boies). Sometimes the courts simply aren't in your favor.

  2. -1, stolen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
    but seriously, you should sign up for salon. good stuff. I'll save you the daypass ad:

    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.

    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 disclosed but is thought to be around $10 million -- pocket c

  3. They must be crazy by ajiva · · Score: 1, Interesting

    SCO must know something that Novell, IBM and others don't. There has to be some clause, or wording that says "SCO ownz you". Otherwise why do all this crazy stuff? Why sue everyone and everybody? Is it for attention? No, this is a bad way to get some. Ahh well lets see how this plays out...

  4. It's a comedy by Sri+Ramkrishna · · Score: 5, Interesting

    SCO apparently seems to be suing everyone and anyone that stands in their way. So lets recap:

    SCO sues IBM
    SCO threatens sue Linus
    SCO threatens to sue Novell

    The whole unix world is in some kind of uproar now thanks to this crappy company over IP thats so old that it should have lost most of it's value anyways. Theoretically, the concepts and whatnot in the unix world can also be in Cisco and everywhere else.

    What really blows my mind is that they don't own any of it, they are a sub licensee of Novell. Maybe Novell can revoke the contract with SCO and then they can no longer sue because they no longer can enforce the copyrights? I don't know, IANAL.

    sri

  5. Bollocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "If Linux had all of the capabilities of AIX, where we could put the AIX code at runtime on top of Linux, then we would.

    "Right now the Linux kernel does not support all the capabilities of AIX. We've been working on AIX for 20 years. Linux is still young. We're helping Linux kernel up to that level. We understand where the kernel is. We have a lot of people working now as part of the kernel team. At the end of the day, the customer makes the choice, whether we write for AIX or for Linux.

    "We're willing to open source any part of AIX that the Linux community considers valuable. We have open-sourced the journal filesystem, print driver for the Omniprint. AIX is 1.5 million lines of code. If we dump that on the open source community then are people going to understand it? You're better off taking bits and pieces and the expertise that we bring along with it. We have made a conscious decision to keep contributing."

    On the surface, those comments seem fairly damning, but let's think outside the box for a moment, something Bruce Perens is used to doing. "IBM is smart enough not to open source other people's intellectual property," he says. "Maybe the comment about being willing to open source any part of AIX that the Linux community considers valuable simply means that there is no portion of AIX that would be considered valuable by the Linux community."

  6. Set the /. Wayback Machine for 2000 by graveyhead · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Some "highly recognizable" members of the open-source community have also asked about the NDA process, but he would not give their names.
    Will The Real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up?

    Anyone wanna take bets? My guess is Bruce and Eric.
    --
    std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
  7. So let me get this straight... by HiredMan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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?
    Are they the super secret comment statements that surround the code?
    Is the secret code surrounded by super-double-secret code ?

    What's next? I have to sign and NDA and wear a tin foil hat so Linus can't suck the super-double-secret code directly from my head and add it to the source?

    Sounds like someone was sniffing glue and listening to the M$ FUD about the GPL over at SCO...

    =tkk

    1. Re:So let me get this straight... by GlassHeart · · Score: 4, Interesting
      What's in the secret code that I can't see by looking the kernel source?

      Not to take SCO's side, but their NDA requirement is not unreasonable.

      If there's a file, say feature.c, that Linux ripped off illegally, SCO proves nothing by showing you a copy of feature.c. They obviously could've downloaded it from kernel.org five minutes ago, and changed a couple of comments. The theft of feature.c would only make sense in the context of the entire SCO source tree. That is, let's say they shipped version 3.1415 in 1995, and they show you a source tree with feature.c included, that compiles exactly to v3.1415's dated binaries. You are therefore convinced that feature.c was SCO property and a meaningful part of SCO products circa 1995, not just added in two months ago so they could sue Linux. If feature.c later turned up in Linux, then somebody might have stolen it.

      Basically, SCO needs to prove that the code does belong to SCO, and that it predates the "copied" code in Linux. Both require the context of the rest of SCO's source tree.

      Therefore, it's unreasonable to ask them to let competitors such as Linus Torvalds look all over their source tree, just to allege that Linux may have received illegal code contributions.

  8. The Language of Shakespeare in danger by bstadil · · Score: 5, Interesting
    How far will IP terrorism go. Read all about it Here.

    Even Slashdot posting could be next.

    Pretty much the best write-up of this farce so far.

    --
    Help fight continental drift.
  9. Re:shareholders.. by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    SCO stock has been worthless for a long time, now it is simply moreso. It's not quite time for the self-immolation yet. I just hope I have some money when they have the surplus sale, they have over the years supported some really cool platforms and I'd like to pick some of them up if they have them lying around. Like an 8 processor 486. It would be worth having to run SCO on it for a while until I could find a way to run something good on it, even.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  10. Dvorak Predicts Death of Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Don't shoot the messenger...

    Killing Linux by John Dvorak

    Sensationalism bullshit at it's very worst, IMO.

  11. Who are the lawyers for SCO? Who's funding this? by Desmoden · · Score: 3, Interesting


    Lets think about this. If you look at the history of that last major UNIX legal battle ( I highly recommend reading http://opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html )

    it's quite obvious this is going to be a very long drawn out ugly deal. How is SCO going to pay for it? This could honestly take years. Who's helping them? Are the lawyers employees or are they hired? Are they just working on the chance of a big payout?

    This is the worlds biggest and most expensive poker game. Someone is bankrolling the players, and I don't think it's just Microsoft.

  12. Conundrum with open source? by Ben+Escoto · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The article, although rightfully skeptical about SCO's claims, appears to make a good point about a problem with open source:
    since the programs have many contributors, it is difficult to be sure that the final product does not include unauthorized proprietary code. It only takes one sloppy contributor or someone who is sceptical about intellectual property to make problems for everyone. Pragmatically, the same thing can happen in a proprietary product, but the customer has someone to hold responsible in that situation (the developer of the product) so the economic incentives discourage such illegal contributions. The challenge for LINUX is that with multiple contributors and distributors, how do you set up similar economic incentives for contributors to ensure that they only add code that they have the right to add? That conundrum remains.

    However, it seems to me that the incentives are totally analogous. Programmers in the open source world code (mainly) to help others, or show off their skills (for prestige or a better job). If they are caught cheating then they obviously are not helping, and plus they lose a lot prestige.

    Similarly, the people who manage open source projects clearly want their project to be successful and popular. If they accept infringing contributions then they jeopardise this, so they have an incentive not to. There may not be a direct economic incentive, but that doesn't mean the incentive isn't just as strong. The only conundrum is the familiar one that, in the free software world, people do things for reasons other than money.
  13. oh ... it's much more kafka .... by taniwha · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They wont let you see the NDA ..... unless you sign an NDA on the NDA .....

  14. SCO is acting like they have no case by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am a lawyer--specifically an IP litigator.

    Any litigator knows that you don't want to go to trial--you want to force a settlement. If you hae a halfway decent case, you'll show your evidence up front, so the other side sees that it's going to lose. On the other hand, if you have no case, then you try to keep everything under your hat and stretch out the legal proceedings until the other side pays just to make you go away.

    Which of these sounds like SCO? I think that they have squat and I think that SCO and their lawyers know it.

    BTW, if SCO doesn't produce evidence, IBM can file a motion to compel discovery and demand to get it. If they still stonewall, IBM can move for dismissal and get the whole case thrown out.

  15. Goodbye and good riddance SCO by argoff · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Several years ago I made a strong push to move my career from SCO to Linux. One of the main motivations for this was that I was so fed up with SCO, SCO support, SCO licenses (and policy daemons), and most of all SCO crashes. It was so bad - SCO eventually made the entire OS mirror a bunch of soft links to the real files, and changed their FSCK program so as not to do a real fsck on bootup. (which made things worse) They litterally had programs to undo the damage of their crashes like "fixmog".

    I also got sick of people insisting that SCO was commercial quality UNIX while blowing off Linux, while I knew darn well that Linux was more trustworthy and stable, and the only way to get decent productivity out of a SCO box was to install tons of free software on it that was often better then the software you licensed out the nose for from SCO - they even licensed TCP/IP for chrisake. Anyhow, sometimes I still do SCO work, because I'm one of the few that know how to nowdays - but none the less I am so thankfull that this next generation will never need to deal with them. And I am so thankfull that many of the businesses that toiled under SCO now have the freedom to be productive with their computers.
    I am also thankfull that people no longer need to suffer under their lies, lies about quality, lies about stability, lies about being for the enterprise, and most of all lies that they were better than free software. They are so full of it. At home I tell my 4yr old daughter no-no, and in the enterprise I tell business men sco-no.

    Goodbye and good-riddance SCO, I should have known you'd sue IBM. You maximized damage and harm to the computing industry for years, it only makes sense you'd do it on your death bed too. Goodbye and good riddance.

  16. Re:Why up in December of 2001? by cdrudge · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The spike in late 2001 is probably due to India's largest insurance supplier ordering 6,000 SCO servers. The spike in late 2002 is OpenServer. It's also interesting to note that the little triangle in the graph was a 1:4 reverse stock split (aka contraction). At that point, the value still was falling drastically while it should have had a much higher value.

  17. The Real Outcome of This Fiasco by sethadam1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The real outcome of this fiasco is easy to see. Dvorak thinks he's got the scenarios covered, but in my book, he's missing the likely outcome if SCO somehow wins this case.

    Linux is free and available. Provided SCO wins anything, they will HAVE TO come clean about what parts are offending code and which are clear. As soon as that's done, SCO will have a field day with IBM, RH, and other Linux vendors.

    However, within a few weeks/months, the Linunx community will rally to replace all offending parts of the kernel/GNU utilities/whatever with something equal if not better, it will be tested, and deployed within a year. Linux will suffer a setback, but Linux will NOT die.

    It's been said that open source projects never die, they just cease to be developed. Linux ain't going anywhere. There's no imaginable way that hackers around the world will simulaneously abandon Linux and move to FreeBSD or some other alternative. If, by some miracle, there's something to all this, we'll have it behind us within a few months. ...but I'd still hate to be Red Hat.

  18. Has SCO got anything right so far ? by timlewis_atlanta · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The more I think about it the more I begin to wonder if SCO have grabbed completely the wrong end of the stick. Having read the "Comedy of Errors" link I was thinking about the "ham handed" comment, i.e. the fact that so far SCO have done just about everything wrong. So I ask myself this : is it less likely or more likely that they would have done an equally bad job when doing their technical investigation. Clearly it's more likely that they did a bad job. From that I think there's a good chance that a) yes, there is code in Linux that is also in SCO (I mean, can they really be bluffing, surely not ?). b) investigation of said code will show that the code was appropriate FROM Linux and placed INTO the SCO product. From a technical point of view this is a more likely scenario. And of course that mean that SCO would have to GPL their source code.

  19. The real issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The real issue here probaly has something to do with large dollar federal contracts from homeland security and/or defense agencies.

    Just as it was a remarkably convenient time for Microsoft to license technology it already owns from SCO, this lawsuit is probaly happening during a bidding process for a massive contract.

    Microsoft recently gave some very serious discounts and other carrots to get a 750,000 user Exchange implementation in the face of stiff competition from IBM running Linux mainframes in a large northeastern state government. I imagine larger federal contracts would justify more "agressive marketing".

  20. John Dvorak predicts death of Internet, Linux etc. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This from the guy who predicts the death of the Internet every 6 weeks.

  21. Re:NOBODY has mentioned SCO being shutdown in Germ by shfted! · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seems to be only the index page affected. Take a look at http://www.sco.de/images/ =)

    --
    He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
  22. Re:shareholders.. by cheezedawg · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What the hell are you talking about?

    First of all, inflation is not out of control. On the contrary, many economists are worried about deflation now.

    And what on earth makes you think that people making money on the stock market leads to high inflation? Even during the height of the .com boom, inflation was very much under control. Inflation topped out at a very reasonable 3.38% in 2000 (compare that with the Jimmy Carter administration's 13.48% in 1980).

    --
    "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
  23. Re:Killing Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    So? When Mr. Dvorak said "I don't think any of this bodes well for the open-source community." it shows he somehow thinks that if Linux goes away, that it matters.

    *yawn*

    GNU/FreeBSD, GNU/HURD, FreeBSD, NetBSD etc la. The rest of the revolution - PostgreSQL, Apache, Sendmail all are uneffected and all run on other platforms that are NOT GNU/Linux.

    Advice to the worriers: Start calling Open Source Open Source and not Linux. Stop saying "My Webserver is Linux" and start saying "My Webserver is Apache"

  24. Does Linux have legal vulnerabilities? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've been outraged, puzzled, and amused by the on-going SCO saga. While I think SCO is unlikely to succeed in their current "endeavor," I am increasingly concerned about open source legal vulnerabilities which I think SCO is exposing, and which I think the open source community should address more vigorously.

    Consider the following scenario:

    Imagine that the Linux kernel developers are having trouble designing a driver for some new hardware device: a winmodem, a video card, a hard drive or whatever. The manufacturer, ACME INC, has released a Windows-only (binary) driver, but doesn't appear willing to cooperate with the development of an open source driver. Furthermore, ACME's minimal published specs for the device seem to be wrong in significant ways.

    The Linux driver is buggy and giving users trouble. A volunteer - Mr. Smith - presents himself to the Linux kernel mailing list. He says he has the device in question and he would like to try to help with improvements to the Linux code. Taking the existing driver code as a start, he makes a series of important contributions over a few weeks that resolve the difficulties. His changes are incorporated into the kernel source and released as part of kernel 2.6.30.

    A few weeks after the release of 2.6.30, Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox receive an angry letter from ACME Inc. ACME claim that large portions of ACME's original (proprietary) driver code have been incorporated into the Linux driver code. Furthermore, they are incensed that the kernel developers accepted contributions from Mr. Smith, who, it turns out, is an ex-employee of ACME, dismissed for serious financial improprieties. ACME is convinced that Mr. Smith has stolen their code and released it under the gpl in order to harm ACME's competitive position in the market. (ACME says that a careful reading of the Linux driver code clearly reveals that Mr. Smith made use of ACME's trade secrets.)

    The company decides to sue Linus Torvalds and the kernel developers. The suit does not allege that the kernel developers knowingly tried to harm ACME Inc. Rather, the claim is that the kernel developers didn't exercise "due diligence" in vetting Mr. Smith and his contributions. In effect, ACME says that someone in a position of responsibility should have asked Mr. Smith where he worked previously, and an effort should have been made to contact Mr. Smith's previous employer. Furthermore, the kernel developers should have asked ACME to review the Linux driver code before it was released.

    During a news conference, ACME's CEO says:

    "Every computer company in American does a at least some background checking before they hire someone to work on an important project. Where did the employee get their education? Where were they employed previously? Did they have any significant problems at their previous place of employment? In the Linux world such questions are rarely asked or followed-up on, even though Linux advocates claim that millions of people rely on the Linux operating system. In failing to ask such questions of Mr. Smith, the Linux kernel developers made themselves legally liable for the harm that resulted when he exploited the open source development process for nefarious ends."

    My question is: Is this a plausible scenario? What safeguards are in place to prevent such a scenario from coming true? Are these safeguards adequate?

    1. Re:Does Linux have legal vulnerabilities? by I_redwolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My question is: Is this a plausible scenario? What safeguards are in place to prevent such a scenario from coming true? Are these safeguards adequate?

      What safeguards are in place to prevent such a scenario from coming true in a closed-source system? Infact, would ACME even know if their code had been stolen in a closed-source system? How would they know this if they don't have the code to look at? It seems that in a closed-source system your IP can be stolen without you even knowing. That can't be good, and you're always left wondering if ex-employee is using methods and code at the new company; of course no NDA, peer review or anything else will catch the code thief in that situation because who's to say he didn't just think the stuff up him/herself?

      With that, it's pretty obvious that opensource allows a company to prove IP theft extremely easily. The employee or code thief in question should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and thats one less thief to worry about.

      If the company in question harmed financially or competitively they need to take proactive steps to reclaim any loss ground via the thief and to also have a "debriefing" process where the programmer(s) they hire that are leaving are aware they can't divulge or use X ip anywhere else. As said by many people before, if someone is going to throw a brick through your window, attempt a robbery of your car, steal your code, attempt at burning your house down or simply attempting the bombing of an airplane. They are going to do so regardless, and people are responsible for their own actions. You can only mitigate the attack and prepare for the worst.

      Basically, this example is typical stuff and it again shows that opensource is the crowd I'd rather play in.. Especially in regards to business and Intellectual Property. Not knowing if that last programmer you fired is now working for the competition and is stealing your IP must really make it difficult to sleep at night. That is; if you run on a closed-source system.

    2. Re:Does Linux have legal vulnerabilities? by klmth · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In your scenario, the liability lies with Mr. Smith and Mr. Smith alone. He was the one who released the code, and violated the copyright of ACME. The kernel developers have nothing at all to do with it.

    3. Re:Does Linux have legal vulnerabilities? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Is it plausable? Perhaps. Would it be a strong suit? Probably not.

      I think the theoretical ACME statements you made _way_ overstate the amount of "due dilligence" that is common practice in the industry. Sure if you're hiring someone they generally will give you a list of all recent employers, but if they don't list one (and give a plausable excuse for the gap) then you'll be none the wiser. It's not like you're going to call a private detective to check their story.

      Plus, lots of device drivers are written by outside consultants anyways (I used to be in this business) and there you're not even expected to give your whole client list - just a few references giving similar work.

      Finally, even if THEY KNEW that they were a former employee of ACME that doesn't mean that their contributions should automatically be considered tainted - you don't know that they have privledged information or any reason to suspect that they are and operating without permission.

      Back to the theoretical lawsuit - I believe that as long as Linus&co removed the offending code within a reasonable time of being notified by ACME then the courts would look on them favorably. Since the code is open for all to see there's little evidence that they would be acting nefariously - nothing they did was hidden from ACME. Worst case, they might get their emails with the disputed developer subpoenaed but as long as there's no "smoking gun" demonstrating that they knew the code was likely tainted they'd be fine. As for demonstrating negligence, see above - it would be hard to prove given industry norms.

      (Warning: IANAL)

  25. For all the "NDAers". by janda · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IANAL, but let's talk trade secret law for a bit.

    If you have something you're going to claim to be a trade secret, you have to exercise "reasonable precaution" and "due diligence" to prevent the secret from being revealed to the public, or you lose your trade secret status.

    How do the courts decide if something is a trade secret? Generally, you sue somebody for trade secret infingement, or somebody sues you claiming that you don't really have a trade secret.

    One of the big things the courts look for is consistancy in keeping your trade secret a secret. If you don't require everybody (and I mean everybody) to sign NDA's, the court can rule that you have allowed your secret to pass into the public knowledge, and is no longer a trade secret.

    If, however, I sign an NDA with you to not disclose your trade secret information, and then I give it to a competitor, the courts can rule that I violated the NDA, so I owe you money for damaages, the company I gave the secret to may be liable for damages (that would probably need another lawsuit), and that the trade secret is still a secret even though there are now "umpteen" people who know it.

    If, however, I give you access to my source code without requiring you to sign an NDA, even though the material is in millions of archives all over the planet, I'm basically saying "it's not a trade secret anymore", and the courts will (hopefully, I don't know about US courts anymore) rule that you no longer have a trade secret due to your actions.

    Courts have, however, ruled that once a trade secret has reached enough people, regardless of the method, that trade secret status is lost. So, if I found out the formula for Coca-Cola (either by signing an NDA, breaking and entering, torturing one of the people who knows it, whatever), and posted it all over the internet, the courts could rule that even Coca-Cola maintained due diligence in attempting to retain their trade secret, it has lost that status.

    Whether or not people should be signing NDA's is something they'll have to take up with somebody who can provide competent legal advice (in other words, not me), and will depend on lots of factors.

    --
    Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
  26. One line of code by BrynM · · Score: 4, Interesting
    If SCO is really serious about proving this and wants anyone to take their NDA seriously, then show us one line of code that's both in it's property and in IBM's code or in Linux. If Mr. McBride truly is "going to show hundreds of lines of code", then give the public and your detractors a taste. If there are "hundreds of lines" that offend, surely SCO can pick one that proves their point.

    Then again, he never said they were going to show offending code. For all we know, Mr. McBride could show us "Hello World!".

    --
    US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
  27. More SCO News by aerojad · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Legal action hits SCO Web site

    Lawyers representing LinuxTag, the German Linux group, told SCO on May 23 that the Lindon, Utah-based company was engaging in unfair competitive practices when it sent to 1,500 large companies letters that said using Linux could pose legal problems because SCO proprietary Unix source code had been copied into Linux, according to a statement from the group.

    "SCO must not be allowed to damage its competitors by unsubstantiated claims, to intimidate their customers and to inflict lasting damage on the reputation of GNU/Linux as an open platform," LinuxTag's Michael Kleinhenz said in the statement. LinuxTag demanded SCO make its evidence public by May 30 or retract its claims.

    SCO removed copies of that letter from its Web sites as a result, but later, LinuxTag succeeded in obtaining a temporary restraining order against SCO, said Ryan Tibbitts, SCO's newly appointed chief legal counsel. Because SCO hasn't been able to see the actual contents of the order, the company ordered the entire site shut down to be on the safe side, he said.

    --

    SecondPageMedia - Wha
  28. Line count percentages by Schubert · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Ok so we have this quote:
    "The month of June is show-and-tell time," McBride said. "Everybody's been clamoring for the code...and we're going to show hundreds of lines of code."
    So lets assume "hundreds of lines of code" is our N value. Now let N equal... oh... we'll be lenient on our definition of "hundreds" and make N = 5000.

    Ok so we've got our hypothetical 5000 lines of offending code. Now lets count the number of lines in every .c file in linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2 ...

    TMPFILE=`mktemp /tmp/$0.XXXXXXX` for i in $(for i in $(for i in $(find ./|grep "\.c"|grep -v Documentation);do cat $i|wc -l;done);do echo $i;done);do echo -n $i+>>${TMPFILE};done;echo "0">>${TMPFILE};echo quit>>${TMPFILE};bc -q ${TMPFILE};rm ${TMPFILE}

    Which gives us 3332935 (including comments but hey we're lazy).

    And this seems reasonable give that according to this link which shows ~1.8 million for a 2.2 kernel so yeah hey what's another 1.5 million between friends? (think of all the new hardware support)

    Ok so we've got our probably bogus number of ~3.3 million lines of code. Remember N? Come on you can do the next step its fun!

    5000 / 3332935 == 0.0015% and lets be super generous and assume comments make up 40% of our line count...

    5000 / 1999761 == 0.0025%

    I wonder what the statistical liklihood of having similiar blocks of code of some signifigant size that happen to be the same (excluding format and variable differences). I mean there's only so many ways one can _intelligently_ code a given function

    Given those kind of percentages I doubt a judge or jury could be convinced of any copyright infringement of any signifigance. It'd be kind like trying to sue a competing encyclopedia company for swiping that one entry in the "P" volume on "Petards" ("hoisting", "petard", look it up) from you and demanding millions of dollars in compensation for this plagerism (ok so this analogy sucks but I had petards on my mind so...)

    --
    -- schubert
  29. BOMBSHELL: Is Boies no longer representing SCO!?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com/2100-1016_3-101294 7.html?type=pt$(B"_(B=marketwatc h-cnet&tag=feed&subj=news

    "SCO previously hired outside attorneys to serve as its chief legal counsel, but about 10 days ago hired Tibbitts, who has experience in litigation."

    I'm not sure that means Boies is no longer representing SCO at all or if it means Tibbitts is now going to court and Boies is doing other legal stuff. Sure seems like Boies is gone though..

    Having said that I want to say this.

    I know a little about Boies. Boies takes cases he believes in. That is why he took on MS, why he represented Gore and Napster. The man doesn't need $. Also, Boies has a photographic memory.

    BUT: Boies takes cases that he often has little background in. Because he has such a good memory though, this doesn't impede him. Recall how he embarrassed Microsoft several times. This is a man that previously had never used email.

    If Boies is no longer working on the SCO case, it's probably because he realizes just now that SCO lied to him. If you read the filing that was made against IBM as if you BELIEVED EVERY WORD - would you think IBM deserved to be sued?

    I think Boies thought that every accusation made in that filing was correct and factual. I think Boies believed that SCO had an enterprise Unix and a significant marketshare. I think Sontag and McBride who, let's face it, have no regard for the truth, lied to Boies.

    Boies is a fairly ethical man and he doesn't take cases for money. If Boies isn't working for SCO, I'd bet money he quit because he was lied to from the start. There is no POSSIBLE way SCO fired Boies either. If Boies is gone, he quit.

    If McBride and Sontag lied to Boies, they're going to jail because they have absolutely no case and they have lied to their stockholders. This might be a little embarassing for Boies but this is the end for McBride and Sontag. You don't hire a lawyer of Boies stature and lie to them and expect to do anything besides burger flipping for the rest of your life.

    I think Sontag and McBride really are stupid as hell. If this entire theory is correct, it explains everything. I couldn't figure out why Boies, I mean BOIES, would take this case and allow his clients to make these statements, unless he didn't realize the statements were false. Boies is a respectable man and he deserves the respect he gets. I think he's been played for a fool.

  30. SCO coders tainted? by geoff+lane · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Over the years SCO has had access to the sources of most of the major versions of Unix and Unix-like operating systems currently marketed. Zenix, Unixware, OpenServer, AIX, SYSV, PTX, Linux. In addition, there are so many ex-Novell people in SCO right now it wouldn't surprise me if SCO had a copy of Netware sources. When Caldera sued Microsoft over DRDOS, the court granted Caldera access to parts of MSDOS and Windows.

    So, any coders within SCO potentially have had access to almost any operating system code of any significance written over the past 20 years!

  31. Does this affect anyone other than IBM? by hughk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Even if IBM lose, can anyone else be affected? The organisation breaching contract and revealing the trade secret would be IBM, not their customers, nor any other distributor of Linux or their customers either.

    --
    See my journal, I write things there
  32. Hidden campaign to strengthen Linux? by juggy · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This may seem very strange, but I recently had an (admittedly very weird) idea: What if this whole thing was no attack against Linux but in reality a covert operation by, let's say IBM or anyone else who plans to profit from Linux in the long run, to strengthen Linux's stance?

    I mean, c'mon, look at what we have here:
    1. a company that apparently has nothing to back up it's claims
    2. a company which carries out their actions rather in a slapstick sort of way (blunders all over the place)
    3. a company that screwed up in any way you can imagine: distributing the allegedly infringing code 2 months after they knew about it, bullying their business partners (United Linux), taking on the "gorillas" (IBM, Novell)


    Now imagine, someone like, let's say Mr. X, wants to make sure it cannot be harrassed in the future by anyone in the way it is happening right now. Think of all those who want to check whether the GPL is valid, all those who want to bet their business on Linux only if they have security that noone can attack this platform later on and ruin everything.
    Now Mr.X decides to, covertly, establish a pro-Linux-case. One sunny day he chats with the guys at SCO and says: "Look, your company is almost dead, and you know it. How about this: You make some unsupportable claims against Linux. I make sure nobody will bother you for some time, so since your stocks will rise you can make some money. After I decide it's enough, I will crush SCO in a way that noone ever dares to attack Linux again without having some REALLY good reason for it. Although it will be a problem for the Linux business for a brief time, afterwards everybody can be happy."

    OK, OK, sounds weird I know. But what would the world be without conspiracy theories? ;-)
  33. Why not just rewrite the offending code? by MattGrounds · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Please someone correct me if I'm missing something here.

    But isn't there a very quick solution for Linux once SCO discloses which are the "hundreds of lines of code" which were taken from SCO's UNIX source code? Can't we just rewrite the source code to perform a similar function to what's already there, but with a brand new open source implementation?

    As far as I know, it's the source code which is copyrighted, and NOT the algorithm. So once SCO discloses in court what the offending lines of source code are, can't we rewrite those lines, distribute a kernel patch, and hey presto, the code is open source again?

  34. What we neglect to remember by zakezuke · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What we neglect in our history of the computer revolution is the fact that the sco business model was the norm rather then the exception to the rule. Basicly there were a vast number of professional platforms where they nickled and timed their customers to death. Useful for sales folk, "oh let me evaluate what you need, you only pay for what you need", where in reality you pay mostly for the trivial accounting that goes with this sorta system, and employ a shit load of book keepers rather then developers.

    When people get on the Microsoft is evil bandwagon, what they neglect to take into account is that microsoft just isn't SCO, and part of it's success in the market place was the fact that it was so cheep to implement. The fact of the matter is there are even more evil people out there then Bill Gates empire.

    SCO is a throwback to the 1980's attitude of computing, back when we were willing to pay for high technology because we knew that there were a few dozen or so high paid developers who were working on project as we speak, with the SCO diffrence being you didn't actually need the developers after the product lost it's comercial value. I had to work it a little some years ago, and I thought it was all a joke. What the hell is this license I have to enter after I restore the backup, shouldn't it be here? What are you going to go cry to your mommie? Oh hello sco support, what, you noticed that I just restored from a back, well yea, whole system crashed, oh you are billing me for this phone time, you phoned me, I don't need your help.

    Microsoft is pretty bad at times... SCO is the devil... and hopefully their business will be crushed, novel will finally freely distrubute a public license for their product so we don't have to put up with this crap again. That's speaking idealy ofcorse.

    --
    There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.