Slashdot Mirror
iBox Episode 2
coolgeek writes "According to this article on Wired, the iBox (original SlashDot post), later renamed to the CoreBox, has run into some trouble. Their strategy is to clone Mac computers using spare parts from repair centers. Evidently, the supplier of the repair parts was reminded by Apple Computer's Legal Department that supplying to a computer manufacturer was a breach of contract. Consequently, the supplier has chosen to stop supplying parts. More information on at the CoreComputing website, and they say the game isn't over yet..."
I am very tired.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Frizist Pizost, biznaitches. All of you can blow me.
Frank: Here's the memo you requested, encrypted and uuencoded. (remove the spaces)
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lol
Q: How did the Linux action originate? How and when did you come to realize there was this problem?
A: It really goes back to last fall. I joined the company last summer, and we spent a quarter or two looking at this Unix operating system asset we have.
SCO ends up owning the intellectual-property rights to the Unix operating system, which is a pretty substantial asset to be holding. So we started looking closely at where Unix was relative to Linux. Linux was starting to take off, and we did have some concerns.
We saw some initial problems last fall, and we tried to address those with vendors in the December time frame. We didn't really get a lot of traction with just having friendly discussions. So we came out in the first part of this year and basically said, 'We are going to enforce our intellectual-property rights.' And even though we weren't directly going after IBM at that point, they had a violent reaction to (that).
So at that point in time, we tried to work through the issues with IBM. We came to an impasse, and that's what led to our filing our lawsuit against IBM on March 7. Concurrent with filing our lawsuit against IBM, we put them on notice that we were going to be revoking our AIX (IBM's Unix distribution) license. Under the contract, we have to give them 100 days notice. That notice was due on Friday, June 13, and if we hadn't had the issues resolved then, we would revoke their AIX license.
During the period of time we were focused on the IBM issues, it came to our attention that we had our code, our Unix System 5 code, showing up directly inside of Linux. So that, in turn, led us to send out letters to 1,500 of the largest companies around the world, to let them know we had these substantial intellectual-property violations and to notify them that we had these problems. We didn't think that necessarily they were the ones that generated the problems, but they had been passed a hot potato they were holding.
Was it a matter of someone at SCO just working with Linux source code and saying, 'Hey, that looks familiar?'
When we filed against IBM, they were supposed to respond in 30 days, and they filed an extension for another 60 days. So we had about 60 days where we were waiting for IBM to respond. So we turned a group of programmers loose--we had three teams from different disciplines busting down the code base, the different code bases of System 5, AIX and Linux. And it was in that process of going through the deep dive of what exactly is in all of these code bases that we came up with these more substantial problems.
Why was IBM the initial focus?
When we first started talking about how we were trying to protect our intellectual-property assets around Unix...IBM basically became very upset we were going to go down the path of even talking about intellectual-property rights in relation to Linux. And they basically threatened that if we didn't pull back from our statements that we were going down that path, they would quit doing business with us at all.
To me, it was a strange posture to be taking for a company that collects a billion and a half dollars a year on their own intellectual-property portfolio. And so that caused us to go digging on what was behind the initial set of problems we found...And as we dug deeper, we found that we did have significant violations going on with respect to their version of Unix they had licensed from us.
At one of their conventions this year, an IBM executive stood in front of an audience and said that IBM was going to destroy the value of Unix and move it all over to Linux. They were going to take the know-how, the people, the methods they developed over the years around AIX--which is our licensed version of Unix--and they were going to transport all that in a wholesale fashion over to Linux. Those statements alone caused us alarm. When we dug deeper, we found they, in fact, had been doing that and they were going to do more.
What would IBM need to have done to keep this from going to court?