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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."
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 By only executing on outdated hardware, we've been able to keep system procurement prices down while effortlessly sustaining the user's reading and coffee time. In an attempt to muscle in on our territory however, SGI have chosen to stay the course with MIPS CPUs and confusingly outdated IRIX.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!
We should complain to SCO, they haven't been giving us our daily laugh as consistently lately...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I suppose you don't call your self "Overly Critical Guy" for nothin'...
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".
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 :)
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???
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.
That we've lost the leader of our legal team is conjecture and fallacy -- David Boies has been sent back to battle the first offender. The very first thief of SCO's mighty library of intellectual property. The next suit, and first in the new time line, will be filed against none other than Charles Babbage, your honour. Charles Babbage and his fabulous counting machines will fall like so many loose gears in the cuckoo clock that is the world of SCO IP.
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.
Actually ZDNet have it all wrong. Our actual next target is God himself. As you know, God is responsible for all life on earth, including "trees". The way trees recursively divide their branches is a blatant copy of the hierarchical file system present in Unix. We plan to file suit in the next week or so.
Chris Sontag - Senior Vice President and General Manager, SCOsource
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!
Why don't you head back on down to the community college and see what our "MIT" boys think of that. Have we got another pattern here, Chris? Is this another pattern, Chris?
I think of you when I'm naked, Christopher.
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?
"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.
They've already dumped some of their common stock. However, these sales were "Planned" as in a 10b5-1 program that allows Insiders and Directors (holders of 10%+ of total outstanding common stock) to sell without violating SEC regs. If you look at the Form 4's filed with the SEC and visible here you'll see that the majority of the sales were for blocks of 5,000 shares.
SCO's CFO stated in a conference call that the total shares that the executives sold was 117,000. Which is less than 1.5% of the stock owned by insiders and that the majority of that was sold to cover taxes on "Restricted Stock Grants" that the company made to them.
There is a huge difference between common and restricted stock. The main one being that normally the holder of restricted stock cannot sell it for a set period of time, normally anywhere from 1 to 10 years thus locking in the share-holder and effectively basing their rewards upon the success or failure of the company.
The reason for the need to pay taxes on the restricted shares is that the IRS views them as "Income" when granted and thus taxes them accordingly.
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
I've been wondering about this myself. SGI does seem to be a likely target for SCO, given SCO's rhetoric. But SGI doesn't have much, if any, money. So it seems unlikely from that point of view.
Another thing that bothered me in the ZD Net article is that they don't mention the other file systems. Let's face it, JFS and XFS are not the most popular journaling file systems for Linux; they're mostly used by companies that have legacy file systems they need to support. ReiserFS, Ext3, and Ext2, are the most popular file systems. If Linux lost the ability to support XFS and JFS, all it would do is make migration to Linux more difficult for some companies. It probably wouldn't much affect adoption rates.
Anyway, I suspect that SGI should start talking to Red Hat about accessing some of that Open Source Now! fund. Just in case.
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.
XFS is not a legacy file system -- it's a pretty new high performance file system, replacing SGI's EFS, which is what you might have thought of?
XFS is becoming increasingly popular for Linux users, not the least because it's usually the fastest file system you can run. The price you pay for this is that it commits to disk less often than other file systems, and for small temporary files, it may not even touch the disk between file creation and deletion. For large file streaming, it supports "real time" subpartitions, where you can run the file system in GRIO (guaranteed rate IO) mode. It also supports posix access control lists (ACL), which gives much more fine grained access control than standard unix protection bits. The advantages of XFS are good enough that it's rapidly becoming one of the most popular file systems -- a direct competitor to ReiserFS.
Ext2, now that's legacy, and ext3 is just ext2 with journalling on top -- it saves you the fsck at boot, but you pay a slight performance penalty for it.
Regards,
--
*Art