Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
I'm suprised some of the SCO shareholders haven't sued the directors for essentially making SCO stock worthless. It may have seen a temporary increase when this mess started, but its been on the downslide lately, and announcing ignorant lawsuits isn't going to help.
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
For Immediate Release
June 3, 2003
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
The SCO Group is based in Salt Lake City, Utah and has done nothing of interest for many years.
Trolling is a art,
Whether SCO's code has been infringed or not will be exposed in court.
Anything we say here is irrelevent. What is there to discuss except to say that having 'many cooks' increases the chance that any one of them may have tossed in a poison pill unwittingly?
I have been pwned because my
It so happens that this "Free Day Pass" is, today, sponsored by Microsoft.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
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
"The month of June is show-and-tell time," McBride said.
How do you take someone seriously that says stuff like this. I'm sure he thinks he's being tough and serious.. but it just comes off like a bad joke.
"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."
I don't understand why they would force analysists to sign an NDA, when the whole basis for their lawsuit is that their code is already in the public domain. Nothing new can be revealed if it is indeed already part of the Linux code. Perhaps they are going to tell analysists that its all one big hoax and they don't want them to write about it.
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.
This site has described the SCO-Linux situation using the Dukes of Hazzard metaphor.
:)
I found it quite helpful
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
All this talk about this technology known as SCO. It seems cool, hell, it has to be with all this Slashdot coverage. But does it run Linux?
Normally this would not be right, but since this won't stop until they run out of cash, and they have to pay for bandwidth... here goes...
a dmin.pdf
Got bandwidth? Mad at SCO? Download a 5mb file from here or launch an unspecified number of wget processes:
wget http://www.sco.com/images/pdf/eserver/eserver_sys
This way, you'll know how to administrate their linux server which they discontinued.
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.
Read: a review of the code by *anyone* "means absolutely, positively nothing".
Anyone wanna take bets? My guess is Bruce and Eric.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
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
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
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
Even Slashdot posting could be next.
Pretty much the best write-up of this farce so far.
Help fight continental drift.
It only fails to make sense if you are looking at it like a programmer. From a lawyer point of view, they see some money to be made.
Of course, the problem is that the lawyers don't understand what the underlying issue is, and have made a real mess of themselves.
But, if it works out in their favor, they will have future clients for the next 20 years.
Don't shoot the messenger...
Killing Linux by John Dvorak
Sensationalism bullshit at it's very worst, IMO.
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.
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.
From the second link:
Overly said a review of the code by anyone other than a judge "means absolutely, positively nothing" in determining the merit of SCO's claims.
Is it just me, or is there something scary about a judge, who may or may not use his/her computer for anything other than e-mail and word processing, trying to interpret two snippets of source code to determine if one uses the other in an illegal way?
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
I believe the injunction only applies to SCO's German subsidiary. Maybe this is why www.sco.de has been blank for several days.
McBride characterized Novell's move as "a desperate measure..."
Pot to Kettle, come in Kettle, are you there?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
They wont let you see the NDA ..... unless you sign an NDA on the NDA .....
This is funny. Someone should mirror it before ot dies.
http://www.arie.org/doh/
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 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.
I think "blow" is the wrong metaphor. A "blow" implies strength, power, and the ability to inflict pain and damage. None of those apply to SCO.
SCO is making a lot of noise and releasing a lot of hot air, something that should be embarrassing to SCO and is somewhat annoying but generally harmless to the bystanders. That kind of event is more accurately described as a "fart", not a "blow".
So, using this more accurate metaphor, the reporter should probably change the article to read:
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.
She (MRS. M. GOTCHA), has as a result of the trust and confidence she has in me mandated that I search for a reliable and trustworthy foreign partner, who will help receive some UNIX source code which she has totaling Five Million United States LOC into a personal, company or any reliable foreign Unix-like system for safe keeping for a short period of time, since her family computer accounts within and outside the country have all been frozen by the authorities.
This source code in question has however, been carefully kept in defaced form and deposited with a security company that has branches in Europe and America. You may therefore be required to travel to any of the branches to collect the source code on behalf of my client for safe keeping.
I shall let you into a complete picture of this mutually beneficial transaction when I have received your anticipated positive reply. This matter should be treated as urgent and confidential. This is very important.
PS, it's very important that you maintain your current good relationship with Dr. Linus. Only he has the keys to the vault in which we must deposit our Five Million United States LOC. When added to the Millions of LOC already there, we will all become very rich.
Best Regards,
Dr.Darl McBloodsukr
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.
or worse than slashdot... where you get to stare at an MS ad 20 seconds while the restof the page loads and renders.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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
a world in progress...
...it was well used by this man. Never underestimate what a company would do to keep up the illusion that they're winning.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
Never thought i would be routing for Novell any time soon.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
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.
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.
...but I'd still hate to be Red Hat.
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.
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.
for(i =0; i j; i++)
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
Anyone working on free code should be highly suspicious of NDAs and other agreements that limit free speech and co-opt IP. There's no reason to sign a NDA to look at Linux source code. You have to wonder what SCO has that they don't want you to talk about.
Chances are SCO are going to make some realy stupid terms. They would love for only their clueless dupes to sign and therby raise their credibility in the land of the lost. What kind of objective opinion can be written if you can't describe the thing you are talking about? An even more devious prank they can pull is full publication, "against their will." All they've done so far is sling insults. "The anarchists are publishing the Linux source code again, even after they agreed not to!", echos from the future.
Smells like more M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yes, this was ripped right out of AT&T Unix and was found in Linux after careful examination by SCO:
++i;
Note the use of the letter "i", indicating it got there via IBM.
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".
Yeah, but contrary to your analogy.... a supernova is also pretty bright. Need I say more?
I find it amusing that the story states Copyright issues raised by Novell, from which SCO bought the rights to Unix, are irrelevant, McBride said during a conference call with media and analysts. SCO licensed the code to IBM, who allegedly misappropriated it. However, if they don't actually own the copyrights, then isn't SCO guilty of the same thing they are suing IBM for. Makes no sense to me, but I'm just a computer geek.
RandomIO
Even if SCO in fact owns the code that they claim was copied, how can they expect to get a billion off of it? They themselves say it's only a couple hundred lines at most. That's nothing. How much do you think the author of the code was paid? $30 for writing it? Plus $200 for debugging it? Lets say he was drunk that week and got $500 total for the code in question, or about $2 a line. SCO's demanding a 200000% markup on that. That's not justice and the leaked IP has nothing to due with SCO's financial troubles.
They decided to stake their future on a small set of products and instead of introducing new products and services when faced with tough competition, they just ignored the problem for so long that now the only way they can profit is by suing their once most valuable customers.
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.
is it me or is SCO suing EVERYBODY now? I wonder if they will soon decide to sue God for creating a universe in which all these patent infringement stuff takes place.
I seem to remember a case where some guy's house was destroyed by a tornado... so he sued the church. Supposedly, the church represented God, and God controlled the weather (act of nature and all that), so it must have been the church's fault.
The guy won the lawsuit.
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
You know, put like that "SCO SCO SCO", it made me think SCO would make a good swear word. I'm not sure what it would mean and in what context one would use it, but I'm sure people can think of something. It would have to mean something SCOing awful, that's for sure. Windows ME is SCOware? The project is ruined, that idiot SCOed everything up!
Maybe?
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?
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).
Trying to prove which code SCO actually wrote and which was from some free third party source will take years.
The Lawyer's know this and are egging SCO on towards their doom. They even got M$ to guarantee their fees...
Perhaps if these "Dark Lords" had a public face, they may feel a little more shy...
"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.
Who's to say that SCO didn't copy code from the Linux source, put it in their code, and claim they did it first? After all, we can all freely look at GPL'ed code, but we can't look at SCO code. We have no way to know if SCO put that code into their source tree or vice versa.
Another reason all intelligent societies should reject any software patents.
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
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...)
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.
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
I'd be offended also if I found SCO in my code. :)
;)
If I was SCO, I would be so embarassed to find my
trashy code in someone's prog or OS that I would
litigate to just have the nasty *&^% removed.
Wouldn't you?
Sco reminds me of that crazy guy you always see the park downtown. You don't know if he's a bum or just a guy off his rocker.
You know the guy. He has some outlandish claim every thirty second. " I own this park". " I used to be a king!" " Until the police and Hillary CLinton destroyed me!" " Those alians didn't like me either." " I am going to buy this park!"
YOU know that guy. That's SCO. Every thirty seconds some new crazy talk.
If I owned SCO stock, I'd be sellin it right quick. Pretty soon everyone will just say "Yeah Sure" and walk on by.
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
While they're at it, they should have a go at Apple.
... we all know that's where the /REAL/ zealots live :)
I mean, come on, they've raised the ire of all the Linux zealots, and now surely the Novell zealots (these do still exist in captivity, in fact, I work with some). Perhaps even the OS/2 zealots (being as how they're suing IBM 'n all).
Go on, just have a poke at apple
They should also tread on some BeOS and Amiga toes while they're at it, just to try to set a world record at pissing off the most amount of zealots in one law suit ever!
Imagine the PR!
-- James "Bragi" Deucker Patrician of Networks
Obviously the US educational system failed you since you can't seem to think your way out of a wet paper bag.
The German restraining order is relevant to a US proceeding because SCO is making claims regarding a US proceeding. If a wider discovery process occurs due to foreign legal action, this may very well affect the ultimate outcome of the US proceeding.
Think of it as the legal equivalent of a DDOS.
The other 5 BILLION of us might contribute something relevant to the outcome of this case if we have full knowledge of the relevant details.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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!
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
I mean, c'mon, look at what we have here:
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?
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?
Here is the first line of offending code:
x++;
And you have not seen it all, there are hundreds of lines like that, the bastard crackers just cahnged the name of the variable in all the code!
And there is even more:
x--;
You did not see that one coming you fucking nerds. Take that you pirates!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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.
You know, this is just childish, in addition to plain 'wrong'. Stop it. There has got to be better ways to get your point across.
Fast, Soon, Correct. Pick 2.
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.
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
SCO's own linux distribution was hazadarous to them. They did something stupid with it. They continued to distribute it.
SCO is making allegations that are OFFENSIVE to members of the opensource community that have contributed to the linux kernel, and to the 'linux community', whatever they may be.
The 'linux community', at large, tries pretty hard to avoid issues like this, and for the most part, if you had any familiarity with IP cases, you would understand SCO is acting as if it was bluffing.
The sancity of their trade secrets has already been violated. If you assume that their claims are correct, than they have already released their own code (unknownigly), in their custom kernels for the caldera distribution.
Generally, when a company has a strong IP case, they parade the evidence all over the place, in order to convince the other to settle quickly---after all, settling now is cheaper than settling later, 'cause settling after a court order will cost you court costs as well.
On the other hand, if you are bluffing, you DON'T release your evidence, because you want someone to buy you out, to shut you up. You drag out precedings, and make ridiculous, slanderous claims, in order to upset your enemies, and you harass their customers, so that other corporations will buy you out, 'cause all the trouble you are making is costing them more money than the buy out costs.
This second scenario seems far more likely. Especially given that SCO had to close its German operations because a German court ordered it to release its evidence regarding IP violations, or cease threatening to sue. In Germany, you aren't allowed to threaten to sue without evidence. You have to put up, or shut up. SCO shut up.
This has no legal precedence for U.S. legal preceedings, but it does say something about SCO's sinceritity. Why didn't they just give the evidence to German courts?
Because they don't have it. Because the case is BS. Because SCO is an incompentent company. It was incompentent when it was called caldera. It has nothing to do with the intellectual roots of unix.
Sad to say, but I think Michael's right. SCO's board of directors are a bunch of immature assholes, and you have very little grasp of the situation. This isn't just about a fair trial before being stoned to death. This is about the last gasp of a shitty company, who has spread FUD to all kinds of customers, of customers of companies like MY OWN. Telling them they shouldn't be adopting my product.
Without evidence. Merely asserting my product has bizarre, unknown risks associtated with it. Its as is I e-mailed all Microsoft customers, saying "I wouldn't use windows, because they use stolen IP, and I will prove this as some point in the future".
This is NOT fair. Legally required to protect their secrets? You have no idea what you are talking about it.
Pull your head out of your ass.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
As I see it, there are three possibilities.
A. IBM screwed up. They released stuff from their SCO license into Linux. Oops.
B. IBM didn't screw up. They have all the evidence (remember, they have BOTH SCO's source, and Linux's source). They don't care what SCO says, because they already HAVE all the evidence. They can't release the evidence, because that would then violate their licensing agreement with SCO, but they can sure as hell prepare they legal briefs now.
C. IBM didn't screw up. They are in cahoots with SCO, and are doing this to screw linux.
Given IBM's investment in Linux, and its contribution to the kernel, and other software, I'm guessing that C is highly unlikely.
I dunno, A seems unlikely to me too. If A were the case, an IBM had a big problem on their hands, I think that as soon as SCO threaten them, they would have rapidly been able to determine that SCO's claim has some legitimacy, and bought them out immediately. After all, they have plenty of cash.
That leaves B. Someone in the IBM legal department is of the opinion that they have a REALLY strong case. Someone on the board of directors decided it would be better for their credibility if they blow SCO out of the water.
Remember, IBM can see both sides of the table here. They hold all the cards. They don't need to get SCO to show them the evidence, so they didn't even have to ask.
They knew they would win from day one. You can't bluff when the other guy sees your cards.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
----- Original Message -----
From: Darl McBride
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2003 12:05 PM
Subject: URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL
ATTN: MANAGING DIRECTOR/C.E.O
LINDON, UTAH
REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
First, I must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction. This by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and 'top secret'. You have been recommended by an associate who assured me in confidence of your ability and reliability to prosecute a transaction of great magnitude involving a pending business transaction requiring maximum confidence.
We are top officials of SCO Group (formerly Caldera International -- Nasdaq: SCOX) who are interested in obtaining your services. We are presently in negotiations in a business deal we feel will be quite lucrative. Since we may leave the country quietly in the middle of the night, in order to commence this business transaction, we solicit your assistance to enable us to transfer a large sum of money into your account to hold until further arrangements can be made.
The source of this fund is as follows: We have leveraged IP that we originally thought belonged to our company in order to solicit a rather large monetary investment by the company Microsoft. We have in turn sued IBM for contractual violations and IP violations, as well as sending out thousands of threatening letters to various corporations and Linux vendors, in a move carefully designed to drive up our stock and put us in a position for our company to be purchased simultaneously. You see, this is a carefully executed plan modeled after what some might call, "a house of cards." We hope very much that we will collect from all parties involved, sell our stock before it tanks, and head for some fun in the sun, IF all goes as planned.
However, by virtue of our position as members of the SCO Group, we cannot acquire this money in our names.I have therefore, been delegated as a matter of trust by my colleagues of the panel to look for an overseas partner into whose account we would transfer the sum of US $21,500,000.00 (Twenty One Million, Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) Hence we are writing you this letter.
We have agreed to share the money thus:
1. 20% for the Account owner (you)
2. 70% for us (The officials)
3. 10% to be used in settling taxation and all local
and foreign expenses.
It is from the 70% that we wish to commence the importation business.
Please, note that this transaction is 100% safe and we hope to commence the transfer latest seven (7)banking days from the date of the receipt of the following information below
(a)company name and Beneficiary of account (b) Your Personal TeL. Number and Fax Number
(c) Bank account/Sort/ABA/Routing numbers were the funds will be transferred to
(d) Your Bankers Address, Telephone and Fax Number.
The above information will enable us write letters of claim and job description respectively. This way we will use your company's name to cover our paper trail. We are looking forward to doing this business with you and solicit your confidentiality in this transaction.Please acknowledge the receipt of this letter using the above tel/fax number. I will bring you into the complete picture of this pending project when I have heard from you.
Your faithfully,
Darl McBride
Ron Paul
Hilarious. The salon article was well done. My favorite line (it actually had me laugh out loud) has to be:
For folks keeping score, "SCO" doesn't stand for "Santa Cruz Operation" any longer, and it's to be pronounced not as three separate letters but as a word that rhymes with "fiasco."
Priceless
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin