SCO: FSF Reply To GPL Claims, Conference Sponsors Back Off?

bkuhn writes "Last week's Wall Street Journal (and other news outlets) carried statements by SCO's Mark Heise challenging the "legality" of FSF's GPL. FSF has issued a response to this baseless claim." Also, mcgroarty points out that Intel and HP seem to be backing swiftly away from their sponsorship of SCO's in-progress Las Vegas conference (a EWeek article suggests that "Intel Corp. was recently billed as one of the lead sponsors of SCO's Forum 2003 conference here this week, but then suddenly disappeared from all marketing and press material for the forum. It appears that Hewlett-Packard Co. also got cold feet. As late as last week, SCO was telling attendees that HP would be giving a partner keynote at the forum on Tuesday morning. But on Sunday the schedule of events given to attendees when they registered makes no mention of an HP keynote...") M adds: Now we've got a few stories from the conference: News.com.com and Eweek. Despite some bad headline writing at News.com, SCO simply continues to employ the Chewbacca defense, showing no code to back up their claims. Amusingly, Darl McBride started his rant about copyright infringement by copying some footage from a James Bond movie. Bravo!

Comments

Irony - please contact your employer

[Tim Macinta]

It's very ironic that SCO claims to be fighting for intellectual property rights when they are seeking to destroy the right of authors to control how their work is distributed. There is no reason that they should be attacking the legitimacy of open source licenses like this when their dispute with IBM is supposedly contractual. McBride actually admitted today that their attack is about destroying free software which is just disgusting considering that one of the core principals of IP law is that the author should be able to disseminate his work as he wishes - SCO apparently wants to destroy this choice.

I was disturbed enough by Darl McBride's statement last Friday (which he repeated again today in Vegas) that the "silent majority" of companies in the IT industry support SCO's recent actions that I had my company release a public statement of opposition to SCO. It would seem that the latest thing SCO is trying to claim ownership of is the opinion of companies that have been silent on the issue, so I am calling on companies to break the silence. If you have control over such things in your company, please get them to either copy the statement of opposition to SCO that I wrote to your company's website or write and post your own statement of opposition. Let the world know that SCO is strongly opposed within the industry and that they are truly fighting to destroy the intellectual property rights that they claim to be championing.

Re:Irony - please contact your employer

[Anonymous Coward]

That eweek article is just not funny anymore. It's moronic. I'm posting AC because that will pre-rate it redundant because I'm sure this case has been made over and over on /.

"Presenting what he claimed was a literal copyright infringement in Linux of Unix code, Sontag showed examples of identical registration of variables, lines of code and comments in the same sequence."

int frame_length;

Identical registration of variables!

for (frame_length = MAX_FRAMES ; frame_length > 0 ; frame_length--)

Identical lines of code!

/* loop above counting back for cycle efficiency */
/* somebody should improve the compiler */

Comments in the same sequence!

"Sontag said SCO has gone through millions of lines of code and developed methods to find similarities. "We have rocket scientists who have applied their spectral recognition and pattern analysis to software, which has yielded amazing results."

Pattern analysis is statistics. And they used rocket scientists to use statistical methods to get 'amazing results' that there is some nonzero correlation resulting from a pattern analysis?

I hope the judge too will know that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

"Sontag noted that a copyright case law also made clear that the quantity of code is not at issue, but rather how important that code is."

So obviously there is virtually no code to show by SCO...

Oh, and leave out the 'int frame_length;" from the code above and the code doesn't even compile! Look how important it is. Yeah, so is the semicolon that SCO copied from Linux at least 5e6 times!

By the way, there is no mention of proof of origin. Even if there is copied code, then how do you know SCO isn't the thief here.

Oh, and this is the killer:

"Turning to derivative works that have found their way into Linux, Sontag said these include NUMA (non uniform memory access), Read Copyright Update (RCU), Journal File System and schedulers."

"NUMA (non uniform memory access)" Access? Since when did the 'A' in NUMA not stand for Architecture?

"Read Copyright Update (RCU)" That cracks me up. He's not talking about "Read Copy Update". Fact's don't matter to him. He just quickly browsed the Linunx Scalability Effort web pages and is just taking some random acronyms from it without even knowing what it means.

"and schedulers"... Yeah, just the one word he remembered right under NUMA from the Linux Scalability Effort home page.

Even the money argument he makes doesn't hold a stake in proportions. He's claiming to be so good for shareholder value that now the market cap of SCO is at $130 up form $8... That is so little money compared to how much money has been made and saved in the same period of time.

Plus legally, he's making the classic move of somebody who knows he's losing an argument. He's switching discussion subjects and including side issues that don't matter for the case at hand: the contract dispute with IBM that he filed.

So I would like to conclude with this:

Technically, Financially, and Legally, McBride is full of shit.

Let's just hope the system works and chews him up and spits him out.

Re:Irony - please contact your employer

[greenrd]

The company I work at is desperately looking for an exit strategy from our current SCO-based offering; but we can't find any product comparable to Sentinel (block-level hot disk mirroring over a network to a standby system) on Linux.

Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by that, but it sounds similar to RAID-1 over the network. I have used the free enbd module (Enhanced Network Block Device driver) and Linux's built-in software RAID to implement that. It's all free. Is that similar to what you were looking for?

Picket?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't there some slashbots in Las Vegas who would like to run a picket line in front of the MGM Grand?

Who is John Moore? (from Yahoo SCOX board)

[nyet]

from here

>"The company's arguments seemed to hold weight with the SCO faithful. "I think (they've) got a strong case," said SCO reseller John Moore, the president of Moore Computer Consultants, based in Pembroke Pines, Florida."

>Is this company the same as www.mcci.com ? Where at this link it mentions the president of the company is called "Terry Moore" ?? And it seems to be very much a Microsoft shop?!?

Good catch

I got some even better ones for you:

Here is www.mcci.com searched by google for the term "Windows"

tinyurl.com/kf24

Here is www.mcci.com searched by google for "Unix"

tinyurl.com/kf2a

Want something REALLY revealing? Try this: this is www.mcci.com searched by google for "SCO"

tinyurl.com/kf2l

Judge for yourself if they are a Microsoft shop or a Unix shop. I wonder what they were even doing there at SCO Forum? SCO isn't even mentioned on their website ANYWHERE. I don't think they are a reseller of SCO's Unix, with no mention of SCO anywhere on their webpage - how could they be?

And oh...

[Anonymous Coward]

The SCO Forum crowd applauded when SCO executives announced that an upcoming version of its OpenServer [... will ...] provide better compatibility with Microsoft Windows through version 3 of Samba

I guess not all Open Source is bad in SCOwonderland. Fuckers.

Re:They shoot horses, don't they?

[nocomment]

I agree. It's been fun to watch so far but it's time for everyone to collectively turn their back on SCO and just let them yell until they are blue in the face. It's like SCO is holding a handgrenade and people are slowly moving away from the madman so as not to make him blow you up to. As an aside, I wonder if slashdot could get an interview from the original SCO owners and get their take on the whole thing.

"Lines of disputed code"

[prehistoric]

From the news.com.com article,

"... executives displayed the lines of disputed code..."

Can anybody confirm this? If true, it would mean
at lot of attendees whom I presume didn't sign a
NDA finally got to see the code. I doubt it's
true, but you never know.

SCO shows the alleged "stolen" code

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least according to their executives, which I have my doubts. The PHBs could have just show them the whole linux source code, and I doubt most people in the audience would have a clue.

I do wonder if the investors didn't have to sign NDAs and if someone was able to take note of those "stolen" lines of code.

Best quotes from the article:
McBride said pattern-recognition experts SCO hired have ferreted out a slew of infringing code in Linux.
Yeah sure, who are these pattern-recognition experts and are they your executives?

"They have found already a mountain of code," McBride said. "The DNA of Linux is coming from Unix."
Only thing I can say about this is it sure sounds like a good PR FUD line to use to increase investor confidence.

Taking the wind out of their sails...

[Wesley Everest]

So I was thinking -- SCO is using these alleged copied lines of source code to spread their FUD. And they are having some success because their claim is currently unverifiable, so some people are unsure -- maybe there is a violation...

Now, if we could get a hold of their evidence we could either expose it as a fraud or, in the unlikely event that there is some truth to their claims, clean up Linux source to be legal. But since they require an NDA to see the evidence, you'd have to break the law to show that Linux isn't breaking any laws.

If only we could see their evidence legally without signing an NDA...

So then I got to thinking. If we knew what compiler and compiler options SCO used when they built their version of unix, we could build linux with that compiler and compiler options and have some pattern matching utility search for potentially duplicate machine code.

Then, we could look at the Linux source for the code in question, and follow the electronic paper trail to find when it was first submitted. If we could have proof that the Linux submitter was the original author, then we have proof that at least some of SCO's alleged pirated code was, in fact, pirated from Linux by SCO. If the code was of questionable origin, then we could clean-room reverse-engineer a replacement.

Anyone know how one might identify the compiler SCO used on a particular release of unix?

Why challenge the GPL?

[epicurius]

I dont get this. SCO owns copyrights to Sys V Unix. Claims violation of confidentiality provisions in IBM contract, sues IBM for the same. So far, it has some amount of believability. Even their Caldera Linux distro is not necessarily fatal to their case, they are arguing ignorance anyway. So why this totally redundant campaign against the GPL? And how does a tiny company like SCO manage to get this much press attention? The guys who sued MS and won a court judgement certainly got nowhere near this much press. Sure the activism of Linux advocates explains some of it but still.. Could there be more to this than meets the eye?

Re:Why challenge the GPL?

[dmaxwell]

But I would be surprised if they ever find any proof.

Agreed.

I seriously doubt there is any sort of smoking gun on paper. If MS or Sun was directly involved, then it was some board level people in a face to face meeting. The only remotely possible way I could see that coming out is if the rumored push for RICO charges got some steam or maybe an SEC probe. Basically, a weak SCO sister would be offered a deal to roll over his boardroom butt buddies or be the scapegoat who gets to go to pound-me-in-the-ass prison. I don't see that happening and I don't see any reporters digging up anything either.

Re:FSF calls Redmond. Come in Redmond. Anyone ther

[arkanes]

I dunno, it'd be kinda cool if the win. Since they seem to be claiming that the GPL is trumped by federal copyright law, which only allows one copy, and this somehow means that the GPL is not only invalid, but the rest of the code is freely distributable, then it'd mean that pirating any software that comes with a distribution license is now legal.

Another company known for not respecting IP...

[whoever57]

One of the keynote speakers is Maggie Alexander, "VP Marketing Operations and Planning The Progress Company". AKA Progress Software

Try googling on mysql "progress software" gpl or click this link

Re:Sco Is reportedly showing the code

[rdean400]

It's things like this that make me believe that the only proper way for this to shake out is for the FSF to sue SCO for GPL infringement and seek a permanent injunction barring them from distributing any code distributed under the GNU General Public License. That should really kick them in the nuts, because they'd have to build their own stuff (compiler, SMB server, among others) for a change.

heard through the grape vine

[linuxislandsucks]

I heard through the grape vine that Monday's slide talk by McBride showed codde that supiciously matches code donate by Caldera employees to Linux..ie SCO Group..

Can anyone get copies of the slides to verify this?

HP

[El]

HP distributes thosands of copies of Linux every day embedded in HP devices. SCO has now put HP on notice that it owes them $32 for every copy of embedded Linux it distributes. Gee, I can't think of any reason HP would be unhappy with SCO... can you?

Re:They shoot horses, don't they?

[Watts Martin]

I've been more interested in what the original Caldera folks, Ransom Love and particularly Bryan Sparks, make of this. SCO was always an uninteresting company (to me, at least), but Caldera wasn't. Even though they got less interesting even before their transformation into total dweebitude, they started out pursuing "pipe dreams" of Linux credibility in the enterprise and a viable desktop Linux before anyone else did. The "Linux will take over the world" mentality has its antecedents in the work Sparks and Love were doing back at Novell circa 1993-94 on the Corvair/Expose project. (And as I've noted before, it's ironic to see the anti-SCO crowd dragging Ray Noorda's name through the mud so frequently, given that he was a lunatic anti-Microsoft crusader--Corvair was, at least according to Infoworld reports of the day, an attempt to use a Linux kernel with DR-DOS to make a 32-bit Windows-compatible OS before Windows 95 was out.)

Love is largely out of the computer scene these days, I think, but Sparks isn't--he's running DeviceLogics and owns DR-DOS (again). Anyone tried to interview him?

SCO's Profits

[Bruha]

Sadly maybe the world would be different had the Nasdaq delisted them.

In a report card update on the company over the past year since he joined, McBride said he had acheived his first mission, which was to increase company value. A year ago the stock was trading around $.66 and the company was capitalized at some $8 million. Days after McBride took the helm at SCO, the Nasdaq sent a delisting notice informing SCO that it needed to get its stock price above $1 again to avoid being delisted. This raised customer concerns about the financial security of the firm and its viability. SCO now has a market capitalization of more than $130 million, McBride said. A year ago the company was sitting on just two quarters of cash and was about "to go out," but a belt tightening effort and aggressive sales campaign had changed that. "We have tripled our cash position over the past four months. SCO is actually going into business, not out of it, and we have turned the company around. We are proud of that, and the future going forward is bright. We have no long-term debt, cash balances are improved and we have reduced costs," he said.

As you can see from the above more proof that the FUD attacks against Linux has only served to increase their bottom line. McBride admits this publicly at a confrence. While at the same time he's dumping the same stock he claims to have turned around. So it seems to me that he does not have much faith in the company. Another sad fact is the silence from the SEC about all this. Clearly this is stock manipulation in the worst light. A small company on the verge of going out of business begins to spread rumors that other companies owe them big bucks and suddenly people jump on the bandwagon becuase they know the stock will shoot up if such a case won in court. In fact the stock has gone up over 1000% in the last 4 months and people have made a profit at the expense of Linux and frankly I dont see how the damage can be reversed at all. Yes more people know aobut Linux but now they're just saying "There's that OS. Looks nice but I'm not going to buy it and have to pay a fee to SCO" Seriously I heard that the other day at a CompUSA when someone was considering a copy of RedHat Pro for 99.00 which I sorely missed by one day cause I misread the label *cry* but back to the topic here. Linux is damaged, the SEC is doing nothing, and McBride and his cronies are raking in the cash. I'm sure the Jailed company Exec's are screaming from their cells to get the SCO crew to join them also. Must be torture to watch someone commit the same crimes you're imprisioned for but nobody's doing anything.

Life will be fun if the court decides that SCO is in error. But if such a decision comes about the stock will be worth .02 cents and of course SCO will appeal and drag it through the courts. Even then if it is still proved wrong those who paid the license fees will not be able to get a refund becuase by then SCO will have declared bankruptcy.

Another tidbit about SCO

[mewyn]

I've been doing a lot of Google News trolling for SCO lately. Sometimes for a good laugh, sometimes to get my blood up to a good boil. Found this article at CRN about SCO bashing IBM and RedHat's counterclaims.

SCO Blasts IBM, RedHat Counterclaims

Best part about it:

"We're fighting for a right in the industry to make a living selling software," McBride said. "The whole notion that software should be free is something SCO doesn't stand for. We have drawn the line. We're supposed to be excited about that and we're not."

Now, if I'm not mistaken, SCO uses the GCC compiler, and Samba (and is using Samba 3 as a big part of their new OS plans) which are both free software. I'm also sure they are using Apache and many other free software packages. It seems free software is just fine and dandy in SCO's eyes as long as it's not infringing on their marketshare.

mewyn dy'ner

Boycott SCO? How?

[dcavanaugh]

What do they have to sell? Aside from Linux licenses, what is there to not buy?

Cancel CRN subscription

[bstadil]

CRN sponsored SCOForum despite emails asking them not to. If you get a free CRN subscription, do as I, go ahead and cancel here

Businesses needs to learn that if they support SCO they wil be treated like pariahs.

Re:FSF calls Redmond. Come in Redmond. Anyone ther

[rodgerd]

The logical inference would be that any BSD code Microsoft ship is illegal (since the agument against the GPL holds for BSDL), and that most of Microsoft's enterprise licenses are potentially illegal (since they involve more than the 1+1 scheme SCO are asserting).

Re:They shoot horses, don't they?

[dnoyeb]

The Ray Noorda went over to the dark side himself. Considering he is majority owner of The Canopy Group, which is majority owner of SCO, and all the other companies under which are some strange business dealings coming forth.

Indeed

[Arker]

I think this would be a great time for the Samba team to serve SCO a C&D. I'm sure someone will be willing to step up and handle the legal fees? IBM? Redhat? Anyone else?

Re:SCO to sell Samba product...

[snilloc]

Samba, pull your head out of your ass and revoke their right to use/distribute your software.

They can't keep SCO from distributing a GPL'd Samba unless the Samba folks can show that SCO has violated Samba's copyright terms (ie, the GPL as it applies to Samba).

However, it seems to me that Linus and other Linux copyright holders CAN and should demand that SCO stop "licensing" Linux. SCO can't license "their" part of Linux and still distribute the whole kernel as GPL. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too with respect to the GPL - and that's giving them the benefit of the doubt about their supposed IP rights in the kernel.

Re:They shoot horses, don't they?

[bwt]

Have you read the IBM reply and counterclaims. Four separate patent claims nicely covering all of SCO's products, trademark, copyright, breach of contract, deceptive trade practices, and a few others I've never heard of.

Don't worry, SCO is dead.

I honestly have no idea how such lunatics could get to run a company. "Don't get involved in a land war in Asia" probably is 2nd to "Don't get involved in litigation with IBM".

The only possible rational I can think of for what SCO is doing is that MS subversively decided to send them running into the machine guns to "slow down Linux".

No it isn't.

[roystgnr]

"believe they have total control over because of their interpretation of a contract that supposedly reassigns to them any code that ever gets linked with a line of System V"

Funny, the GPL is the same dam way...

The GPL, whether you agree to it or not, does not reassign any copyrights on any code you link to GPLed code or remove your right to do anything you wish with code you wrote.

Also, despite popular Slashdot urban legend, the GPL does not automatically turn your code into GPLed code if you release it linked to GPLed code. It offers you that option (as well as the option of releasing your code under any other GPL-compatible license) as one way to allow you to redistribute works derived from GPLed code without having to negotiate a new license with the author or violate copyright law. If you ignore these options and release an amalgam of your own code and GPLed code, it means that you're violating copyright law, not that you've accidentally relicensed your code or relinquished your copyright to it.

And the fact that you don't relinquish rights to anything you write is the most important distinction between the GPL license and the contracts that SCO claim to have with Sequent and IBM: code that you write and link to GPL'ed code is still your code. If you want to legally distribute this code linked with the GPL'ed code, then you have to distribute it under a GPL-compatible license, but while that license does grant additional rights to others it does not remove any rights from you. If, say, you write a new feature for Emacs, you cannot legally redistribute your modified Emacs except under a mixed GPL+compatible license, but you can then take your new code and tack it on to your own text editor which you may distribute under any license you want.

According to SCO's claims, as soon as someone linked NUMA code with System V code, somehow SCO gained the right not just to use that NUMA code themselves, but to prevent the original authors from using the code how they wish! Under that theory SCO could have sued IBM for distributing "their" code in AIX even if IBM had never touched Linux. It's of course theoretically possible that Sequent or IBM signed such a contract, or even that at some point IBM signed a contract which transfers ownership of the whole damn company to SCO, but I wouldn't take SCO's lawyers' (much less their executives') word for it after reading about their ludicrous ideas about copyright law "invalidating" the GPL.

Re:We are up to a million lines of code!

[mewyn]

I just did some checks on my current kernel, 2.6.0-test3.

There is about 5.4 million lines in all of the .c, .S, and .h files. Seperating that out, taking the most likely parts of the kernel that would have any of these parts in question: arch, fs, include, kernel, and mm, they only have 2.1 million lines in the files. Seperating even further, taking out the files that SCO has not a chance having any IP in, it brings it down around 900k lines. Now, I know that SCO does not have ALL of the IA32, IA64, PPC, Kernel, and MM code. Also, I counted out any files that have to do with NUMA, and the lines from those total less than 2,500.

Have we yet proven SCO is full of it?

mewyn dy'ner

I was just there

[Billly Gates]

I live in Las Vegas and attended part of the forum today at the Mirage.

McBride showed 60-100 lines of code. They were precise including the comments. However its possible that the duplicate code was from RCU from sequent so the verdict is still out. I am not a coder and McBride did not say which file it was.

Anyway he showed more examples in the linux kernel including the SysV initialization code. THe Unixware version was similiar accept it had break/switch statements while the linux version did not. McBride went on saying that 829,000 lines of code were way too similiar and I could view them if I sign a NDA. I refused.

For more info look here.

IBM may have including code from sequent and the courts have to find out which license IBM was bound by. I personally think its evil that SCO can claim ownership of something they do not even own because of a piece of paper 15 years ago. Its rediculous.

Boycott SCO's lawyers

[wytcld]

The ethics of criminal defense are clear: Everyone accused of a crime deserves good representation. So there's nothing wrong with a lawyer willing to defend those accused of the worst crimes; indeed, something to commend.

But the ethics of civil offense are quite different: There is no inherent right to abuse our legal system and attack the innocent through it on false charges. Judges can - and we hope they will in this case - sanction the lawyers who enable such actions. But even beyond that, the lawyers working with SCO deserve complete sanction by civil society, and particularly by the tech industry they are trying to carve a niche out for themselves in. We must make it very clear that any company which hires them in the future will be subject to boycott. Any news organization which hires them for commentary - on anything - will be subject to boycott. Anyone who invites them to attend their party or join their club will be subject to boycott. We must learn to see them as tainted by their association with SCO in a way which in which a criminal defense attorney should not be seen as tainted. We must treat them as the moral equals of child abusers and meth manufacturers, and give them the same cold welcome in our neighborhoods.

Re:Not quite what I wrote

[shaitand]

Actually I come from an anglo-saxon background, my family has lived in the United States for 5 generations AND I'm a contract programmer.

You do realize that these programmers aren't actually being paid less. We have a massive concentration of wealth in the United States... it's us who are paid far too much. They can work at half the salary you were (Before you were underbid/outclassed) and essentially be making a sum worth 10x that in their country. For what you can buy one house for, they could buy 10 of the same house. So really, they are making a hell of alot more money than you were. It's just that money is essentially devalued in the US because we have too much of it.

Re:Stupidity?

[HBI]

Hrm. In the sense of the common law, it *is* illegal to bring frivolous cases to court. Tortious interference is illegal, as is trade libel, and so forth. So I wouldn't be so sure about labeling what they are doing "not illegal," if I were you.

The rub is in proving it. The judge is going to have to be really pissed at SCO for that to get anywhere. I was somewhat surprised that Mr. Moglen used that word. It is a very loaded term - one of the worst curses you can utter against another lawyer (they are immune to all the normal ones, you see). It insults their ethics, for one thing.

Not suggesting they didn't deserve it, but we should take that as a sign of disgust and hatred towards SCO that that word escaped him in a moment where he was clearly trying to be as accurate as possible.

Re:We are up to a million lines of code!

[nathanh]

For example, 110,000 lines of Unix System V code for read copy update, 55,000 lines of NUMA code and more than 750,000 lines of symmetric multi-processing code from Unix System V has made its way into Linux, attorneys and SCO executives claimed.

Hrm, those figures are suspicious. Look at this:

aaf22607:linux-2.6.0-test2# grep -irlE '_smp|smp_' . | xargs -n 10000 -s 100000 wc -l | grep total
1130736 total
aaf22607:linux-2.6.0-test2# grep -irlE '_rcu|rcu_' . | xargs wc -l | grep total
88110 total
aaf22607:linux-2.6.0-test2# grep -irlE '_numa|numa_' . | xargs wc -l | grep total
41671 total

Those numbers are within the same ballpark as SCO's claims. I think SCO is counting every line in every file that touches the 3 technologies.

The SMP example is noteworthy because many matching files are simply including an SMP header (smp_lock.h) so they can use spin_lock and spin_unlock. That's necessary for the code to be SMP-safe. SCO must intend to argue that anything linked against the SMP core constitutes a "derivative work". So because SCO claims to own the SMP core they also claim ownership of all code linked against it. That would explain the 750kLOC figure they've been throwing around.

http://www.sco.com/2003forum/sponsors.html is 404?

[mdupont]

http://www.sco.com/2003forum/sponsors.html
It seems that SCO has really big problems with sponsors. The sponsor page is done.

Re:We are up to a million lines of code!

[jrumney]

They are probably counting the lines in every point release of 2.4 and 2.5 and adding them all together to get the final number.

Re:The End is Near

[McPierce]

Man someone should doctor up this photo so that Slashdot would have two borg icons... we could replace caldera with the SCO-mcbride-borg adaptation...

Nah, not the Borg. Either the Ferengi or the Pakleds ("you are smart...we look for things that make us go...")