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Law Professor Examines SCO Case
An anonymous submitter writes "This law professor from the University of California points out weakness in SCO's legal bluster, and further takes a poke at closed software, for those hungry for more SCO scraps. At the end, he references Slashdot for more info ('itself a demonstration of the power of dispersed individuals working together')."
I have a small company and was attacked in a similar way by a large German company (I'm in the USA). They simply attacked with a lawyer from a large office in New York and I am in a small town in California. My lawyer did some digging and found that there is a federal law that states you must give the person in violation a full description of the violation and allow a responce. If there is not a civilized responce then you can go to court. We never went to court and we got the problem sorted out. It sounds like SCO would be in violation of that federal law.
NO. IBM did not license any of the technologies in question from SCO. What SCO is claiming is that even though the code was developed by IBM (during AIX and OS/2 development) that SCO has exclusive rights over it because it constitutes a derivative of Unix. This affects Linux because now that this "Unix derivative" code is in Linux, SCO claims Linux is a derivative of Unix.
If you're going to quote SCO's bullshit lies, get it right!
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Nope. You can see Insider trades. Just go to Yahoo lookup 'SCOX' click the insider link and there it is. Last I checked there were no insider trades since the lawsuit.
They know better, if the executives are dumping stock don't you think people would notice? SCO is either hoping to be bought by IBM, or they actually belive they have a case.
Non gratis rodentus anus
In the late 1990s, IBM, Sequent, and the Santa Cruz Operation were working together on a project called Monterey. Monterey/64 was designed to be a common UNIX platform running on 64-bit Intel (Merced/Itanium) and Power4. It had wide industry support from hardware and software vendors, such as Intel and Oracle. Around 2000, IBM scrapped the project based on issues with the Itanium1 platform and concerns about SCO's ability to deliver. UnixWare retained its name for some time after the SCO purchase from Novell. In the next year or two IBM acquired Sequent and Caldera acquired SCO. However, in this way did Sequent non-uniform memory access made it into UnixWare and AIX.
This is how IBM and SCO have NUMA cache concurrency code. NUMA made it into Linux because IBM wanted to improve Linux reliability on their SMP Xeon-based servers, and instructed some of their programmers including some people who worked on Dynix/Sequent that wrote NUMA in the first place. This is how NUMA came to be in Linux. What I believe is the management at SCO has little knowledge of the code history of their SVR4 UNIX product. Caldera upper level management is populated with experts in hostile takeovers and making a business out of patent and copyright enforcement. I have no doubt that they took the effort to see if the Linux kernel had any resemblance to their UNIX code tree, and lo and behold some of the SMP memory management code is identical.
SCO quickly informs IBM to stop putting UNIX code in Linux, but they don't seem to know that NUMA belongs to IBM, it is a derivitave work of AIX, which is a derivitive work of Dynix, both of which IBM owns, and on top of that IBM's source license with UNIX Systems Lab gives them intellectual property of code they create based on AT&T code.
Claims that IBM is "diluting" UNIX by putting UNIX-based code in it and having UNIX-knowledgeable software engineers working on it is rather a stretch of the imagination. If IBM has sole intellectual property on Dynix/Sequent, just because they shared it with Santa Cruz does not mean they cannot use the code elsewhere. SCO wants to compare their SVR4 UNIX with Linux code, but what we really need to see is Dynix and AIX right beside them. This will prove that IBM owns NUMA.
Claims that using NUMA in Linux will place SCO UNIX under the GPL are also false. SCO will retain rights to use and improve NUMA code they received from Monterey, because it pre-dates the NUMA code used in Linux. So in the end there are essentially who Sequent NUMA forks, the one in AIX and UnixWare cum SCO UNIX is proprietary and the other written for Linux is open source.