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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."
Something must be going on... I haven't been able to get there in the last 4 or 5 hours...
Who wants to be a Darl Mc Bride?
:
- Question 1 -
Your best friend kindly lent you his new Toyota, but you have literally destroyed it in a accident you were entirely responsible.
What do you do?
[ ] a) You apologize.
[ ] b) You buy him a new car.
[ ] c) You sue him.
[ ] d) You sue him AND General Motors.
Answer
If you choose D, congratulations! You could be SCO's CEO!
I already had the welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com bookmarked. This one is going right next to it.
Now if only he sold t-shirts and playing cards to go with it. Or perhaps diapers with the name McBride stamped on them. Honey, I think he needs a new McBride, this one is all poopy.
Well, it's getting to be that time...
As soon as they have to publish their 10Q everyone is going to see that SCO has little future revenue and that the execs have been engaged in wash-trades to pump and dump the stock. I'm mildly amused that the SEC and FTC haven't stepped in to prevent all the stock-holders from being royally screwed over. Nope... Nope... the government will step in only after everyone has been fucked and the execs are kicking it in Bermuda on everyone else's retirements.
common practice there and at other companies to remove the BSD copyright notices from the internally used source code
That's a large part of what cost AT&T in the ATT/USL vs BSD case -- AT&T had incorporated BSD code without the BSD copyright notices, violating the BSD license and thus BSD's copyrights. IIRC, AT&T ended up paying BSD's legal costs in that trial.
Hey SCO, how do you feel about paying IBM's (and anyone else you were thinking of suing) legal costs?
-- Alastair
Dennis got into the act after Linus called his code ugly: damn, them be fightin' words!
...for some software developers whose code was misappropriated by a certain publicly traded company to start filing cease-and-desists against that company for violation of copyright. I wonder how much of SCO's products would be unsellable under such conditions.
This isn't to say that everyone else is perfect, but then again, everyone else hasn't tried to benefit from open source licenses only to turn around and bash the concept while still using the technology that they gained from such licensing.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Going to sell a deck of cards showing the faces of SCO management and lawyers?
Not sure the exact quote, but when people pointed out the fallacious examples, SCO said, "We think we know our own code."
However, their claims contradict this. Crucial to their suit is the fact that they did not know that there was UNIX code in Linux prior to all this litigation. If they did know that, then they willingly released their code under the GPL.
Perhaps they've learned a bunch about their code in the past few months, but if their developers did stuff like ripping out BSD advertising clauses many years ago, I don't see how the new management would be privy to it.
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.
You may recall that recently SCO declared the GPL invalid. I believe the real reason why they did that is not, as many believe, because they continued to distribute Linux after they announced their lawsuit, but instead because they have actual Linux code inside their own SCO Unix. So far, this is just a hypothesis, but I think it best explains their action.
If in fact they have copied BSD code in violation of the BSD, then it's very plausible that they have copied GNU/Linux code in violation of the GPL.
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The requested URL
Continuing to cover this is not particularly useful. SCO won't be bothered by anything so trivial as facts. They are out for blood and maximum damage, and no possible response from anyone is going to stop them now. They will have to be defeated, but no action we take or not take will do anything significant. They know they aren't popular and don't care in the slightest. They may even know they are wrong, but that won't stop them from trying to use the system to get $$.
If we want to do something interesting, let's look ahead to how we might lobby and/or structure the GPL 3.0 to fight this kind of crap. Maybe create an auditing trail software package people can use to know not just the origin of a piece of code, but how it is used and what code is based off of it. Also give more press to the idea of mutual defense clauses in licenses - kind of the counterweight to the cross licensing of IP between companies. Let's think of some positive steps we might take in the future to make our position so obviously strong that anyone short of an SCO type wouldn't waste their time. I think someone who earlier said SCO really believes it is actually impossible for open source to produce what it has was right on the money, and with that settled in their own minds SCO goes into attack mode. There is nothing that can be done about such attitudes but fight. For the rest of the (semi) sane world however, making our position more obviously strong might be good. Let's focus there, and wait until SCO does something that we can actually respond to before rewarding any more of their tantrums.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
MontaVista swats back at SCO.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
[ ] e) After taking possession, it became your car anyway; he owes you a new car.
-Hope
I love babelfish:
Altogether Raymond appealed to the reason of the SCO upper one with an allusion to the insight ability of Darth Vader: "you have the choice. Remove the dark helmet and converse with us like a human nature, or you continue your way, which lets bad times fear for us, however you and the entire SCO Topmanagement into the ruin will completely surely float."
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
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!
"You want fries with that?"
I don't know who this Dennis Ritchie guy is, but he obviously has no respect for SCO IP. As soon as my crack legal team locates him, he will be sorry!
Yours Truly,
Darl
Oh yeah, we are also implementing a new SCO trademark, "SCO owner of all IP post Genesis". What do you think?
First and foremost, it dents their credibility. Either they don't know what they own, or they are guilty of intellectual theft. Either way, would you subcontract to a company with serious IP issues? No, this isn't going to do SCO any good at all. It would raise way too many questions with those with the money. Such as "are they going to steal anything from us?"
Second, it raises the issue of liability. If SCO have been open to doing a bit of IP theft of their own, in the past, then will SCO customers be subject to unexpected license fees themselves? Since SCO clearly thinks they can demand fees from Linux users, it would logically follow that SCO UnixWare users may be subject to fees from other companies, if SCO has incorporated IP without authorization.
The US Navy is a big SCO UnixWare user, and it has plenty of cash. That makes it a nice, juicy target for corporations who have even a halfway decent case of SCO misusing their IP. The Navy is more likely to pay than not - Governments tend to be wary of bad publicity in the run-up to a major election, and virtually anything asked for is going to be loose change to the DoD.
But let's say that happens. Is the DoD likely to stick with SCO? After getting bitten, even if the bite is relatively mild? Probably not. SCO isn't strictly approved for the sort of use it gets. Quietly shifting to a "trusted" OS may well prove cheaper both financially and politically.
Government spending dwarfs spending by virtually all companies in the US, combined. The loss of Government orders would devastate a company like SCO, which probably gets much of its income that way. It is also likely to turn the fortunes of whoever the Government turned to. (Likely HP or Sun, as those tend to be favourites with the US Government.)
Neither of these companies has been doing well, of late, but a major contract shift - or even the suspicion of one - could change that in a big way.
This is not just a consequence of these statements, but is a consequence of the ramifications of all aspects of this case. If you follow the chain far enough, one thing is very clear. Whether SCO wins or (more probably) loses, there's going to be a reckoning, and the tech landscape will shift.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Darl: so, um. Ya. So we didn't try googling our code before we showed it in las vegas?
Blake: ya, no.
Lawyer#1: ya, um, we, ah. Ya.
Lawyer#2: dropped the ball on that one!
Darl: so, ya, and, um, it's, ah, in a book from 1977? Huh. Didn't know that.
Blake: ya, a book! Who knew.
Lawyer#1: didn't think to look in a book.
Lawyer#2: ya, hm, ya, book.
Darl: hmm, book. And, ya. Umm, it was released under the BSD license?
Lawyer#1: ya, BSD. Hmm.
Blake: so. That was, um. Ya.
Lawyer#2: BSD. Uh hu.
Darl: so... Dennis Ritchie? Really? He's famous and stuff.
Blake: um, ya. Dennis Ritchie.
Lawyer#1: Dennis Ritchie, uh hu. Famous.
Lawyer#2: Hmm. Ya.
Darl: um, Linda, if you could get my stockbroker on the phone that would be great, thanks.
Looks like Dennis' check from IBM finally cleared...
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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.
because its illustrative of just how stupid a law it is. if major companies were as routinely screwed by this law as the little guy, the DMCA would be a memory.
SCO can have the GPL or BSD licenses declared invalid all they want--the code is still copyrighted. With the GPL or BSD in place, at least they have the excuse that "it's free anyway, we just got sloppy about satisfying a few conditions". But if they actually argue that they believe the GPL and BSD license are invalid, then they are committing willful copyright infringement of code they have no license at all for.
At first it looked quite innocent, like a genuine interest in the story, but then, it got worse and worse. The story just had everything: Crime, Comedy (Linus: they are smoking crack. SCO: IBM is staging everything. Haaa, that's hillatrious!), bad guys, good guys, all the good stuff!
Soon I've found out I cannot pass the day without reading the daily SCO item on slashdot. But it wasn't enough. Just like any other addiction, I found out I need an increasing dosage every day. When slashdot didn't provide it, I turned on to google news search and started refreshing the "SCO" search every hour and so, but even this wasn't sufficient. There just wasn't enough SCO news to provide my ever growing thirst, so I started making my own SCO stories.
Help! I think I'm an addict. Is there a remedy?
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.
Oh SCO would just claim the virus code was their IP all along, and claim license fees from everyone who's still running it - people whose IP they can get easily as it keeps contacting their website!
Actually that doesn't sound any more nonsensical than their current machinations.
I thought there was something fishy about all of this. I just figured it out, and my suspicions were correct all along, the Iraqi Information Minister went to work for SCO!!! It all makes sense now. Without this case, he would have been bored out of his mind!
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
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.
"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."
Not only SCO proved that they violated the BSD license, every Linux distro does.
Now, reading the replies on this article, I find it remarkable no-one has noted this. No offence, but even when code is licensed under the BSD license, that license has to be obeyed. You can't remove copyright claims because you think that's necessary. When someone violates the GPL, hordes of people think they have to say something bad about the possible violator. However, it seems the Linux kernel as well violates an OSS license, which is IMHO as bad as violating a GPL license or any license.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I'm inclined to believe in the "true believer" theory.
...
Look, I think that SCOX is worth $0.50 to $1.00 per share. I'm sure for the Slashdot crowd, that's a high estimate, and I'll get a bunch of replies saying "no! $0.01 per share! $0.000001 per share! Negative $699 per share!" But face it, reality says that there are people, right now, who are actually paying $13 per share for SCOX.
I have to try to get inside these people's heads, and I have to do it without taking cheap shots, which means that everyone else will take cheap shots at ME, the messenger.
But if you really want to understand
McBride gets up on stage with "Slide A" and "Slide B". McBride says that Slide A is from SCO Unix. McBride says that Slide B is from Linux. It's obvious to everybody that Slide B looks like Slide A.
Then the Linux community replies and says "We admit that Slide B is from Linux 2.4 Yes, but that code is properly licensed. Yes, but that code doesn't run on desktops or embedded systems. Yes, but that code has already been removed from the 2.6 series".
All of these things are true, and they are all important in a court of law. Especially the bit about proper licensing.
But the SCO-lovers and the Linux-haters aren't interested in "Yes, But". So our message doesn't make it through their filter. They put a lot of weight on "Slide B equals Slide A", and are not listening to an argument that Slide B has every legal right to look like Slide A.
Human beings are like that. They discount arguments and evidence that disagree with them. And once a human being "flips the bozo bit" on another person, or another group of people, it stays flipped.
That's what I think is happening with the stock.
As far as "marketplace efficiency" goes -- whole new topic. I agree that this kind of bubble is inefficient for capital formation. However, it does satisfy the psychological need of people to identify with something that embodies their ideals, just like a sports team. Some people buy SCOX because it fulfills their desire to hate Linux.
- The license under which the "historical" versions of Unix are released is a BSD style license with the advertising clause. The advertising clause makes it incompatible with the GPL, according to the license comparison at the FSF site. So, it is not legal to pull code from the historical Unix versions into the Linux kernel, unless the historical Unix code in question was licensed from UCB under the BSD license (UCB retroactively removed the advertising clause from their code).
- DMR worked for AT&T on the code is now owned by SCO. So SCO does have legal ownership of that code and is allowed to control how it is released. Much of it (including the code in question) was released under the license mentioned above, but that license conflicts with the GPL as used by the Linux kernel.
So, if DMR's old Unix code was used verbatim in the Linux kernel AND it is not available under a license different than the historical Unix license, then the kernel is violating SCO's license terms.Right, you mention two of the big valuation models for stocks. First there's the model that a stock worth is the current value of its expected future dividend stream -- or som e flavor of that, depending on your philosophy of accounting. According to that model, I think the whole company is worth maybe $10 million to $50 million for its conventional products and services, and perhaps $50 million to $100 million (being generous) as an option on a lawsuit.
The next model is that you try to figure out why other people are buying stock. You try to figure out what is going to be fashionable next month and buy it this month (or figure out what will be disgusting next month and short-sell it this month).
People using the first model are like retail buyers -- end users of stock, almost. People using the second model are like merchants or wholesalers -- they buy the stock because they think someone else will want it a little bit later.
I sorta think that bubbles happen when a lot of people become wholesalers and think they are going to sell to other wholesalers with no clear idea of where the end of the value chain is. Warren Buffett says that he asks this question: "would I buy this stock if the stock market was open only once a year?"
Also, some people are momentum traders -- they buy whatever is going up. The ordinary laws of supply and demand do not apply, because the demand curve actually turns UP with increasing price, and the supply curve turns a little bit DOWN. So the curves do not cross in that beautiful Econ 1 diagram, and the usual negative-feedback loops of micro-economics become damaging positive-feedback loops.
I think that's what's happening to SCOX. Lots of momentum buyers, not enough fundamental buyers (where "fundamental" includes "chances of winning IBM suit" * "value of suit" of course).
That still leaves the question: why were Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday flat, and then big price increases on heavy volume on Thursday, Friday.
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.
Next they'll be including copies of UnixWare in the writs they send out ("Is that really grey paper? It looks like very, very fine print to me... my goodness, they've taken almost all of the whitespace out... but it does look like a winner from the Obfuscated C competition...") so they can be sure that all recipients have unlicenced copies of their code.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing