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

SCO

[nother_nix_hacker]

I have more karma than I can spend so I may as well lose some in a wreckless bout of imaturity:

SCO can kiss my ass

I'm sorry about that. *Bows head in shame*

Re:How'd they miss this???

[bobsalt]

you mean this old POS

Re:Why would anyone buy a license?

[Ironica]

Why would you care?

A company that buys a license is doing so based on their particular beliefs about the situation. For some companies it's just easier to buy a license and possibly sue for damages later.

Well, as put a couple of posts above: Paying SCO so that SCO will [have] the right to audit you seems to me to be wasting money and aquiring a liability.

In other words... If a company you do business with, i.e. they have you in their customer database, has a licensing agreement with a company like SCO, then your vendor is creating obligations that could entangle you at some point. Besides which, they're raising their own costs and passing it on to you, their customer.

So, if a company decided to buy a license or four as a CYA measure, they probably wouldn't want this to be public knowledge. And if they were a big enough company, they could probably make a deal with SCO that would keep it from being public knowledge too. It doesn't seem like disclosure is something that SCO regards very highly anyway.

A little off-topic but...

[benjaminchoate]

if you look at the SCO executive profiles they all look like nice enough guys... except darl... he kind of has that... evil glint in his eyes. I bet he's POSSESSED THEM! Take a look at them yourselves: http://www.sco.com/company/execs/ (Foreword: I don't need any critical words OR acts of violence/terrorism committed against my person for my use of the web-based email provider named below. I began my account with the unsaid provider before they were owned by the unnamed current owner of unsaid provider so everyone has this address. If you can't contain yourself then read no further.) Also... an interesting side note. Did anyone know that hotmail's junkmail filter regards mail sent from slashdot as junkmail? I thought that was hilarious. I was trying to get my password emailed to me and it would never come. Finally I turned off the filter and sent it again and it came :). Ben

Slashdot poll idea

[ReelOddeeo]

Is it pronounced... ?

[x] Ess See Oh<BR>
[ ] Skoe (rymes with hoe)<BR>
[ ] KO-boy neal