My Visit to SCO

Ian Lance Taylor writes "I signed the SCO NDA and visited them to discuss their claims against Linux. My essay about it is on the Linux Journal web site. The short version is that SCO's claims are unproven, as indeed I expected would be the case before I went. The amount of information they were willing to show me was extremely limited, and did not by itself prove that their claims were true, nor that their claims were false." Other SCO-bits: Sun is doing their usual foot-in-mouth routine, thinking that two FUDs makes a Solaris purchase, or something like that. IBM is now joining the contact the customers bandwagon. Eric Raymond has been keeping himself busy - here's a story about him. SCO hates BSD, too, but they're not taking it lying down. And of course Cringley has his two cents.

Comments

Oh the irony...

[MoogMan]

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.sco. com

'Nuff said.

What if SCO wins?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if they're right? That's the key question over SCO's claims and it's also the one question the open-source community largely refuses to address. For all the pleadings and letters that will emerge from this maelstrom, SCO's claims are fairly simple: It owns the bulk of the intellectual property underlying Unix, and recently, some of its code has been spied in Linux. Actually, make that quite a bit of it, says SCO.

It's not just the code. Programmer comments embedded in Linux -- English-language descriptions -- are identical to those found in SCO's Unix code, according to SCO. There's even a typo in one of the commentaries in Unix System V that also appears in a Linux commentary. Extracting the controversial code is not really a feasible solution. Because of the way intellectual property (IP) laws work, derivative products that use the allegedly pilfered code are also subject to liability. Anyone who bundles suspect products, or uses them, is also conceivably on the hook.

My college roommate in my sophomore year, an electrical engineering student named Mike Foster, helped me coin that one. He had an answer for everything, and often it involved the death penalty, a flat tax or some other clean, simple solution that would have been absolutely insane to try in real life. Don't get me wrong. I stand in awe of people who can design transistors or even who can put up drywall. But there is arrogance inside the scientific mind, and it rarely knows when to stop.

Put the SCO argument another way: What if you found out something you had a hand in was now the basis of a multibillion-dollar empire? Would you want a slice, or denounce yourself as a fraud? SCO could also be really overplaying some minor copying. But we won't know until the evidence is in.

Damage SCO's lunacy might cause.

[s0ckratees]

While, SCO's claims seem to be destined to fizzle out eventually, I fear they may have caused enough damage by then. This will give fodder to anti-linux lobbby claiming this is something that would never happen with a proprietary. Yeah, Linux may be great, but look at "these problems" with "this kinda software".

I was wondering...

[MachineShedFred]

I was wondering when we were going to get our daily dose of SCO stupidity.

I guess that case is solved now.

Re:What SCO is really afraid of.

[sbwoodside]

I'd bet a all the money I have that if that "offending" code was revealed tonight we'd have it all rewritten by Monday morning. The Linux community is more angry about this than anything that has ever touched it. All that anger would be unleached in an orgy of coding the likes of which even God has not seen.

The big headache will come if SCO manages to get through this without ever revealing the code. Then they can charge extortion money from anyone without end.

simon