Further Selections From the Mixed-Up SCO Files

grahamlee writes "It may be a case of 'do as we say, not as we do' over at the Santa Cruz Operation. The Netcraft statistics meter says that for the last year, SCO's web site has been served by Apache on Linux. Indeed, it's been more than a year since the site was ever served from a SCO Unix machine. So what is the possible reason for this? Your humble author suggests that SCO found themselves requiring a multithreaded web server, and as SCO UNIX is based on an ancient version of The UNIX spec it just couldn't cope ;-)." Read on for one of the strangest-yet turns to the SCO story, and several merely insipid ones.

An anonymous reader writes "SCO have made much of how their claims about UNIX code being improperly copied into Linux were verified by 3 teams including 'MIT Mathematicians.' However, MIT can't seem to find the mathematicians concerned!"

(SCO's explanation is that the company is talking about a team made up of people who formerly worked at MIT, rather than a group still associated with the school, but "due to contractual obligations, we cannot specifically name the individuals.")

kuwan writes "SCO has responded to the massive debunking of their 'evidence' last week. Chris Sontag claims that the BPF code was 'not intended to be an example of stolen code, but rather a demonstration of how SCO was able to detect "obfuscated" code.' That, however is a flat-out lie. If you look at their Obfuscated Copying slide (#15), it clearly states 'Obfuscated System V Code Has Been Copied Into Linux Kernel Releases 2.4x and 2.5x,' and then the slide labels the BPF code on the left as 'System V Code.'

At this point I think they realized that their case has been severly weakened and they need to spin it any way they can. And in their case this means more lying."

Captain Beefheart writes "According to this story over at The Inquirer (crediting a special edition of Terry Shannon's Shannon Knows HPC newsletter), SCO has officially announced that HP is safe from their infringement lawsuit brigade ... This leads one to suspect that HP is the Fortune 500 company that SCO claimed recently had paid for a license."

Maybe HP just wants to avoid Microsoft/BSA-style hassles: FatRatBastard writes "According to an article on Commentwire.com SCO has started sending invoices to Linux users. If a company signs up for SCO's 'Intellectual Property License for Linux,' they allow the possibility of being audited at SCO's expense to ensure that the user has been truthful about the number of Linux installations it has. Should the audit reveal that the user has underpaid SCO by 5% or $5,000, whichever is highest, the user also agrees to pay the price for the audit."

Blacklantern writes "The SCO lawsuit has made it into "Halloween Documents" gallery. Eric Raymond takes on the contents of the lawsuit point-by-point. "

Comments

But they claim to own Linux

[fermion]

What does it matter that SCO runs Linux. Their basic argument is that they own Linux. Is it unusual for a company to use the technology they claim to own? They want everyone to pay them for the privilege of running it. Shouldn't they be showing how wonderful it is so that more people will use it? If there is a long term strategy, it is to bring Linux under the control of SCO. Hopefully, like Unix, companies will still use it as a basis for development, but as in the past the new code will be the property of SCO.

Of course what will likely happen is that one of the other kernels will be used, and the GNU/OS supporting tools will be shown to be OK.

If people have to pay the $2K fees per proccesor, the MS can better compete.

Re:BPF

[stratjakt]

The stock scam angle, and the MSFT-puppet angle are just yammering conspiracy theories from linux zealots without the mental accumen to think outside the slashbot party line. I dont buy it.

There are a million and one other ways to boost their stock price, if all the execs were after was a quick buck. Ways that wouldnt attract the SEC. They could announce that they plan to resurrect project monteray, or some shit like that. They could announce a PC emu for the G5 mac.

This is more than a pump-and-dump scam, else they're about the most pathetically inept corporate criminals in history.

Of course, only "we're right, they're wrong" conspiracy theories are allowed here. Lets ignore the fact that there are countless politically motivated anti-corporate types in the linux "community", any one of which would not hesitate to dump corporate IP into the kernel. SCOs allegations are not as far fetched as /. would have you believe.