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SCO Preparing Linux Licensing Program
akorvemaker writes "OSNews is reporting about an article at InfoWorld that SCO's new Linux licensing program 'will allow users of the open-source operating system to run Linux without fear of litigation.'" This seems to be either the best business decision ever, or a nail in their coffin. One would think they'd wait before charging a license fee over what some would call shaky ground,
Multics is an operating system that is currently "owned" by a small company in Canada. Bell Labs was part of the Multics project, but decided to pull its people out for various reasons. Some of these people then found a PDP 7 and created Unix, an operating system that had many features similar to Multics, including an HIERARCHICAL FILE SYSTEM. This is clearly a case of theft of Intellectual Property. The Canadian company should sue SCO.
Here's the info for the SCO conference call:
Where: US: 800-406-5356
Toll Call: 913-981-5572
Password: 464644
When: Monday, July 21, 2003
Noon EDT
Freedom Is Universal
Linux-Universe
"Did that software come with an EULA?"
"Yes, the GNU GPL."
Not to be a stickler, but the GPL is not a EULA, it's a RDLA (Re-Distribution License Agreement). You are not required to agree to anything to use GPL software.
Thanks.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Repeat and write 100 times: The GPL is NOT an EULA!!!!
As End User you are not required to agree with it! (And EULA is the end user license agreement)
Those programms that let you click-wrap through the GPL, like EULA do, show the programmers have not understood that the GPL is not an EULA, that does NOT needed to be agreed, until you want to redistribute or change the software.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
SCO is still distributing kernel 2.4.13. Are they licensing this code under the GPL or not?
The article was written on Friday. (RTFA)
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
SCO is "hoping that even if 99 percent of Linux customers laugh in their face, that there will be sufficient large companies who, for what is presumably going to be a relative drop in the bucket of their IT budgets, can potentially eliminate a cloud over their heads," he said.
99 percent? I think that percentage is a bit low.
This looks like the "sell worthless insurance" business model, and there are already many companies that use it. For example:
- Credit card insurance ("Protect your Citibank account in case you become unemployed or disabled"). Banks make big money on this one.
- Extended warranties. $19 for a warranty on a $99 television from Best Buy? (If the TV does break, it will almost certainly happen before the manufacturer's warranty expires anyway. TV's either break right away or they last forever)
- "WirePro" on your phone line. Pay $2.99 a month and the phone company pays to repair inside wiring. But this is hardly ever needed, and if you live in an apartment this is often the landlord's responsibility anyway.
What's different about SCO is that they are actually creating the "risk" that companies would be insuring against while the others just exaggerate existing risks. But it's still effectively the same business model.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
Short interest, btw, is a measure of traders that are shorting the stock. Shorting a stock is when you borrow a stock and sell it. Then you buy it back at a later time. People use this when they are really confident that a stock will go down, eg SCOX is expensive now (>11 dollars). If you short the stock and it falls to 1 dollar once people realize what kind of crap sco is shoveling, then you buy and you make 10 dollars per share (just as if it had gone to 21 and you bought it with a long position)
--Joey
and yes, there are laws against it.
Barratry \Bar"ra*try\, n. [Cf. F. baraterie, LL. barataria. See {Barrator}, and cf. {Bartery}.]
1. (Law) The practice of exciting and encouraging lawsuits and quarrels. [Also spelt {barretry}.] --Coke. Blackstone.
The above is from the 1913 Webster's dictionary. It's normal use today descibes use of the legal system to slander or malign someone.
After all is said and done, if SCO loses (which is likely) they will be called on the carpet for this, I'm sure.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Those programms that let you click-wrap through the GPL, like EULA do, show the programmers have not understood that the GPL is not an EULA, that does NOT needed to be agreed, until you want to redistribute or change the software.
You are not bound by the GPL if you CHANGE the software, only if you distribute it.
Repeat and write 100 times: The GPL is NOT an EULA!!!!
Repeat and write 100 times: You are not bound by the GPL if you CHANGE the software, only if you distribute it.
--fatboy
>>The program will be announced "within the next month or so,"
C OX &selected=SCOX
Last December, scox said they were "planing" a linux licensing programing. Then, about a month ago, scox said they would announce such a plan in July. July is more than half-way over, everybody is wondering what is going on. Now scox is saying they will have a plan "within a month or so." Or so?
Could it be that scox knows they can not legally implement such a plan? In two months will scox call another such teleconference to anounce their big plan, only to say once again: "we're working on some details to try and create some kind of a licensing program for Linux users to be able to run Linux legally."
Some details? Haven't they been working on "some details" since December? How complicated could it be.
Yet another SCOX bluff? Remember scox said they would stop ibm from selling AIX, they haven't. Scox said they would audit AIX users, they haven't. They said they were going sue Linus Torvald, they haven't.
But it did drive the stock price up another 15% in one day. And you better believe, insiders are selling like mad.
http://www.nasdaq.com/asp/Holdings.asp?symbol=S
The tax originally applied to cassette tapes. A similiar tax applies to blank video cassettes. Canada has one on all CD-Rs, the USs is only on the "audio" ones, which is why they cost more.
Furthermore, SCO's claims are bunk as this entry shows, for what SCO is complaining about is the inclusions of pieces of code in IBM's distro, such as JFS. But a Caldera employee at the time was contributing to this process and they didn't complain at the time!
SCO is sunk.
It would surely help raise the standards of discussion if opponents of the GPL would actually take the time to read and understand it (and start by understanding basic properties of copyright, to boot). Knocking down straw men is a weak form of argument. IANAL, but this case is not going to hinge on the validity of the GPL. The case that may hold water for SCO will hinge upon whether IBM redistributed code that they did not have a right to, which is quite independent of the license under which it was (purportedly illegally) redistributed.
The GPL does not say "someone somewhere combined the two, and so now my license applies to both". It can't, legally, since someone can't agree to something that he does not have a legal right to agree to. If you combine source code that you have the right to with source code that you don't, you don't have the right to apply any license at all to it (or indeed, even to do it at all). So it's completely irrelevant whether the first piece of code is GPL, BSD, public domain, community source, shared source, or whatnot, if you don't have a legal right (through license or possession of copyright) to the second piece of code, you can't legally combine the two. All of this is spelled out very clearly in section 7 (see http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.txt).
SCO's public claims are vague and confusing (IMHO intentionally so), but the most far-reaching claims seem to be that all modern operating systems embody concepts from UNIX, and that they are therefore all derivatives of UNIX, and therefore SCO owns all of them. If that were to be taken literally on its face, it would imply that everything that Linus, Alan, Microsoft, et al. have written is actually copyright SCO, which is sheer nonsense. For one, "derivative" is being used in a confusing way here. From a copyright perspective, "derivative" has a very specific meaning, and since concepts aren't subject to copyright (only expression is), the use of "concepts" from System V doesn't mean that anything was actually copied in a copyright sense. Secondly, copyright violation in the form of distribution of a derived work doesn't mean that the copyright automatically belongs to the author of the first work. The copyrights to various parts of Linux still belong to whoever wrote them, including (hypothetically) SCO. If multiple people own the copyrights to a work, then they all have to agree in order for it to be legally distributed.
Presumably, what SCO wants to convince people of is that they are going to sue the creators of Linux, and for damages insist that the copyrights to the entire source to Linux be turned over to them. Whether this is something they would have a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding in is something a copyright lawyer would have to answer, but from what I've read a copyright holder has a duty to warn someone of an inadvertent violation so that they can correct it. SCO has done nothing of the sort.
SCO further weakens their position by continuing to distribute Linux from their web site. Whatever they may or may not hope to win in court, they incontrovertibly do not hold the copyrights to all of Linux, so they only have a right to distribute it under the terms of its license (the GPL). So at the very least, they're implicitly warranting that they can legally distribute whatever that is under the terms of the GPL, and if they went for the nuclear option they would surely be countersued for copyright violation by Linus and other major copyright holders. The only way I can see they would have out of *that* would be to represent that everything they were distributing from their web site as Linux was in fact legal, and so someone could start freely from there (and incidentally more or less destroy their own case). So they're in a bit of a catch-22 (of their own making) -- admit that what they're distributing is legal, and that therefore they have no case, or admit that it's illegal, in which case they're wide open to copyright violation themselves.
I've yet to see anything t
Seems there's been a fair amount of trading by the higher-ups in the last couple months. Note, also, the levels of the automatic sales...
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/s/scox.html
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
As has been constantly said, you can't openly run pirated software or listen to pirated music without fear of reprisal anymore. The corporations that own the intellectual property have wised up to the ways of the Internet and are cracking down. Whether the Linux kernel has any SCO I.P. in it has yet to be proven, but if it does then everyone is on pretty shaky ground.
I'm sorry but you are way off base here and show a lack of understanding of IP law. It depends greatly on exactly what IP rights SCO is asserting were violated. Currently SCO is only asserting breach of contract and trade secret disclosure. The ONLY parties who are liable were the ones who signed the contracts involved.
Even if SCO was to claim copyright violation it would be difficult for them to go after everyone who distributed linux since the distributors and users acted on the assumption of good faith. Typically at worst they could demand that everyone stop distributing the infringing code.
The only scenario where SCO would have any possible legitimate claim against the users would be patent infringement. This is highly unlikely since SCO holds few or no current patents. (if anything SCO should be afraid of violating IBM's patents, indeed this is likely a key part of IBM's defense strategy.)
This case has little or nothing to do with the Internet and much to do with a contract dispute. If SCO was suing Microsoft for breach of contract and disclosure of trade secrets, Windows users would be in no more danger of being individually sued than linux users currently are.
(I do realize that SCO could file lawsuits against individual users if they really wanted to. However when it was discovered that the suits had no basis, SCO would get bitchslaped hard)
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Ha! My sig is working!
If enough people short the stock and the short interest goes sky-high, that by itself will take the wind out of SCO's sails. At some point the herd effect kicks in, and nobody will buy at any price. After all, it's sheer insanity to buy a stock that everyone else is shorting, regardless of what you think of the company's future.
MANY people are looking to short SCO, but most are trying to figure out when the rest of the world realizes there will be no buyout.
If most of the potential buyers (Sun, IBM, etc.) started announcing that no buyout of SCO was under consideration, that might get the ball rolling. Although merger negotiations are always kept secret, a non-merger is under no such restriction, right?
I think if we can get the price under $9, they will be on the fast track to bankruptcy. Keep up the good work Slashdotters!