Slashdot Mirror
SCO Berates Linus' Approach To Kernel Contributions
Matthias_305 writes "The New York Times has an article about a new court document in which SCO critizes Linus Torvalds touting the 'inability and/or unwillingness of the Linux process manager, Linus Torvalds, to identify the intellectual property origins of contributed source code.' They claim to have got evidence from a conversation on the kernel mailing list in which Torvalds advocates programmers shouldn't care about patents. According to the article he stands by his view which is at least 'candid'." On a related note, BobDowling points to a proposal at The Inquirer ("Shutting down SCO's FUD machine") regarding SCO's claims. "SCO won't let people see the contested source code without signing an outrageous NDA but the article gives a mechanism for publishing appropriate MD5 checksums which allow code trees to be compared without anyone else seeing the code. This is offered as a means to locate the source of SCO's contested code. ... This mechanism gives a concrete procedure that SCO can be challenged to follow as part of the community's "put up or shut up" response. There would be no threat to SCO's claimed IPR."
Man, I had thought that SCO was losing it.. but this shows that they have totally and completly lost their minds. they are criticizing linus torvalds for not being keen on intellectual property rights when he is one of the biggest proponents of open source?? What is the world coming to?
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
...that they really are working themselves up to sue Linus personally, perhaps for negligence, and will likely due so if their extortion demands continue not to be met. They really have a scortched earth anything goes mentality there.
Well if the SCO group had ANY technical knowledge in their company I might care. However I rank their comments below pond scum's. Heck even Microsoft knows more than the SCO group.
As all hashes go, and I know, it's mathimatically "very hard", two different byte segments CAN have the same md5 sum. Longer they get, harder it is... but then again, anything is possible.. just not probable.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
So, he added, if there are intellectual property transgressions, they are easier to track. ...and community will replace it, when you told them where is it. But SCO wants nothing but sue.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
You'd want Linus to compare both codes and after that sue him for "inspiration"?
Look, Linux, you've seen all SCO code, now don't say you weren't influenced by it. As we said earlier, it is technologically impossible for anyone to produce great code without copying it from us.
They're shooting themselves in the foot, and remove their shoes beforehand!
Filter the articles off your homepage, then. And stop being a whinny bastard.
It is the responsibility of copyright holders to find violations and defend their own hold on ideas. It is not the responsibility of everyone else to police their claim. If someone, like the moderator of an open source software development community, is notified that they are directly or indirectly violating such claims, then they have they will have to remove the proveably unsanctioned content, but that is not a blank check to stop others from speaking or sharing ideas. Until a law is passed to actively restrict all communications on the basis of "defending" the rights of copyright holders, then I'd understand such accusations - but otherwise, I can't imagine how Linus could have done anything wrong here.
Perhaps it's the ones who complain about their rights the loudest/with the most money that may end up getting their way. But here, unlike many copyright cases, you can expect everyone present to stand up for their rights, loudly. Unfortunately for SCO, it appears that IBM and many other powerful companies are in favor of Linus' and other's rights.
Ryan Fenton
As I understand it, the lawsuit is about IBM contributing code to Linux that SCO claims it owned the rights to, and which they didn't have the right to distribute. There was no way Linus or anyone else who didn't have access to IBM's contracts with SCO, could determine that. In any event, the case certainly doesn't seem to have anything to do with patents.
One can only draw the conclusion that they're throwing mud in the hope that some will stick.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Of course, if US patents are to do what the founding fathers originally intended -- make it easier for the *inventors* to invent -- the patents should be non-transferable and with a relatively short patent period. A corporation and bunch of lawyers won't ever invent anything and shouldn't be allowed to own a patent, and unless the patent expires, there's no economic incentive for an inventor to invent anything new.
As for software patents, and patents on methods, they don't contribute to increased invention and development unless you restrict patents to what truly IS groundbreaking or a Columbi egg. If patents were more difficult to get, there would be an added incentive to try to come up with something more revolutionary than what people have been using, but not describing, for years.
Regards,
--
*Art
He's extremely patient and reasonable, which about sums up SCO's most obvious deficiencies, and not at all greedy for either money or attention, which apparently sums up SCO's entire motivation (or more specifically, D'ohl's entire motivation). Is it any wonder that they're jealous of him?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, it is not just you. I don't think that MicroSucks would even stoop to a level of condemning someone for what they invented which they currently sell. You never hear about how Microsoft condemns everyone that ever sold them software, now do you?
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
Pardon my ignorance, but how is using MD5 to find the allegedly copied code snippets going to "help" keeping them keep their trade secrets? The Linux source code is publically available and the only thing which "protects" the alleged SCO code snippets is that nobody knows exactly where in the heap of non-SCO code they are supposed to be. Sure, you wouldn't have to look at any other SCO code, but the same result could be achieved if they simply told us which parts they believe are stolen code.
SCO seems to be trying to pull the strings of the Linux community, hoping for an irrational response. The more of an uproar, the more news coverage, the better the situation for SCO.
Everyone needs to take a deep breath. We all know what they are trying to do. We need to just turn the other cheek and let IBM deal with it. SCO is now threatening IBM's bread and butter. It will be over soon. I doubt IBM would drag this out in the courts, because this type of FUD would continue to be spouted off throughout that entire time. If IBM comes up with a solidified argument demonstrating that SCO was near perjury with this lawsuit, its all over.
They shift a five-line window in one-line steps. The problem is that it wouldn't find "identical" code blocks which differ only by variable names or whitespace, but perfectly identical five-line blocks would be detected regardless of the file they occur in or where in the file they are. My only other criticism would be that one shouldn't throw out duplicates from the same code source, as copied code might have been copied to more than one place.
You must consider...perhaps the IBM lawyers are probably still far too busy...laughing. It should be very interesting to see how and when IBM finally does reply. I don't like the ignore approach, because while IBM is busy ignoring them, there are plenty of free and open source developers who could be suffering business losses due to cancelled contracts and lost oppertunities. In the end, I do think some form of community legal action will be nessisary.
America is so over!
Back to Finland, Baby! Where there are still reasonable legal structures in place, and the rule of law is still bigger than the U.S. Dollar.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Just a guess...it could that IBM is just letting SCO dig its own grave. How can IBM defend itself if SCO isn't "freely" (I mean in the courtroom sense) showing its alleged proof? Thus, when it comes time IBM can silence SCO forever by suing it for damage to its reputation and business.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Yep, I'd say that's an accurate statement, really.
If you are trying to identify closed source/proprietary origins of submitted linux code, there is just one thing you need.
God-like omniscience.
Linus is good, but he isn't that good.
Oh, if you wanted a horrible paperwork audit trail, you could make people include a signed document stating "I am the copyright holder for submitted code" or something like that. But part of the draw of working on OSS is to get away from all the icky lawyers and legal documents.
In this one specific instance, SCO is correct. It doesn't really affect their case at all, but they are still correct about this.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Much as I'm also getting slightly bored by these stories, it really is the biggest thing going on for years in the Linux (and maybe the whole Open Source) community. If, somehow, SCO succeeds in winning any of these cases it does have significant repercussions for most people who read Slashdot, somewhere down the line. (I know we all think it can't happen, but someone at SCO obviously believes they stand at least some chance..)
I know, I know, if there's infringing code it can just be pulled out etc, etc, but the PR disaster that would follow could spell real trouble for open source in general - we have to be careful here and not dismiss this totally, just in case it really does happen.
The blanket coverage is justified I think, because the open source movement as a whole really depends on this case being thrown out, or at least won heavily by IBM.
Q.
SCO themselves said it..
"If source code is copied from protected Unix code," the SCO document adds, "there is no way for Linus Torvalds to identify that fact."
So, there's no way he could have known in advance if a contribution came from somewhere else? Sounds like they are pointing at the process as the problem, rather than setting Linus up to take the hit.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
It seems to me the proposed use of MD5 sums is quite dangerous here, meaning that the md5 sum list might give away the original source. /*, the words copyright and SCO and such.
The next line can then be guessed, and this will be relatively easy because it has to be valid C. I don't think there is much 'randomness'in C, so it should be fairly easy.
It won't be hard to find the source matching the first 5 lines. probably somethine with
Fairly easy meaning with the use of brute force, which seems quite an appropriate term in this matter.
The only problem I see is that the hashes are still derived from SCO's intellectual property and are therefore still covered by copyright.
Nope, not a problem at all. I'm not a copyright expert, but the hashes would certainly not be covered by SCO copyright for two reasons: 1) They are not an original work of authorship, but instead an application of a mathematical algorithm to "fingerprint" a file; they're just a list of numbers. That would be like copyrighting the output of "ls -l". 2) Even if a judge somehow finds 1) above to be inapplicable, the hashes would certainly fall under the "fair use" exception to the copyright on the SCO files, as they are a form of commentary on them.
Of course, SCO will never agree to such reasonable measures, since they are not fundamentally looking for something reasonable, so the whole thing is moot. A far more likely scenario is that SCO may *eventually* be forced to submit their code base and backups to a court-appointed special master tasked with analyzing the issue of code derivation (what, when, and in which direction), and will be required to fully disclose their development logs to the court. At which time,assuming it ever gets to trial, the case will finally, finally collapse for good and all, and we can get back to sniping at Microsoft.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
... is to hijack Unix and all derived works. If they can con a court into revoking the AIX license, it will not be long before they go after all the other whose business is based on Unix.
As their business depends on the "trade secret" which is the Unix sources, merely winning damages from anyone who leaks the secret DOESN'T help SCO (apart from the money.)
SCO has to recreate the situation where ALL existing Unix licenses are revoked and all Unix-like code is awarded to SCO for safe keeping. Then they can make massive amounts of money re-licensing Unix to IBM etc.
(BTW, Sun invested $5M in SCO/Caldera in 2000)
Now, because the patent system has been horribly abused and twisted, and because capitalism is stupid about some things, the idea of the patent lawyer came into existence, and the MAIN PURPOSE of a patent lawyer is to write your patent in as obfuscated and broad a manner as possible. IE, to totally subvert the intent and goal of the patent system.
This is one of the reasons the patent system needs an overhaul.
Nope. Microsoft may be evil, but SCO is simply dumb. "Evil" is cunning and scary. Someone cunning would have long since realized that these uncoordinated and unfounded all-out attacks simply make SCO look hysterical and ridiculous.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
That worked when the difference between proof-of-concept and production capacity was an extra mule. This doesn't work anymore. I know a bit about a lot of technical equipment from graduate school, equipment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Let's say I invented something completely new and cool that was meant to work with complicated lasers. Under your idea, the best I can do is draw it and patent it. I can't test it, let alone produce it, because I can't afford lasers.
There's just no reason anymore to tie inventing to production. There's no reason, necessarily, why the two activities should be tied. And under your approach, you have made it impossible for anyone who's not already a millionaire to invent ANYTHING.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
unfortunately, some small developers dependant upon Linux business may be affected by the FUD; that's unfortunate.
Once it's over, provided IBM wins the case, IBM et. al. can then sue SCO for damages. They could end up owning SCO in the end after all...
Right now, since it's having little or no impact on IBM's business, it's in their interest to let SCO dig a deeper hole for themselves.
Right, so when some developer who is ignorant of US IP law asks Linus for his advice on a patent problem, Linus basically told him to STFU. And it was a good thing he did too - look at the riffraff who ends up pointing at things like that. What if the company owning the patent in question found that email? They wouldn't have to work at all to build a case - you've already proven that Linus and the other developers were aware of your IP at time they were developing a competing product. How smart would it be to document this freaking publicly?
Now, I expect Linus was expecting his flock to read bteween the lines there - it's not good necessarily to be ignorant of other patents - but it's a bad idea to let anyone, inside the company or out, to know about the knowledge. You can't exactly make this official corporate policy, but unofficial policy should be "do your own patent searches. Talk about them with no one."
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
No no no.
Linus doesn't have a shit to do with it if something is pushed into the kernel which happens to be someone else's IP, because everything contributed not from linus is someone elses IP.
He doesn't get assigned the rights from the contributors, and he doesn't distribute the kernel (i.e. he doesn't own kernel.org), insofar SCO again is really really far away from anything which matters.
Boy do they get on my nerves, they more and more fulfill the rolemodel of that guy in school which was sooo obnoxious that even the most pacifist people sooner or later had to follow the urge to beat him up.
Linus wrote:
"...the transparency in the process also means that if dishonesty happens, you can go back and see what went on."
Right on. In other words, if SCO would release info on what was copied, then by going through the archives it will be possible to see who contributed it, and under what auspices. So we can see if IBM did it, if Caldera did it, if John Quackenschmoe did it, and if there is a violation hold the appropriate party responsible and stop the FUD.
Of course, the fact that SCO hasn't done this only shows that the pieces of paper they hold in their hands, probably don't have the names on it they say they do.
What I find beautifully ironic about this is that I tried the same defense when writing a paper in school once -- I didn't want to taint my ideas unnecessarily with those others had -- but my professor disagreed and I ended up writing a paper that was simply a summation of everyone elses's ideas -- and got an A. I hated that.
What I don't understand about the SCO/IBM case, is why IBM isn't taking action to immediately stop SCO from doing what they are doing. I am sure it must be affecting their AIX business, and I can't believe that there isn't a legal method they can use to take some kind of cease and desist out on SCO.
In our system, it makes more sense for IBM to lay low for the moment and let SCO do all the work. It will cost SCO a fair amount of money to actually execute a lawsuit against anyone, much more so against IBM. IBM knows that SCO can't win; why would they initiate a bunch of legal action on their own?
IBM recently refused to settle with SCO, meaning that this lawsuit will actually go to court and IBM is actually going to defend itself. If you know anything about Wal-Mart, you'll see the similarity. Wal-Mart has a corporate policy of never settling a lawsuit unless they agree that they are culpable (which they have done on occasion, so no "evil corporation" diatribe, please). This has saved them lots of $$ over time, because they discourage a lot of lawsuits, and many of the brave (or ignorant) souls who actually try to dig $$ out of Wal-Mart's deep pockets eventually drop their cases.
I think IBM's strategy is correct in this case, particularly because IBM knows that SCO can't prove anything and that SCO can't possibly outlast them in a court battle. It's nice to have big blue on the side of open-source, even if it is only because it directly affects IBM's interests.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
Linus is not checking all contributions against potential patents. Are you kidding me? So for every contribution he has to go search the patent database?
From the article:
"If source code is copied from protected Unix code," the SCO document adds, "there is no way for Linus Torvalds to identify that fact." (emphasis added)
So they are saying Linus is a bad boy because he is NOT doing something THEY ACKNOWLEDGE HE CAN'T DO, even if he wanted to - which he has said he does not want to, and for good, sound, and sufficient reasons.
SCO(Caldera), I don't care how many lawyers you bring into the case, you are not able to hold someone to a standard that you then point out is unattainable.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
I believe that our efforts should be aimed at identifying and exposing the top managers at SCO.
SCO is a company but it is also a group of people. SCO's current actions have to had been sanctioned by management at the highest level. Someone made a choice, someone said "let's go ahead with this".
So make it personal. By exposing each and every of SCO's top-level managers as being associated and willing participants in this mess their chances of ever again be employeed in a top-level management position (at least in this industry) are highly decreased.
This is especially true if they are tracked into any new job they go into and the company that employes them is exposed (thus being smeared along with SCO by their choice of managers) - any company that hires any one of those persons has a business ethics (or more precisely lack of it) that accepts this type of attitude.
Decisions are taken by someone (companies do not take decisions). Those that take the decisions (or are willing participiants in taking those decisions) should be made to assume their responsabilities instead of being allowed to hid behind a SCO-mask.
I'll agree with you there.
Oh, but they are.
My emphasis.
My emphasis again
... and again
... and again.
Well there's the problem! And I completely agree with you. But that is the current system. Lawyers don't generally get to argue what the system "should" be, unless they make it to the Supreme Court. It's highly unlikely this case will go that far, so the current "completely corrupt and obfuscated" system is in no immanent danger of reform.
Nope, no sig
Yep. and that's because SCO refuses to identify the protected code.
They also complain that Torvalds refuses to go hunting patents.. That's also appropriate. One of the best ways to avoid violating patented methods is to not know about them. If the solution is an obvious one, then the fact that you came to the same solution without konwing about the patent is almost a sufficient defence. On the other hand, if the solution is not an obvious one, then chances ar that you'll come up with a solution different enough from the pattern that the difference is a sufficient defence.
The purpose of a patent is to document a method such that (once the patent expires) anybody else can use it. The patent monopoly is just to ensure that people have an incentive to register their patents so that they ultimately do go into the public domain.
An interesting feature about the OS process is that -- once something goes into an OS project, it is (or at least should be) essentially unpatentable -- this is because any open source project is effectively published.. Especially for large and well-distributed projects like Linus, it's almost trivial to prove when that idea was published.
If you take the time to hunt patents before you use an idea, you run the risk of delaying the publication of an idea long enough for someone else to patent it.
The long and short result is that it's easier (and even better) to implement an idea and then wait to see if someone complains about a patent infringement than to go wandering through the patent office looking for something that may be the same as what you are using.
Reading through a patent application well enough to understand whether or not it applies to an idea is a long, difficult and dirty job. I'd much rather leave that to someone who's paid to do it (like the patent owner's lawer). Once the issue is raised by somene who cares about it then I'll deal with that bridge when I come to it.
I think that Linus has the same idea, and it sounds like he got it from his business colleagues.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
One other thing that has to be done is to use the same set of supporting compiler libraries as was used in 199X. Unfortunately this makes it more difficult to prove, as you would have to start with a compiler from a system that old (hope it doesn't have any y2k issues itself) potentially you would have to compile the compiler support libraries before you compile the kernel.
If the compiler includes a datestamp indicating when the binary was compiled, you will need to set the system doing the compile to various dates and times per what you are compiling (and hope the datestamp isn't millisecond sensitive).
Finally you will need to demonstrate that the code you compiled was functional. The fact that the MD5 hash for the two blocks of code is the same does not show that what you are comparing it to was functional code to begin with. This may be aleviated by getting a copy of the executable from a third party, which the lawyers would have to prove was not an interested party in the case.
All told, it seems easy/simple, but it is quite a bit of work. Last I heard it took quite a bit of time for kernel compiles. I don't know if SCO stockholders would appreciate paying lawyers to sit around and watch if the actual compile took more than a couple of hours.
Then again, that's an opinion, and IANAL.
-Rusty
You never know...
SCO won't let people see the contested source code without signing an outrageous NDA but the article gives a mechanism for publishing appropriate MD5 checksums which allow code trees to be compared without anyone else seeing the code.
However, the point is that SCO is claiming that their code has already been released (unauthorized) into the wild. This means that anyone who can read the linux kernel code can also view the (supposed) SCO code as well, because it is (supposedly) in the linux kernel. While the fact that SCO won't likely even support the MD5 summing method (which wouldn't work very well if the code is only "similar" as opposed to "identical") is more damning to them, even describing *where* the two equivilent chunks of code are will not hurt them anymore than they are claiming they have already been hurt.
Even if every single line of code the SCO is objecting to happened to get removed by some massive kernel overhaul by someone who had never had the opportunity to see SCO's "evidence", SCO would still claims rights over the changes as a derivative work because they consider the fact that their code was merely inspiration to be a cause for the new code to be "derivative".
SCO would consider any code developed based merely on what one had learned from Unix code to be derivative. This would mean that at least 3/4 of the programs I wrote in Operating Systems class were probably infringing in some way on SCO's IP. The GPL does not consider code developed based on what one learned from GPL code to be derivative -- The GPL only considers a derivative if it is copied and modified, not if it is completely rewritten from scratch by the application of actually understanding what the code does.
Let's say, for example, I wrote a book that had all the same concepts and ideas as Lord of the Rings, but didn't use any of Tolkien's names or trademarks. Having already read LotR, my book would obviously be a "derivative". Indeed many people might say my book was just a knockoff of LotR. While many Tolkien fans would likely be outraged at my writing it, I wouldn't actually be breaking any copyright laws, however. The most anyone could do would be to personally boycott my work, but they couldn't stop me from publishing it or from it being distributed anywhere I chose.
Just as a quick recap, here are the four major IP's. I find it interesting that SCO has changed its story so many times, it's hard to actually tell which sort of IP they actually have that they are referring to. It seems like the premise of trade secret is closest to what they mean, but they keep talking about owning rights to derivative works, which has to fall back on the strength of copyright, not trade secrets.
Copyright only protects content, it cannot protect ideas. Copyright also has provisions for protecting works that can reasonably be considered derivatives, such as translation into another language, changing the media of distribution, and several others. Trade secret can protect ideas, but it cannot protect them once they are publically known (although it is entirely reasonable to make a claim for damages from the party that caused ones trade secret to become public in the first place). Further, trade secrets do not protect against reverse engineering or reinvention. Patents more completely protect inventions and methods, even to the point of stopping reverse engineering, but unlike trade secrets, *MUST* be public knowledge in order to retain patent protection. Trademarks protect terminology, must be publically known, must be defended in order to be retained, and only apply to the field in which the trademark itself is applied (for example, a person should be able to start a plumbing business called "Apple Plumbing", without violating Apple's trademark).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I noted an article where Microsoft lawyers signed the NDA to look at SCO's claims. I thought it odd. So while you can't say Microsoft is behind it, you might say Microsoft is looking at it to see if they can make trouble - based on previous bad spirited memos they've released in the past.
When you buy SCO Unix (ha!) or AIX, or MS Windows, or anything, how do you know, as a customer, that its unemcumbered by patents?
As a developer, when you write a bubble sort, how do you know someone hasn't patented the idea?
As a company, given the vague nature of software patents ("A method to do ecommerce using a single button on a web page..."), and also given that developers don't necessary explicitly say what methods they're using. So a search is not reasonably possible.
Finally, even if you buy into the idea of software patents, how would you know if MS had infringed? Unless you have access to the source code, you have no idea. And last I check, MS doesn't readily hand out source code to make sure they're not violating any software patents.
In points out the fallacy of software patents, it highlights the stupidity of granting them, and it shows why all software patents are unenforceable, *except* against open source software.
Software patents must be eliminated: they serve no purpose except as litigation tools for large companies.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
One thing to keep in mind is that the code SCO claims is infringing on their rights did not already exist in SCO's copies of System V and their own derived code.
What SCO is claiming is that their rights include the modifications made by companies licensing the AT&T System V code.
Their contracts specify that any derived works created by the licensees is also covered by the license.
But their use of the phrase "derived works" does not seem at all reasonable or acceptable.
The question is what does the phrase mean? If you look at Title 17 of the U.S. Code (available from wwww.law.cornell.edu), you find the following definition:
In other words, when you modify SCO's licensed code, the result is a derivative work and is consequently covered by the license.
However, they are claiming that the modifications themselves are also derivative works, apart from the object being modified.
But if you look at the definition, the derivative work is a transformation, adaptation, revision, ..., of the original work.
The code in question is largely or maybe entirely code that was done by others apart from AT&T/Novell/SCO and added to their licensed copy of the code to create something better. The code that you get when you add the additional code to the original code is clearly a derivative work and SCO clearly has interests in keeping you from distributing the resulting derivative work.
But SCO seems to be claiming that the code added to System V to create a derivative work of System V is itself a derivative work.
The only other possibility I can imagine is that they are claiming that you can't copy code directly from the derivative work into another product because of the licenses. (See Exhibit C of their lawsuit.)
But I haven't seen any evidence that IBM has done that. If someone at IBM excerpted the additions to the code so that none of the System V code was present and those excerpts were added to the Linux code, I don't think think there would be any violations at all.
If someone at IBM did copy the additions directly from the derived work and was careful to avoid copying any System V code over, I suppose that would be a technical violation of the contract. I think a technical violation of that sort would be so minor that they wouldn't warrant anything more than a letter from SCO to IBM demanding that they be more careful.
And there are no allegations that I've heard that IBM did a copy and paste of their own additions directly from the SCO code to their own code.
It would be nice to find out what some knowledgeable lawyers thought about the issue of whether or not adding Sequent or IBM's own code to System V makes their own code a "derived work" of System V. It could be that the legal system sees it some other way.
One other point. If SCO is interpreting the phrase "derived work" in an unobvious way, then the phrase should probably have been clarified in the agreement instead of leaving it ambiguous. In law, isn't an ambiguity in a contract generally interpreted against the side who wrote the contract? Since the basic contract was probably written by AT&T and then hammered out between both sides, I think that any ambiguity would likely be decided in IBM's favor.
It could be argued that way in the earlier days, when people went around Microsoft wearing buttons saying "B.O.G.U.S." (bend over, grease up, sucker) to remind those whose stocks hadn't yet been vested that their stock holdings were (also a not-so-subtle badge of seniority)
Let's face it - you've become a millionare, you want a home life, you leave. Lots of talent left - some temporarily (gone to pick lettuce, as one employee did, just to get a break), and others, well, they either retired, or created/joined start-ups.
Remember - no overtime/weekend pay, the expectation of 80-100 hour weeks as normal, etc. And fewer interesting challenges for top coders. Under those conditions, the ones who stay are the ones you would want to leave, so we're probably seeing a rush to the bottom in terms of code talent/quality at Microsoft.
This would explain why they had to take a couple of months to "refresh" people on the idea that buffer overflows are a "bad thing". And, when taht didn't work, appoint a group of code reviewers just to check for such inanities.
Not quite. SCO does seem intent on dancing on the thin edge, but their strategy appears to be placing Linux and IBM on the defensive, i.e., making the Linux community prove it didn't steal code. In this instance, SCO is positioning itself to assert that someone could easily slip proprietary code into Linux because no one is checking to make sure they don't. To bolster that assertion, they can produce Linus' statement counseling contributors to avoid reviewing patents. Can the Linux community show a court anything to the contrary?
Knowledge of the technical issues isn't required of the court. Knowledge of patent law is required. If SCO does, in fact, show a court proprietary code copied into Linux, IBM and the Linux community will need good lawyers, not more assertions that the openness of their development process keeps people honest.
It only takes one dishonest developer to make SCO right.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
However, this standard is not attainable by SCO either. It may not even be attainable by IBM.
Their entire rant can be turned back on them and used to expose their own poor practices.
The development model has nothing to do with whether or not the problem is soluable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
1. Linus manages the production of software with all of the available source published in the public domain.
2. Linus tracks each individual contributor to the kernel back to the start of Linux development.
3. We think that your auditing process ought to include a laborious process of researching every patent ever filed for any technology related to kernel development.
4. We find that this process is flawed compared to our model of:
a) closing our source from public view, thereby increasing the potential that stolen code is in our source,
b) not identifying who is working on particular aspects of kernel development and the potential conflicts of interest that might develop (e.g., hiring a Sun developer and then using their expertise to enhance SCO's code), and
c) not researching every patent ever filed for any technology related to kernel development thereby giving us plausible deniability if we develop code that is similar to a competitor's IP.
Does anyone but me think that SCO is getting funnier as time drags on?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
This was just a demonstration of the technique, having nothing to do with SCO. It was merely a comparison of Linux and the 4.4BSD-lite, both of which are freely available and easy to obtain.
4.4BSD-lite was a release of BSD that was deemed by the courts to be clean & free of AT&T (then the owner of the SysV IP) code, thus if anything that exists in both SCO's source and Linux is also in 4.4BSD-lite, SCO doesn't have a leg to piss on.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I think that perhaps you're a bit optimistic in thinking there are far more "FOSS" programmers than "proprietary" programmers. Plus, its an artificial distinction without any real basis for comparison. Somedays I'm programming Open Source, somedays, not so much. Heck, I'm pretty sure that Linus has been doing some proprietary stuff for Transmeta these past couple years.
So now SCO come along and say that they own blah blah blah, because I implemented it into AndyIX first. As far as I can see, this seems to be the basis of SCO's "case". If the GPL is "viral", then SCO's Unix licence must surely qualify as a WMD?!
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
No. They're making a case that the whole management structure of Linux is flawed, since the project manager can't even determine that the work people under him submit is their own work.
:-)
:-P
I realise that you are merely stating what they say, and are not claiming to agree. It's a statement that amazes me though. Since when should someone make the default assumption that everyone she is dealing with is probably lying to her? How would she get through even a single day, knowing that she had to do background checks on absolutely everything said or presented to her?
Typically you trust someone until they prove to be unreliable, then you adjust your behaviour to compensate. If the people at SCO think in any way like that quote, then I think they should be put out of their misery and shot or something. It's only humane - living like that must be hell.
If some court were to actually support this viewpoint, I would lose the infinitesimally small respect I already have for them.
---
the patents should be non-transferable and with a relatively short patent period.
# We already have a relatively short patent period: 20 years.
20 years in the software industry is an eternity. The end of life on a piece of software will probably come many years before the patent ends. In that situation, they may as well be indefinite.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Wouldn't it be simpler to just run both sources through a compiler preprocessor? Yes, it would ignore comments, but it's the sequence of keywords (operations, etc) that we are looking for. The preprocessor tracks the line numbers too. I don't see why we need to reinvent the wheel.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
SCO could already provide us with a list of files and line numbers they claim are infringed, since they have access to both sources.
/foo/bar.c in Linux 2.4.18 violates our IP rights" and it would not violate their IP at all, since it simply a reference to a location in a public work.
They could already have stated "We claim line 13-37 of
To make a more concrete example, I could claim that Stephen King's latest novel has sentences identical to mine. But when asked to point them out, I would answer "No, that would reveal what my sentences are. See you in court." Does that make any kind of sense?
The fact that they won't show it except under an NDA, makes it very clear that they do not *want* to identify the infringing pieces, if there are any at all. They certainly don't want anyone to be able to find them or replace them.
The MD5 approach would be appropriate for two closed source companies disputing the same problem - it allows a comparison by a third party without compromising either codebase. But in this case SCO has already done what the program is meant to do - they just won't tell you the results. Period.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings