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IBM Responds To SCO: Business As Usual
Newsforge is running a statement from IBM on its decision not to bow to SCO's demand that they stop shipping AIX. In a statement this short, there's not much room for weaselly language, but the even-shorter version is this: "IBM's Unix license is irrevocable, perpetual and fully paid up. It cannot be terminated."
SCO's claims today that anybody running AIX is doing so without a license are themselves illegal - they constitute the tort of "injurious falsehood". Watch for IBM to make a counter-claim against SCO on this. Imagine how much IBM could claim to have lost if customers stop using and buying AIX because of this. That's the pecuniary damages. Then there's punitive damages. Idiots.
"I know it's silly but I always love when IBM uses the phrase "FUD" in corporate announcements since they know it means nothing to the mainstream press but it gets the Linux community all fired up."
Where does FUD come from anyway? I know what it means based on the context, but where'd it come from? "Fucked up deal"?
"Derp de derp."
IBM is multinational by all means and any measure. International laws, i.e. laws in other countries than US may not be so overwhelmed by SCO's case inside the US as indicate in this Byte magazine article:
"It is also undeniable that the business climate in the U.S. lets someone take a far more aggressive attitude towards a competitor's customers than does the climate in Europe. SCO should have anticipated this, but Sontag seemed to be quizzical about what these European lawsuits are demanding, and how SCO should react to them. I got the impression that SCO's management was thinking entirely in terms of U.S. law, and have not thought through the international implications of their actions.
I find this amazing, especially considering that SCO's latest 10Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reveals that "revenue from international customers accounted for 48 percent of operating system platform revenue." "
Let's say everything that the most cynical slashdotter suspects about this case is true. SCO has no case, this is an exit strategy, they're running around making a bunch of noise and making outrageous claims just to get attention and to try to scare IBM into doing what they say, and the instant that they are in the courtroom and their bluff is called, they are going to go down in countersuit flames in the most spectacular way possible.
If that happens:
What is stopping the people within SCO who started this case and subsequently destroyed SCO utterly from quietly selling all of their SCO stock sometime between now and the point SCO goes into court, thus making gobs of money in the span of time between SCO's stock price being temporarily knocked up by all the publicity around this case and SCO's stock price being knocked down once it becomes apparent SCO has nothing to back up their claims with?
What is stopping the people within SCO who started this case and subsequently destroyed SCO from walking out of SCO with incredibly lucrative golden parachutes, and possibly simply being rehired at another company in incredibly high-ranking, lucrative positions just because from the ignorant perspective of another corporation's board, hey, they were the ones who got SCO all that attention and tried to capitalize on that IP, even though it didn't work out?
I think specifically i'm thinking of Daryl McBride here. But I can't get rid of the sneaking suspicion that, by design this case is designed to cause SCO to go SPLAT like a little tiny bug on IBM's windshield, obliterating it and its stock value utterly, while somehow letting the board members who initiated this entire fucking mess somehow wrangle a huge amount of money for themselves out of it and walk away scot-free and with a big impressive "CFO, SCO CORP" bulletpoint on their resume. What is stopping them from doing this? Anything? Anything at all, either legal or in the way corporations hire? Will the people responsible for causing this mess have consequences, or will the only ones to face the backlash after SCO implodes be the stockholders and employees?
Echo echo echo echo echo.
It seems like SCO is like that little kid who just wants to be annoying so they will get attention (or in otherwords cause IBM enough of a headache that IBM will just buy them out to shut them up)
Ave Molech Setting
Yeah, because companies don't normally say things like that. Look up the name on IBM's website. He's not the director, he's listed as someone in the Linux systems group. The press release is also not on IBM's website. I seriously doubt the validity of that post.
But when did IBM become an ally?
There's too many good companies out there to have to resort to playing the "enemy of my enemy" game.
The OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint suggests why IBM seems so confident.
(I'm sure it's been posted here before, but it's required reading)
CousinDave
It's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.
four or more of the top execs at SCO are grads of BYU or Utah state... the company is run by Mormons and by extension, the Mormon church?
what's up with that?
Who is this guy doing this "press release" anyway? Why isn't there an official statement from the company?
And why did Timothy post this himself, linking to NewsForge (no less), instead of posting one of the hundreds of submissions he undoubtedly must've received, given the "hot topic"?
Sometimes I just wonder...
And not just that, Gerstner was a "traditional" CEO which is what they needed. Instead of responding to and engaging in the endless personality conflicts and insults that are constantly lobbed around Silicon Valley he basically just shrugged his shoulders and got down to the job of repairing the company and rescuing the stock price. His book is a good read, and the thing I find most interesting is that he didn't have some blinding insight into technology, he just shut his mouth, relied on common sense, and focused on what makes businesses work. It's amazing what a cool head can accomplish.
IBM is going crush SCO. It's gonna take a few years but they have been marked for death. No licensing, no merger, no buyout. Remember, IBM got into a pissing contest with the Justice Dept. in the 70's. In case you need to be reminded the Justice Dept. is part of the U. S. Government who prints the money. The Justice Dept. does not have to show a profit, IBM does. IBM fought the Justice Dept. to a standstill for over 12 years and still showed a profit every year.
IBM most likely employs more people in their legal department than all of SCO. IBM is going to go into court with SCO and stall, bleeding them dry in the process. The legal fees will bankrupt SCO and IBM will not even break a sweat. Want proof? Go to your local University library and start reading the New York Times from the early 70's. 1971 or 1972. If I remember correctly IBM went into court to file a brief and the brief was 56 4-draw filling cabinets. It took the lawyers 2 years to read it. Ever seen mainframe documentation? Visualize that as legal paper work. SCO is dead they just don't know it yet.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
IBM simply put a brick wall into SCOs way. Considering that with all the ruckus they made SCO has burned all bridges behind them and will never be able to get this resolved on friendly terms there's no way SCO can go: if they stall the shareholders will finally loose confidence and SCO stock will drop through the floor to it's real value, and if they go to court IBM has them where it wants them and SCOs bubble will burst, maybe they can drag along the case a little longer by fighting in court, but then IBM might also countersue for damaged reputation, reduced sales because of FUD etc.
IBM is calling on SCOs bluff, so SCO either has to fold or show their weak hand and lose.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Imagine the fame for being the first person to be fired for buying IBM.
Old news. fortune(1) has the following quote from the WSJ in 1989.
Although it is still a truism in industry that "no one was ever fired for
buying IBM," Bill O'Neil, the chief technology officer at Drexel Burnham
Lambert, says he knows for a fact that someone has been fired for just that
reason. He knows it because he fired the guy.
"He made a bad decision, and what it came down to was, 'Well, I
bought it because I figured it was safe to buy IBM,'" Mr. O'Neil says.
"I said, 'No. Wrong. Game over. Next contestant, please.'"
-- The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 1989
The second paragraph: "IBM's Unix license is irrevocable, perpetual and fully paid up. It cannot be terminated" is nothing but pissing on SCO's shoes. Beautiful, I can't suppress a beaming smile.
If I were IBM I wouldn't be smiling... IBM's license agreement with SCO (which SCO acquired from AT&T), says "If LICENSEE fails to fulfill one or more of its obligations under this Agreement, AT&T may, upon its election and in addition to any other remedies that it may have, at any time terminate all the rights granted by it hereunder by not less than two (2) months' written notice to LICENSEE specifying such breach, unless within the period of such notice all breaches specified therein shall have been remedied; upon such termination LICENSEE shall immediately discontinue use of and return or destroy all copies of SOFTWARE PRODUCTS subject to this agreement."
IANAL, but that seems pretty straightforward to me...
Now, Linux wasn't derived from any AT&T source code; it was written from scratch, under the GPL, much as System V Unix wasn't derived from Linux. Therefore, any System V Unix code that was contributed to Linux was improperly contributed, and should be removed as well! Right?
I have a feeling that if SCO tries to use this particular line of reasoning as stated in that Byte article, they'll get their asses handed to them. Or at least they should...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Despite the fact that you can't seem to differentiate between a friendly opinion on a web site and a personal attack on you, whoever you are, I will still take the high ground and agree that companies are still all about profit. However don't be so naive as to think that egos aren't a huge factor as companies pursue profit. I work for a Fortune-500 company and have seen multi-billion-dollar mergers scrapped because the respective CEOs wanted to come out the "winner". I've seen Silicon Valley companies ground into dust in a personal vendetta against a competitor. I've seen departments out to crush one another just to beat out an internal competitor. In this instance IBM seems to be taking it personally, and if you think IBM is above crushing a company just to hear the "squish" then not only do you know nothing about corporations, you also know nothing about people. IBM is holding a magnifying glass over SCO on a sunny day. And I sincerely suspect that rather than buy SCO and make them happy, they would rather see them fry in the sun no matter how much it hurts.
If you look at page 2 of this document from SCO's site -- in a letter TO IBM, it quite clearly states: ... are owned by you"
"We agree that modifications and derivative works
The only qualification is that the actual lines of code from ATT's source code in the derivative works still belong to ATT.
Elsewhere, in the documents, I found a paragraph that implies that if IBM has someone look at the original source code, write new code, the new code belongs to IBM. This seems to completely destroy any argument that the "methods, etc" belong to SCO.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It amuses me to no end that people consider buying SCO to be a valid option to be brought up again and again. There is no point. It would be of benefit to SCO shareholders, and to reward them for putting these idiots in place is not on IBM's agenda.
If IBM were to buy anybody, they might buy Novell, since Novell owns the patent. Relatively speaking, that'd be an end run around SCO. In fact, if you really wanted to have fun as IBM, you'd buy the patent, and sell it to FSF for $1, and have the patented code GPL'ed.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Java is cross platform. It's not Linux-specific.
OpenOffice? Don't you mean StarOffice? Yeah, you know... the one Sun develops that you need to pay to use?
Sun is looked down upon by Linux zealots because they keep changing their story as to whether or not they're pro or anti open source.
It's funny, because people keep trying to make it look like slashdotters/Linux users or whatever have some fucked up political agenda and as such therefore must hate Microsoft/Intel/IBM no matter what they do. In fact, some would say that the only thing slashdotters enjoy doing more than said bashing is bashing the bashers. So in turn, here I am to bash you, the basher bashing the bashers.
I'm going to put this in plain and simple terms.
SCO is doing something stupid.
IBM is calling them on their stupidity.
And you expect us to all sit around and go "But wait, IBM = big company = bad... Uh... GO SCO!" or something like that? Right.
Maybe, just _MAYBE_ slashdotters base their opinions not so much on who they think is the popular choice but rather on what makes the most sense... because through this whole debacle, there is extremely little that doesn't make you want to cheer on IBM in this matter, regardless of your opinion towards them in others.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Ahead of all the others, SCO's biggest mistake was that they accused IBM of ignoring its confidentiality obligations. IBM either partners with or manages systems for every major company on Earth. (Maybe a few other planets, too, for all I know.) IBM Global Services' main stock in trade is its trustworthiness in keeping secrets. A measly $billion$ isn't even in the noise compared to the value of IBM's reputation in this matter, so IBM simply can not afford for SCO to have even a shred of credibility when the dust settles.
This sucker is going to a finish, and I somehow doubt that IBM will be the one finished.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Seriously, do you really think this make any difference? Huge companies with tons of lobbyists and massive legal departments essentially dictate the law. IBM has friends in very high places that count on IBM jobs and contracts for their constituents. Do you think it's a coincidence that IBM had the case moved to a federal court? That contract could state that SCO owns AIX but it wouldn't make a lick of difference. If the DOJ couldn't take down the 43rd largest company in the US (Microsoft) what chance does a fart in the wind like SCO have of taking down the 8th largest company in the US (IBM) when that company has a lobbying arm that makes MS's seem like an organ grinder with a pet monkey?
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I'd imagine IBM don't particularly like companies trying to, when stripped of the legal niceties, basically extort money out of them. Crushing SCO sends a message to anyone else who might try it that IBM isn't going to roll over easy.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If (and a big IF) this case actually makes it to court and recieves a judgement this case could very well determine the fate of all free/open software including but not limited to Linux, OS X, BSDs, and all of GNU. If SCO settles with IBM and IBM acquires the same copyrights/patents that SCO is claiming to have the Community could be in big trouble if IBM decides to press the same issues that that SCO is. How could Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, Gentoo and the rest compare to IBM's lawyerly might. Its no contest maybe better than IBM vs. SCO but not that much. I don't think IBM would pull this currently they are enjoying much good will and support from the Community but in a few years diffrent leaders/mindset could cause things to be diffrent.
Now if this case goes to court and GPL/BSD liscenses are validated we will all be on very good ground
just food for thought
From the background notes:
- The government contended that IBM planned to and did eliminate emerging competition that threatened the erosion of IBM's monopoly power by devising and executing business strategies which were not illegal, but which did not provide users with a better price, a better product or better service. Specifically, it was alleged that IBM had hindered the development of service and peripherals competitors by maintaining a single price policy for its machines, software and support services (bundling); it had granted discounts for universities and other educational institutions and by so doing influenced those places to select IBM computers; and that IBM had introduced underpriced models knowing that they could not be produced on time and did this to prevent the placement of competitors' machines. For example, IBM had prematurely announced new systems such as System/360 claiming that it was a superior product and that its introduction was imminent when in fact, it was several years from completion.
It sounds very similar to the DOJ case against Microsoft.Look at the statement and in the second para IBM says clearly that it is defending it's AIX customers. The IBM licence for UNIX that as reflected in AIX is probably as rock solid as they suggest ie. irrevocable, never ending and all that.
They do not state that they will defend Linux even if it is implied.
SCO will go bankrupt from the legal fees with this case alone. Their death is even more certain if you take into account potential legal fees from fighting an IBM countersuit, a possible Novell lawsuit over the Unix copyrights or patents, multiple (including international) copyright infringement suits over their illegally distributing non-GPL code in the Linux kernel source, multiple defamation or trade libel lawsuits for their damaging, inflammatory comments made in the press recently, and possible shareholder lawsuits over irresponsible and false comments made with the purpose of pumping up their stock.
I would be quite hesitant to say that this is win/win... (not that they will) But if SCO did manage to win this case it would severely hamper Linux as a platform. Sure, the Kernel devs will re-write the offending code, but that does not mean that Linus/RedHat/Suse et al will be free from legal challenges...
/. I once told my boss (the guy who buys all the IIS and NT machines in the office) that I ran OSX... he was suprised to hear that IBM had upgraded OS/2 to version 10!... If SCO wins, then a good chunk of Linux momentum will be lost...
More importantly were SCO to win would be the shadow over Linux that would be cast... sure, SCO would effectively kill their UNIX sales, but really they are peanuts... I think SCO is out to become a company that just exists to collect royalties.
Now, I know what you might be thinking, Linux is NOT Unix... I too know what the GNU in GNU/Linux stands for... but consider that the business types who write the cheques are not necessarily people who will read
_CMK
Bad spellers of the world untie!
You know what I'm talking about...
You know you do..
You're getting out of your car with your briefcase and your bag of groceries and you have this eerie feeling you're forgetting something important. You stand up and reach for the door and give it a shove. As the door careens toward closure, that little switch in your brain flips and that little voice starts screaming "Take it back! Take it back! Your keys are in there!!!" In an instant, your body wretches trying to catch the car door closing but to no avail. That little voice in your head then says "Awww shit, you really fucked up now, and you're beyond the point of no return."
This is what SCO has just done. They have started the final nail in their coffin in their juvenile, if not heroic, last stand. Their captain has just delivered the message to the crew that this cause is more important than their corporate lives, and they will fight to the death even though the odds are indeed impossible.
In other news, monster.com stock is up 40% today on a wave of new resumes, mostly for UNIX developers.
Now, if this turns out to be a "David and Goliath" situation and they get one of these "root for the underdog" bleeding heart liberal judges, we may have an interesting time yet. These do-gooders who think that parity is more important than justice and truth are easily conned by the "crying little guy" who is actually the devil incarnate.
excerpted from:I A.Ksg /papers/ibm.pdf (real tilde doesn't display properly here)
Red and White and Blue All Over: The Political Development of IBM
http://ksghome2.harvard.edu/[tilde].DHart.CS
"The cost of victory was high. Cary [then CEO of IBM] spent an estimated 500 days preparing for and providing testimony that amounted to more than 750,000 words. ***IBM generated nearly 50,000 tons of legal documents (enough, Cary noted in 1981, to fuel the biggest bonfire...in corporate history ). Some observers and participants believed that the antitrust culture made IBM quite timid and contributed to the woes that beset it a decade later. The company s chief scientist at the time recalled being forbidden from even purchasing the machines made by competing manufacturers in order to study how they worked."
That's alota snow!
The paper is interesting in its own right.
-brice
What you're saying on the surface doesn't match my experience when dealing with contracts and law.
Rights have to be specifically assignable, or else they are not. That is to protect exactly against this sort of thing. Typically, legal language would be something like "AT&T or their assignees".
Hmm. I know Novell gave SCO the right to license out Unix bits, but did they give up the right to issue licenses themselves? My question is: Could IBM nip over to Novell, pay them 20 bucks and get a brand spanking new Unix license?
---
no, the open group will still own the name. all ibm will get is the sysv src code from which most commercial unicies are derived from. (i believe)
I agree. Wish I had mod points.
I also agree. SCO is wrong and so is IBM but that does not change that the fact that IBM has been down this path before and will use what ever stick they can get their hands on. Right, wrong, or indifferent, today in America the guy who has the most money to spend on lawyers wins. You don't like this? Fine! What are YOU gonna do about it? Talk is cheap.
SCO is wrong on 3 counts. 1) this bullshit that they own all the IP of Unix and all subsequent Unix like OS. 2) that suing people is a legitimate business model and 3) the thing that really pisses me off. That they can threaten IBM, Apple, the Linux, FreeBSD and Open Source community and get away with it with out retribution. In my view stupidity should be painful and stupidity on this scale should cause SCO and everyone associated with them should be extinct. All I have to do is wait a couple of years and they will be.
This does not change the fact that the patent and legal system in this country is profoundly fucked. But one pile of shit at a time.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
" know quite a few lawyers, and they seem to be split roughly 50-50 on Bush v Gore."
That's most likely due to the fact that lawyers like the rest of america is split about 50/50 along democrats and republicans.
More telling is the fact that the supreme court itself put language into the ruling along the lines of "don't takae this as precedent, this was just a one time thing, we will now go back to our strong sates rights stance. We just did this to elect a republican this one time."
War is necrophilia.
Oh! How very delicious, indeed!
When I was a newbie Unix Sysadmin in the mid-eighties, it was at a Very Large University that had been given an IBM 3090 "supercomputer" (while the administration, whose salaries were paid for by IBM Corp, purchased a second for full price , at a time when typical academic discounts from Sun and SGI were up around 50%). Well, there were a number of IBM employees "advising" University IT services full-time with offices on campus . They were there to squash any and all use of non-IBM gear, they were.
IBM didn't really have a Unix offering at that time, and the faculty were just clamoring for Unix mini's -- Suns, SGIs, DEC VAXen running BSD 4.2/4.3, Apollos, HPs -- even PC's running XENIX. The faculty found it was more beneficial to their research projects to buy a smaller computer but have it dedicated to the project, than to have to buy time on the University supercomputer. For one thing, they'd have the hardware for as long as it lasted, and have, well, root access. And they could hire monkeys like me for peanuts to keep them running -- on the network!
Well, my installing BSD on VAXen and keeping a network of Suns and SGIs running on the network made me none too popular with the Brainwashed-By-Big-Blue Brigade-- much as my putting cygwin on Windows boxes and occasionally whiping Windows altogether with a nice Linux install makes me none too popular with the MSCE's that infest corporate IT department these days.But in academics, as well as in business, it's the Golden Rule: the ones with the Gold make the Rules. By bringing in research grants, the faculty, who wanted unix boxes, were making the rules. Also, since much of the money was coming in from DARPA and Friends, who all championed BSD (having funded its development) we had the funding agencies to refer to as well. But the B-B-B-B Brigade would continually try to sell us time on the 3090 -- and we would be, like "get your eyeballs off of my stack, jack!"
I recall numerous acrimonious meetings with the BBBBB where they would point to this wonderful "gift" of the 3090 as obligating us to use it -- at which point we would counter with "Well, if it was running UNIX, we'd consider it..." They'd come up with their FUD to the tune of "Well, IBM is working on Unix versions..." (referring to AIX which was vaporware at that stage, and a BSD RISC machine that unfortunately never got off the ground).
But BOOM! We'd hit them with "Why not just install UTS on the 3090?"
Oh! The dirty looks we'd get for that one! Talk about hitting a raw nerve!
But now, IBM is our new best friend. The FUD Fighters and Champions of AIX and Linux.
It is way beyond ironic. It is so deeply satisfying!
Now IBM is famous for its interdepartmental rivalries. I do sometimes wonder if our little blows against the empire at that stage had anything to do with the ultimate rise of the groups, internal to IBM, that were behind the development of AIX.
The truly ironic thing, though, is that the technical sophistication and security features of the PPC chipset and OS/400 systems architecture are really starting to impress me as being quite a bit better than what either linux or unix on any hardware platform ever had to offer. *nix is just starting to get serious database-tuned journaling file systems, stable security implemented, VM's (or LPARs) to your heart's content, and use of an instruction set that can directly manipulate tables of 64-bit hash keys (on the PPC anyway). The AS/400 has had these things for a looooong time. So...maybe we were wrong back in the 80's, and IBM had it right the first time.
Truly ironic.
Felt like saying this close to the top of the article... From here:
How did Microsoft's agreement to pay you for Unix rights happen?
Darl: In the Microsoft case, they saw an opportunity. We originally approached them and said we're on a new licensing path; we have this intellectual property that we've started approaching vendors about. IBM is one we approached; Microsoft was another. We had about four big vendors in the last quarter that we talked with. With two of them, we signed deals. The other we're still talking with, and IBM we reached an impasse.
To me it feels like they are still talking with HP, and Sun decided to pay up to take a stab at linux (in the back, I might as well say). Or is there any other interpretation? Was anyone surprised at how quick Sun was to advertise that they are in the clear?
Boy, these Sun people don't seem like such friends of ours after all.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
This does indeed to be what SCO wants to argue - that all these things that licensees have added to their own unix derivatives are somehow now their property. I think (and I hope) that when this finally gets in front of a judge they'll be disabused of that notion very quickly. This isn't just Linux and AIX they're talking about, it's Sun and HP and SGI and everyone else that's ever added features to a SysV derivative (which is everybody that's ever sold a unix, essentially - SysV isn't exactly a useful system without all the stuff the various vendors have coded themselves.)
I know it sounds like a bad joke, but it really does sound like 'all your IP is belong to us' is what SCO is asserting.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Everything you said was true, but irrelevant. If IBM is doing the right thing, then we should cheer them, right? Isn't that what we're doing?
When IBM does the wrong thing again, we'll take sides with their adversary, whoever it may be (even if it's Microsoft, and MS is actually doing the right thing). While we have a tendency to support the little guys, fact is, we don't support the little guys. We support what we, each as individuals, think is right, from whatever direction it comes.
To put it clearer, The Enemy of my enemy is my ally.
Like what I said? You might like my music
My [large, well known hardware vendor] rep is also SCO's representative. His company sells Linux server solutions, BTW. Anyway, he told me even as a vendor he didn't want to do business with SCO. Talk about a tech industry pariah...when the vendors hate your guts...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Don't be so certain that SCO is going to die here.
David Boies, who led charge for the White Plains Cravath office team defending IBM in the antitrust action, is now representing SCO.
In the '70s, IBM was facing the real risk of being split at a time when they were unquestionably the dominant player in the computer industry. There was not a dime IBM had it would not have spent in the defense of that action.
Now, IBM is a shadow of its former self, and this issue -- a license fee for Unix -- is not the same mission critical issue as the antitrust litigation.