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SCO Says IBM is Beating Up on Them
SCO's McBride claims that IBM is stage-managing all the attacks and bad press, which would probably explain why I cleared this article with IBM World Headquarters before running it (not!). The publisher of Linux Journal invites SCO to sue. One of SCO's lawyers has this barely coherent interview where he spouts legal rubbish for a gullible reporter. There's an interview in German (machine translation) with SCO's execs. And finally, SCO is still hoping for a settlement with IBM. Update: 08/22 18:26 GMT by M : ESR responds.
"We have absolute direct knowledge of this..."
:)
Yup, and all this proof is, of course, documented with the 'illegal' source code. To see it you'll need to sign an NDA.
Seriously, I don't think Linus' comment that "they are smoking crack" really covered it. McBride obviously seems to believe that the Open Source community isn't capable of refuting their bullshit without the backing of a large company.
Here's a newsflash for you, Darl: IBM doesn't -need- to coordinate an attack on SCO. The way I see it, an attack on one member of the Open Source community is an attack on all of us. And I know it's been said before, but why not: put up or shut up, SCO.
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
A. Because all this SCO fud is being backed by a big corporation (M$).
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
If the Linux kernel is truly infringing on SCO's UNIX copyrights, why doesn't SCO ask a judge to issue an injunction against kernel.org/mirrors to stop them from distributing it.
If they did this, however, they would have to show a *minimal* amount of compelling evidence. Enough so that it is justified, but not necessarily the amount it would take to prove the case in a court trial.
My bet is they know they don't have this much evidence. They are simply trying to extort license money from gullible companies. If they saught an injunction, and were denied, all their posturing would immediately be disregarded.
Anyway, just something I was thinking about. Mabey they did seek one already. I admit I've become lazy in my SCO-story-reading duties.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Ok, let's put down the flamethrowers for a moment, and try to understand what SCO's lawyers are saying.
When they say "the GPL is pre-empted by copyright law", they don't mean that the GPL is invalid. What they mean is this: You can't GPL something you don't own. In other words, the fact that the code in dispute was distribute "under the GPL license" is irrelevant -- the company which did that (IBM) didn't own the code, so the fact that they "licensed" the code under the GPL is irrelevant.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
> The main thrust is that he's betting on the fact that Copyright law trumps whatever provisions are in the GPL, so IBM's GPL defense doesn't hold water;
Oh come on. This is their same claim that Federal Copyright only allows 1 copy for backup and the GPL allows multiple copies and is therefore invalid.
Somehow out of all this, they conclude that since Federal Copyright only allows 1 copy, the GPL is invalid and they are now free to make unlimited copies. After all, they are STILL distributing the kernel and, even if you can accept that 1 million lines belong to them, the rest DON'T. Under their own theory, SCO is guilty of vast copyright infringement.
And this, of course, completely ignores the fact that the Federal Copyright law still allows the OWNER of a copyright to authorize additional copies. Duh.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The lawyer makes this quote: Let's say you have a hundred files, and you put one of your hundred files under the GPL. That doesn't mean you've lost the rights to your other 99 files.
But from what I can tell, SCO argues if one of THEIR files (or some of their files) touches Linux, then Linux is essentially theirs, especially because Linux apparently benefitted from the code they "own."
Maybe its just me, but there appears to be some hypocracy here (OK, it's SCO, expecting hypocracy is a default setting). Maybe it relates to their twisted take on GPL and Copyright, but I think the lawyer's statement really makes them look worse.
Thoughts on this?
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Not that there haven't been many signs already that SCO has lost touch with reality, but adding in the "it's all a conspiracy by IBM" really indicates that the paranoia has gone into high gear.
[It's akin to Hillary's claims of a "vast right wing conspiracy" out to get Bill. There certainly was (and is) a "vast right wing" that delighted in hating Bill Clinton; but that doesn't make it a "conspiracy".]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
- completely at odds with what the law actually states;
- not even applicable in the current context, which is not about "making a legal backup of licensed software that doesn't otherwise permit copying"
- contrary to the entire body of contract law
- full of lame meanderings, circumlocutions, and just plain bad sentence constructs/grammar
Besides, he still sounds like he's smoking more crack than the worstIt's incoherent in part because it matches everything else SCO has been doing lately.
Heise, a SCO lawyer, claimed that GPL was "pre-empted by federal copyright law", to which Eben Moglen, FSF General Counsel, replied. Heise repeats his argument in the CNET interview.
But in the same CNET interview Heise also says:
So - according to Heise - GPL is valid after all!
The only way to make any sense of this is that Heise's real argument - at least today - is that "GPL is pre-empted by federal copyright law" if something is released under GPL without right owners consent... This is of course trivial: if you release someone else's program under GPL without her permission then the GPL is obviously not valid (in that particular instance). But if you release your own or somebody else's code with her permission under GPL then GPL is valid and enforceable.
How do you address claims that SCO's demonstrated evidence so far is not theirs to copyright!
Nobody has answered the questions about the four kernal modules origin and algorithms being textbook common knowledge - in whole or in part. Why is this considered IP?
Why did SCO keep distributing the GPL'd code while putting out press releases?
Why does SCO make use of many many GPL'd tools for their own product?
Why does SCO [threaten to] spread this lawsuit out to Linux users instead of only IBM's copyright infringement case?
How is SCO planning a business model around a licensed copy of Linux when it will be quickly obsolete once the full body of evidence is released?
What are your definitions of "derivative works" in this case? Would future version of Linux without any SCO IP be within those bounds?
Why are the true numbers of lost existing customers for SCO due directly to their adopting a "free" Linux alternative? How are they calculating damages?
Can SCO provide the complete code references to things it DID contribute to Linux (as SCO or Caldera) and thus differentiate between given and stolen?
These are just a few things I'd like to ask anyone at SCO, legal or not, or both!
mug
From the Infoworld article:
"You've got all of these guys and it looks like the whole world is coming against SCO."
Geez, Darl, you think? Couldn't be because you're attacking virtually the whole community?
What a putz.
realityshunt
Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate.
The fact that SCO shipped GNU/Linux under GPL is extremely relevant.
SCO had every opportunity to review all of the code that they were distributing before they distributed it. I would say that reviewing each piece of code for IP is the responsibility of any distribution such as Red Hat, or Suse, or SCO. If a distributor is going to make money off of somebody else's work, they better make sure it is owned by the right person.
Distributing code under the GPL is analogous to signing a contract. SCO's argument that they aren't responsible for copyrighted items that they didn't know where in their distribution is simillar to claiming that they are not responsible for a signed contract that was not fully read. Anyone can say that they are not responsible for an item in a contract because they didn't read that part. At the end of the day, when the judge looks at the contract and sees the signature at the bottom - the contract will be full and binding and the person will be as accountable as if he had read all of the items.
SCO has signed the contract - even if they didn't read it before they signed it.
Paul Seamons
I remember a kid in our neighborhood growing up who wasn't a very nice person. One time he said to a group of us: "You just hate me because I'm Jewish." To wit, I replied: "No David, we hate you because you're an a**hole..." We don't hate SCO because they are trying to make a profit selling software, we hate them because they are trying to make a profit by scheming and defaming and threatening people. Did I mention that IBM told me to say this?
"They'd pull the rug out from under linux in an instant if they could."
They'd pull the rug out from under linux in an instant if it made buisness sense. As writing operating systems and maintaing them across all of IBM's platforms makes less buisness sense than getting a much cheaper one, maintained largely by other people and companies, working on all their platforms that is unlikely to happen. Especially as it has the added advantage of making ISV programs easily ported between the different IBM architectures, and makes support more easily streamlined within the corporation in the long term. IBM is _the_ company that linux makes buisness sense for.
"It'd be a real sweet plum if someone could take "ownership" of linux."
Not quite. It would be a rotten tomato if someone could take ownership of Linux. Take a quick look at how well buinsess has turned out for the non-free Linux distributions. Take a look at how well buisness was/is going for most other x86 proprietary unixes, even before Linux became more mainstream.
As you'd lose every developer, all support competence, all contracts, all evangelists in a single second, what do you think you could do with the ownership several millions of lines of unmaintained code without a single developer and with everyone in the computer industry hating you?
Proprietary Linux would not be a sweet plum. It would be a worthless pile of unsellable unmaintained code involved in litigation from every contributor to the end of computers as we know them.
Smart companies know the value of Linux is in its freedom. Idiots like SCO have a hard time realizing that there is no money in it for people who dont want to work to earn their money.