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SCO Extorting Unixware Licenses to Linux Users?
An anonymous user noted that SCO will
sell you Unixware if you want to "Legitimize" your usage of Linux at your company. If you buy the license, you will be held blameless for your transgressions against SCO! Pricing has yet to be determined for the special licenses, but I suspect that for any value greater than zero, there are going to be a fair number of angry users.
A sample of this, in perfect "Management-Speak":
* Do I need to buy a SCO license?
SCO has not demonstrated that any infringement exists, nor has it established that it owns derivative works in UNIX. Nothing has been proven to establish that such a license is needed.
Which, translated into English says:
* Do I need to buy a SCO license?
Not at all
You go, RedHat!
Peace!
-1 : Redundant
Trolling using another account since 2005.
SMP came from Alan Cox's work with Caldera-sponsored equipment. A portion of NUMA came from IBM, as did the RCU which allowed greater scalability of the SMP kernel, mostly from removing overhead and latency with talking to many procs. The RCU which was sponsored through IBM, actually came from an acquisition of IBM, who essentially wrote it from scratch. It is the licensing terms and 'derivative work' stipulations which cast doubt on much of the validity of the added code.
Unfortunately, we will have to wait until April 2005 before we know exactly how far the term 'derivative work' encompasses. Is merely seeing Unix code enough to make any additional coding a derivative work? I say no, SCO is saying yes.
And oh yeah, go back under the bridge, troll. That wasn't even creative. j00 ()w|\|z3r3d nobody.
(1) These features were never present in your own UNIX offering. They were not even developed by SCO/Caldera; they were developed by Dynix, which is now a subsidiary of IBM. Because these features were developed for SVR5, you claim they are derivative works of SVR5 and therefore your own intellectual property. The legitimacy of this claim depends upon your contracts with IBM; it is not as black and white as you make it out to be. When asked whether the code supposedly copied from SVR5 originated in BSD, you respond that this is high end "enterprise" code which isn't present in BSD--but it's not present in SVR5 either. Your claims on this matter are misleading.
(2) To state that Linux stole your market is preposterous, since you yourself were a Linux value-added reseller. In fact, you actively contributed to the development of enterprise features for the Linux kernel. You even cooperated with IBM in the Trillian Project (SMP on Linux). Your previous CEO, Ransom Love, spoke of unifying UNIX and Linux into a single platform. Now you turn and say that an enterprise-ready Linux took you completely by surprise, even though you helped bring it where it is.
You portray yourself as a protector of intellectual property rights, but then you seek to wrest control of Linux from its creators on the basis of unproven allegations of copyright infringement. Your arrogance and hypocrisy know no bounds. Linux development has been very transparent, as Linus Torvalds has said. If you were really interested in protecting the intellectual property of all parties involved, you would work with the kernel developers to find out which parties contributed your intellectual property to the kernel and seek relief from them and/or allow the infringing code to be removed. Even if this would disable Linux SMP for a time, there are millions of Linux users running uniprocessor systems who were never infringing on your IP in the first place, and should not have to pay you a license fee. Furthermore, your move to collect license payments from Linux users without identifying specifically what they are licensing or even proving that you have a claim on Linux at all is fraudulent.
Your proposed Linux licensing program amounts to the wholesale theft of years of effort from thousands of Linux contributors. You have profited from their efforts for nearly a decade, and now you stab them in the back and bite the hand that fed you. Since you could not compete in the marketplace, you resort to barratry, racketeering, and extortion.
I include it verbatim, to save you using the link
SCO has made a big noise about registering SVR4
copyrights and announced their linux liscensing
plan, which they call a UNIX liscensing plan. Looks
like they're going for $1500 per LINUX seat for Unixware
liscense to emdemnify from lawsuit.
HOWEVER everything is not as the media is reporting...
The copyright they registered is a 20 page revision
to SVR4 (i.e SVR4.1ES) registration number TX-5-705-356.
You can verify this at:
http://www.copyright.gov/records/cohm.html
The original UNIX copyright was never registered to Novell,
and is currently registered to (SURPRISE!) AT&T.
I'm not sure about the legal ramnifications, I believe
that SCO has the right to copyright derivitive works
in their aggreement with Novell. However, a search at:
http://www.copyright.gov/records/
under the tab "Copyright ownership documents,
such as name changes and transfers" shows no
record of any copyright transfers to SCO Group.
In short, despite what is being widely reported,
SCO still has not acquired (and may not be able
to acquire) the copyright that they are
threatening to use to sue LINUX users.
(Copyrights MUST be registered before lawsuits
may be filed).
Because SCO will only show someone the "offending code" if they sign an NDA. The NDA would then prevent them from removing the code if it exists.
This shouldn't be a surprise. SCO doesn't want any alleged code to be removed. As soon as it is removed they no longer have anything to threaten customers with and force a license purchase. After all, a threat of "upgrade your kernel or pay us $1000" won't make nearly as much money as a threat of "pay us $1000 or risk a lawsuit."
The worst thing that could happen to SCO right now would be if the case was mainlined and taken to court quickly. I think this would also be the best thing for Linux too.
Note to SCO lawyers... this posting is mearly my opinion and IANAL.
>>most of these guys got options when the stock was at $.66 just before all of this craziness started.
C OX &selected=SCOX
Actually, in January, when scox was still planning the lawsuit. SCOX insiders gave themselves a boatload of shares for - get this - $0.001 each. So insiders could sell shares for one cent each and still make 1000% profit. SCOX stock is now $13/share. Insiders are selling like mad.
http://www.nasdaq.com/asp/Holdings.asp?symbol=S