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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.""
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
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.
Really? I'm of the opinion (and I think most reasonable people would agree) that if someone wants to pick and choose what they show, htey have something to hide.
So, what are they hiding?
It's pretty obvious - the fact that they don't have a case. After all, the the code is in fact already in open-source software, it's already public.
I certainly wouldn't want to look at their piece-of-shit code, just like I wouldn't want to look at anything coming from the Beast of Redmond - to avoid future charges of infringement/theft/copying.
End result: Anyone stupid enough to go along with this qualifies for the darwin awards. They've certainly removed themselves effectively from the pool of OSS developers.
What could the counterparty to SCO possibly gain by agreeing to this?
Money. The counterparty would presumable be being employed as an Expert Witness in the lawsuit. Fees for such witnesses are normally very lucrative. >$1000/day plus expenses for the research phase (reading the code) and more for attendance in court are the figures I have heard.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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.
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Yeah. I was reading an article at news.com.com where mcbride was saying how they haven't finished assessing the scope of their case yet. Which seems odd to me bacuase companies usually know what the scope of your complaint is before your go around suing people. I mean, otherwise, how do you know what you're complaining about?
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