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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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,
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?)
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
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.
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.
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