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OSCON Panel: SCO Lawsuit About the Money
viewstyle writes "Just when you had heard enough, the ongoing controversy about SCO vs. Linux has popped up over at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). According to Eweek's story, the panelists agreed that SCO is targeting companies like IBM in an attempt to raise cash. Most importantly: "if a company is not after money, suing is not the way to go.""
It's all about money? I thought it was about the cool evening wear of the mascot.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If I were a CIO or CTO debating the TCO of *nix vs. Win2K3 to a CEO, would IBM vs. SCO be the TKO that stops the CEO from approving A/P to pay my PO for RH's LGX?
FWIW, even if OSS is FAIB, if the DOJ considers *nix IP with a TM, then it basically become's SCO's LIC, meaning our OSS becomes a CSS OS, which would RSTBO.
AIBO going w/ an ASP that manages our OS? BTA, we might end up w/ a BOFH giving us ZA, which WWAD PMS.
AFAIK, INMP if SCO wants to be ITM by enforcing its supposed IPR - *nix IP should be PD or GNU, like BSD just on GP, IYKWIM. I keep asking myself in this situation - WWLD?
Oh, BTW - IITYWIMWYBMAD?
In other news, it was discovered that the Earth is round and fire is hot. Film at 11.
There are only two reasons you sue-- for injunctive relief of some kind, or to receive damages.
And there is one reason for profit corporations exist-- to make money. This is a surprise why?
You mean Chris Sontag isn't serious about wanting Linux to grow and prosper? That greedy son of a bitch!
Trolling is a art,
When an animal dies its sphincter loosens up and a smelly mess is created. Ditto SCO.
NOCSO?
who thinks the point of the lawsuit is to bleed money
out of Caldera/SCO. Create a pointless lawsuit, and have the company
pay a ton of money in legal bills to a lawfirm that the
CEO is a part of. A nice way to bleed a company dry.
When all done, McBride will move onto the next company
with too much money and suck that one dry also.
Corporate lawsuits often are--although in this case I would say there's a large, genuine streak of pseudo-evil vindictiveness behind the suit as well, just judging from all the public comments SCO has made thus far. They certainly have a bee in their bonnet about something, and god's death, they may even sincerely believe they're right (even if their claims are based on the wind).
The coolest voice ever.
Oh dear! I just thought it was righteous outrage at teft of SCO's GPL'ed IP.
When are people going to realize that first, parties with a vested interest in the matter, such as OSCON, will hold this or a biased opinion. Secondly, the only opinion that matters is that of a judge or a jury. It doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. Finally, a judge or jury is unlikely to render an opinion on the matter for another two to three years so, the constant rehashing of some OSS member's take is completely pointless.
Give it a rest. People need to focus on the positive aspects of Open Source and stop dwelling on this lawsuit. Regardless of the outcome, having this "news" constantly at the forefront is only going to damage Linux and Open Source due to the FUD factor.
if a company is not after money, suing is not the way to go
/or illegal drugs? It would clear out the courts of senceless lawsuits like this one. Who the heck is going to sue for crack? Yep, let em fight it out on the streets I say. Or maybe their street girls could fight it out for them. Hey, it worked in dope wars.
Why exactly would a company want money anyways? Couldn't they pursue a few less evil goods, such as prostitues and
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
And there is one reason for profit corporations exist-- to make money. This is a surprise why?
The real quote would be: And there is one reason for Courts to exist-- to help corporations make money. This is a surprise why?
That just sounds vaguely nasty.
Remember kids, don't share unprotected source with Microsoft, or you risk litigiously tramsmitted diseases.
And all along I had thought it was more complicated than that.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I got a diagonal Buzzword-Bingo on CTO, TCO, BSD and ASP. What did I win?
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
In the light of the SCO lawsuit Apples engagement for FreeBSD as a basis for their new system come into a totally different view point.
We all know that Jobs is a Unix expert mainly due to this economic adventures with Next.
So why did he decide to choose FreeBSD ?
The GPL is not the real problem. Apple has released the Darwin source anyway and it's interface framework is not touched by the GPL. And FreeBSD is today neither more stable nor faster than Linux. In fact with a bigger userbase Apple might have caught much more customers for their new systems when choosing Linux.
So, it seems that there must be a very different point which spoke against Linux.
Indeed FreeBSD is freed and therefore immune to such lawsuits due to the power of the AT&T vs. Berkeley ruling. This doesn't hold for Linux.
The main question is:How the fuck did Jobs know this ages before the SCO suit ?
The only explanation would be that Apple knowing both codebases saw similarities they didn't like and therefore ditched Linux. Note that it is not surprising that didn't make any fuzz about it: they might oblidged by NDA etc. to keep silent and they couldn't provide the code to back such stuff up anyways.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
sean
Our friends Charles Broughton (Sr VP Int'l Sales), Robert Bench (CFO) and Jeff Hunsaker (VP, Worldwide Marketing) are selling, selling and.. wait for it... selling.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
From the article:
"[Microsoft's recent Unix license deal with SCO] proves that Microsoft and proprietary software vendors have a great deal to fear from intellectual property held by others. Maybe Microsoft felt it had something in its software to fear, and perhaps that's maybe why it took out that license."
Or perhaps, maybe, dare I suggest, that Microsoft's public endorsement of SCO's products are meant to reward its loyalty in dealing OSS in general such a blow.
MS leaked an internal memo a while ago that reported on some consumer focus groups they'd conducted to find which arguments against Linux were most effective. People largely ignored philosophical appeals about the nature of OSS, and they didn't really care about the so-called "viral nature of the GPL." The only thing that really worked was MS's suggestion that they could be legally liable for using OSS if -- unbeknownst to them -- it had been tainted by copyright infringement. That result was documented, and MS is well aware that legally-inspired terror is their best weapon against OSS.
Lo and behold, a puppet dances onto the stage and engages in an outrageously publicized lawsuit against a company backing Linux. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe there's no connection, maybe SCO really is just in it for the money. Nevertheless, I think I'm catching glimpses of a four-color butterfly pulling SCO's strings.
I thought it was mostly because the licensing terms of the BSD license were more liberal, allowing commercial use of the FreeBSD code with hardly any restrictions. Whereas the GPL contains more restrictions on the user that are intended to keep the code free no matter what.
Maybe this is what you just said, but I think what I am saying is a different reason. I think Apple went with FreeBSD because it was easier to use for commercial purposes than Linux, rather than because it was immune to lawsuits.
I also do not think that Apple could possibly be familiar with all the code bases of the commercial Unixes out there, of which SCO is one. That is where the lawsuit is coming from, a commercial Unix vendor, not the Linux community!
Incidentally, Apple approached Linus about working with them, but he refused because he thought MacOS 9 was a 'piece of crap' (direct quote).
Here is another story on SCO, from CNET, focusing on their recent licensing deals and the impact on its earnings.
Also, in this story our "favorite" CEO claimed he was in Japan not to invade the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum but instead "just" to get more Japanese firms to license code from SCO.
By the way, when is that code you always talk about going to show up in court? I'm still waiting to see something, anything... yeah...
A computer is a valuable tool, so use it and stop whining.
... who read the first sentence of the post and thought SCO was suing OSCON because they were using 'SCO' in the name of their conference?
The bad thing is, I believed SCO was actually capable of stooping that low! (For a few seconds, at least. LOL.)
The SCO group, and both Old SCO and Caldera before it, directly acknowledged and assisted IBM with the scalablity of Linux
In August 2000, just days after Caldera purchased the Old SCO server division, the then CEO of Caldera, Ransom Love, made a keynote speech at LinuxWorld 2000. A RealPlayer video stream of the event can be found at DrDobbs Journal's Technetcast
In the question and answer session at the end of the keynote, Love was asked about the possible conflict over Monterey and Linux IA-64
A mp3 capture of the following transcribed portion
I am not a lawyer, but even I can see that The SCO Group has put itself into an intractable situation, any judge will listen to evidence from the above and laugh the SCO group out of court.It's about time to reexamine the recent claims of The SCO group and call in the lawyers and maybe the authorities
Those are the classical two reasons to sue. SCO has developed an innovative third reason.
Look at SCO's revenue and income for the past quarter. They recorded $13 million from sales of products and services and $8 million from SCO Source. SCO Source has two customers: one is Microsoft, and the other is an unnamed large Unix company (I think it's likely to be Sun).
On the income side, SCO lost money on products and services, but made up for it by making money from SCO Source.
SCO has found a way to monetize anti-Linux FUD. This is not just a sideline. It's the only profitable activity The SCO Group has ever had in its corporate existence.
SCO doesn't need to win the lawsuit. They just need throw enough FUD so that Microsoft keeps cutting them checks. I think it's important that open source people understand this business model.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
According to this they not only are the 2nd licensee from SCO but they also received a warrent to buy 210,000 shares of SCOX at 1.83 per share!
g =f d_top
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1024633.html?ta
Bastards.
Darn! The replies to this article burned out my Sarcasm Meter.
You should warn a fella before posting something like this...
Step 1. Run company into ground ...
Step 2. File frivolous lawsuits that enrage the entire computing community (even mac users).
Step 3.
Step 4. Profit!
This quotation from the article:
got me to thinking. Has anybody considered a poison pill scenario?
Bad Company wants to slow down Linux, the GPL, open source software, etc. Bad Company uses Bad Agent to take secret, closed-source code owned by Bad Company and "contribute" it to Linux. Bad Company then waits six months, a year, two years....
Bad Agent vanishes (with his $ millions....)
Bad Company then asserts its copyright claims. "OMG! It seems our former employee, (Bad) Agent, contributed some of our copyrighted, closed-source (and for that matter, trade secret) code to Linux two years ago, and we didn't know about it! Everybody has to rip out the code... and pay us....
While I understand Raymond's concerns, I think Kuhn is right. I'm not sure he goes far enough.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Nice exit strategy. Stocks ten times their value of 6 months ago.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I read slashdot all the time, and I have no idea what this is about. I wish they could provide some context with these articles.
if a company is not after money, suing is not the way to go.
I'm not sure how many people out there are versed in logic but essentially:
IF HYPOTHESIS THEN CONCLUSION is logically equivalent to IF NOT CONCLUSION THEN NOT HYPOTHESIS. (you're examining the contrapostive of the original statement)
Anyways, if you apply this transformation to the original statement (if a company is not after money then suing is not the way to go) you get:
Suing is the way to go if a company is after money
Food for thought ;)
ID-10-T is a way of life
I think that this story is a horribly atrocious rendering about what happened at the panel. 99% of the time, the panel was focused on why SCO isn't a real, credible threat to Linux itself and also on the need for clear copyright inheritence for open source projects. There was also general discussion on the burden of proofs in various lawsuits.
There was also a BOF in the evening that was a very fun session later on that discussed the roles and needs of copyrights and patents.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
"panelists agreed that SCO is targeting companies like IBM in an attempt to raise cash." ... in stark contrast to every other corporation in the world that is in existence to better humanity.
"Derp de derp."
First of all, you are assuming that given a choice with no other constraints, a knowledgeable person should choose Linux over FreeBSD, which is a rather biased perspective.
For one thing, MacOS X hasn't attracted a FreeBSD crowd because of its incorporation of parts of FreeBSD - it still is far from FreeBSD. Had it been based on Linux, it still wouldn't have been what people usually consider Linux, and I can't see how it would've attracted more users (unless Apple relied on "Linux" as a buzzword; but some of their existing customer base might have been frightened off by that).
Also remember that MacOS X is based on NeXTSTEP, which used a combined Mach + 4.3 BSD kernel and much of a 4.3 BSD userland. So they basically upgraded the BSD part of the code using the FreeBSD code base.
While it would certainly be possible to glue Linux subsystems into the Mach kernel, it would probably be a bigger job and diverge more from the original code base (making it more difficult to keep in sync with new developments). Even ignoring the historical connections, Linux is not very cleanly layered internally and its components are highly dependent on the lower-level parts...which have a very x86-oriented history.
The way I see it, Unix is like a bicycle, while Linux is more like a luxury car. Bicycles were invented before we had the technology to make luxury cars like Linux. Now that we have Linux we really don't need Unix anymore. Linux is open.. lots of people can get inside Linux and it's comfortable. Unix only has one occupant, and he's not very comfortable. IBM is like a huge truck. If a huge truck like IBM runs over a little bike like Unix then people become more careful about who they piss off in the future.
My Blog
This post is an AC's ripoff ot the original here.
Translation also appeared in that thread.
Really? Do you have any idea what the EU is actually like? Remembrr also it is a collection of rather different cultures & languages, there is much more diversity in culture and politics than there is in the USA by orders of magnitude.
To think that they're just in it for the money leaves me feeling hollow inside and disillusioned.
Rest assured, it's not about money; it's about protecting the sacred System V code from dilution by the heretic IBM. Remember what the Profit^H^H^Hphet McBride said: "We showed our contract to outside people, and they said, 'You have *sniff* *sniff* a very strong contract here.'"
1. Jobs is already very familiar with BSD from his work on NeXT.
2. Although their current use of BSD would not violate the Linux GPL, they may want to reserve the ability to modify the kernel and keep their modifications secret.
3. Linux's main advantage is in drivers. Since Apple is doing all their own hardware this may have eliminated this advantage.
They've established a useful precedent of claiming to have evidence, but declining to release it for scrutiny. It's unreasonable to criticise Mr McBride simply for following the example of such great leaders.