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.

Comments

Suing the wrong people

[bsharitt]

Maybe IBM did do some work in Linux, but it would seem that Intel and HP had more to do with making it scale better.

AT&T code is not magic

[phliar]

Just because some lines are from the "original" AT&T code doesn't mean it's suspect! Remember the BSDi/AT&T judgment: all code in BSD, including code that originated at Bell Labs, is free. She says

In my case, I saw Unix System V, version 4.1. Incidentally, this particular code is from the early 1980s, and hence predates Linus Torvalds' first Linux code.

Considering the amount of BSD code that's in SVR4, I think it unlikely there's any problem there.

One thing I found incredibly annoying is her style -- why does she want to sould like a bimbo? Random crap about MIT and Stanford, and many!!! exclamation!!! points!!!!!!

Back in the Eighties, Baby!

[corby]

You know, I have not read every bit of press related to the SCO case, but this part is news to me. Laura Didio, the analyst who was so impressed with SCO's evidence, says:

I saw Unix System V, version 4.1. Incidentally, this particular code is from the early 1980s, and hence predates Linus Torvalds' first Linux code.

This answers the question about how SCO can be claiming that Linux copied features that don't exist in SCO Unix. Their claims of copied code revolve around AT&T's System V Code!

This means that in order to even get started on this case, SCO has to establish:

1) SCO has free and clear ownership of the AT&T System V code

2) IP rights to the AT&T System V code were not dilluted by the BSD settlement

I am not an expert on these issues, but they seem to be very high hurdles to clear.

Re:I read today on CNET....

[rjamestaylor]

German scientist sees the SCO code and they forget to have him sign an NDA -- his analysis (poorly tranlated by Google):

• http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F %2Fforum.golem.de%2Fphorum%2Fread.php%3Ff%3D44%26i %3D1774%26t%3D1716&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=ISO-8 859-1&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

This quote really bothers me:

[narfbot]

SCO Group's goal isn't to "chase every company that's selling Linux," McBride says. The goal is to get its fair share of revenue from its intellectual property.

While he is not quoted exactly, this is easy to decipher what the article means he really said. The antecedent for the "its" that is right before "intellectual property" is "Linux". The antecedent for the "its" that is right before "fair share" is "SCO Group's". So in another words he said, "The goal is to get SCO Group's fair share of revenue from Linux's intellectual property," or something very similar to this. So they want distro makers to pay them licensing fees?!

No! Download the LInux kernel from them...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to advocate wasting SCO's bandwidth, but I really think people should be spreading this link around:

ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/updates/OpenLinux/3.1.1/Serv er/CSSA-2003-020.0/SRPMS

Yes, that's right, SCO is still distributing Linux! This LWN artcle quotes them as saying that it has stopped distributing their own version of Linux, but this is obviously not true (see the link above). The more people who download the kernel from them the better - not because it will waste their bandwidth but because it will help demonstrate that they are violating the GPL by distributing code which they are forbidding (albeit overtly) others to redistribute.

I got curious about SCO cutting off distribution

[Merlin_80000]

SOOooo I looked around on their website....nope...can'e download an entire package of OpenLinux....and then I thought....wait a second..support! shouldn't ceasing support of a product that they sold a few weeks ago put them under some kinda liability?? so i dug around on the ftp site....and it didn't take to long to find exactly what i was looking for. ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/updates/OpenLinux/3.1.1/Work station/CSSA-2003-020.0/SRPMS/. The Linux kernel packed in source RPM format! yes, they ARE still distributing the source code for very thing which they believe contains their own proprietary code!