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SCO Gives Friday Deadline To IBM
bcisys writes "Reuters is reporting that SCO is planning to revoke IBM's license to Unix this Friday unless IBM settles SCO's claim that parts of its Unix code are being used in Linux. 'If we don't have a resolution by midnight on Friday the 13th, the AIX world will be a different place', SCO President and Chief Executive Darl McBride told Reuters News. 'We've basically mapped out what we will do. People will be running AIX without a valid license.'"
...Or I'll say Stop again!
I mean it this time too, pal.
SCO is sounding more and more like the meglomaniacal villian from an 80's movie.
At least that'll make everyone elses' lisences invalid just like mine.
So they either have to remove code they don't know about, or pay up ... not much of a choice SCO leaves them.
Perhaps April 1st would be a better deadline.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
The whole plot of the SCO vs. IBM saga.
It's pretty clear that SCO is trying to get IBM customers to pressure IBM to settle this. However, it frankly seems pretty absurd. The bottom line is that, as a customer, I am not responsible for IBM's alleged failure to maintain a proper license for UNIX. IBM's license is a license to *copy* UNIX software, and copying is the only activity that could possibly be prophibited. Given that IBM's customers already HAVE copies of AIX, unless IBM's license from SCO has some very odd language in it it seems extremely improbable that customers could lose the license they already have.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
What does this really change though?
This seems like nothing more than a sneaky attempt by SCO to force IBM to settle.... Did SCO not check into IBM's operating profits before this announcement? This isn't a David and Goliath situation, this is a David VS. 4 Goliaths with Lasers.
And I want Goliath to win too.
Stupid SCO.
Yep...too much hype beforehand, the plot sucks, everyone knows how it is going to end, and it is probably only the first of a series.
It's viral: parts of SCO code in AIX make the whole AIX a subject of SCO whims.
If the license of a subcomponent is revoked the whole thing may be in trouble. What if one of M$ subcontractor get in dispute with M$? Windows user is suddenly in license violations.
IBM will guarantee its customers protection from any indemnity, and they'll keep on running AIX. Come Friday, everybody will be happily running unlicensed copies of AIX in the knowledge that IT WON'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE.
Sorry, SCO, you lose.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
After Friday, we'll have a pretty good idea what IBM really thinks about SCO's suit. If they make no attempt to settle, it will be clear they really don't think SCO can prevail.
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
An SCO koan.
And the apprentice asked of the Master, "But the end user is not the infringing party. Why are they to be invalidated?"
The Master replied, "Are the children at fault if their father steals a loaf of bread to feed them?"
"No."
"Yet the baker sees the children eating, the produce of his ingredients" says the master.
The apprentice points out "The father owns the bakery. The baker stole the recipes, which were developed by the father's kin. Who owns the bread now?"
The Master became enlightened.
A dark room.
blinking lights in the corner (like, servers maybe?)
Sysadmin looks up as the door to a lighted hallway opens, and takes on a look of horror as a long bladed glove casts a shadow across the room
Sysadmin: "Noooooo!"
A figure runs around the doorframe. A little mouse with spiky hair and a bad attitude. Sysadmin steps on it.
Cue credits.
Yes, and they don't want it to go to court. That's why the extortion. I'm assuming they know they don't actually have a choice, they're just trying to scare IBM. I don't think they have a chance, and I don't think IBM is going to scare.
Hey editors and who ever submits these stories:
Can we do this OJ style? For example:
Trial of the Millenia: Day 47
It is now day 47 in the trial that rocked the geek world as SCO prepares to offer 5 more lines of evidence. Opinions have been mixed, has SCO now is suing IBM for mental anguish while Linus Torvalds has responded "[Expletive Deleted] SCO and their [Expletive Deleted] code". Defending lawyers are believed to try and have the case thrown out on the grounds of insanity on SCOs part. Stay tuned for more minute by minute coverage after these commercials.
Something like that? Come on lets add some day time television drama to this.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
>> Though, the people who might truly be worried are SCO's customers
Yep, I'll bet both of them are worried!
This is the type of ridiculous stunt that only damages SCO's credibility. It is very unlikely that IBM signed an agreement with AT&T all those years ago that allowed AT&T to yank the license at a future date.
SCO should be very careful about the claims it is making.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Wham, come Saturday June 14 thousands of boxes with AIX all over the world would suddenly shut down.
Now tell me why DRM is a good idea and explain how it will never be misused or abused.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
In recent months, some corporations have been doing their part. They have delivered public and private monies urging a settlement to leave with SCO, so that licensince can proceed peacefully. IBM has thus far refused. All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end. IBM and it's board of directors must leave IBM headquarters within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing. For their own safety, all foreign workers -- including contractors and temporary employees -- should leave IBM immediately.
/tongue planted firmly in cheek
Many IBM employees can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them. If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your company and not against you. As our lawyers take away their power, we will deliver the employment and medical benefits you need. We will tear down the apparatus of AIX and we will help you to build a new IBM that is prosperous and free. In a free IBM, there will be no more wars of aggression against UNIX, no more antiquated mainframes, no more skipped lunches, no more broken copier machines and TPS reports. The board of directors will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.
Hammer of Truth
Or to paraphrase Apu,
"Hey, hey! I have asked you rudely not to mangle my copyrights. You leave me no choice but to ask you rudely again."
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
In other news, IBM spokesperson John Ashton responded to SCO's reported Friday dealine by simply saying, "Blow me."
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
This ongoing story is riddled with absurdity, however, my favorite quote of the day has to be McBride's remark in Reuters' article.
Quoted from Reuters, "McBride said SCO's Unix intellectual property had been previously under-utilized by the company: 'We've spent the last couple of quarters waking the sleeping giant.'"
Yeah, I guess you could call suing IBM for a billion dollars "waking the sleeping giant."
...and I don't mean IBM. SCO just rattled the cages of everybody that uses AIX. I work at a .gov that shall remain nameless, and without bragging, we have at least one of everything - and we run AIX in all kinds of funky places. Tell me I can't run AIX? Come and get me. But make sure the SCO flunky you send is expendable, they WILL shoot you nowadays.
But forget about the guard force using SCO interns for target practice, you just threatened almost every Fortune 500 company with a datacenter to speak of. THEIR lawyers using your ass for target practice is much more scary. Telling folks with THAT kind of power to turn off their line-of-business systems will get SCO slapped around like a red-headed stepchild.
IBM has done something about that already...
We always talk about SCO, SCO, SCO but I realized I have no clue about what IBM's response is...
Anyone ?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
SCO also won a license from Microsoft, which agreed to pay SCO to ensure that it would not violate intellectual property rights when developing software that works with Unix. But Microsoft's move was widely seen as an attempt to lend weight to SCO's attack on Linux, which Microsoft views as a threat to its Windows franchise.
This rather strong anti-Microsoft comment is coming off Reuters. Not Slashdot. This tells me that, despite what the Windows apologists may say, the public view of Microsoft closely mirrors some of the more cynical posts here. Such widely-held disdain spells doom for a corporation. Cash reserves and ruthless schemes will only go so far against it....
-----------
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
At 11:30PM on Friday the CEO of IBM should fax SCO a Xerox of his butt. That seems an appropriate response.
The real question of course is: what is it that they really don't want us to notice while they mount this ridiculous distraction?
Go to go now, there's someone at the door...
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Except that licenses prior to this threatened expiration are still valid. SCO is really telling a bald-faced lie when it claims that it can de-license people who already have licenses.
Get off my launchpad!
All,
Several thoughts have come to my mind concerning this issue.
Please keep in mind that IBM:
1) backs Linux on a large number of it servers
2) believes that it's license with SCO is perpetual.
3) has spent billions hyping Linux.
IBM will likely take action on Friday or perhaps sooner in a pro-Linux fashion, given the above facts.
Suppose it is shown that in the completion of LKP (Linux Kernel Personality) that SCO did incorporate GPL'd code into it's kernel (as suggested by an article on linuxtoday.com) and it is shown that, according to Eben Moglen, that "SCO gave up rights to the code when the released their version of Linux".
If SCO licensed any of this code to third parties for inclusion in their products, it is possible that *all* of those products will be *required* to be released as Free Software under the terms of the GPL.
This is perhaps why SCO is being so loud about this. Is this the fact that they want to hide under all of this legal rangling? Also, don't forget that Microsoft made a public showing of buying a license from SCO, which according to the recent news from Novell, ONLY covers the copyrights which, if the above is shown, would be subject to the GPL.
The implication here is very clear. Many companies which have incorporated the disputed code would need to release their code under the GPL.
Could the GPL set the industry on it's head?
I, for one, hope so. I am not a lawyer, just an engineer.
Later, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
On friday the thirteenth the unimaginable will happen! All of the AIX machines in the world will become Illegal, oh the humanity. Hundreds of previously upstanding companys will be running illeagal warz!
seriously would be interesting if IBM filed counter-suits, and as part of the discovery process requested the complete UNIX SVR4 source code and pedigries; with 10K patents in the basement I'm sure the lawyers at IBM could find a few infringements of their own.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I've been watching this whole fiasco unfold and I've been fascinated. The reason is because I was a Caldera employee up until just over a year ago. I worked in IT, and IT at SCO is still made up of some of my best friends. So, I have the unique opportunity of getting the inside scoop on their feelings of what's going on, and the feelings of the company in general. I also have an interesting internal battle with where exactly I stand on the issue. Being that I learned about the things that matter most there (Linux), I can tell you that the early days of Caldera (right when it went public) were EXTREMELY exciting! We were all going to make money doing stuff that was cool and fun, PLAYING WITH LINUX!
/. community rejected Caldera. "You can't make money with Linux, you leeching bastards!" was pretty much the common attitude from /. users. We tried, we really did. But not only did no-one think they had to PAY for anything, they bashed and made fun of Caldera. Keep in mind that most of us WERE LINUX GEEKS and we LOVED LINUX. Our job was more than money, we wanted to be part of the OS community. People made fun of the logo, the company, the products, and it hurt. I wondered many times what we possibly did to deserve the scorn that was thrown at us CONSTANTLY.
/. persecution since the lawsuit: "Well, there's deffinately no love lost between SCO and the OS community. Things are no different now than they were before the lawsuit."
Something happened though. The
I was laid off about a year ago, and I've since moved on to much better things. Ransom was replaced, and the name was changed back to SCO because OBVIOUSLY there was no value left in the Caldera name after you guys were finished with it.
I've been using Red Hat ever since I was laid off, as Caldera's Linux distro pretty much fell by the wayside. I look back on those days with fondness and wish it could have turned out differently. I am horrified by SCO's actions as of late, at the same time I can't help but think that you guys kinda created this fiasco in the first place. You guys have been poking this dog into a corner for the last several years and now, when it turns around and starts fighting for its life, you seem to be amazed at how angry and irritated and frusterated SCO is. "Will they stop at nothing?!" you all ask in amazement? Of course not, cause they are going the ONLY ROUTE THEY HAVE LEFT. You all seem to be proud of yourselves for boycotting their products... sheesh, that's a rediculous notion since you had all boycotted them WAY before the lawsuit ever happened. I'll quote my friend who still works there when I asked him about how he felt about
I'm rooting for IBM. I think SCO are going way too far. It makes me angry that they have become such a mindlessly self-centered company. SCO is not at all what Caldera used to stand for.
But when you think about it, they really don't have anything to lose and a whole possible pile of cash and revenge to gain if this thing pans out for them.
And the ironic thing is that you are all, to some degree, the ones that helped cause this. You can bet that if they do prevail, they are going to make you suffer as MUCH AS THEY CAN with no remorse, since you all have had no remorse for them in the past.
This is not meant to be a troll. I only wanted to present a unique viewpoint of the whole situation.
Why don't y'all read the contract for yourself?
... I always wanted to use them both in the same post!)
SCO lawsuit against IBM
Read Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and Exhibit C, in particular.
SCO can revoke the license for breach of contract. The procedure for doing this is not at all clear.
My question is: what is SCO going to ask a court to do? Is SCO going to ask for a preliminary injunction, or what?
The test for a preliminary injunction is: (1) the moving party's chances of success on the merits of their case and (2) the "balance of harm": how much harm that SCO suffers if they do not get a preliminary injunction, and how much harm IBM suffers if SCO does get a preliminary injunction.
On part (1), it's anyone's guess.
On part (2), the "balance of harm" strongly favors IBM.
SCO does not claim that IBM's distribution of AIX has harmed SCO in any way whatsoever. Thus, stopping the distribution of AIX will have zero effect on SCO's alleged suffering. In contrast, stopping the distribution of AIX will have an immediate, large, irreparable effect on IBM in the marketplace. It is grossly unfair to subject IBM to such a penalty without a trial on the merits first.
If not a preliminary injunction, what else could SCO do after Friday the 13th?
Disclaimer: IANAL
Disclosure: I am short SCOX
('disclaimer' and 'disclosure' mean subtly different things
The other quote that I can't get out of my head is from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, where the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto explains his reservations about attacking Pearl Harbor as ordered by the military junta: ...it was hard to tell them that their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get really pissed off and annihilate them. Substitute "IBM" for "Americans", and you have my feelings exactly.
God, I love that book.
T3? That's sad.. (hehe)
:
/24 from WestNet, who has the two /16's containing that block.
/24's owned by ShreveNet in Louisana, which is part of 4 /16's owned by UUNet.
:)
:)
Most of the bigger lines I've delt with, it's a fixed rate for connection itself, a dedicated bandwidth amount, and a burstable amount.
Like, we're dedicated to several Gb between our various facilities. That's what we pay for every month, if we use it or not. If we exceed that amount, we pay a higher amount for the overage. If we use less, well that's our tough luck.
If they're in a colocation facility (like most good companies are these days), they probably have multiple lines coming in from different providers, and have at least a 100Mb/s uplink. That's the prefered method these days. It saves a whole lot of money in actually keeping a physical room going at your facility, and having copper or fiber run to you.
A little research can give you a hint of where they live.
sco.com
216.250.140.112
nameservers:
ns.calderasystems.com 216.250.130.1
ns2.calderasystems.com 216.250.130.5
c7ns1.center7.com 216.250.142.20
nsca.sco.com 132.147.210.253
MX:
mail.ut.caldera.com 216.250.130.2
calderasystems.com is 216.250.140.125
216.250.128.0/20 (everything but nsca.sco.com) is owned by 'NFS", which has nameservers of:
ns1.canopy.com 216.250.129.1
c7cs1.center7.com 216.250.142.20
c7ns2.center7.com 166.70.45.162
c7ns3.center7.com 216.250.142.14
166.70.0.0/16 is owned by XMission, which has the nameservers of:
ns.xmission.com 198.60.22.2
ns1.xmission.com 198.60.22.22
ns2.xmission.com 207.78.169.150
The 198.60.22.0/24 block is owned by Xmission, who only has the
The 207.78.169.0/24 is one of two
My guess would be that SCO lives with Center7. If you go to http://center7.com/, you'll see a whole lot of PR crap, that sounds like every other colo provider's crap. They are nice enough to say that their connectivity is an OC-48 from XO Communications, and an OC-12 with Qwest (which is what I see on my traceroute to sco.com), and two T3's that aren't active. They also say something to the effect that their customers are attached "at 10-100", which I'd take to mean ethernet (like, duh).
I'd have to say that xmission.com is just someone being nice enough to provide a home for a nameserver.
I wouldn't expect that too many people can flood their OC-12 off the net, unless it's already fairly utilized. Since I've never heard of Center7, I wouldn't suspect that they are.
The best, and most likely to hurt them is if there was 100Mb/s of traffic filling up their ethernet connection to Center7's switch.. So, don't try to push 600Mbs in, it only takes 100Mb/s..
I know, I know, there are possibilities that they are rather reinforced. What if they have some spiffy hardware in front of their server? They could be doing all kinds of wild load balancing. But if I remember right, this was the company that was hurting for money and this is their last-ditch effort to make get IBM to buy them. Honestly, it looks like an old Linux box that no one ever bothered to update Apache on.
user@home (/home/user) telnet sco.com 80
Trying 216.250.140.112...
Connected to sco.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET ? HTTP/1.1
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 06:06:47 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.0.3pl1
It would seem to me that any of a few thousand script kiddies out there with a few exploits could get in, or anyone in control of a few dozen DDoS slaves could make their site rather quiet.
Now my disclaimer.. I don't suggest doing it.. It's no fun to have your pager go off at 4am because som
Dont try to hack the SCO website as a revenge. Do something thar realy hurts instead. Like loss of development support. Stop porting applications to sco-unix and sco will die a paifull death. Does Apache, Bind, GCC, Mysql or Perl run om sco-unix today? Does the next verson have to? Who want to by a system without programs?
Case #1:
>
#include<stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>
#inc lude<math.h>
#include<limits.h>
#include<time.h
More cases of flagrant copyright infrigement of System V source code by Linux kernal hackers is to come!
April 1, 2004: Today The SCO Group(formerly known as SCO/Caldera) sued 27 of its Linux customers for breaching SCO's IP rights on UNIX (tm).
... weed prices are going through the roof man ... and we're like, you know in UTAH for god's sake ..."
... this is Chewbacca ..."
Darl McBride, SCO's CEO has made the following statement:
"This move was made in the light of the fact that, like, you know, our case with IBM was thrown out of court on account that we were misleading the court in our complaint and like, you know, were trying to confuse the court on the issues of trade secrets and copyrights and like, you know, we didn't do anything to minimize our losses until we were waaaay down the drain."
Also, SCO's CEO declared that the company was strapped for cash, depriving the board of certain commodities: "Lately, there seems to be a crackdown of some kind
SCO's lawers declared that the grounds for the lawsuits are rock solid: "Well, it's obvious they stole it from us. Yes, we sold it to them, but we didn't know it was stolen from us. And even when we knew, we kept selling it for a couple of month, but look
Good luck, SCO, you're gonna need it.
"We answer your tech support calls, we pump your packets. We gaurd your systems while you sleep. Do not fuck with us" - Slashdot