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The Power Behind the SCO Nuisance
akahige writes "Forbes has a fairly detailed story about the sordid history of The Canopy Group and all the various companies they've sued -- Microsoft (who they beat) and CA (this case is still pending), among them. Before joining Caldera, Darl McBride sued IKON Office Solutions, for whom he worked -- and won. And it also seems that a bunch of Canopy power players also sit on SCO's board of directors. The short summary is, 'these guys are professional litigious bastards -- be exceptionally wary.'" A local user's group is planning a protest for tomorrow. Reader myst564 writes: "After reading all of this SCO press I remembered that SCO once offered up all of their 'Ancient UNIX' (their words, not mine) source to the world while retaining all copyrights (i.e, no OSS license). Interestingly enough it WAS located here but isn't any longer: SCO's Ancient Unix. What's more you can read about the original release here at: Linux Today. I downloaded the source myself way back then but never did anything but delete it! Anyway, check out this comment. It's interesting that this was predicted in 2000!"
You did not count on the Way Back machine Herr Doktor SCO?
Here's a working link..
Enjoy!
Courtesy of the wayback machine:
http://www.sco.com/offers/ancient_unix.html
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
So, that brings up an obvious question:
Is the ancient software found at
http://www.tuhs.org/archive_sites.html legal?
What is the probability that SCO will rescind the public availability of it?
Perhaps there was meant to be a NOT in there somewhere?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Hit the "wayback" links and read the License Agreement SCO was offering these sources under.
It's sufficiently restrictive such that you most certainly can't copy the code into a GPL'd product -- not legally, at least.
Of course, that's assuming the source SCO's providing you (for 100 bucks, by and large) is your ONLY way of accessing the code. The case IBM and the Linux community at large will make (I'm pretty sure) is that the violations SCO claims are NOT violations because SCO's code wasn't the only means of obtaining that code, or at least the algorithms in question.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
"The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. P.O. Box 7745
San Francisco, CA 94120-7745
United States of America"
The current SCO is NOT the same as the former SCO. (Now the Tarantella Group.)
If you read the article, you'll see that the current SCO was formerly Caldera. Caldera bought the Unix rights from SCO, the old SCO became Tarantella (which was one of their products IIRC...), and then Caldera renamed to The SCO Group.
That source offer was made by people with no management connection to McBride...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It depends really. A MD5 hash will only tell if entire files were misappropriated verbatim. So throwing on a GNU header, adding in a changelog entry for a bug fix etc would all invalidate the MD5 hash. I do not believe that there is any truth to the SCO claims, but MD5 hashes wouldn't be proof in favour of linux either.
A first step would be to use a regexp to spit out all the comments into a file sorted by some key. Do this for both the SCO and linux code bases. Toss out all the comments which aren't in both lists and you now have a file with common comments. This would be where to start looking, if you see non-trivial verbatim comments then further investigation would be needed.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
See breakdown at TrollTech investors
So - yes, Virginia, they have an interest in Trolltech, and no, it's not a controlling intrest. Though maybe they could sue their way to the top?
The case against Microsoft was not won. MS settled out of court. This is what they are hoping will happen with the IBM suit.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
No, no, this was gone over before; you MD5 hash each consecutive five-line set (including overlapping ones) for each set of source, sort the list of hashes, do the same for Linux, and then run through the list of MD5s looking for matches.
That'll give you hits for any five-line segment of code that matches anywhere between the two.
And on this linke http://web.archive.org/web/20000816145931/www.sco. com/linux/
you will find this... "A corporate sponsor of Linux International, SCO has always supported open standards, UNIX Systems and server-based technologies and solutions that benefit business computing. Our engineers have continuously participated in the Open Source movement, providing source code such as lxrun, and the OpenSAR kernel monitoring utility. We offer a free Open Source software supplement that includes many Open Source technologies as well as making our commercial UNIX products available free for non-commercial use. "
So you're like -- interested in all the countless other stories using the Caldera icon, but not the SCO vs IBM stories?
Turn off the Caldera stories in your user preferences, then hush and enjoy your peace while the rest of us keep an eye on the most important thing to happen to free software this century.
I'll bet you use Mandrake.
Or maybe you could look here for a whole list of mirrors containing the v6, v7, 2.2BSD 4BSD etc releases and sources.
All helpfully provided by the Unix Heritage Society
Economic Left/Right: -0.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69
In the army, infantry are refered to as "crunchies" because of the sound they make while marching in formation. Crunch, crunch, crunch. So they're the crunchies.
In context, she was referring to the army of Linux developers, and specifically, the ones doing the dirty work.
A simple run through indent would mask code copying this way. As an undergrad our software engineering class had us write a cheat detector for C source code. Our code removed white space and comments and then tokenized the C code. It compared the tokenized versions across multiple lines. You could move functions around, change variable names, add white space and comments and our program could detect a similarity.
Running a MD5 hash is quite frankly useless. Almost certainly the two kernel trees have different code styles. Linus uses an 8 space indent, which as far as I can tell is pretty rare. Any code that would have been inserted would have at least been ran through indent.
The more you know, the less you understand.
IBM should follow Jerry Jones's (owner of the Dallas Cowboys) lead.
NFL Properties, the league's business and marketing arm, filed a $300 million lawsuit in September 1995 that challenged licensing and sponsorship agreements involving Jones and Texas Stadium that included private contracts with Nike, AT&T, Dr Pepper, American Express and Pepsi. The suit contended those arrangements violated NFL Properties' centralized licensing and marketing role.
In response, the Cowboys filed a $700 million lawsuit in November 1995, charging that NFL Properties' centralized role violated antitrust laws. The suit also claims the Texas Stadium sponsorships don't involve Cowboys trademarks and are consistent with NFL Properties' rules.
The NFL backed off because they were going to get stomped. (They don't own Texas Stadium; The Cowboys lease it from Jerry Jones even though Jerry Jones own both the Cowboys and Texas Stadium)
Canopy owns 5.8% of trolltech.
Not ownership.
Safari has an emulation layer to make signals and slots work with khtml. I wouldn't say it is based on Trolltech's Qt.
And even if Canopy goes nuts, there is the Trolltech/KDE agreement. Nobody can do anything about that.
OK, now I am confused...
Understandable. SCO is deliberately sowing confusion (not showing any evidence while screaming accusations publicly most of which can be proven false without their proported evidence, changing their accusations every five minutes, deliberately obfuscating and misrepresenting diverse areas of law, including trademark, trade secret, contract, copyright, and patent law, etc. etc.).
IANAL, but I have been following this rather closely, at first with consternation and concern, now with irritation and amusement.
The release of Ancient UNIX undermines any trade secret violations; The SCO Group failed to register and copyrights, making accusations of copyright infringement impossible; SCO isn't accusing IBM of patent infringement, and another company owns the trademark to UNIX.
That is essentially correct. The only thing which could hold legal water would be a contract violation. There is some speculation that SCO is persuing some of the more onerous AT&T licensing provisions, which might give AT&T/SCO some control over IBM's own code written for UNIX system V. However, even if this 'worst case scenerio' were to be true, the provisions are so onerous and absurd that they are likely to be declared unenforcable by a court of law.
There is further evidence that the case is extraordinarilly weak, although this evidence isn't admissable in court. Namely, SCO wants a jury trial, and while a courtroom is neutral on whether or not a jury vs. judge trial is selected, attorney friends of mine assure me that when a litigant chooses a jury trial it is almost always because they are uncertain of their case and hope to baboozle lay people and get a judgement anyway.
In contrast, folks who have a very good case generally choose to have a judge preside over the trial, as juries are much less predictable than judges.
So it boils down to a possible contract violation, nothing more. No copyright violation (despite their public rhetoric to the contrary), probably little or no trade secret issues given that they themselves have contributed to and distibuted Linux code long after making the allegations publicly (and continue to do so to this day), no patent violation as they do not own the patents, and as you rightly point out, no trademark violation as (a) Linux does not use the UNIX trademark and (b) they don't own the trademark anyway.
So it amounts to some arcane contract law which, in the extraordinarilly unlikely event that IBM did in fact violate their contract with AT&T/SCO in some way and lost the lawsuit, wouldn't affect the legality of Linux in any way.
It is all FUD and nonsense, created in a desperate attempt to extort money and defraud investors, underwritten by Microsoft and a nameless second entity, and will likely be viewed as a mockery of the beleagered American legal system for some time to come.
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong..."
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
In the March trade, notice section 2. The issuer is listed as Caldera, but notice the trading symbol is SCOX. That's the same trading symbol as the Friday filing in section 2, even though the Friday one lists the issuer as The SCO Group.
So, I'm comparing oranges and oranges. (Or maybe rotten apples to rotten apples.) Also, if you look at a 5 day intraday trading chart for SCOX, you'll notice that there were some really large volume trades on Friday and Monday. Some approaching 100K in a single transaction. This for a stock that normally averages around 200K/day total. I believe that last Friday's total was 2.4M changing hands. A lot of people unloaded a lot of SCOX stock on Friday and Monday.
IAABAAP (i am a biologist and a programmer), and the 2 processes are not really similar. most higher organism genomes are chock full of very highly repetitive genetic filler/rubbish/crap, which makes the gene assembly *way* more difficult.
This is the official press release from the Provo Linux Users Group:
----
To whom it may concern:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jason Hall
jason@plug.org
http://www.plug.org/
UTAH LINUX USERS DEMONSTRATE OPPOSITION TO SCO LAWSUIT
Provo, Utah (June 19, 2003) -- To voice their opposition to SCO's
lawsuit against IBM and their malignment of the Linux programmers
community, members of the Provo Linux Users Group (PLUG) and other
Utah-based Linux Users Groups will protest in front of SCO's Lindon,
UT office on Friday, June 20, 2003 from 3 to 5 pm.
SCO's lawsuit claims that IBM copied parts of SCO's UNIX computer
operating system into Linux, a freely-distributed operating system
written by an international community of computer programmers.
They have therefore revoked IBM's license to distribute AIX (IBM's
version of UNIX) and are seeking $3 billion in damages for theft of
intellectual property. Furthermore, they have sent letters to 1500
corporations warning them that Linux contains computer code belonging to
SCO and continued use of Linux may result in SCO taking legal action
against them.
With this suit, SCO has raised the ire of computing professionals
worldwide by overstating its contributions to UNIX operating systems
(which include Linux and AIX), claiming ownership of Linux and denying
past involvement in its development, and making inaccurate and derisive
comments about the Linux development community. Under the auspices of
the Provo Linux Users Group, Linux users and programmers from northern
Utah will meet on Friday in front of SCO's headquarters in Lindon, UT
to demonstrate the opposition to SCO's actions and to show their support
of IBM, the Linux development community, and any other companies against
which SCO takes legal action.
About the Provo Linux Users Group:
The Provo Linux Users Group (PLUG) is a non-profit, volunteer-run
organization dedicated to helping members to learn the Linux operating
system, offering volunteer technical support, and encouraging the use of
Open Source software. Membership is free, meetings are held
monthly, and the group mantains an active email list. For more
information about PLUG, go to
http://www.plug.org/
About other Utah-based Linux users groups:
PLUG is only one of a half-dozen Linux users groups in Utah, and one of
thousands of such groups worldwide. More information about Utah-based
Linux users groups can be found at
http://www.ssc.com:8080/glue/groups/us/utah
Taken from '/usr/src/linux/Documentation/CodingStyle':
"Chapter 1: Indentation
Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.
Rationale: The whole idea behind indentation is to clearly define where a block of control starts and ends. Especially when you've been looking at your screen for 20 straight hours, you'll find it a lot easier to see how the indentation works if you have large indentations.
Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.
In short, 8-char indents make things easier to read, and have the added benefit of warning you when you're nesting your functions too deep. Heed that warning."
Not that I personally agree, but that's what the Linux coding Standards says...
rm -rf / is the evil of all root
No that isn't quite right. Unix System Laboratories (USL) and Novell brough a suit against several parties including Univ. of Calif. Berkeley and Berkely System Design, Inc. over large portions of 4.4BSD. The lawsuit was for trademark violations, copyright infringement and disclosing trade secrets. (Sound familiar?)
The case was settled after it was found that USL and Novell incorporated large swathes of BSD code going back to before 1985. This included code was in violation of the BSD license because the BSD copyrights and license attributions where removed. BSD threaten to countersue, and the judge indicationed that BSD was very likely to win.
The settlement terms were sealed, but depending on who you ask, the settlement only affected 3 or 4 BSD files out of 16,000+ source files. That code base went to become 4.1BSD Lite. The common code base that today BSDs derive.
According to Eric Raymond (from 6/10 TheLinxShow.com, 1:00:00 timemark), AT&T and Novell effectively lost propriatary claim to a large part of the System V code. The code that was common to the System VR4 and 4.1BSD releases. This is due to the 1993 lawsuit settlement. SCO is contrained by that settlement as well.