Slashdot Mirror
IBM Countersues SCO, And More!
mr.crutch writes "Few details are available, but CNet is reporting that IBM has filed counterclaims against SCO. CNet also has an interview with Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik..." Jizzbug writes "Thanks to the folks of K5, we can all obtain our rights to use the Linux kernel from SCO, and without paying up to SCO's extortion. If kernel.org kernels aren't safe, sco.com kernels certainly ought to be." LWN has a copy of SCO's Linux License for your perusal. Bruce Perens is speaking of the dangers of patent portfolios to open source software, notable because IBM's counterclaims include patent infringement. And finally, a company is selling SCO Check, a tool to de-SCOify your Linux system, if SCO ever presents any evidence whatsoever of infringing code in Linux. Update: 08/08 00:16 GMT by T : SCO's public response to IBM's counterclaim is short and to the point. Among other things, it says "If IBM were serious about addressing the real problems with Linux, it would offer full customer indemnification and move away from the GPL license." Given the other links in this story, perhaps SCO should go first on that count.
I think that old Darl (www.tubdarl.com) bit off more than he can chew! IBM has more seasoned lawyers that specialize in patent cases than SCO has employees.
Anyone notice that SCO's stock slipped another 11% today? heh.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Hope SCO managers cashed in ALL of their stock.
Sco is going down like Justin Timberlake at a Nambla meeting!
"SCO said it revoked IBM's license to ship AIX in June. In its countersuit, Big Blue reasserted its position that its AIX license is irrevocable and perpetual, but then added a new twist involving Novell, the company that owned Unix copyrights until selling them to SCO's predecessor in 1995.
;)
IBM's suit revealed that Novell on June 12 effectively forbade SCO from terminating IBM's AIX license. SCO said it revoked the AIX license on June 16. Novell maintained the right to issue such instructions to SCO under the terms of the Unix sale, the suit said. "
Does anyone know anything more about this?
I know tht Novell apparently DID sell the copyrights, but this is a news Item...
Bruce Perens might want to help clarifiy this for us
-Colin
Colin Davis
There's another story here that has more details, including:
In its 45-page complaint, IBM claims SCO Group's products violate four IBM patents and claims SCO Group doesn't have the right to revoke IBM's Unix license. IBM also claims SCO Group has violated the general public license, or the GNU GPL, under which Linux is distributed.
The Armonk, N.Y., computer giant seeks unspecified monetary damages and an injunction requiring SCO Group to stop violating IBM patents and refrain from misrepresenting its intellectual-property rights.
It also says that a spokesman for SCO wasn't immediately available to comment, I guess they haven't recovered from being bitch-slapped yet. I suppose that this means we'll also have the obligatory conference call tomorrow, or soon after, where Darl will blow some more hot air out of that ass that sits on his neck.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Generally, I would say that linking to a 25 meg file from the front page of Slashdot is unconscionable. But in this case, perhaps it should be seen as an act of patriotism.
BM is seeking unspecified monetary damages and an injunction stopping SCO from shipping its software
I'm guessing that in the end, this will be a big number, but perhaps IBM will go for a settlement that involves SCO execs, bricks, and deep water.
Seriously, if anything this whole fiasco is probably as much good publicity for IBM as it is bad to SCO. IBM gets to lay on the smack-down, and they end up looking very much like a hero in the eyes of the linux users/developers.
I just bought a tool for $699 to De-SCO my windows 98 box. I'm not taking any chances.
I recommend you all buy the utility, the website is http://www.caldera.com/
In a way, I'm glad it's IBM fighting the first big GPL court battle, rather than any of the advocacy organizations, which while strongly motivated and highly expert, are also woefully underfunded and would almost certainly lose in a drawn-out war of attrition.
For once, a corporate behemoth on our side...
When SCO dies, who will snatch up the assets it has (including if any valid IP)?
Who has more cash floating around than most?
M$... and that could get messy quickly.
Darl McBride: "We can't comment on the action yet. Our attorneys are still reviewing the court filing."
No Mr. McBride, your attorneys are already dead
sPh
All Linux distros need to do is place bright yellow sunburst stickers on their packaging claiming to be Guaranteed, 100% free of infringing SCO code, "for your piece of mind".
SCO really can't dispute that claim without offering proof, and once they offer proof, the distro can issue a patch removing the code from the system, assuming that there really is problem code
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Looks to me that big blue wont have to buy SCO. They will simply be awarded what's left of the company as a settlement. How poetic.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
sPh
For a legal, SCO Linux kernel (copied from K5):
/usr/src/v er/CSSA-2003-020.0/SRPMS/linux -2.4.13-21S.src.rpm
"cd
mkdir silly_sco
wget ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/updates/OpenLinux/3.1.1/Ser
rpm2cpio linux-2.4.13-21S.src.rpm > sco.cpio
cpio -i --file sco.cpio
bzip2 -d linux-2.4.13.tar.bz2
tar -xf linux-2.4.13.tar
You'll find the license agreement in linux/COPYING
Compile, install, enjoy."
Odd - I'm still getting 191KB/second - Come on, Slashdotters, you can do better than that!
So the big question; who shorted the stock? What was the price point and when do you plan to cash in? C'mon, fess up. We're all rooting for you to make a killing from SCO's flameout as we get the pleasure of watching Darl's FUD machine go crashing into the sea.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
IBM: Do you hear that, Mr. SCO? That is the sound of inevitability. That is the sound of your death. Goodbye, Mr. SCO.
SCO: Oh shit.
I believe it [the IBM anti-trust case] was settled by Nixon appointees early in the Carter administration. "ran out of money" is of course facetious
Don't remember the Carter years too well, do you? "Ran out of money" isn't that bad an exaggeration!
:-) Couldn't help it
...I always took it for granted that SCO obtained permission from IBM to use RCU, NUMA, ... in their OS. (I am assuming that those are the patents that IBM is accusing SCO of violating.)
You could assume that, or your could RTFA:
The patents cover a data compression technique, a method of navigating among program menus using options arranged in a graphical tree, a method for verifying that an electronic message was received and a method for monitoring computing systems linked in a cluster.
The infringing SCO software, IBM said, is its UnixWare and OpenServer operating systems, its SCO Manager remote administration tool and its Reliant HA package for letting one computer in a cluster take over if another fails.
BTW- Don't you just love how general all of those sound? I'd love to see patent numbers, but it sounds like almost any OS might infringe on one or two of those.
the no
McBride: What happen?
Ballmer: Somebody set up us the bitchslap.
Ballmer: We get lawsuit.
McBride: What!
McBride: Main screen turn on.
McBride: It's You!!
BigBlue: How are you gentlemen!!
BigBlue: All your rights are belong to us.
BigBlue: You are on the way to bankruptcy.
McBride: What you say!!
BigBlue: You have no chance to survive make your time.
BigBlue: Ha Ha Ha Ha
McBride: Take off every preferred share.
Ballmer: You know what you doing.
McBride: Move shares.
McBride: For great profit.
It's all fun and games until someone loses the key to the handcuffs.
http://lamlaw.com/
My understanding is that IBM's Linux distribution policy is specfically crafted to make sure IBM doesn't lose the right to enforce it's patents, at least not on code they don't explicitly release.
Specifically, IBM doesn't actually distribute Linux, it partners with Suse and RedHat who do that for them. Sure they produce patches, but that's all you'll get from them, not the whole kernel.
So IBM has decided to give up the right to enforce the patent on, for example, RCU. They distributed the RCU patches as GPL. But if, for example, RedHat contributes some code to the kernel that contains IBM patented techniques, IBM can still enforce those patents because it never distributes non-IBM code.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
This is not investment advice.
I finally found out why there are no shares of SCOX to short. As most everyone knows, shorting is the process where you sell a stock with the intent to buy it back later at a cheaper price. In other words, it is the opposite of buying a stock. Therefore, if the stock goes up in price, you are losing money; if it goes down you are making money... many /.'ers figure that SCOX will fall due to a variety of opinions.
In order to short a stock, there has to be some supply of the stock somewhere somewhere that can be sold... this supply of stock normally comes from stock used as collateral on a margin... somewhere, someone is borrowing money to buy more stock than they have money for, and using stock as collateral.
The problem being is that SCOX stock has climbed too quickly too fast and was once very recently a penny stock... thus brokers are unwilling to take SCOX as collateral... bingo, no SCOX stock available to short!
Just thought /.'ers would find that interesting.
Remember, this is not investment advice.
I'm starting to find more and more comparisons between McBride and the Iraqi Information Minister.
"There are no IBM patents in SCO. Never!"
"We have them surrounded in their servers!"
"Let the IBM infidels bask in their illusion!"
"We will own them all...most of them!"
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
Does anyone remember the Bill Gates thing on cross-license, well IBM is dumping huge amounts of money into Linux, they see the potential, it's in their interest to never use these patents against Linux, just as it's in their interest to never use them against MicroSoft, as it's in MicroSoft's interest to not use them against Linux as IBM is sitting there with it's portfolio ready to shred MicroSoft if it came down to it, so effectively Linux is using cross licesened patents, and being protected from others by IBM. This is business, this is how patents are used, we should be glad IBM is up on IP law and knows how to use it, and that Linux is so valuable to IBM.
Actually, IBM litigated until the United States Government ran out of money, which should really give SCO pause!
This is true, according to the book "Big Blue: IBM's use and abuse of power".
Baxter finally dropped the suit (Regan adnimistration) due to "lack of merit". Lack of merit? Then why did they spend 10+ years litigating this?
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
I'm serious about this. After IBM & Red Hat finish these pathetic twits off in court, their stock will be probably no more than 10 cents per share. The open source community needs to buy them (hell, everybody throw in a dollar) and then throw open their "intellectual property" completely free to the world. While we're at it, let's publicly abandon the Unix trademark (which is likely unenforcable, anyway).
Their market cap before this was $25M. I suspect it'll be 1/10 that after this is done. It's not much money spread among all of us.
Michael
Do you have ESP?
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
So, yeah, IBM could kill Linux if it wanted to brush off some patent and take RedHat or someone to court. They way I read this (IANAL, duh), if IBM got a court order saying that Linux infringes some of its patents, people would have to stop distributing programs that cannot be used royalty-free, right?
Seems unlikely they they would do that.
According to forbes:
IBM last year took in more than $1 billion in Linux-related revenue. In its 2002 annual report IBM claims it has 7,500 employees involved in developing, selling or supporting Linux, and that more than 15% of the mainframe capacity it shipped last year was for Linux workloads.
IBM is pulling in some major cash from its Linux business (after having made an equally major investment, it seems). What motivation would they have to piss in their own cornflakes?
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
From SCO's quarterly report:
This, Ladies and Gentlemen, has to be the understatement of this century, if not of this millennium.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
I just finished my SCO timeline complete with SEC fillings. Got to go back and update it again. Oh well, here it is. Please email me if you can add to it.
June 27 2002
McBride becomes CEO of Caldera.
Stock price around $0.60
March 7 2003
SCO sues IBM
Stock price up from $2.21 to $3.10 but falls back to mid $2.00 range
March 18
SCO stocks hits low of $2.07
Jeff Hunsaker (VP Worldwide Marketing) gets 100,000 options
Reginald Broughton (Senior VP International Sales) gets 50,000 options
Michael Olsen (VP Finance) gets 50,000 options
Robert Bench (CFO) gets 100,000 options
Darl McBride (CEO) gets 200,000 options
Can anyone fill me in on what happened between 3/14 and 3/17 that caused the
price to drop from $2.64? And how did the executives know that $2.07 was the
lowest it would go?
April 8
Robert Bench sells 4100 shares at $2.90 each for $11,890.
April 23
SCO issues warning to Red Hat and SuSE
Stock is up to $3.10
May 2
IBM responses to lawsuit, denies claims
SCO claims they have proof
May 14
SCO stops selling Linux, sends out letter to 1500 large corporations
suggesting that they stop using Linux.
Stock has been steadily rising, now at $3.55
May 15
SCO offers to show proof under strict NDA to journalists only
Stock shoots up to $4.55
May 16
SCO changes name to SCO Group Inc.
Board of Directors gets 10,000 options each at $4.75
May 19
SCO announces that Microsoft has given it cash, and that M$ is
not the first company to pay it off. Rumours are that the other
company is Sun. Total revenue from both licences: $8.25M.
Stock price starts to really take off.
May 28
Novell issues press release challenging SCO
SCO states that they may end up suing Linus
Stock plummets from $8.71 to $6.60
June 3
Opinder Bawa (VP Global Services) pancis and sells 15,000 shares at a paltry
$6.00 each, making $90,000.
June 5
O. Bawa exercises 7916 in options at $1.20 each and sells them for
$6.60 each, netting himself just over $42,000. He really should
have waited a day.
June 6
SCO announces discovery of ammendment to Novell contract
Share price shoots up to $8.52
Giddy with glee, Jeff Hunsaker (VP Worldwide Marketing) sells
5000 shares for $44,500.
June 8 SCO announces that they have shown 80 lines of code to some
doofus. This is a Sunday.
June 9 The day after this announcement, shares are up to $9.38.
Robert Bench (CFO) celebrates by selling 7000 shares, making
over $64,400.
June 11 SCO gives IBM until Friday the 13th to settle.
Shares drop to $8.65. Believing that the end is near, Michael
Olsen (VP Finance) sells 6000 shares, earning $51,720.
June 13
IBM's deadline passes and SCO is still alive. The stock price shoots up
to $11.21. Darl buys 7003 shares for one tenth of a penny each. In an
interview, Chris Sontag (Snr VP OS) says that SCO may own BSD
as well.
June 16 SCO announces that they are revoking IBM's AIX license. IBM
announces that they don't care. Shares dip.
June 17 SCO decides that they actually want three billion from IBM and
elaborate on what technology they think IBM stole from them.
June 18 Sun launches ad campaign trying to get Linux and AIX customers
to use Solaris instead. SCO criticizing Linus in a court document.
June 20
Reginald Broughton, needing some weekend money, sells 5000 shares when the
stock price goes over $11, making almost $55,500. The price closes at $10.77.
June 23 SCO says that they won't sue their own Linux customers.
June 25 With the stock