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

How'd they miss this???

[TopShelf]

This is all pretty amusing stuff, but I can't believe they left this story out:

Over at Computerworld, they have an article which outlines SCO's plans to revitalize their Unix offering, and market it as a competitor to Linux. The best part, of course, is Darl's insight:

"It's like a house that hasn't been maintained in a few years," McBride said. "We're going to come back and spruce the place up."

Sure, a little paint and some nifty accents from Pottery Barn, and SCO will be swimming in cash, right??? Thanks again, Darl, for making my day just a little funnier...

Re:How'd they miss this???

[DataPath]

Can you even GET a building permit for a condemned building?

Re:How'd they miss this???

[Kenja]

Sure, just bring in Bob Vila to do a segment called "This old OS".

Re:How'd they miss this???

[El]

We're going to come back and spruce the place up."
Uh, perhaps they should do a title search on the old building first, and make sure they actually own it!

Re:How'd they miss this???

[Mr. Penguin]

[user@host] $ telnet www.permits.gov 80
Trying...
Connected to www.permits.gov.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /building.permit?applicant=sco&building_type=UNIX
<PERMIT>
<H3>Because you are SCO, you have been granted a permit to do anything you want to.</H3>
<P>Signed,<BR>
The Government</P>
</PERMIT>
Connection closed by foreign host

Ok, -1 redundant

[koali]

Why wouldn't they use Linux? They own it, don't they?

Re:Ok, -1 redundant

[zjbs14]

Even more interesting is the fact that the Investor Relations area on their site (http://ir.sco.com/) uses ColdFusion running on IIS. That's just sad on many levels.

Backdoor?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

So, could this be the reason why the successful DoS attack on SCO by an overly zealous open source advocate was so successful?

Ahhh...

[stames]

Finally! An SCO story. I've been going into depressive withdrawal...

Darl Infringes Apple Patent

[ferret70]

More specifically, Steve Jobs's Reality Distortion Field(TM), except that he crossed the wires wrong and only he is affected. W00t!

Yeah, they "reviewed" that code...

[AEton]

Paul Hatch, a SCO spokesman, wrote in a statement to The Tech, "To clarify, the individuals reviewing the code had been involved with MIT labs in the past, but are not currently at MIT. Unfortunately, due to contractual obligations, we cannot specifically name the individuals."

I get the sudden impression of a trio who tried out for the role of the Lone Gunmen on the X-Files and failed miserably, crawling through MIT's underground tunnels.

"Quick, it's the campus cops! Run!"

"But we haven't finished copying UNIX code into /src/kernel!"

"That's okay, we'll just grep some BSD code and put it in Symbol font. They'll never know the difference!"

Well, this is what *I* think...

[Talia Starhawke]

SCO reminds me of my brother and I fighting over something. My brother would say I had something of his, and I would say, "Prove it, fart-butt!" And he'd run off to his room and grab some miniscule carpet fiber (which he had been saving for months) that had an imprint on it which *might* have looked like a part of my shoe, which proved I was in his room. But he never could say what I took, why I took it, when I had the opportunity to take it, or even that he wanted it back! He just wanted me to pay for the "missing property" immediately, or he'd pound me into grape jelly.

My mother would tap her foot impatiently, say, "She doesn't have your stuff, stop being so mean to your sister," and promptly ground him for being a dork.

So, using this logic, IBM should say, "Linux doesn't have your code, stop being so mean to the open source community," and promptly sue them for being dorks.

License to get sued???

[El_Ge_Ex]

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.

So, not only am I being extorted, but I'm agreeing to be extorted at a future date as well!?!

Please, SCO spare us the bandwidth. Shut Up!

-B

about time.

[514x0r]

wow, it's 4:30. i'd almost given up on my daily SCO story.

Maybe I'm too old...

[shotfeel]

...but that stuff about the mathematicians had me imagining a SCO representative doing a Maxwell Smart impersonation.

"Yes, we hired a team of crack mathematicians from MIT to scour the code...."
"Would you believe we hired an accountant who's heard of MIT to scour the code..."
"How about we cornered a kid coming out of his remedial math class and offered him free pizza if he could find two words that matched?"

Dear SCO

[QuackQuack]

Dear SCO,

I have already paid for your Linux license, yet I have erroniously received another invoice.

After some investigation, I think I figured out the mix up. Due to contractual obligations, I had to send the payment secretly. It's in a white unmarked envelope with no return address. Due to the circumstances, I was forced to send cash against the advice of the US postal service. Still I trust that it arrived safely. If you have any doubts, my accountant, whose name I cannot reveal, will vouch for me. He used to teach at MIT so his credibility is obviously impeccable.

Now that we've straightened out this matter, I will discard this invoice.

Thank you,

Selected searches from SCO's website

[GillBates0]

Darl McBride is a big yellow turd
Displaying documents 1-20 of total 2825 found.
1. SCO | Company | History of SCO

Plans for the next weekly Pot-Party
Displaying documents 1-20 of total 2951 found.

We think we rock big time
Displaying documents 1-20 of total 1116 found.

nya nya nya nya take that suckers
Displaying documents 1-20 of total 1586 found.

Why shit and waste it when you can burp and taste it.

Holy Cow

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, a girl!!!

So, do you like....stuff?

Re:Holy Cow

[PetoskeyGuy]

All these guys ignoring what was said and drooling over the fact that an actual girl said something. Come on guys, that's the internet equivelent of staring at her chest during a conversation.

Perhaps slashdot should have users enter their sex so you can have a +5 Female modifier. :)

Re:BPF

[Sven Tuerpe]

Am I the only one who believes there has got to be more to this claim?

Yes.

a more likely explanation:

[pb]

Caldera bought SCO, remember? That's probably when and why it changed over.

Why, I remember when Caldera was trying to be a Linux company, and SCO was just a defunct Unix. Now all we have is Caldera/SCO trying hard to be a defunct company!

Re:Lots of talk, little action

[aoteoroa]

Why are so many companies who are doing Linux business (SuSE, for example) complaining, but not unleashing their lawyers.

Like the old saying:

Never argue with an idiot. He'll drag you down to his level, then beat you with experience.

Not to rewrite it too much...

[VValdo]

but it would go like...

"You might not realize this, IBM, but standing on the other side of that door is a team of MIT ninja mathematicians with top-of-the-line pattern-matching supercomputers!"

No one comes in the door. IBM stares blankly.

"Uh...wouldja believe a team of highly-paid CPAs with a beowulf cluster?"

No dice.

"How 'bout an advanced algebra class and 'diff'?"

Nope.

"Two monkeys and an abacus?"

W

Occasional insanity...

[drakaan]

Is it just me, or does anyone else occasionally feel like running to Utah and twisting Darl's balls off after reading some of the articles that he's quoted in?

"The linux community is splitting hairs"

For the love of god, please, somebody give him a solid-gold 5-iron and point him towards a lightning-prone golf course.

Poof!

[Anonymous Coward]

And McBride's disapperance will be brought to you by the letters A and K, as well as the numbers 4 and 7.

clarification

[penguin7of9]

"To clarify, the individuals reviewing the code had been involved with MIT labs in the past, but are not currently at MIT.

Translation: one of the individuals' brother in law was a part-time undergraduate at MIT before dropping out.

Unfortunately, due to contractual obligations, we cannot specifically name the individuals."

Translation: their expert said "as long as I don't have to defend this opinion in court or to the press and as long as you guarantee that you won't leak my name, sure, I'll take your consulting money and you can put out whatever you like in your press release".

Re:How about

[MuParadigm]

"I use SCO products daily"

I didn't know they made a deodorant.