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SCO NDA Online at LinuxJournal
shadowbearer writes "The full text of the SCO NDA is available here at LinuxJournal. IANAL, but my reading of it makes me understand all the industry "No way!" style comments. Here's a snippet:
"Dan Ravicher, an attorney who specializes in free software and open-source issues at the firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, said in an interview there are three key problems with the NDA. First, Ravicher said, "SCO can pick and choose among all its evidence" to show only the parts that back up the company's claims. "They're agreeing to let you see the half of the picture that they want you to see", he added.""
"Dan Ravicher, an attorney who specializes in free software and open-source issues at the firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, said in an interview there are three key problems with the NDA. First, Ravicher said, "SCO can pick and choose among all its evidence" to show only the parts that back up the company's claims. "They're agreeing to let you see the half of the picture that they want you to see", he added.""
Under Section 8 (Injunctive Relief), if I sign the NDA and then even threaten to reveal any of what SCO showed me:
SCO shall be entitled ... to preliminary and permanent
injunctive relief
Does this mean they can send me down for the dirt nap?
"IN CONSIDERATION of the mutual promises ..."
This contract was created by only one side of the deal. So it's worded precisely the way SCO wants it for their maximum advantage. Usually in a dispute courts will favour the party which didn't create the unilateral contract, but it looks like they've covered off that angle by choosing Utah.
Bilateral contracts, where the parties negotiate and both have input into the final wording signed, are much safer as a rule.
This is a one-sided contract by a known litigous company.
The person signing gives up all kinds of rights, is straitjacketed legally, and doesn't even make any money on this.
All the risk with no reward.
What could the counterparty to SCO possibly gain by agreeing to this?
I usually try to be ambivalent, but can't seem to find anything redeeming here.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
It is interesting to note that if what Ravichner is saying "the
NDA does not exclude information that the recipient obtained in
ways other than from SCO" is true, then signing the NDA could
prevent you from disclosing any information about SCO code even
if the court rules that SCO's distribution of the code (with
Linux) made it public.
So you could in theory be binding yourself to confidentiality
with regards to SCO's code even if (when?) the ruling goes
against SCO!!
As SCO has said, binding legal agreements are far more
compelling in a court of law than copyrights. I wouldn't touch
that agreement with a ten foot pole.
Unfortunately, as we knew it would be all along, this is just
another ploy by SCO. They won't give you full access to the
code, you can't talk about the specifics, they can bind you from
disclosing already public information, and to top it all off,
they can make you come to Utah to defend yourself in court.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
In other words, we can show you only what makes us look as if we have a case
I'm surprised that the NDA isn't under NDA itself.
SCO can only show you half the evidence now as they haven't made up the other half yet. Just be patient and play nice, boys.
Trolling is a art,
From what I read elsewhere, and I can't confirm it, but this is the 1st NDA you need to sign before seeing the real (2nd) NDA.
I'm not kidding.
P.S. SCO's stock is going up like crazy today. Big volume too.
Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, and half a picture is prolly worth about 500...
I say we use those 500 words and tell sco the many ways to "get bent".
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
and sent it to them next day mail. I signed it Linus Torvalds.
this is a big question i have: why show evidence if you're just gonna hush up those who see it? that doesn't make any sense to me if they really do have a case to make against linux.
----
http://www.hellection.com
Seeing part of the picture is better than none of the picture. Hopefully, we will have enough old men for an accurate interpretation of the elephant. Unfortunately, this is SCO's show and they can take their ball home: for now.
Kill the White Man
.. who hold back progress. Nothing like a bunch of crappy press to shelf that new OSS project for another year. Looks like well have to develop on the mainframe in COBOL74 again. Dicks.
And to think, I was having SCO news withdrawal.
This should fix me till Monday!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Symbol Last Sale Change Net / %
SCOX $ 8.48 1.88 +28.48%
do they know something we don't ?
What would happen if someone anonymously violated the NDA (say on slashdot)?
I didn't even read beyond the first section because that quote says it all right there.
fork.c, line 272
module.c, line 54
module.c lines 153-155
and most potentially damning, signal.c, line 430
There is a constant flood of people who keep asking why SCO does not just show everyone the evidence if they really have a claim. I mean the code already exists for the public to look at in the linux kernel, so why not just point out which lines that are talking about?
(for purposes of this discussion I am going to pretend SCO really has a legit claim and is not just doing this to get bought out)
Here is why: They want to collect royalties. They cannot collect royalties if the code in question is removed and replaced with "clean" code, which is what will happen within minutes of them announcing exactly which lines of code are in violation.
My guess is they would want all evidence to be secret, and never disclosed to the public else they lose their imagined "windfall" they plan to make via royalties on future sales of Linux distributions (or just extorting users of Linux directly).
Can you just see it? "To keep our IP secret we cannot tell you what code is infringing on our property, buy we will let you keep doing it for a small fee. Don't worry, we will tell you if the code is ever removed or changed and stop charging you"
Now before you scoff at this as the stupidest thing you have ever heard, think: Is this idea any sillier than everything else that has happened in this SCO fiasco so far?
Finkployd
This NDA will self-destruct in ten seconds.
Please don't take the fact that I'm on the same message board as this guy to mean that I'm "against us". I know with the Patriot act it's pretty easy to get labeled a terrorist, so I just want to cover my butt before the feds come busting down my door.
Thank you. God Bless America.
First they claim that open source developers could not possibly be smart enough to make Linux as good as it is, and then they expect people to accept their obscene NDA.
end of line
Never seen those jokes before.
Sit down and shut up.
Sure, I can program in C, but without an intimate knowledge of the Linux kernel, who the hell knows what goes on in there?
I once proved that God was a seven-headed Hydra by reading too much into a Shakespeare play I once read at school, so I'm wary of leaping to conclusions like this, but surely somebody at SCO must've realised that this would happen.
Bob has some interesting thoughts this week. The column is about how, IF there is UnixWare or OpenUnix code in Linux, it was most likely Caldera itself that put it there, not IBM. This isn't a new idea, but he provides quotes from Ransom Love at the time which sound pretty damning.
SCO/Caldera's motto at the time was "Unifying Unix with Linux for Business". To the extent that wasn't just hype, how can they blame anyone but themselves for migrating their UNIX code into Linux?
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
How the hell did Eric Rudolph get access to a computer?
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
The whole NDA thing is a pretty rediculous farce. The fundamental principle is that SCO does not want it revealed what code in Linux is in question. Since that code is already public knowledge, if they let you publish information "obtained from other sources" you can basically publish the relevant code.
:-(
SCO also doesn't want to have to turn over everything they got. They basically want to just throw down their Unix trade secrets and Linux source code, and have people draw their own conclusions. A contract with more flexibility could open them up to having to share a lot of other things related to the case.
As for the state of Utah clause, it's pretty typical for a contract to have some state governing its enforcement, and typically the home state of the company drafting the contract. Sadly, they aren't a Delaware corp.
I think SCO is as evil as the next guy, and I think the NDA thing is a red herring, but I have to say I can't see how else they could have written this NDA without compromising secrets that they obviously feel they need to protect.
sigs are a waste of space
I read on CNET that they have a new councel from the Canopy group. What happend to the David Boise looser?
IANAL = I am not a lawyer. Fragging = Killing someone with a fragmentation grenade, usually. Vietnam connotations. Try google next time.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
I believe it's I am not a lawyer.
At BBC, theregister etc there is a story about Sendo suing Orange over patent infringement on the Orange SPV Smartphony. The link is at Sendo vs Orange
It seems M$ should have bought a licence to Sendos patents before giving it away to HTC and others.
Since the lawsuit is directed at IBM, why doesn't IBM just do a diff AIXSOURCE LINUXSOURCE and publish it? It seems to me that is all anyone has to do to bury this once and for all.
"Ski" from DG/UX was a pretty cute game, too...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Usually IANAL means I Am Not A Lawyer however it must be taken in the context of the discussion. If you're discussing mowing lawns it might mean I am not a lawnmower. Various perversions of the original crop up all the time.
Fragging refers to killing one's opponent in the first person shooter doom. It might have come out before that or might be an old military term but Doom was where I was exposed to that term.
G
Could somebody who has contributed to the Linux kernel explicitly revoke SCO's license to redistribute it and then counter-sue to get them to stop? It would seem that SCO has lost their right to distribute the kernel by attempting to add restrictions on top of the GPL (which the GPL forbids) and that as a result somebody who owns part of the kernel could enforce a revokation of their ability to use the GPL'ed code. Wouldn't it be great if all the kernel contributors did this at once? SCO would quickly be drowning in countersuits. (Maybe we could even see the headline In Soviet Russia, Linus sues SCO!)
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how realistic of an approach this would be.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
4. COMPLAINING. Employee shall not, upon leaving the office, complain, celebrate, share or disclose any details of any day at work or the disposition (good or bad day) of any day. Further SCO reserves the right to alter the empoyee's view of any working day based on whether SCO believes it to be a good or bad day at work.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
What is IANAL?
I Am Not A Lawyer.
If you take advice marked thus and get into legal trouble, you are entirely on your own. Mind you, anybody who takes legal advice from the Web/Usenet is a workd class fool anyway.
Also, what is fragging?
Literally, killing with a fragmentation grenade - a means occasionally used to get rid of disliked officers.NCOs in the Vietnam war.
Figuratively - destroying with great force.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
You guessed it - Stupid SCO tricks!
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
You can find most internet/tech related jargon on one of the various Jargon File Nodes floating about the net.
:)
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/ for the to lazy to google.
To strive, to seek, but not to yield
Disclosure: I have a short position in SCOX.
Permission granted to anybody to use this text for any purpose. I would particularly like it if journalists asked these questions of SCO executives.
Questions for SCO
2003-06-05
===
Did SCO sign a contract with IBM for Project Monterey?
(if yes) Will you file that contract as an exhibit in your suit against IBM?
(if no) Why did you undertake a large joint development project with IBM with no contract?
===
Your UNIX contract rights depend on a contract with Novell.
Are you going to file your contract with Novell as an exhibit in your suit against IBM?
Are you going to make your contract with Novell available to the press?
===
Who has signed your NDA and received copies of confidential materials?
If the identities of all the NDA recipients are confidential, can you tell us how many there are?
===
Have you provided legal notice to any person or organization which distributes Linux software of any specific source code lines that you claim infringe on your intellectual property?
"Confidential Information" means any and all data;snip. They don't clarify that so that is all that I really need to see, if you sign the NDA you might as well never even say the word kernel, or for that matter you might as well never talk about anything relating to programming or computers. Anything you say afterwards could be used against you in a very malicious nature by SCO.
The Jargon Dictionary
What if this is a big plan on the part of Big Blue? What if they are paying SCO to bring this legal challenge so that questions about IP in Linux can be addressed in court? IBM gets a free and clear Linux to push against MS Windows, Sun Solaris, Apple OS X, etc. And SCO gets money or is bought out... everyone gets what they want.
Or, maybe this is an attempt by IBM to take over Linux; be the only 'authorized' Linux distributer. Anyone else see the possibilities here????
He's probably creating a buzz by buying a little bit which makes it appear as if there's a demand and driving prices up, meanwhile, selling twice as much as he bought.
A sucker is born every minute.
as soon as it get's into a court they cant play these stupid games.
The ENTIRE sourcecode will have to be revealed in court. or they need to just give up.
I know that judges are corruptable, but they aren't idiots.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here is why: They want to collect royalties. They cannot collect royalties if the code in question is removed and replaced with "clean" code, which is what will happen within minutes of them announcing exactly which lines of code are in violation.
All right. Let's say SCO does have a legit claim and does want to collect royalties. Even so, at one point or another, they'll have to reveal the "code in question" to, at the very least, the parties involved in the lawsuit, if not to the general public as well. If they never reveal said code, then how the hell can they prove that it was copied? That would be akin to accusing someone of stealing without even specifying that which was stolen.
Now, even when they do reveal said code, they are claiming that damges have already taken place. So, even replacing the code with "clean" code will not suffice to pay for past damages, though it would prevent future infractions. If SCO wins, the judge would likely rule that either the code be removed or end users of Linux pay royalties to SCO. Again, this is only a speculation; I am certain, however, that SCO will be unable to force Linux users to keep their "illegal" version of Linux so that they would have to pay royalties.
In any case, I and many others feel that SCO's claims are bogus and that they've no chance in court. Even if the code is, in fact, copied, it still remains unclear whether or not SCO really has the rights to it and, even if they do, whether or not average Linux users are in violation.
I woulnd't sign this with SCO's president's hand holding the pen, and the VP moving it!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
From the article: "They could sue me and make me go to Utah to prove I didn't disclose confidential information" Speaking as someone unfortunate enough to live in Utah... *shudder* Well, at least if a case did make it to Utah, the local theocracy probably wouldn't take a "controlling" interest in the affair, and you might get a fair trial. (Hey, it's not all bad-- one advantage of living in Utah is that I at least theoretically have access to the same supply of sweet, sweet crack that the guys at SCO are apparently smoking.) - Blenderfish
Why can't IBM, RedHat and the other big dog Linux companies have their people compare all the past and present Linux code against SCO's code which was available freely until recent retraction. :) might do the job. It will be cheaper than legal fees.
plus i am sure, you can stumble upon the System V code on the net. Who knows it might be code stolen from Berkely by Att. Some intelligent perl scripts running on a Beowulf cluster
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I suspect this won't be a "growth stock" for very long.
That's a really freakin good idea. It would be a little more complicated than that, of course, but but not all that difficult really. Surely they've already done that internally... well I hope they have. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world now, but I'll admit I hadn't thought of it until I read the post I'm quoting.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
No, the term fragging was used long before Doom. I was always told that the term appeared during the Viet Nam war when GI's used to remove officers they disliked by tossing a fragmentation device (aka grenade) to the officer. Note that there was an instance of this during the recent war in Iraq.
Don Dugger
"Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale
Because they love typing ANAL in uppercase. It is creepy.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I agree.
Why in the world would ANYONE agree to something like this?
To gain some bizzar form of personal satisfaction?
Maybe to "take one" out of some sick sense of undying love for SCO?
It sure isn't like you can, even remotely, help get Linux "cleaned up". Indeed, if Linux were to happen to "fix" anything, even by an accidental change, SCO would like come after the NDA signitories like rabbid utonian dogs.
Anyone playing along with this whole NDA charade, in the smallest way, is simply paying homage to some scheme or other of SCO's. For NOTHING of value in return.
Why do this? SCO is a scoundrel. Don't gift any value or meaning to their cause.
BEST CASE REASON --- You agree with SCO and just want to check before you try and negotiate a license fee for your copies of Linux.
But why? Your risk doesn't even start until SCO demonstrates a case. Even then, you don't have to pay -- you have to take affirmative steps to correct the problem. Why volunteer fees, in advance of SCO even having a licenseing program available?
BEST BUSINESS REASON -- You work for Microsoft and your bonus next year is based on your offering your services under the NDA "to protect the God, Flag, and Motherhood of IP in general".
Stupid is what stupid does. That's probably the biggest risk in Free Software. Any fool can step up "on behalf of "the community"" and make claims like SCO's look good.
SCO wants to show the court that XXXX people believed enough in SCOs claims to investigate them at considerable risk to themselves. This is about a Trade Secret, after all, and if what SCO has is that awe inspiring then there must be something to it.
Quick quiz: Who was it that said "If they kill me, promise me you'll carry my body over the border to Wyoming, cause I wouldn't want to be caught dead in Utah"?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Is it just me or does the large amount of shares the directors of SCO received (~30,000 at $0.001/ea per director) in late February of this year look like insider trading? I mean, they had to know at this time where their future lay.
Fragging came from the method whereby disaffected troops in Viet Nam rid themselves of officers with whom they had a MAJOR problem. You just rolled a FRAGmentation grenade into his hooch in the middle of the night.
Those of us who wore green suits and little metal bars during that era don't care too much for the term.
utter rubbish
7. No Obligation to Disclose. SCO has no obligation under this Agreement to disclose to RECIPIENT any Confidential Information which SCO elects to withhold."
No way! They want a sock puppet, not an honest analysis of the problems.
The scope of the complaint is exactly equal to whatever length they feel the need to go to extract the amount of money they feel they can get from Microsoft/IBM/anyone else. And since Microsoft is inclined to fund a long-term effort, tying the scope down would limit the payoff.
I tell you I do no kernel coding, and I am familiar with C. This is a severely restrictive agreement, but doesn't it just make you wonder what the hell they have? Is this all a big bluff, or is there something that actually is damning? I can think of compelling reasons why SCO would be so restrictively secretive in both cases. Of course, IANAL, but it seems I would be tempted to sign just to see what the heck its all about, the same way we are tempted to look at an accident on the road, sure we are giving up attention to driving, and may possibly see something we actually don't want to, but we just can't resist.
I can see why everyone is saying not to sign it, it is terrible, but don't you just wish we could find someone to bite the bullet?
Am I the only one not convinced that SCO is entirelly bluffing and once the time comes for the flop they will have to fold?
IANAP but I did some hacking on C64 basic before..
SCO very powerfull. the SCO first to courts the IBM. it is bringing much unknown and the sneaky.
even now i know US goverment will attacks the IBM at the bringing behest of the SCO. the equity of the inspected is to devalue in the very soon will be not good. not good!! the IBM will suddenly and fall fast!!
the SCO is now even now there with you and is very very bastard!!
Seeing part of the picture is better than none of the picture.
How do we know that SCO hasn't grabbed the code they show us straight from the Linux kernel source tree, circa 1995?
The only way they can prove their case is to demonstrate that a source tree including the offending files compiles to a binary identical to one from a date before those features were added to Linux.
Of course, that doesn't even begin to address the fact that different programmers often solve the same issues in very similar ways...but then, we know they never had a case to begin with anyway.
You should create an NDA saying you won't say anything
at all in public and sign it to whoever's in charge
of SCO. That would show them.
Anyone else getting demoralized about this whole thing?
I know in my heart it will be litigated out successfully.
I know I wasn't the original author of this OS.
I know my job means that I have to use Win32 mostly for business purposes.
Still, this is eating me up, the whole SCO thing. The few Linux boxes I have are like a hope of throwing off the Microsoft yoke at work, and these bozos are threatening to take that all away.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Now we got an idea of what a pact with satan looks like... breed this NDA with MS EULA...
1. Because they want to make it clear that I Am Not A Lawyer.
2. They might be admitting that I-ANAL!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
To the extent this isn't moot, insofar as whoever signs this NDA and sees the disputed source code, cannot say anything about what he has seen. Then, what is up with this partial source? Why isn't SCO wanting to show all of it?
Let us now assume that someone will be sufficiently bold and/or daft so as to actually go ahead and sign this NDA, and thus get to see this fabled source code.
SCO shows some part of the code, it is anybody's guess what or how much it will be, but there will be some nevertheless. There are two possible outcomes:
Either the code seen is discovered to be infringed, and SCO has a case, although whoever saw this cannot say so, upon his head be it.
Or the code is not infringed. The professional who has seen the code still may not tell, but this time there's really nothing to say either: some other code in there could still be infringed and the only conclusion is that time has been wasted.
Either way, this comes out slightly less than useful. No wonder not many have bothered.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
This whole SCO-thing reminds me of an old Gary Larson strip where a cowboy in a gunfight is told something like "If you get shot, don't just die! Be dramatic! Jump around screaming or something, then die!"
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
This thing needs to end. There will be no winning party in the whole trial. IBM will lose, SCO will lose and sadly Linux already started to lose!
The only winning party in this whole nightmare will be Microsoft. If anybody at SCO has any consideration for Linux or Open Source they should STOP NOW and concentrate their resources on something productive! Even if SCO will win the trial, they will win rights on something that won't be worth anything in a very short time. Linux is alive because it is open source. DON'T SHOOT THE PENGUIN!
DO NOT SIGN THE NDA!!! Not a single person! If you sign it, SCO will have "expert witnesses" at their disposal. If no one signs it, I assume that the court will appoint someone with appropriate credentials. IANAL.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It is amusing (in the tragic/comic sense) to me that what was originally designed to protect honorable companies from dishonorable people has become a weapon wielded by dishonorable companies. This looks like a pretty standard NDA, and a lot less onerous than most software EULAs (even those from supposedly honorable companies like Ximian).
My favorite piece:
11. Waiver. Any waiver of, or promise not to enforce, any right under this Agreement shall not be enforceable unless evidenced by a writing signed by the Party making said waiver or promise.
Translation - when the blow-dried business weenie / marketroid says, "Oh don't worry about this, it's just for our protection, we would only ever use it defensively." - he's lying. By the time the ink is dry there will be someone checking SourceForge, the USPTO, and the Library of Congress for your name to see what they can hijack.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
While an "NDA for NDA" wouldn't work as several others pointed out would copyright do the trick? I know that some legal texts are copyrightprotected (bad as it is) and i am wondering when we will see copyright-notices under contracts like that NDA, just to prevent them being publicly sneezed at.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
> P.S. SCO's stock is going up like crazy today. Big volume too.
... i wish my virtual cash wasnt virtual :;)
this is unreal,
just look at it,... +29%!
Bottom Line: buying options contracts has a predetermined downside: the cost of the contract. On the good side there is no limit to the upside; the more the price of a stck moves in the direction that you guessed the more money that you make. On the other side of the story is that of selling contracts. There is a limited upside: the cost of the contract. There is an unlimited downside though; the more the price of a stock moves against you the more you loose. There is not really any way out of selling a contract except the expiration date. That said you can buy an options contract that is in the opposite direction from the one that you previously sold and stop the bloodletting there by essentially making money on one instrument while loosing it on another at the same time. The general rule of thumb, the reason that there are about as many people selling contracts, either puts or calls, as there are people that want to buy them is that 90% of the contracts will expire worthless.
There is a major differences in options contracts in Europe and the US: when they can be exercised. In the US options can be bought and sold at any time during the contract. In Europe contracts can only be sold on the date that they mature. Either way they are priced by a method known as The Blask Scholes method. These two economists won a Noble Prize for developing these equations and the markets have never been the same since. The price that they come up with is based on many different things: the current price, the volume of stock, the amount of stock in play, and how fast the price is moving, among others.
Back to selling stock short. The borrowing of stock is arranged by brokerage houses so you need not worry about that detail but if the price goes up the brokerage house can and will demand that you have enough cash in your account to cover the margin between the current price and that which you bought it at. If you don't have enough margin the brokerage house will do whatever it thinks is necessary to cover their ass as anything that you cannot cover is their loss. That often includes liquidating everything that you own. Just make sure that you have the required margin!!!
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
I will be reporting this to SCO so they can take legal action against the party who posted this.
I imagine that they are being careful. What if they show you something and you say, "hey I wrote that!" And that is released under GPL.
;) Unless they audit their code monthly, which I am sure they do not, they can't be sure themselves they are not violating the GPL or some other license or copyright.
And of course they can not show all the code. They know that programmers are lazy sometimes and simply copy code they should not have. (or bring code from their last job). I know I keep a personal copy of everything I write
How's this for a conspiracy theory...
There has already been some debunking of the theory that Microsoft is funding SCO, so I've got two new candidates. How about the RIAA and MPAA?
It's all based on the issue of "economy of scarcity" vs "economy of abundance". The latter is what Open Source offers, and some would think is the natural way of handing most IP matters. All that is needed is a business model to make sure artists/authors/inventors get paid, so they'll keep creating.
But the prime thrust of the RIAA/MPAA (and BSA, for that matter) has been to keep IP in the mode of "economy of scarcity", because under a scheme focused on artists/authors/inventors, they're left out. So far music, movies, etc have remained under a scarcity model.
However, there is a strong and growing amount of software that remains in the "economy of abundance" model. As long as Open Source exists and thrives, the siren call of an alternative business model beckons to artists/authors/inventors, especially those who feel at the short end of the stick from media conglomerates.
So in order to retain scarcity for the long haul, it's necessary to kill/discredit abundance. SCO is now at the forefront of this.
I don't know if this is an attempt at humor, or not.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
and sent it to them next day mail. I signed it Linus Torvalds.
;-)
Well I sign all my mail "Rob Malda", especially my email - it seems to keep my own email address free of spam
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
All this talk of SCO making money from licencing anyone who distributes the linux kernel (once they have proved that it contains their IP) depends on the fact that the kernel is a binary, which it is not (always), it is a collection of source file. If a distribution doesn't contain kernel binaries then SCO would have to say which files contained their IP.
Hypotheitcally if I wrote a program that made a request for each kernel source file seperately from a web server and then built the binary for me - could SCO sue the web server owner, saying they let me have some of SCO's IP, without saying which files? Each request to the server is different and only a few violate SCO's IP.
Tom.
DO NOT TALK ABOUT SCO NDA
http://bike.stu.ph/rides - free GPS routes available for Garmin, Magellan, GPX and Google Earth
They have an ongoing lawsuit with IBM over this. Since when is it a good idea to broadcast your evidence all over the place months before it goes to trial?
Sheesh, people, I'm glad none of you are lawyers for the plaintiff.
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?
Remember that bandwidth costs money, so LET'S NOT ALL DOWNLOAD THIS AT ONCE! Maybe someone can set up a mirror.
Try this interesting Linux file:
http://www.sco.com/images/pdf/eserver/not-any-more -eserver_sysadmin.pdf (4 MB)
They also distribute Linux software like Mozilla:
ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/scolinux/server/4.0/updates/ SRPMS/mozilla-1.0.1-38.src.rpm (28 MB)
Doesn't this show that they are still in the Linux business?
Again, DO NOT SLASHDOT THEM. Remember that they are in a tough situation and need all the money they can get for the numerous lawsuits they are launching. Wouldn't want their servers to go down or something because of the Slashdot effect...
;)
Sure, its illegal. But I don't think that it can be stopped.
Disclamer: I DO NOT have the balls to do this. I wish I did. Maybe if I lived in another country. My puny little balls make me fearful of nearly every legal risk. I don't speed, and I don't disclose NDA protected material. I won't sign this NDA, 'cause I'm scared like a little dog.
What if, say, John Doe, signed the NDA, got the documentation, scanned it in, removed all personally identifiable charateristics, and then uploaded it to freenet?
Just a thought. Any of you black hats with big, titanium bullet-proof balls willing to do this? (Note, these are figurative balls. I know MANY females with bigger balls than me. This is not designed to be misogynistic. Any flames will end up burning my balls, and won't be responded to, because I'll be cradling my balls in ice )
Specifically trouble-making types---seems like you could cause SCO a lot of pain and trouble by pulling a stunt like this, and if you were a lot smarter than me (maybe not that much smarter), you could do it and not get caught.
Just my 2 cents.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Looking at the NDA, looks like only people who are friendly with SCO will dare sign it. Then they will tell people that the Linux and IBM violated SCO's IP.
I wonder if the other half might contain Linux code that's crept into SCO? Mod me down for the consipracy mongering if you want, but there's got to be some reason SCO is behaving this strangely.
--Jasin NataelTrue science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
When it cannot have any possible damage to your case, and would only go towards increasing your stock value. Something which I just realized is that share holders of SCO could argue that the executives are actually depressing the stock price since if they released the evidence and it actually "proved" their case the stock would go through the roof. Thus they have a fiduciary responsibility to reveal that code NOW not later.
Look, if they've been harmed, than they've been harmed and there is nothing that IBM or anyone else can do. The evidence must be presented before trial anyway to give IBM time to prepare a defense. With IBMs stable of lawyers that time period will be as long as they need. You can't just walk in to court and say "hey here's the evidence, now show today that we're wrong or pay up!" This isn't a case on Perry Masonary. There will be no surprise evidence in this case.
The only thing gained by not clearly disclosing which lines of code have supposedly been infringed is continued uncertainty and continued exposure in the media. In fact because it can be argued that SCO is not disclosing this code and thus not actively trying to mitigate harm that they will get a less favorable view in front of the judge.
Furthermore, at the risk of repeating myself, as long as they hold out for no good* legal reason they may be implicitly agreeing to the GPL'ing of the supposedly infringing code.
* since nothing is gained by holding out, and the code must be presented long before the trial goes to court to give IBM a chance to respond the current ramblings of SCO have no basis in legal fact or fiction, e.g. "no good legal reason".
Sure information wants to be free, but how much are you willing to pay for the packaging?
That would be like a hundred lines of code. From what I understand (from reading slashdot) they only have about 5. That coud be why they're only offering 5 NDAs.
Got it right.
> SCO is obligated to disclose the supposed "infringing" code in order to reduce any possible harm.
Nope. You are simply wrong.
"Harm", for SCO, started the moment IBM commited the act SCO claims (if, indeed, IBM did the deed at all). The "Harm" may well continue into the future if the information IBM released cost SCO marketing value into the future.
SCO is under no obligation to "reduce" harm. It simply can't collect on harm it could have prevented.
In this case, SCO will hold that releasing the "secret" they are trying to protect would be more harmful than letting the market move on as it were for a short while longer. Thus they might claim they ARE trying to mitigate the greatest of multiple harms in this case.
> Secondly by not disclosing the supposed infringing code they could be viewed to be implicitly agreeing to it's disemination via the GPL license.
Again wrong. No such thing as "implicit" agreements when it comes to Copyrights, Patents, or Trade Secrets. If it isn't explicity granted by the owner, there is simply no agreement binding on the owner.
The GPL plays into all this because SCO (or its predecessors, successors, or assigns) have released versions of Linux they claim contain their secrets. Doing that was an explicit and binding grant by the owner of the IP.
> They can't simply say that they are being harmed and will be harmed in the future therefore everyone give us money.
At least you got that one sort of right. But you've still missed the target.
Damages happen when you mis-appropriate IP without the owners permission AND act in bad faith.
IBM signed a paper that acknowledged SCO's "property". Releasing that property was an act of bad faith. IBM pays. Now, if SCO doesn't give IBM the means to "fix" that wrong, then SCO may have stopped the clock when it comes to damages or reduced the damages overall.
Red Hat distributes Linux under a good faith undertstanding that the owner (Linus) permits said distribution. Red Had cannot be held for damages unless 1) they had reason to belive Linux was misrepresenting his ownership interest; OR 2) SCO demonstrates they have a rightful ownership interest of their own AND Red Hat fails to abide by SCOs terms.
"Damages" start the moment you know, or should have known, you were misappropriating another's IP.
The Day SCO demonstrates a legal interest in Linux is the day YOU must start paying royalties to them for using it. Or, that is the day you must stop using it altogether. If you do neither that day, damages start.
This has been discussed before. Just because they show their evidence, and even if all the infringing code is replaced tomorrow, that does not excuse the infringement. All the evidence is still there on thousands of CDs and web sites. For example, if somebody steals your car, and the police catch them, just because you get your car back doesn't excuse the thief.
It would seem to me, that if SCO plans on showing any gpl'd linux code other than what they claim is stolen from them, they would be violating the gpl by putting restrictions upon releasing gpl source code to binaries that they have distributed.
The FSF should jump on their case about distributing linux binaries for years and now trying to get out of showing the code for free. It would seem that this NDA couldn't cover any code released under the gpl, just code that SCO has in their propriatory unix product so anyone seeing both, could say what part of linux is in question.
I heard this song on the radio today and thought "This should be the SCO anthem!".
In the words of the great Don Henley:
Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody's pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry
We can do "The Innuendo"
We can dance and sing
When it's said and done we haven't told you a thing
We all know that Crap is King
Give us dirty laundry!
The whole thing applies...
If you don't have something nice to sig, then don't sig anything at all.
Boies worked for IBM as representation against the Feds some years ago. Now he's attempting to work for IBM's adversary. This is blatant attorney conflict-of-interest, and pretty much banned by every legal bar association on the planet. Both SCO and Boies are so freaking stupid that they didn't realize this little problem until now. Lawyers have been known to lose huge malpractice suits when they negligently take on a client who is an obvious C.O.I. case, they've even been known to get disbarred because of it.
That the NDA would be unacceptable was so predictable it's not even funny. Only M$ and SCO shills would sign that thing and SCO is going to say stupid things about free software advocates who refuse to put themselves at the mercy of the state of Utah. Next, they will plant chunks of code someplace and say the anarchists put it there.
Fuck you SCO.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My Favorite, from the other night. Put the following in the file get_sco.sh and then "chmod u+x get_sco.sh":
This will download their entire FTP site (toPut it in a loop if you really want to hurt them:
Report back when the site's down.This works on the bash shell, which is the default under Cygwin on Windows -- so Windows users can help also.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I'd buy put-options, since i think that SCO shares will soon drop below $1. Another tactic might be to buy shares and a lot more put options. That way if SCOX experiences any drastic changes, be it up or down, you win. It will be quite interesting to watch SCOX when IBMs Unix-license with SCO expires and SCOs bluff not to renew the license is called.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Moron or a shill. They want to be able to discredit anyone who would say they are full of shit. "They don't have all the information." they can say. So what exactly are they showing? What's the point? Their shills can say, "I've seen the code and SCO is dead to rights." without having to prove a thing.
It's SCO precictable. Expect loads more BS to flow before these morons go away.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In other words, "This Agreement means what we intend it to mean, and not what it actually says."
I wouldn't touch it with a 10 ft pole.
{Not that I actually have a 10 ft pole, and I didn't intend to imply by listing a 10 ft pole in the text that the text has anything to do with an actual 10 ft pole, and you agree that
You can't take the sky from me!
I have followed this story since it broke. Right now, I'm none the wiser. The publication of the NDA is not really revealing - it's what you'd expect given the rhetoric.
Nor is SCO's suit against Novell the real issue. IMHO, what's needed is for one of the 1,500 leading companies to whom SCO sent their "Stop Using Linux Or Else" messages to pony up, get some quality IP attorneys and throw it right back at SCO.
Picture it. Acme Widgets Inc respond to SCO with a clear message that they will NOT stop using Linux unless SCO can provide evidence of their claim.
Now, bluff firmly called, SCO have to put up or shut up. Acme Widgets Inc have to convince a judge to force SCO to identify the code they claim (not trivial). And somehow (and IANAL) this has GOT to get into the public domain - not SCO's code but the GPL's Linux Kernel sections claimed by SCO.
Once this happens, the uber-geeks who gave us Linux can replace the SCO sections with newly-developed code and we can all go about our business. Given the community's sparkling record on patch turnaround time, this could be concluded rapidly enough to offer Acme grounds for a dismissal.
C'mon Acme - go for it!
I believe SCO are trying to protect their IP - it's their methods which are truly offensive. Even if this case blows over, does the Open Source community want contributions from people like this?
The same might be said for IBM's silence on the issue - as Edmund Burke (IIRC) put it "evil will prevail when good men do nothing".
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
Thought this was interesting. If you look up www.sco.com on netcraft this is what you get.
The site www.sco.com is running Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.0.3pl1 on Linux. FAQ
What, you think it's gonna take until the trial for this info to leak? I give it an hour once the first people outside of SCO see the "proof" :)
TPF
Why? Well, going long (buying) stock is good when it's going up. Going short (selling before buying, by borrowing the stock from your broker -- you need a margin account for it) makes money when the stock goes down.
Options make money within a certain timeframe on stock moves. Back when I did have money, late 1998 I believe, I thought Dell would move but wasn't sure which direction, so I bought both puts and calls, in equal dollar amounts. The stock moved up, and I made money on the calls and lost 100% on the puts. However, the amount I made was something like 700% (God I miss the 90s!), so the bet paid off bigtime.
Right now, either SCO has something up their sleeve (which the evidence, such as there is, doesn't seem to support) or they're a fuckedcompany and will be sleeping with the fishes before long. One year is plenty of time for this to pan out (if I was more of a gambler, I'd say 3 months).
Dammit, I said all that and turns out there are no options for SCOX stock. Oh well. Here's the current options for DELL in case you want to learn more (the CBOE has more info in their links -- see the Learning Center at the top right).
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
People looking at the source code doesn't help a thing as they can't find out the source of the source just by looking at the source. All you can find out is, "Hey, they really look similar, I wonder why?"
What needs to be communicated, publicly, is the exact files and lines of code in Linux sources that allegedly violate SCO's Intellectual Prescious. However, even then the Linux community can do only half of the job in determining the source of the source. The other half is determining who wrote the SCO code and when. That requires a police investigation -- interrogations of old or former SCO developers and such.
The review of the allegedly violating code has no legal meaning. Only what happens in court matters.
And only a complete idiot would sign such an NDA with a company that has gone crazy suing others for NDA violations. Only write an NDA manufactured by a court dealing with the matter, when you have been called as a witness.
IANAL, etc.
I heard from a Marine that served two tours over there that they would just shoot annoying Louie's in the back. Nevermind sneaking around at night with the grenades.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Looking through these files, it seems as though some SCO employees have contributed code to Linux directly, and some other code was lifted more or less directly from SCO source code. I don't know what the legal status of any of this code is, but it could make a good starting point for taking a serious look at SCO's claims.
I also don't know what impact it would have on the kernel if all this code had to be removed or rewritten. Everytime I've tried to hack on the kernel, I've managed to get completely lost.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
They've certainly removed themselves effectively from the pool of OSS developers.
I'd like to see it go further than this. I'd like to see the GPL amended so that the code can be used by anybody except employees of SCO and their customers.
Unfortunately, as I'm not a programmer (and as a result I'm not overly familiar with the GPL), I don't know how feasible such a move would be, but it would certainly be a cute case of tit for tat.
SCO threatens Linux customers, Linux threatens SCO's customers right on back -- and eventually we'll see who has history on their side.
Caldera bought the SCO name and properties, and then changed their name. These shots are being called from the former Caldera's headquarters.
ESR perhaps? And propose that. As it stands now, they'll never get any witnesses that are "impartial" or on the other side of the accusations. ACINAL, but I'd think that whether or not such people can be called as witnesses having seen the code would be of crucial importance as to how any sane judge (perhaps that's where I go wrong ;-) would weigh these "expert witnesses".
They probably think NDA stands for No Details Available.
I signed the NDA, and have seen the code.
:) I'm only a lowly AC.
Do SCO's claims have merit? Sorry I'not allowed to tell you.
Just kidding
However I do think this type of course is likely to be the case for the any real analyst who does sign their NDA. If you look at the code and then publicly reach a conclusion one way or the other, you are practically pinning a big "sue me" sign on your back, especially if the court's final judgement is not 100% in indetical with what you say. If you say the code infringes and the court says no, IBM and Linux-friends come after you. If you say it doesn't, you get a letter from SCO's lawyers.
Imagine that... a chance to use P2P for good....
In order to reduce bandwidth usage of both the Slashdot infrastructure
and Slashdot readers' internet conections, when replying to articles covering
anything legalese, just leave out the ubiquitous "IANAL, but", and only
in case you are a lawyer, use "IAL, therefore" or "IAL, hencewith".
Thank you.
my
My wife and children frequently refer to me as a soul-less bastard. I'll sign the NDA. What do I have to lose?
The middle mind speaks!
#!/bin/sh1 DL/volution_manager_1.1_eval.iso -O /dev/null
while true
do wget http://www2.caldera.com/download_files/049-000-00
done
eliminate spaces in the url first.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Originaly, fraging was throwing a fragmentation grenade into someones tent while they were sleeping, the someone was usually a superior Office or NCO. Grenades leave little forensic evidence that could be collected without a FBI crime-lab, so the murderer usualy got away scott-free. This was quickly expanded to include shooting people durring fire-fights, which is often difficult to seperate from freindly-fire accidents.
Military leadership is the art and science of telling a group of people who out-number you, and are armed with pistols, rifles, and grenades to do things that could very easily get them killed or maimed, and having them do it.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
They control what you get. What makes you think that everybody gets the same code? They could give different people different parts of the code (the "important" part, as well as some "identifying" code). Then, they can tell who posted it.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Let me see - SCO are claiming that the Linux code (available to anyone) has been copied from their code. ... ... look mum, these two screens of code are the same!
SCO are happy to show their code to anyone who signs an agreement agreeing not to use it.
But they claim their code is the same as the Linux code - which is available to anyone
So all you get to see is two pieces of code, supoposedly the same. It doesn't sound too interesting
Sounds pretty boring.
"Cats like plain crisps"
How does one know that SCO has not manufactured the evidence by taking Linux source code and wrapping it in their style of comments just so they can compare Linux source code to the artificial evidence? Considering the amount of time that elapsed between the date of SCO's allegations and the date of their announcement that they will let people see their evidence and the restrictive nature of the NDA it makes me wonder that they aren't trying to a "Wag The Dog" maneuver.
"The ENTIRE sourcecode will have to be revealed in court."
Not quite. The code can be shown to the judge "in camra" ie., in his chambers.
This NDA is obviously a problem. As an alternative, would SCO be willing to reveal who their "experts" are who assert code violations, and make them available for questioning?
It should be instructive to ask these experts about the conditions around their claim:
Word-for-word copying? (If so, how much?)
Copying of ideas?
How about Slashdot preparing a top-ten list of questions for them?
"SCO can pick and choose among all its evidence" to show only the parts that back up the company's claims. "They're agreeing to let you see the half of the picture that they want you to see"
Just means they haven't quite finished falsifying the evidence yet....
Seriously, though..Linux code, as we all know, is freely perusable by anyone who can be bothered..SCO's code is only viewable on SCO's say-so.
What's to stop them presenting a bunch of code that they've worked up to "prove" their point?
Anyone who called them out over a lie would clearly have been ferreting in their precious source, and thus eligible for exile on Pluto under the DMCA!
Who needs evidence? We've got Lawyers! Stall 'em until we can make some up!
Informationweek.com reports that one of the first analysts to see SCO's "proof" (under NDA) did find matches between SCO and Linux code
... usually these things end up collapsing in on themselves.
Larua Didio concluds that SCO code was copied into Linux. Here is the article:j html?articleID=10300314
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.
McBunkum has admitted to exactly this in the IBM-buy-us-out article:
Is there any doubt left that the judge needs to smack this guy down like the liar and FUDster that he is?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Not my favorite flavor of UNIX, that's for sure.
they wouldn't have been clever enough to figure that one out by themselves...
After all the Novell hoopla, SCO does apparently own UNIX copyrights but not the patents - according to a 1996 contract amendment.
Heh. That AC napped you on the ^H. That was sweet. Dude: You're gettin a Dell!
After all the hoopla about whether SCO or Novell owns the UNIX copyrights - News.com is reporting that a recently rediscovered contract between Novell and SCO dated 1996, seems to indicate that SCO do infact own the copyright (but not patents) for UNIX.
Meanwhile over at InformationWeek, the first analyst to report back on seeing SCO's "proof" under NDA, says she did find matches between Linux and SCO code. Laura DiDio, a Yankee Group analyst says she finds this "very damaging" - although of course Penguin lovers will probably be already be speculating about other possible reasons for any possible matches.
Who cares if you see source?
Saying: "Looky looky! Same bits!" proves nothing.
You have to look at source tree A and source tree B and the commit history with dates, and then you at least know who included it in the source tree first... still, *that* proves nothing.
SCO must show the provenance (sp?) of the code in question, with a prerponderance of the evidence. Both A and B may have copied code from the same text book, same manufacturer's ap note, same whiteboard in a CS lecture, whatever. Unless SCO can show that they had it first, and that there is little likelihood it could have come from someplace else, only then do they have a case.
Looking at source without commit histories is pointless. Looking at commit histories does not establish where the source came from.
So, looking at source under NDA proves what, again?
Here's a thought for you: presumably SCO source is a little harder to come by than Linux source.
Who's to say that any duplicated code wasn't Linux code misappropriated by SCO?
Or code (and according to recent stories, comments) from *BSD?
It would be a very twisted way to try to turn a GPL violation into a profit... and recent crud from SCO has certainly been twisted and warped in every other way possible.
Some of your statements are inaccurate;
âoebuying options contracts has a predetermined downside: the cost of the contractâ â" since you buy something it has its price but why is that disadvantage in buying options? It isnâ(TM)t, because options cost far cheaper than the âoeunderlyingâ value of the stock. IBMâ(TM)s share that cost say $90, for 100 shares youâ(TM)d pay $9000, while one call option at $90 âoestrikeâ might cost just $300. For every one point, or $1, if IBM stock goes up, you gain some value. So, on 100 shares youâ(TM)d gain 100 (shares) * $1 = $100, but your total investment was a whooping $9000.
At the same time if you bought just 10 call options, your investment is $3000 and with $1.00 price movement in stock the gain would usually be $400*10=$4000 subtracting investment of $3000, youâ(TM)re left with $1000 gain, right? If you could use the whole amount of $9000 for buying call options youâ(TM)d have around $3000 in gain. Thatâ(TM)s why options are such attractive leverage against the underlying stock value: you donâ(TM)t need to have huge money to use options and gain more than by buying/selling stocks.
âoeThere is a limited upside: the cost of the contract. There is an unlimited downside though; the more the price of a stock moves against you the more you looseâ â" not really clear what you mean by âoea limited upsideâ. Downside/upside are basically have the same potential for calls and puts depending on the stock movement. If the stock moves against you thereâ(TM)s nothing that prevents you from closing your position and exiting with a limited loss, you donâ(TM)t have to wait until the option loses its all premium value or expires worthless âoeout of the moneyâ at the expiration date.
âoeThere is not really any way out of selling a contract except the expiration dateâ - ??? on what options?, equities, stock options? You probably never traded any options yourself, I make several option trading a day, in and out, the same option can be bought/sold at your own decision and nothing else, you donâ(TM)t need a broker to do that or wait until expiration date for that option to make profit. I would recommend Optionetics or Shaffer's option tradding classes for those who are into this subject.
IP was invented for the sake of lawsuits.
Make SCO share a jail cell with Martha Stewart. The clueless nitpickers deserve each other.
karma: Marianas Trench (mostly blub blub)
Quite seriously, a major reason for America's economic troubles, according to the Harvard Global Competitiveness Report, is a failure of the court systems, especially in contract law.
Although the whole report is for sale, you can click through to some pdfs, and read them. Especially interesting is the Executive summary, in which [p. 19] they say that they are increasing the weighting of technological innovation, [p. 20] note that the US has fallen to #2 and Finland has taken #1.
Yet for the case of the United States [p.37], they note that the bubble has burst, and they say that technology is *overrated*. They also note that the major problems with the US are the undermined court system, now ranked around #14.
What that means is that they US hasn't just fallen to #2. In reality, the US has already fallen a good deal farther. And when you consider that superpowers *do* have more power, and therefore fall under the category of "more competitive" all other things being equal, that means that the US is really hurting, and is probably going to hurt more. Fallen, fallen, is Babylon and all that.
Now, flip over to the Cato Institute, and you can find documents [or this] where they point out that the fall Argentina's peso was engineered, and that this represented a major additional break from the rule of law. But what also hurt was that their court systems were completely corrupted, and their society had separated into two societies: the taxed and the government folks.
Well, hate to break the news, but it's looking a lot like what Argentina had, America is getting ready to eat themselves. Not that it will be exactly alike. I fully expect a blackmarket boom in Argentina, followed by [1% chance] them becoming the top economic power in the world if they are good to each other, or [99% chance] them turning military and conquering most of South and Central America, and sending a pressure hammer of refugees into North America. The US, on the other hand, I expect to slide into corruption, and be overwhelmed by said pressure hammer.
But back to the topic at hand, I don't think we can necessarily expect expert witnesses, truth, and Justice to prevail, in light of the American way.
So if you're into Linux, download all the source code you can right now, and put it on CDs/DVDs, and keep it. You may find that it is quite valuable for internal use, and public use after you're sure that it's clean. Don't let Linux depend on America, because America has different ideas right now.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
There are probably more violent geologic activities than that -- for example, a wall of lava 500 m high that rushed from eastern Washington State to the pacific in the age of the dinosaurs [talking off the top of my head here... and I have a very unreliable memory].
But my impression was that that wall of lava could have been stimulated by cracks in the Earth's crust after an asteroid impact.
Point being, though, wouldn't it be ... well, something amazing, if M$ had been targeting Linux from the first, and named had their little trojan horse named Caldera as their little signature of smugness as they ...
Nah. Couldn't be.
PS. There's a caldera under Long Valley near Cal Tech, and I think there's another under Minnesota. And don't believe the PBS documentary about Krakatoa and climatic change -- when my Dad and I were watching that, he said "they lied, outright there" twice, and stopped the VCR, and pulled out some magazines [Sci Amer, Nat Geo], and showed where references made in the PBS documentary said exactly the opposite of the referenced material.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Mormons believe in being honest. SCO has not shown that ability. Mormons believe in freedom. SCO does not. In fact SCO acts the way that Mormons believe Satan would act.
I can just imagine the code they will show. It will look something like this:
#include<stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
printf("Hello, World!\n");
return 0;
}
Now, with seeing that, what could you legally code? Are you still allowed to program and use the same functions as them?
"The first rule of the NDA is that you do not talk about the NDA!"
She says she was shown indentical comments. If true, that could be rather damning.
I wish they would at least publish the comments though. It's hard to know what she saw. Some similarity in simple comments could be accidental. But if it's long strings of identical comments..
Most of what I read at Slashdot doesn't seem to care if it's true or not. If IBM really did steal code, doesn't that mean anything? Or is it OK to steal as long as the people you steal for are happy - is this some Robin Hood thing?
Before you get pissed at me:
Look, I don't like this at all. I think this can do serious damage to both Linux and Unix and that the only people who win here are the immoral scum who run Microsoft. But if it really is theft, the fact that a great big stinking mess follows is not a reason to ignore it.
The fallout from this lawsuit could destroy my business. It could quite literally change my whole life, and not for the better. I have a lot to lose, and the prospects are rather frightening. But that doesn't change morality: if it IS theft, then whatever has to happen has to happen, and if it destroys me, well, that's life, right?
I'm still hoping that this is going to blow over fairly harmlessly. Of course I'm also hoping to win the lottery next week, right?
-- Tony Lawrence
Busy day today, so I'll make this short.
No, Dud, I'm not gettin' a Dell today. I have more of their kit than I care to. Set up two full racks last week. But whatever the boss wants, the boss gets. Today, I'm taking delivery of two Teradata NCR racks and meeting with a Liebert rep to get a new standalone power unit and two separate natural gas generators to hold up my facility and HVAC units.
It's pretty amusing to watch you congratulate yourself on a your own OT pointless post.... not.
Oh well, there's the truck. gotta go. Ta-ta.
Can I bum a sig? I left mine at the office.
What are you talking about? Your post just sounds like paranoid rambling.
I don't want IBM to buy them out. I want this to drag on until SCO runs out of money.
IBM has more disposable cash than SCO, than Microsoft.
Frankly, I hope they get SCO to hand over all their source code going to back to before SCO acquired UNIX. I'd love the chance to audit their code against historical Linux code.
Five will get you ten that either SCO employees put the code in Linux as Cringley suggest or they "stole" the code from Linux. No one will know the truth of what happened unless SCO can be made to release all of their source code, even historical releases.
I'd sign the NDA, if they'd agree to give me all their source going back, and all the time I need to look it over. I'm not working on any kernel projects, and I'm not even working on KDE any more so, why not?
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Ah, so stringing together vague accusations of widespread corruption with random snippets of economic theories ripped out of context is "Insightful". I do like how you worked in the obligatory reference to Linux as the shining beacon of hope in a World Gone Mad. That sort of thing is always good for a little extra karma.
http://www.mormonstoday.com/000806/B4Caldera01.sht ml
"News about Mormons, Mormonism, and the LDS Church
Sent on Mormon-News: 04Aug00
Caldera Expands By Acquiring SCO Division "
That the anonymous mudslinging didn't have support, but the post it was slinging mud at did?
Okay.
Suggestion, though: go ahead and read the links. They're actually quite interesting. And no, they were not random snippets of economic theories ripped out of context.
The first group (harvard) is data and analysis. It is prepared for the UN, but it is actually a quite valuable compilation.
The other group *is* economic theory, but they've typically been right ahead of time. It's pretty good work they do.
That said, I *could* be wrong. I don't claim divine inspiration for this. I rather came up with a scenario that I consdier to be more likely than other scenarios, in a pleurality fashion. Only time will tell, though.
And no, I didn't point to Linux as the shining beacon of hope etc, etc, etc. I rather said "get it while you can, if you want it, because Linux' shining beacon of hope in justice may not come through." I expect there will be plenty who want it. Quite frankly, I didn't point to any shining beacon of hope in a world gone mad -- but if you want one, try www.worldchallenge.org . That's the best I can suggest for you -- start there.
Can I ask, though, where exactly you are invested that this hit such a sore spot for you? And I don't mean necessarily economically invested, as in M$ stock, SCO stock, or whatnot. I mean, where are you invested, possibly psychologically or personally, that it hit such a sore spot?
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Oh man, you really like /. to live vicariously. You aren't doing anything of this. This is all lies. You act like you are some sort of manager, but in reality and by your own admission, you are an IT plebian, most likely helpdesk, and some PHB's beck and call.
You put machines in a rack. OH MY GOD, You are so uber to me now, be still my beating heart. Luckily, where I work, the IT gophers do that.
And your story about the Leiberts and the HVAC is such a crock, I'm laughing. You went to some NOC's online brochure and started chugging out this trash. You know, if anyone had the money and the need for the kind of infrastructure you are hinting at, I feel bad for the share and equity holders of that company: They have a moron like you even taking delivery. Taking delivery: Translation, you get to drag the skid into place and mount the shit while the real McCoy does the brain work. You are such a freakin plebe. Hehehehe. This is great watching your digital janitor ass wave his digital janitor mop all over the place.
HAHAHHAHA.
And then saying there is the truck, gotta go. Whaaaahahahah. More holes in your bullshit than Lorraine cheese.
Summation for this last bullshit: WHAT A FUCKING LOSER THAT MISTER TUFF STUFF HAS TO PROVE TO SLASHDOT HE IS IN PROXIMITY OF SERIOUS IRON.
Hahahhaa.
He can "take delivery" (read: physically move) of big iron but he cant figure out ^W hahahahha.
OK, nobody here wants to listen to us swap insults and beat our chests. But I'll do my best to accomodate your need you spew bile and recieve feedback for it. I have replied to your comment with a jornal entry. Against my better judgement, I have even enabled comments on it.
Knock yourself out.
Can I bum a sig? I left mine at the office.