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Embarrassing Dispatches From The SCO Front
An anonymous reader writes "Dennis Ritchie has acknowledged he with Ken Thompson wrote the code cited as 'proof' by SCO. This seems to fit perfectly with Bruce Perens' Analysis of SCO's Las Vegas Slide Show, and undermine Blake Stowell's claim 'At this point it's going to be his word against ours." Andreas Spengler writes "In the ongoing battle between SCO and the Linux community, German publisher Heise has shown that not only was the Linux implementation of the Berkeley Packet filter written outside of Caldera (now SCO), but that it was common practice there and at other companies to remove the BSD copyright notices from the internally used source code. In effect, SCO has proven publicly that they violated the BSD license." (Warning, article is in German.) Finally, a semi-anonymous reader writes "Learn all about how IBM's stomach will be roasted on a pyre of CDs at WeLovetheSCOInformationMinister."
It's starting to become painfully obvious that indeed SCO is completely full of shit, and will stop at no ends to destroy Linux's image.
I think at this point it would be a good idea for the slashdot community as well as everyone else in open source to start contacting the FTC
Here's the
babelfish translation of the German article.
Now, can somebody please post a link that translates from babelfish English to real English?
-- Alastair
The whole SCO mess is really pretty simple when you think about it.
Through the IPO and such a bunch of lawyers ended up with a large interest in Caldera/SCO. When they realized they didn't have any revenue from product sales they decided to: A) Find another possible source of revenue. B) Increase the value of their near worthless stock holdings.
So, SCO needed to find a company that A) had a Unix license with them. B) Was a large player in the Linux space. C) (most importantly) Wouldn't blink at the cost of buying them. IBM looked like an attractive target.
Unfortuantely for SCO, IBM didn't blink. They just laughed, gave them a lollipop and told them to run along. Since the stock was ticking up the SCO execs/lawyers (same people) are playing it to the hilt and trying to create an impression that they might be gaining some huge revenues soon. Look what its done to their stock. Also, look at who is suddenly selling stock in SCO.
Pretty soon IBM will give them the bitch-slap they so truly deserve and likely buy their assets pennies on the dollar at a bankruptcy sale.
Until then, lets just recognize this whole fiasco for what it is. Its a pump-and-dump on the stock. Nothing more, nothing less.
Nah I was just trolling. still funny though.
MontaVista swats back at SCO.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
I don't think Tycho and Gabe care enough to make a cartoon out of this. A lesson that all of us should take to heart.
Germany? Either you're trolling, or VERY VERY ignorant.
SCO is the old Caldera, and a US based company. Since they're in Utah now, and not California, they use SCO instead of Santa Cruz Operations, which the initials stand for.
To make the story short, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie wrote the first PDP/10 and PDP/11 implementations of what was to become Unix in the early 70's, at Bell laboratories. Later, the property rights became part of AT&T, although widely circulated elsewhere, and code from others (like the University of Berkeley) made it into AT&T's Unix, as well as the other way around.
Later, Novell bought the Unix rights from AT&T, and then sold the licensing rights to Caldera, who later changed their name to SCO, the old name that belonged to (I believe) Caldera's predecessors.
Some big vendors like IBM, Sun, HP and SGI have had license agreements with either AT&T, Novell or SCO to have full use of the source code to produce their Unix or Unix-like versions, based on both their own work and the old Unix work.
Linux came along in the 80's (before the current SCO, though), and parts of Linux has indeed been copied from other and public sources. The key word here being "public".
Now SCO wants to collect license fees for everything that is Unix or Unix-like -- or, as many speculate, to either make so much noise that a big company (IBM) buys them out, or they make the claims in order to make the stocks go temporarily up, so they can bleed off inflated stock for personal gain. I won't speculate as to the true motives, but either way, few people in the IT business find the claims anything but ridiculous, considering how much code has flowed back and forth in the open, and considering that AT&T lost a similar lawsuit against BSD a long time ago.
It's much more complicated than that, but that's a good start.
Regards,
--
*Art
The coffee cup story has been thrown around so much that few people have heard the facts as they really happened. The McDonalds coffee was not only hot, it was scalding, and capable of almost instantaneous destruction of skin, flesh and muscle. Worse yet, the paper cup it was in was capable of easily collapsing and spilling the contents. Because of its insanely high temperature, the coffee was a real danger.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
> The event happened in Germany
Huh? SCO/Caldera is Utah-based. No one is in Germany except for Heise, the news outfit.
Fact is Linus didn't call Ritchie's code ugly. He called SGI's patch ugly, that's a big difference. Yes, the patch included some of Ritchie's code, but the ugly part was the rest of it - having a separate malloc implementation just for their code in particular.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I like how all the replies to this are taking it seriously, despite the admission of trolling. Good times for all.
McDonalds offered way less, so they went to court. She only wanted medical. It was the jury after being presented with evidence of prior poor settlements and knowledge that the coffee could burn people that went punitive with the amount.
I don't blame McDonald's completely - if they are known to settle, people would just start dumping coffee or other things on themselves. And the women involved only wanted medical and related bills, so I don't blame her. It's the ability of the jury to go nuts with the punitive that made this case such a shining example, yet they are almost never mentioned.
Two points:
The jury awarded Liebeck $200,000 in compensatory damages. This amount was reduced to $160,000 because the jury found Liebeck 20 percent at fault in the spill. The jury also awarded Liebeck $2.7 million in punitive damages, which equals about two days of McDonalds' coffee sales.
...
The trial court subsequently reduced the punitive award to $480,000.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
What McBride will be giving in jail.
</rimjob>
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Think of it as SCO running around and saying they have some cool piece of legal reasoning, and somebody points out hat it was actually first formulated by Moses. Or some mathematician comes along and says he discovered something really neat about triangles and lines and then somebody points out Pythagoras did it first. Or a pharmaceutical company is claiming the invented a certain drug, just to be told that it was first used by Paracelsus.
Yeah, it's that big. And even if this turns out to mean jack in the legal world, having SCO claiming they created something that goes back to the inventor of the C language itself is something that even the propular press can understand is bull. From a PR point of view, this is not shooting yourself in the foot anymore, it is taking your legs of with a BFG9000.
Once more, a manual translation rather than the fishy fish stuff ... I hope it is more readable than the machine-generated semi-sense.
/sys/net/bpf.c, which is available here (link removed). In the part shown by SCO, the BSD terms of license are missing, which should always be named here: "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer." Because they are absent, code experts like Bruce Perens and Greg Lehey assume that SCO has shown with this example that the license terms have been removed against the agreements.
SCO vs. Linux: The era of conspiracy theories
In the twisted and contorted story about SCO and the source code that possibly has been transferred to Linux from SCO's assets, new turns can be announced. The conspiracy theory that Microsoft is behind SCO is joined by a theory that the denial of SCO's claims is a single, well masked campaign by IBM. Infoworld reported that SCO's CEO Darl McBride sees IBM as the author of the smear campaign. IBM has instigated Novell to turn against SCO, said McBride, who has been working at Novell for many years as head of NEST, the Netware Embedded Division. IBM has made Red Hat to sue against SCO, he said moreover. In addition, Eric Raimond of the Open Source Initiative is alleged to be on IBM's payroll, who moreover finance the Free Software Foundation and with that the lawyer Eben Moglen, according to Darl McBride.
While IBM and Red Hat succinctly called the accusation ludicrous, and Novell issued no comment, Eric Raymond found the energy to send an open letter to Darl McBride. In the letter, he denied being paid by IBM, but did not dispute to have helped IBM. All in all, Raymond appealed to the common sense of the head of SCO with an allusion to Darth Vader's capacity to understand: "The choice is yours. Take off the dark helmet and talk with us like a human being or continue on the path that makes us fear bad times, but which will certainly bring ruin to you and to the whole top management of SCO."
Apart from the booming Star-Wars rhetoric, Eric Raymond used the open letter to draw attention to a petition of the Linux community, which was read on the SCOForum. In it, the SCO group is asked to give up the confrontational course and to name all incriminating parts of the source code. In return, the Linux programmers affirm that they will revise all questionable parts: "If there is code in the Linux kernel that breaches rights, we will remove it, since our community doesn't want to have any part of that kernel."
The polite request may remain unanswered, because SCO's first evidence shown on the SCOForum was not convincing. Apart from the problem of "greek" code, the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) that was presented by SCO is now in the center of interest. SCO's example is from the file
This could constitute a classical own goal, since other possibilities are ruled out. While Jay Schulist, the programmer of the BSF version used in Linux, was employed by Caldera, he wrote the clean room variant of BSF before his time with Caldera. Among former Caldera employees, several remember that in the SCO trees, the copyright notice were missing in many places in the BSD code. The practice of cutting "redundant" licenses seems to have been in use in other companies as well. For instance, Heise Online was contacted by developers who had seen the same "technique" in use at Siemens-Nixdorf. If worst comes to worst, the code hunters have found evidence that proves the exact inverse of what SCO claims. At least in the case of BPF, SCO would have to present not only the powerpoint presentation, but the whole code to allay suspicions.
First, it is very clear that if any license was violated by Linux it was an accident. It was not willful and deliberate. In contrast to SCO, which has been willfully and deliberately removing BSD copyright notices from their code right, left, and center.
On the contrary, the way the BSD attribution of the malloc code was removed from Linux is exactly the same as the way the BSD attribution of the BPF code was removed from SCO Unix
In both cases, it was done as Heise describe, by a Unix company, in the malloc case by SGI (apparently), and in the BPF case by SCO.
SGI might get into trouble over it. Linux developers and distributors who accepted the code from SGI in good faith, and removed it as soon as they noticed it was old Unix code (before it was revealed by SCO), would not be any trouble.
If you're talking about Linux's use of the BPF code, be aware that what SCO called "obfuscated copying" was in fact a well-documented clean-room clone done by a Linux developer without access to the BSD-licensed code, just using published documentation. It was not subject to the BSD license at all.
What do SCO think they are doing?
Close, but no banana.
The old BSDL is not in question here. In 2002, SCO/Caldera (whatever they were called at the time) released the sources under the *new* BSDL.
Besides, the code actually *present* in the new kernels is a re-implementation, as has already been pointed out.
Thank you.
I posted this at Groklaw, and I'm reposting it here since it seems pretty relevant to the current thread:
I ran some traceroutes to see where the problem is, and the results are quite interesting.
First, let's start with www.canopy.com. I am listing the traceroute output from step 12, since that's just two steps before where things get revealing:
Tracing route to www.canopy.com [216.250.142.120] over a maximum of 30 hops:
12 77 ms 77 ms 76 ms 66.62.3.56
13 74 ms 77 ms 74 ms den1-core-01.tamerica.net [66.62.3.45]
14 77 ms 77 ms 76 ms den1-edge-01.tamerica.net [66.62.4.3]
15 77 ms 77 ms 77 ms vi-001.brdr01.den05.viawest.net [66.62.160.22]
16 75 ms 77 ms 76 ms gige-01-m00-00.crrt02.den05.viawest.net [64.78.230.210]
17 87 ms 87 ms 89 ms pos-03-01.crrt01.slc03.viawest.net [64.78.227.10]
18 89 ms 89 ms 89 ms c7pub-216-250-136-70.center7.com [216.250.136.70]
19 91 ms 88 ms 87 ms c7pub-216-250-142-126.center7.com [216.250.142.126]
20 88 ms 89 ms 90 ms c7pub-216-250-142-120.center7.com [216.250.142.120]
Trace complete.
Now, let's traceroute www.caldera.com
Tracing route to www.caldera.com [216.250.140.125] over a maximum of 30 hops:
12 74 ms 77 ms 77 ms dal1-core-01.tamerica.net [66.62.6.193]
13 76 ms 77 ms 74 ms den1-core-01.tamerica.net [66.62.3.45]
14 77 ms 74 ms 74 ms den1-edge-01.tamerica.net [66.62.4.3]
15 * * * Request timed out.
And finally, www.sco.com:
Tracing route to www.sco.com [216.250.140.112] over a maximum of 30 hops:
12 76 ms 77 ms 76 ms dal1-core-01.tamerica.net [66.62.6.193]
13 75 ms 77 ms 76 ms den1-core-01.tamerica.net [66.62.3.45]
14 77 ms 76 ms 75 ms den1-edge-01.tamerica.net [66.62.4.67]
15 * * * Request timed out.
Canopy, Caldera, and SCO, all have addresses that are within the same class C addressing range, respectively: 216.250.140.120, 216.250.140.125, 216.250.140.112. While this makes it very possible that all three sites are served by the same machine, we can't prove that from this information. It is however, likely that they are served from the same router.
The next thing to note is that the route to SCO and Caldera both fail at the 14th step in the tracert. The last router that responds for each of them, at the 13th step, is den1-edge-01.tamerica.net (albeit from different ports). Canopy also passes through den1-edge-01.tamerica.net at the 13th step, but continues on to a router at viawest.com. From there, it passes through 2 more routers at ViaWest, and 3 routers at Center7.
ViaWest and Center7 are both Canopy companies.
On initial analysis, for any other company, a network manager/sys admin/networking consultant (such as me) would simply assume that SCO/Caldera was having a problem with its ISP. The weird thing, though, is the presence of Canopy's IP address right *between* SCO's and Caldera's addresses.
Assume that all 3 segments are served by the same router (no, we can't prove it from this data, but it's extremely likely). Canopy, in that case, should be experiencing problems too if the site were under a DOS attack.
In fact, anyone planning a DDOS attack would find it easier to just take out the whole address range, thereby including all 3 sites, rather than focus on just the SCO/Caldera sites -- and for technical reasons alone. Never mind that they would *want* to target Canopy as well.
Given all this, it is a pretty safe bet that SCO/Caldera has taken its websites down itself.
Why? To protect themselves from a DDOS attack? No. Any decent firewall could take care of that for them. That's why I suspected that it was not DoS attack: they've simply been down too long.
I don't know *why* they're still down. I wonder if they're about to collapse.
SCO's upstream providers are Center7 and ViaWest, both Canopy companies.
It's unlikely that they would cut off SCO's access on the basis of a letter asserting DMCA violation. They'd take it to court instead.
I was simply pointing out that you should not assume that when criminal methods are used to apparently advance a cause that all is as it seems.
SCO almost certainly did not attack themselves but they may have engaged in Nixonian tactics of exagerating the damage.
Madelene Albright admitted that the CIA led the 1953 coup in Iran. You can find a detailed history in All The Shah's Men.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
If you're asking for sources about the CIA's involvment in the 1953 coup in Iran, then I suggest the CIA's own declassified documents, compiled by the National Security Archive. Very enlightening. Basically, the democratically-elected govt. of Mossadeq was seen as too "independent", and so the CIA orchestrated a coup that placed the Shah and the Ayatollahs in power. The Ayatollahs eventually decided they didn't want to share power, and the rest is history, as they say.
Oh, and by the way, the U.S. also prompted the U.S.S.R. to invade Afghanistan by getting involved there first, contrary to the official propaganda at the time. Carter's National Security Advisor admitted as much...
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