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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."
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
A common fallacy, but both Open Source and Free software *depend* on intellectual property rights.
Without it there would be no reason to agree to the OS or Free license terms (you could just ignore them and do what you like) and therefore no onus to put back into the pool any improvements etc you might make.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
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!
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
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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'
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
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