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.

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?

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.

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?

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

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