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No Business Like SCO Business
The SCO must go on. Informationweek has a roundup. News.com has some analysis of the legal case. SCO reiterates their threat to revoke IBM's license. Reader hobsonchoice sends a blurb: "Also more from analysts who saw SCO/Linux code comparisons under NDA. Bill Claybrook, of Aberdeen Group Inc., says SCO changed their story to him about whether they had any "direct evidence" that IBM copied any System V code into Linux.
Laura Didio of Yankee Group has answered some detailed questions about her code review process. Lastly Fujitsu Siemens have joined in the debate: they don't think SCO's case is going anywhere." One observer of the SCO case has compiled some notes about Caldera's active participation in the IA-64 project. And look on the bright side: if you follow the school of thought that all publicity is good publicity, at least this suit has gotten Linux mentioned in many places where it normally wouldn't be.
Ok. We all know what SCO is doing, or at least trying to do.
I hate to sound like a troll, but do we really need this ammount of press time about it? How aobut one giant wrap-up post once this whole business is overwith and SCO is nothing but a faded memeory?
Could we try that? Please?
<quote>...If those terms aren't met, then we will announce what our actions are on Monday," Stowell said. "We would intend to revoke the AIX license...</quote> (infoworld article).
Seeing that they dodn't develop AIX, they can't revoke the AIX license. What they CAN do is try to revoke the license for any use of their code in AIX, which is not the same thing.
Even if they tried that, existing licensees shouldn't have to worry. After all, nothing has been proven in court yet, and an "announcement" that the licenses have been revoked would have no legal effect. Just like an "announcement" that SCO has repealed the law of gravity has zip effect in the real world :-)
Until there's a judge somewhere that actually makes a ruling on SOMETHING, nothing changes. They can announce all they want. Only a judge can actually invalidate the license.
I would guess that the 80-line piece of code that she saw was not related to any of the "enterprise" functionality that she mentions. The pieces just aren't fitting together well, and it is confirming to me that SCO is making a mountain out of a molehill (that may not even exist.)
Encouraging people to waste SCO's bandwidth because they're being stupid is petty and immoral.
:)
On the other hand, it's perfectly fine and moral for you to "vote" by preparing statements for any court case that will result, warning any of your friends in IT who have just returned from a 6 month spelunking adventure that SCO's management can't be sane if they think they can revoke pre-existing licenses, and therefore you don't think they should ever risk future business with SCO, and selling short their stock (assuming you still can).
You don't complain about someone not playing nice by playing naughty yourself. You do it by being scrupulously decent. The resulting contrast makes it all the more obvious how wrong they are to anyone watching, by the way.
p.s. if you don't believe the morality argument, that's fine. Think of this, however: would you rather that SCO lose all its money to hosting companies, ISPs, and telecoms, or to a Linux-and-open-source-promoting vendor like IBM? And I ask that as someone who misses his ISP job, even
Get off my launchpad!
Laura Didio at least identified some of the code areas: "The claims are not limited to just one area of the Unix System V kernel. SCO claims there are multiple instances of copyright violations. SCO said these include: NUMA (Non Uniform Memory access) a mechanism for enabling large multiprocessing systems, RCU (Read Copy Update) (and) SMP."
As far as NUMA goes, this is clearly aimed at the Monterey project. For a good laugh read the SCO Press Release on Industry Support for Project Monterey
I don't see how SCO can make it's "mutual mistake" (aka the pregnant cow) argument for NUMA. Their SCO Linux 4 datasheet advertises NUMA functionality as a feature of the GPL'd "Linux kernel 2.4.19" and trumps up SCO's Linux expertise and support for this kernel. I really don't see how they can win a trade secret case when they ADVERTISE and SUPPORT the open source release of the secret.
Didio: "Check the GPL and look at Section 0. It reads that the legal copyright holder of the source code has to explicitly put an assignment and copyright transfer notice into the beginning of the GPL. There is no concept of accidentally giving away the code to the GPL."
That's not what my copy of the GPL says. It says "This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License."
Further copying and modification are separate. The original author of the program placed the program under the GPL, and it and all distributed derivative works are likewise under the GPL.
If someone modifies and distributes the code, they don't in any way have to reaffirm the GPL notice. They certainly are not required to add additional copyright notices.
Didio's comment about the GPL is a complete misrepresentation, and she reveals herself here as an SCO pawn. I have no reason to believe anything else she said.
I don't think that case has much applicability here for lots and lots of reasons:
1) SCO advertises its linux expertise and supports linux. They can't really claim they didn't know the cow was pregnant here. For example, in the case of NUMA, SCO's datasheets advertise NUMA support in Linux
2) If you read the case, the court found that because of the mutual mistake of thinking the cow was barren, Walker had a "right to rescind, and to refuse to deliver" the prgenant cow. SCO already delivered the pregnant cow. It had babies and grandbabies. Is SCO ready to rescind all the profits they made selling the mistake?
3) The case cited is a Michigan state common law contract case. The GPL issues make this a federal copyright case. State of mind and knowledge of infringement (ie mistakes) are NOT an element of copyright infringement. (see below) They're going to have to do a lot better than state contract law citations to make this argument. Unless they have federal copyright caselaw to cite, I don't think they'll get very far with this argument.
4) This is also a trade secret case. It is settled law that revealing your own trade secret destroys it, mistake or otherwise. You can't "rescind" the destruction of a secret. Moreover, copyright issues aside, Linus has no duty to keep the secret. Even if IBM did screw up and violate their NDA, that doesn't taint Linux. Only copyright issues can taint Linux.
5) Even if the GPL as pertains to SCO is declared void, SCO still needs some licence to distribute the kernel.org owned IP in Linux. SCO can't make up some other licence for Linux, that is not their right. They must choose to accept the GPL or admit infringing the legitimate parts of Linux via their distribution, modification, and copying thereof. Again state of mind (intent) and knowledge of infringement (ie mistakes) are NOT an element of copyright infringement. This is firmly established law, the best examples of which are the "Dance Hall" cases, where vicarious liability was found when dance hall owners allowed the unauthorized public performance of musical works by the bands they hired, even when the owners had no knowledge of the infringements and had even expressly warned the bands not to perform copyrighted works without a license from the copyright owners. [see Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. v. H.L. Green Co., 316 F.2d 304, 307 (2d Cir. 1963) (citing some 10 cases)].
6) Finally, suppose the GPL is deemed breached. Whenever a contract is breached (and this would be especially true if the GPL here was breached by mutual mistake) there is a duty to mitigate damage to the other party. It is important to realize that the alleged wrong-doing here is by IBM, not Linus Torvalds who did little more than commit the same mistake SCO itself claims to have made but without the opportunity SCO had to know it. SCO has steadfastly refused to inform kernel.org of the technical details of the mistake which would allow it to be fixed. Their insistence on an NDA obviously precludes an open source release to fix the problem. Moreover, the actions such as the threat letter sent by SCO to all those companies seem coldly calculated to maximize damage to kernel.org. I think it is inarguable that the damage caused (intentionally) by SCO to Linux is far more substantial than any damage to SCO's IP, which could be easily fixed by simply distentangling the two code bases.