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SCO's Next Target: SGI?
FatRatBastard writes "ZDNet News is speculating that SCO's next target in its legal actions against Linux may be SGI. According to the article its legal strategy will be to claim that XFS is a Unix derivative and therefore under SCO control, much like they claim JFS is in their suit with IBM. One fact not mentioned in the article that would support SGI being the next target is the malloc code they claimed was infringing at this years SCOForum was copyrighted SGI."
A link to ZDNet speculation about what might be SCO's next target. Slow news day? Needed another SCO fix?
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'd sue Slashdot for all the stories about SCO. They're clearly trying to profit by SCO's active legal work.
Now, we can all agree that XFS is based on our own filesystem, famous for the stability and reliability that give you excellent uptimes when fsck time is included in that uptime measure. You don't get that kind of techonolgy for free, and it doesn't simply <fingerquote> evoooollllve </fingerquote> on its own. That SGI stole and released this is not up for debate. But that piece of invaluable IP isn't the issue here, really.
Where SGI has really chuffed our muffins is in having the gall to steal our valuable "long-run" technology. By only executing on outdated hardware, we've been able to keep system procurement prices down while effortlessly sustaining the user's reading and coffee time. In an attempt to muscle in on our territory however, SGI have chosen to stay the course with MIPS CPUs and confusingly outdated IRIX. Now, I know that the R5000 was once state of the art and all that, but the damned things are shipping in Playstation 2s. This, while SGI have the gall to tell customers that these are usable for graphics workstations.
Be the judge and jury on this one, my friends. Why would SGI opt to use this kind of dated processor and leaden IRX OS unless they too were trying to implement our patented "long-run" technology? How long before SGI manages to extend itself into the Linux culture; to prevent system upgrades and encourage ass backward architectures there as well? Soon, our "long-run" technology will be in use by customers the world over, and they will not be paying SCO's investors one penny, your honour.
Your honour -- Not One Penny.
Join the good fight. The good fight is the right fight. God has given me a mission, and my investors call me to it. God talks to me nightly. We are talking about my second home here, and I'll be damned if SGI is going to take that away. We are talking about stockholder value, precariously balanced atop press releases, IP confusion, lottery players, and the belief each buyer shares that there will be one more fool beyond him. We are talking about SCO's God-given right to go where no man has gone before, your honour.
One to beam up, Scotty.
Don't they sell Linux too ?
SCO VS SCO
ultimate deathmatch!
SCO said sometime ago that "their" NUMA code found in Linux, has come from SGI engineers working in the Linux kernel.1 055784622 054/0616_marshall.html
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=8276/byt
So, it is more than "speculation".
{sarcasm: semi-lame} It is true! SCO, she is the mother of all OSes, EVEN the ones that were invented before her! A temporal rift created an anti-time anomaly, sending SCO back before its creation to introduce lines of code in earlier OSes... {/sarcasm} bleh...
When they're done with SGI they'll probably track down Ken Thompson and try to claim that he somehow infringed their IP by writing UNIX in the first place. After all, anything and everything to do with UNIX is clearly SCO's by god-given right.
Morons.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
that we'd see RICO (racketeer influenced corrupt organisation) charges brought against SCO (some corrupt organisation).
*sigh* A man can dream...
is here.
BoD
We Love the SCO Information Minister is proud to now offer T-shirts and mugs through Cafe Press. Any proceeds will be split between our bandwidth costs and free software legal defense funds. Someone order something quick so we can find out if we need to provide alternate artwork :)
In the original IBM lawsuit it occurred to me that it isn't SCO that's going to be using the Chewbacca defence after all, but IBM. After all, isn't it wookies that rip people's arms off if they lose? ;-)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Personally I think SCO has chosen to craft their business model after an urban legend.
Travis
Bill and I are the best kind of business partners. When people ask me, "Is SCO in bed with Microsoft?" I give them my special executive Goatse.cx link. "Yes sir," I say proudly, "Yes sir, I am, and that man was no fudge-virgin, your honour. No sir, he was not. I tasted Stacker and Bungee on his person."
How long until SCO sues the RIAA for infringing on its patented process of public relations?
Jeff Bezos will be suing SCO for violating Amazon.com's patent on frivolous litigation. However, it looks like the patent might be rescended because their is too much prior art.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I can't wait for SCO to accuse *BSD of infringing SCO's IP (or whatever SCO is calling it these days)...
These are the toddler's property laws, but could equally apply to SCO.
If I like it - it's mine.
If it's in my hand - it's mine.
If I can take it from you - it's mine.
It I had it a little while ago - it's mine.
If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
If I'm doing or building something - all the pieces are mine.
If it looks just like mine - it is mine.
If I saw it first - it's mine.
If you are playing with something and you put it down -
it automatically becomes mine.
If it's broken - it's yours!
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
Jesus Christ Fuck! When is someone going to lob a mortar into the SCO offices and put an end to this fucking insanity?!!??!
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Reminds me of a scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont high, where Jeff Spicoli has a pizza pie delivered to class. When the professor fumes at why he's disrupting his class time, Spicolli retorts "If, like, I'm here, and like, you're here, does'nt that make that our time?"
;)
With SCO's asshat logic, McBide must be and alumin of that same school or a long lost relative of Spicolli.
P.S. The professor agrees with his obtuse student, and proceeds to hand a out a piece of the pie to all the students.
I wrote a paper on the subject of SGI donating XFS after interviewing someone there at the time they made their announcement (~May 20, 1999). I just looked up the paper and found the following quote:
"Currently, SGI is clearing the source code of any legal restrictions; it expects to be able to make the code openly available by the end of the summer. "
Ensuring they were free-and-clear to donate XFS under an open source license was *not* an afterthought for SGI. There was concern among all the major UNIX vendors of IP entanglement with Linux, and SGI was the first to openly pledge to donate a chunk of their core UNIX technology. (IBM donated some non-core stuff earlier, and core stuff like JFS later.)
SCO's claim that XFS or JFS are derivative works of SVR4/5 remains, to me, highly dubious.
Too bad for SGI, the last thing they need these days is lawsuits. SCO can't hope for a lot of money, but maybe they're hoping for weaker resistance?
--LP
Not to be excessively paranoid, but SGI makes a great strategic choice for SCO to sue.
They, unlike IBM, don't have buckets of cash in the bank to throw at a legal defense. If SCO can force SGI to do their bidding and potentially spit out some documentation that makes IBM's case look bad, they will be at a better position to take on IBM.
Gentoo Sucks
Well - as one person already stated - RICO sounds like a good way to respond. If you DO get one of these little lovelies - turn it over to your state attorney general and ask for SCO to be investigated for RICO violations! They are threatening people under color of authority they haven't proved they have in court. IANAL - but that sounds like extortion to me.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
I have always been somewhat suspicious that there is a significant SCO-Microsoft connection, but the possibility that SGI is next on their hit-list just increases my worry.
SGI is a company that MS has every reason in the world to want to crush. They have traditionally been a major Unix vendor, they produce high-end graphics workstations that compete directly with popular Wintel solutions, and at one point they spurned Microsoft by dropping an ill-fated line of x86 workstations. And, making matters even worse (for SGI; better for MS), SGI is already suffering financially. This would be a great time for MS to crush them under their heel.
It is entirely possible that MS is pulling some strings here. SGI's target market and SCO's are wholly different, and I really don't see any reason why they (as opposed to HP/Digital/Compaq or any other Unix vendor) would be a real target. It just seems odd. SGI builds graphics workstations, and SCO provides general-purpose workhorse Unix OSes to businesses. Unless MS were involved, why would SCO pick on SGI in particular?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
SCO OpenServer is quite broken, and they have yet to give it away.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
If SCO can invalidate the BSD settlement, then SCO can potentially claim ownership of much of the BSD-derived code in the kernel. Now that would present problems!
The only counter argument to this is that SCO has already "blessed" much of the BSD-derived code by stating that the 2.2 kernel series are clean.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
A change in Darl's approach might be needed soon.
Even with the latest announcement threatening to litigate, SCO's stock price is not up. Perhaps investors are finally wising up now that Darl and his fellow execs have already dumped most of their stock.
Hey, it's possible!
The company has shown a recent preference for more moderate courses of action, such as sending invoices to Linux users rather than taking them to court.
Wow. How bad must you behave until sending out invoices to end users, without backing up your claims by any substantial public explanations, is considered a "moderate course of action"???
so little time. How will they fit in time to dump their stock? Priorities and all that.
Cmon. Admit it. You thought about doing this but decided to be mature. I can't believe I got this name.
http://www.sco.com/products/authentication/
Used to have the awesome IT guy with the Red Hat, which was since photoshopped out, which has since been replaced with a photo of a woman. B-)
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
Seems SCO Group's new false invoice issuance for linux users and dsitributors make sit an ideal candidate for a RICO suit..
Is this OPneSource's next legal strategy?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
On Linuxtoday.com there's an article by a guy who says SCO won't sell him "the license" because apparently their salespeople don't know what they are supposed to be selling. Are they afraid to sell small licenses for exactly this reason?
Everyone, even SCO concedes that one of the prime reason for suing IBM is to get bought out. SGI probably doesn't have that sort of cash, especially now that SCO's stock has jumped.
"SGI will devolve elements of its proprietary software and operating system Irix, such as its XFS journalling file system,to Linux as soon as it clears the legal roadblocks surrounding the intellectual property.
That said, I'm at a loss to explain how SGI stuffed things like that ancient malloc.c into Linux. Perhaps things got sloppy or it was never noticed because someone had previously removed copyright notices? (Apparently this has been a problem at SCO as well, removing BSD license notices internally...)
You know, the ironic thing about this whole SCO uproar is that people have long bitched that the GPL was so viral... well look how viral the closed source SVR4/5 license apparently was!
--LP
P.S. A short history of XFS and Linux, Slashdot-style:
Here's a LinuxToday article and the original Slashdot thread covering that May 20, 1999 announcement.
Three months later, in August 1999, Slashdot covered that the XFS donation would be GPL (not just 'open source')
A year after that, the XFS beta arrived on Slashdot (September 2000), and
After two more years, XFS was merged into the Linux 2.5 kernel September 2002.
You are right, but MS has already crushed SGI.
MS has obtained a cross-license to all SGI's graphics patents, and OpenGL is no longer a threat. A mild concern perhaps. MS buried their joint "Farenheit" high-level graphics API effort with SGI, killing it. MS has announced dropping support of OpenGL on future OSes. Development of OpenGL 2.0 is really the baby of 3Dlabs (or whoever bought them out; I forget), not SGI, which shows you how behind the curve SGI is on pushing OpenGL these days. OpenGL's survival depends more on John Carmack pushing IHVs to keep using it than SGI, and other than OpenGL, SGI has not presented MS with a platform threat.
MS may want to crush Linux and/or IBM, but SGI? Not even in the same ballpark.
The reason SCO is picking on SGI is because of NUMA.
SGI has been dumping their NUMA scalability crown jewels into Linux (unlike all other conventional Unix vendors who are keeping that stuff in their high-end proprietary OS+hardware combos) and this is a significant impediment to selling UnixWare as "the premier scalable x86 Unix". Off the shelf UnixWare supports up to 8 processors today and SCO made a stab at doing NUMA stuff once upon a time, but SGI's NUMA-Linux has tons more R&D behind it and is going 64-way.
Three or four years ago, UnixWare was actually functionally superior to Linux (I know, I know, hard to believe but it's true.) But any margin of superiority then has greatly diminished or been overtaken. This is a real problem if SCO can't keep up with the R&D dumped into Linux by the open source community plus IBM plus SGI, etc. So SCO has gone legal. It's a rational move for them. Their vacillating arguments and tenuously-novel notion of derivative works don't bode well for their long term success however.
--LP
Hehe, bring 'em on. If you're going to pick a F/S to attack, XFS is a perfect choice for SCO. It was developed independently, and I'd love to see SCO find one shread of old unix F/S tech besides the word 'vnode' in there. You go SCO! [Disclaimer, I only worked with the project back when it was an SGI-only system, who knows what happened during the Linux port].
.1% or less of the FS code involved). The rest of XFS is a huge original undertaking. There's nothing quite like it (B-trees everywhere).
I think someone at SCO noticed that SGI had a SysV license (the later versions of SGI's IRIX had a good hunk of licensed SysV in there - same goes for the Solaris folks, I think everyone moved to SysV in the early 90's when it looked like 'the thing' to do).
It'll be a good stretch for SCO to claim that XFS is a derived work in any real form. The only overlapping code would be the vnode entry points and some things related to the buffer cache, and those you really have no choice but to implement the SysV interfaces and that's easy to prove (maybe
First I admit keeping this copy in my backpack becouse of the really ummm cool artwork on the front with the lady clad in diamonds.
(Drool)
Ok... anyway
Wired: Sept 2003 page 80 bottom half artical title "Will This Man Kill Linux"
Darl McBride says (while anwering a question)
"It's really interesting to see what happends when people see the code, when they see how blatant the copying is."
What is intresting is that so far only McBrides experts appear to be able to find this code. Well that and people who can't actually read source code seam able to find them.
I find it intresting that the experts can't be located. I find it intresting that much of the code in question can be found elsewhere. I find it intresting that the features in question are property of other companys.
To date:
The features in question make Linux an enterprise class system, Came from IBM, are primaraly for SGI hardware & Have something to do with 20 to 30 year old public domain code.
To me it appears blairingly obveous SCO is just suing anyone they have balls enough to sue.
Hay good thing they aren't suing the little guys becouse I really like Lunix.
I don't actually exist.
A spokesperson for SCO said, "By leveraging innovative death and destruction technologies, content providers streamline compelling digital rights management solutions." In other words, dead men violate no copyrights.
SCO doesn't want to go to court. They are pumping their stock. If announcing possible litigation against SGI will boost their stock price a bit for a day, they'll do it eventually.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Actually, I don't think I'm joking anymore. The only thing SCO seems to understand is threats to the wallet. So far they've been doing all the threatening, which is actually sort of reasonable since their wallets are so close to close to empty. However, the small bit of real cash in their wallets came from their few customers, and SCO is "proud" to list McDonalds as one of their major accounts.
How many Slashdotters eat at McDonalds? A boycott might be a serious threat!
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Even through they are not derived from Unix Sys V sources, there were certainly "inspired" from Unix and use "Unix concepts and methods.". Mind you, SCO has no patents on any these methods. But why limit themselves to traditional Unix when you have all the other 'nixs out there.
Has SCO even thought of the fact that the Unix interfaces themselves were codified into the POSIX standard? An open, approved standard that anyone can implement. Are they going to claim they own the POSIX standards body now?
Maybe McBride ought to pick a copy of "Just For Fun" by Linus Torvalds and read about how Linux came about. Man, if a filesystem implementation that ties into a Unix kernel a "derivative work", then the ext2, ext3, ReiserFS and every other filesystem builder out there is pretty much screwed.
Come on McBride, invoice me for a license! I even use the SMP code on my dual processor Sun boxes running SuSe. Got Red Hat and Debian too. As long as its on good quality bond, it will make excellent liner for my litter box.
#define malloc(X) getmain(X) - seriously, what are they smoking ?? xfs - is just an ( nice ) implementation of journaling file systems ( existed long before there was any Unix ) made by SGI, are they trying to own all the journaling file systems or are they claiming the name?? Journaling file systems existed long before Unix both in theory and in implementation. Malloc is just a name for a memory allocation procedure/macro - can/has been implemented n ways, even I did those before you can say Unix existed.
When someone finally snaps and takes that sniper shot at McBride or turns the SCO headquarters into a fireball, will they be considered a murderer, an assassin, or a hero?
Or will the world just shrug and be glad someone finally hired an exterminator?
After all, between SCO and the wrist-slaps Microsoft has been given, it's clear the US legal system is nothing but a toothless sham for sale to the highest bidder. Given SCO's real value, the bid isn't even that high.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
There's truth to what you say. SGIs are mostly used for graphics, and most of the work is done on the card itself, which operates in what OpenGL and DirectX folks call "retained mode." And SGI have done an exceptional job of keeping the graphics hardware current!
:)
Ehh, depends on which market segment you're talking about. For the typical modeler or CAD person, a PC will have just as much power for a lower cost. SGI does still sell a lot of very high end gfx machines (dozens of graphical pipelines [pipe in sgi world means "gfx card", not a texel path within a gpu]) and machines with gobs of i/o for multiple streams of uncompressed HD. But SGI sells far more non-graphical supercomputers (Origin and Altix) than they do gfx systems.
SGI's Onyx2/Onyx3 InfiniteReality4 graphics have 11 GB of gfx ram to work with, great for vis-sim applications and massive texture roaming. Raw polygon performance isn't that impressive, but the rest of the abilities more than make up for it. The new Onyx4 UltimateVision is based on ATI FireGL. Both IR and UV can handle multiple gfx pipes in the same machine to drive multiple synced displays from the same machine without performance loss. Great for setups needing a dozen projectors and screens requiring software/hardware distortion correction (curved screens, hemisphere screens, etc) and edge blending. In the case of UV, mutliple GPUs can work together in several different ways for greater performance. But for a single-monitor, single GPU user, a PC will give you just as much power for a fraction of the cost.
But as a general purpose UNIX, it's pretty much dirty pants.
For a desktop OS, yeah, the GUI is pretty oldschool but does still have some neat goodies (www.nekochan.net). IRIX itself as a flavor of UNIX is pretty decent. Recent versions of IRIX 6.5.x have the security holes fixed and much newer versions of various components since the iniital release of 6.5.0. There are lots of awesome builtin features for performance and activity monitoring, the OS is made for app turning. Guaranteed rate I/O, realtime features, native XFS, native OpenGL... the OS is pretty smooth.
The longer this has gone on, the more SCO seems to reach out to Unix vendors, the gladder I am that Bill Joy created the core of the Unix I use, BSD.
I do wonder, muse really, sometimes. Is SCO working for Apple? Linux, though IBM, and SGI's Unix OS are being threatened and it seems that the one real winner, at least a bit in the Unix arena, is Apple whose Unix OS is based on BSD and is according to Bill Joy immune from SCO's actions. Personally, I doubt SCO has a case. But this is exactly the sort of stuff that companies and their proxies do to throw the competition off balance and create market growth opportunity.
Like most OS X users, I can afford to just sit back and watch the fun as those companies wanting "free" Linux distributions now have to content with the risk (and that isn't a joke) of an SCO victory that would cost the free Linux community money. Meanwhile, Apple advances its OS X strategy by readying Panther with not a whisper of a threat from SCO.
Is Jobs behind this?
Yes, I'm joking. But the stakes are very high. At worst, Linux is no longer free which ruins its business model. With companies looking for alternatives to MS, and with Linux no longer free, and with other Unix OS's falling to SCO, wouldn't Apple be the real winner?
Let us go to the stars, dream new dreams, and renew the embers of hope that have long since grown cold.
Enough facts are now known about various aspects of this SCO fiasco that -- with the appearance of this article -- it is impossible not to conclude that several arms of the IT trade press, ZDNet and C|Net among them, are deliberately misleading their IT readership about these events. They are also contributing to the advancement of possible criminal activity... hopefully in ignorance.
In no way does this failing $70 million company deserve the continuing coverage and respect that it is getting from the trade press. When this all started it was perhaps possible to believe that SCO actually had a case. But they have long since transformed into the biggest press relations hoax since the Raelian "clone" episode.
We have been presented with months of empty threats, bogus proof, frivolous legal theories, and behavior indistinguishable from fraud, extortion, and racketeering. Yet the press treats this as something IT professionals need to know about and should pay attention to.
Nonsense. It is a charade. It is either a stock-manipulation scheme, as Computerworld uncovered, or it is the behavior of crazy people who do not care who they hurt with their ever-wilder accusations and threats.
But with this article, we have reached a new low. Now we are presented with the "SCO threat" article bereft of any actual behavior by SCO. The principles have been quiet lately, so to take up the slack, the trade press is actually making up threats that SCO never made, and waving them around as the latest scare stories.
Whjat does an article like this do to SGI's business? What justification can there be for ZDNet and C|Net and Business Week to put this kind of cloud over SGI without even a single direct quote from SCO backing up this claim?
This is way over the line. The dishonsty and desire to mislead apparent in what the trade press is doing here will not be forgotten. If they wish to toss their credibility on SCO's altar for no apparent gain, no one can stop them. But they will suffer for it in the long run. I will never again believe half of what I read in these rags. This whole episode has been very eye-opening for me.
Currently the whole SCO business is working as a smokescreen that captures a lot of oss developers/peoples time and energy, this is probably taking our focus from the list of things that needs to be fixed for linux and the bsd's to stay ahead or aleast not long after the other competitors. Just as we speak right now microsoft is probably gnawing away (or atleast trying) market share from linux and the unices while SCO is keeping all our eyes elsewhere.
/.) you can always write documentation or configure things so they look nicer and then resubmit the new configs to the developers so that the changes get spread.
So stop giving a rats ass about what darl mcbride is up to, it's just been a lot of barking from that puppy and the energy complaining about him and the company he work's for could be better used for code/documentation or userfriendlier configurations, because even if you don't know how to program your way out of a wet-paperbag (not that it's very common here on
So ask yourself, what have you done for gnu or opensource software lately, and what COULD you do?
If we all start helping we could keep our advantage against windows and some closed source unices but the current state of opensource software wasn't created by flaming and complaining on how many faults our "competitors" have, but by acutally producing something better.