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SCO Terminates IBM's Unix License
AKAImBatman writes "SCO has terminated IBM's license to use Unix code. SCO is filing for an injunction that will require IBM to cease all sale of AIX as well as accrue damages for each day IBM continues to sell AIX."
CNET also has some comments from SCO themselves:
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http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com/2100-1016_3-101
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I don't really understand how sco can cancel AIX licenses when the issue is IBM and Linux. What am I missing? Ignoring the fact that the whole thing is ridiculous to start with.
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Ok, Now it really begins, All the smack talk is over. Now we get down to the real battle. What do you say. IBM in 3.
"Do you hear that, SCO? That is the sound of inevitability. That is the sound of your death. Goodbye, SCO."
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Today AIX is an unauthorized derivative of the UNIX System V operating system source code and its users are, as of this date, using AIX without a valid basis to do so.
Does this mean that SCO now has a legal basis for suing Joe User for downloading a Red Hat ISO? Maybe I'm missing something here, but if not, this could be bad...
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Whether the court will grant it or not is another matter entirely.
If IBM believes the license is perpetural, and the injunction is granted, IBM will file a counter claim for breach of contract, probably for the same amount of daily damages.
This means nothing. It's just more grandstanding.
The slashblurb has phrased this poorly. SCO did not terminate IBM's UNIX License. SCO stated that they had terminated IBM's UNIX License. There is a difference.
I could issue a press release saying that i had used my magical powers to turn Bill Gates into a toad, but that would not automatically make it true.
Any court that even takes any other legal theory seriously will destroy the entire US economy
I think you are putting way too much stock in the economic influence of a few pear sheaped nerds....
The party with the most lawyers and cash will win.
This is the rule of the court.
Does anybody else get the impression that Big Blue is going to give SCO a bloody nose over this whole thing? I mean, come on, SCO! It should be obvious by now that IBM isn't going to buy you - they're going to sue you into bankruptcy, and then buy the rights to your code from your liquidators at a dirt cheap price.
Someone needs to give SCO a clue.
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In order to do B), IBM would have to have a copy of what SCO thinks is the offending code...
IBM *has* a copy of the offending code. IBM has had a copy of the System V source code for years now. Anyone with a copy of both Linux and System V can easily find which lines they have in common.
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That really is a load of shit. Maybe you should modify your statement to:
"According to [scumbag] lawyers everywhere,..."
Judges work within the confines of the legal system designed by the legislative branch of government (federal, state, and local). Like anything you are going to have some crappy ones and some great ones. The great ones are usually the ones that the scumbag lawyers really hate because they make their job a lot harder.
Read Judge Harold Rothwax's book and then come back here and tell me what is really wrong with the legal system.
No, imagine for a second what would happen if they actually were to get their injunction requiring each and every copy of AIX to be collected and destroyed. The National Weather Service is using AIX for some of their weather modeling. What do they do, just cease operations for a few months while they port their software..... to WHAT? None of the other commercial UNIXen are safe, you can bet they aren't stupid enough to try porting to a rack of Dells running NT. So does the Weather Channel replace their feed with a slide saying "Out of Service pending resolution of SCO v IBM"? Follow the ripples down through the economy from all of the sites running AIX.
Now imagine the horror as every entity with a "licensed, not sold" product starts frantically researching how many companies their vendor licenses various bits from and calculating the odds of one of them getting into a pissing fight. You either get Congress going into emergency session to pass a law protecting the end users from being pawns in this new form of corporate blackmail or the economy collapses.
Democrat delenda est
If IBM were going to cave they would simply have paid the extortion money or simply bought SCO out. IBM is pushing this towards litigation because they know that SCO's case is ridiculous.
SCO management is engaged in a "pump & dump" stock scheme. Nothing more, nothing less.
What is interesting is that they have NOT filed for a temporary injunction.
In most cases of alleged IP violations, the accuser will file for a temporary injunction, rather than waiting for the end of the trial after which an injunction may be granted.
The real implication is that to get a temporary injunction, SCO would have to convince a judge that they had a likelyhood of prevailing at trial. In order to convince a judge of this, they would have to back up their allegations against IBM with real facts.
Temporary injunctions could cause severe problems, so they are not issued on a whim. There must be real evidence and the defending side has the opportunity to refute that evidence.
So the real impact of SCO's actions is to spread more FUD, and keep the time at which they must present any real evidence far off in the future.
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This just amazes me; considering the general consensus about SCO vs Linux, it seemed to me that the only leverage SCO had was that they might scare people off of using linux. But now there going to go after every other *nix, too! If every *nix is "illegal" than nobody's going to care about avoiding linux...
Who owns SCO? I have the impression that IBM should try buying it, if only to stop it from pissing everybody off.
That's the whole point. Most analysts think SCO is doing this simply to make themselves obnoxious enough for IBM to buy them. That's why SCO's stock goes up when they get obnoxious: buyers are betting that IBM will finally decide it's easier to pay to make it go away.
This just makes apparent something that has been bubbling under the surface for me over the past week: Darl McBride is trying to interview for his next job. Everything out of his mouth throughout this whole crapfest has been just another instance of proof that the guy can bullshit, lie, and exaggerate to the national news media and to the US Judicial system. Expect to find him in government or some large and periodically-hated company somewhere in two years.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
The court will only grant SCO's injunction if SCO shows a likelihood that it will ultimately prevail on the merits of its complaint. This question gives IBM its first opportunity to fire its legal guns, which IBM has been putting into position for months. Good-bye, SCO.
There are plenty of other company's with Unix style os's, SGI's IRIX, Sun Microsystem's Solaris - are they all going to have to pony up bucks for a SCO license someday?
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According to this site, the currently outstanding shares of SCO are worth less than $150 million. That doesn't mean that the company could be bought for that, but it would be certainly less than a billion. At this point, it would seem to behoove IBM to launch a hostile bid for SCO and go ahead and offer about twenty bucks a share for all outstanding shares. I'm sure they could do it. It is ridiculous that a penny-ante company like SCO is risking a multi-billion dollar per year business.
I appreciate all the jokes about David vs. Goliath, with people cheering for Goliath, but I have to wonder why IBM hasn't taken the opportunity to annihilate SCO's case by now. Are the lawyers just waiting for this thing to reach a courtoom to unleash the legal nuclear weapons? Are they waiting to spring a nasty surprise on SCO, like proof that the code in question is really BSD, or even GPL? Do the charges really have merit, and the legal team is just buying time to figure out a way to extricate the company unscathed?
Seriously, Big Blue's been strangely dormant on this. What gives? For one thing, the reputation of Linux--a codebase that IBM's banking a big chunk of money on--is at stake.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
linux is untouchable. SCO, nor anybody else in the world can't harm "linux". "linux" is source code and they can't stop it's distribution and development.
What do I care if SCO has problems with IBM?
I don't give a shit.
As far as I can tell, SCO now plans to sue every single end user of AIX. Which should help the adoption of Linux in a big, big way, since all those users now need to replace their AIX installations. This could be the best thing to every happen to Linux, since it makes IBM a Linux only shop.
The big deal isn't that the Weather Channel is running AIX. Many banks are using AIX as their OS. Because AIX is known to be secure.
So, SCO is doing something dangerous for their "case". Now, the David-against-Goliath case they think they've got is transforming in a David-against-GoliathS
I don't understand what they're trying to do. Do they want to run out of business? Or do they are simply stupid?
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Why bash SCO? It's a genius move. I guess SCO (and IBM + Linux) never have had this kind of attention before.
...
All media attention is positive, no matter if it's good or bad. How many would have talked about SCO these days if it wasn't for this?!?
I think the legal department of SCO should be given a medal of honor. Slick move. I've never looked at SCO's homesite and considered checking their system, but now
In the GNU Coding Standards, there are a couple of paragraphs about the issue of using/referring to Unix code, as well as accepting code from other contributors whose sources (no pun intended) are unclear. The necessity of being extremely careful with these things is now becoming painfully clear...
I read the contract yesterday. I'm no legal expert, but it seems from the wording of it that IBM has to "designate" where the code is used, and how it's used. As long as it's under license, ANY license, (including gpl) they should be okay.
The problem is that the damn thing is paradoxically worded. And parts of it are crossed off and pencilled in. It's a real mess.
On top of that, It was signed in 1985 by AT&T and IBM. System V isn't even mentioned in it. Hell, they mention West Germany as a viable country to sell dirivitive code in!
SCO is listing it as evendence. But I don't see how it's even applicable considering that the origenal code that it was made in reference to has fallen into the public domain.
Am I wrong about this?
Please correct me if I am.
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Now that Mr Mc Bride appears to be claiming the right to extort licencing fees from anything stemming from System V I think he is doing a very good job of illustrating the daftness of the system which gives this claim any ( remote ) credibility at all.
How can a company who have themselves had comparitavley no input whatsoever into the development of System V and anything which has come from that claim rights from the millions of people worldwide who have actually created the programs and applications in question ?
I don't think for a second SCO will get anywhere with these aims either in the US or Worldwide but the fact they even consider they are in with a shot points to the fact that somewhere down the line all common sense has been lost. If one good thing can come from this it's finding out where the current laws diverge from common sense and taking some steps to ensure the work of millions of people and hundreds of corporations can't be held to ransom over similar issues in the future.
Does OpenBSD even _have_ SMP support? And Linux? If AIX is out, so is Linux. Neither OpenBSD nor Linux are anywhere close to a drop in solution. Not to mention the massive amounts of cash nessecary to replace the kind of big iron AIX generally runs on...
Why?
This is one of the first cases in which the 900 pound gorilla is probably in the right.
In addition, it's one of the few cases that has a direct impact on almost everyone who reads Slashdot regularly.
Of course, IBM would be foolish to have allowed such a thing....
Oh no, IBM would never have made such a licensing mistake
While I'm sure IBM has enough money to pay someone to fuck everyone at SCO in the ass, I hope they decide to fight. It's probably even a better deal for them to give in to 100 scammers demands. But all the same, I'd like to see a company with the resources to do something about this step up to the plate and swing the bat instead of taking the hit for a walk to first.
I guess I can see SCO's strategy in making IBM's customers and shareholders worried. But I don't see it as a solid plan. They are pissing off some big players saying they wont have source code and assumably SCO would try bullying those customers to pay SCO for a license. I would love to see IBM see this through. I think their stockholders believe IBM will not cave as their stock is not doing well. Pouring a bunch of corporate resources into this, alienating nix customers, and creating a terrible public image cannot be good for a company and if I was a stock holder I would be pissed.
If IBM sees this through it should scare stockholders enough that companies will think twice about this sue to riches type business plan.