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SCO's Open Letter to Open Source Community
joefish_only_1 writes "SCO CEO has posted an open letter to the open source community. There's some things Mr McBride mentions that I hadn't heard of yet, like an admission by Bruce Perens that "UNIX System V code is, in fact, in Linux, and it shouldn't be there."" A slashdot reader posted a comment recently
that breaks it down quite well.
You can have $699 for my SCO Intellectual Property for Linux License when you pry it from my cold, empty wallet.
Sincerely,
Anonymous Coward
The article doesn't offer as much insight into SCO's thinking with this apparently suicidal (PR wise anyway) move, but one thing does stand out, the use of the words 'improper contribution'. Not 'improper use' or This for me shows just how empty SCO's talk is. How exactly does someone improperly contribute something? If you contribute something, you do so. If something is stolen or copied from you, it's stolen. SCO didn't even have the guts to accuse anyone of stealing, they just came up with this nonsensical phrase. Kind of telling.
So much to comment on... so little time. Well, the first thing that I see that stands out is this quote by McBride:
The second development was an admission by Open Source leader Bruce Perens that UNIX System V code (owned by SCO) is, in fact, in Linux, and it shouldn't be there. Mr Perens stated that there is "an error in the Linux developer's process" which allowed Unix System V code that "didn't belong in Linux" to end up in the Linux kernel (source: ComputerWire, August 25, 2003).
Here is the original quote from the referenced ComputerWire article:
The other SCO code snippet Perens walks through had to do with memory allocation functions in Unix System V and Linux. He says there was, in fact, "an error in the Linux developer's process," specifically a programmer at SGI, and he says while the Linux community had the legal right to this code, it didn't belong in Linux and was therefore removed.
Talk about out of context! The assertion that the code is owned by SCO is made only by Mr. McBride, who neglected to mention that it has already been found and removed.
I have written an open letter to the open source community. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to reveal its contents since that would mean compromising our trade secrets. However, I welcome you to license a copy of my open letter by signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement and payment of $699.
Yours affectionately,
Darl McBride
CEO, SCO Inc.
Mr. McBride is a troll. don't feed.
There's all this unsubstantiated talk. If SCO wants the Open Source community to take them seriously, they should publicly release the code which they claim to be in Linux, and furthermore, provide proof that that code did not exist legally before SCO made it "theirs."
A blog like any other.
The subpoena sets September 10th as the date for a deposition, at Snell & Wilmer's law offices in Salt Lake City, and instructs that these are the documents Canopy Group's representative, whoever they choose to get deposed on behalf of Canopy, must produce on that date:
1. All documents concerning this lawsuit, plaintiff's claims or IBM's defenses or counterclaims.
2. All documents concerning any communications regarding this lawsuit, plaintiff's claims or IBM's defenses or counterclaims.
3. All documents concerning plaintiff's rights relating to UNIX or Linux.
4. All documents concerning any strategy, plan, effort, or action (actual or contemplated) to use or enforce (or to threaten to use or enforce) rights to UNIX or Linux.
5. All documents concerning any open-source license, including the GNU General Public License.
6. All documents concerning any lawsuit other than this lawsuit (actual or contemplated) involving plaintiff and relating to UNIX or Linux.
7. All documents concerning any agreement, understanding or communication with Microsoft, Sun, Computer Associates, Tarantella, AT&T, USL, HP or Novell, relating to UNIX or Linux.
8. All documents concerning plaintiff's efforts to license UNIX or Linux.
9. All documents concerning plaintiff's alleged evidence of UNIX in Linux.
10. All documents concerning plaintiff's alleged evidence of misconduct or breaches of duty by IBM.
11. All documents concerning plaintiff's UNIX or Linux business.
12. Documents sufficient to show the organizational structure or personnel of The Canopy Group.
13. All documents relating to the ownership of plaintiff.
14. All documents relating to purchases or sales of plaintiff's stock since January 1, 2003.
15. All documents in the possession, custody, or control of Ralph Yarrow, Jan Newman, Darcy Mott, Raymond J. Noorda, Lewena Noorda, Joyce Wiley, Mark Cusick, or Dan L. Baker relating to UNIX, Linux, or this lawsuit.
16. All documents provided to plaintiff by The Canopy Group or provided to The Canopy Group by plaintiff relating to UNIX, Linux, or this lawsuit.
17. All documents concerning the decision to commence or pursue this lawsuit or other lawsuits relating to plaintiff's alleged rights relating to UNIX or Linux.
18. All documents concerning the decision to suspend distribution of plaintiff's Linux products or code.
19. All documents concerning any analysis of any IBM conduct related to Unix or Linux.
20. All documents concerning any UNIX source code, derivative works, modification. or methods contributed to Linux or to the open source community by AT&T, USL, Novell, Tarantella, or plaintiff.
21. All documents concerning the relationship between plaintiff and The Canopy Group.
22. All documents concerning any statements, declaration, affidavit, analysis, assessment, or opinion rrelating to plaintiff's rights to UNIX or Linux.
23. All documents concerning any statement, affidavit, declaration, analysis, assessment, or opinion relating to this litigation.
24. All documents concerning the nature, calculation, and basis of any damages or injuries plaintiff claims in this matter.
I posted this in the previous SCO thread, but am reposting it here where it is more appropriate. Most of the typo's have been cleaned up too. You can also see the full text in my journal.
An Open Response to Darl McBride's Open Letter to the Open Source Community
(First Draft)
Dear Mr. McBride,
First, let me introduce myself. My name is John Gabriel. I have been working in the technical field for 15 years, as a Network Administrator, Applications Manager, Network Manager, Sr. Networking Engineer, and now, Freelance Consultant. And, yes, I'm an MCSE.
My first experiences with Unix occurred in the late 1970's, during school field trips to local colleges. I also did Unix technical support for students while taking a class in Pascal in the late 1980's. My first experience with Linux dates to 1994, when I downloaded whatever Linux kernel was available at that time.
While I did install it successfully, on a Compaq Deskpro 386/25, I quickly abandoned it as the system didn't have enough memory to support X Windows. Several years later, in 1998, I became a Caldera customer, with a purchase of Caldera OpenLinux Base ver. 1.22, with Linux kernel 2.0.33. I ran into similar problems again.
About a year ago, I became interested again Linux, and now run Linux on my home workstation in a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP.
About 4-5 months ago, I began following the SCO v. IBM story. I was at first inclined to be open-minded towards SCO's claims. It wouldn't be the first time a small company has had its copyrights violated by a larger vendor, though the violator is usually, in my experience, Microsoft, as exemplified by Caldera's history with DR-DOS.
However, the more I researched the story and SCO's claims, the more convinced I became that SCO's claims were, well, baseless. Being the type that usually likes to "root for the underdog", I was surprised by my conclusions.
Anyway, that's enough introduction. What follows is an Open Response to your Open Letter to the Open Source Community. I grant everyone, including you, permission to re-publish it, or quote from it, without restriction, except that my comments be properly attributed to myself. Consider it under a "BSD-style" license if you like.
1) The most controversial issue in the information technology industry today is the ongoing battle over software copyrights and intellectual property. This battle is being fought largely between vendors who create and sell proprietary software, and the Open Source community. My company, the SCO Group, became a focus of this controversy when we filed a lawsuit against IBM alleging that SCO's proprietary Unix code has been illegally copied into the free Linux operating system. In doing this we angered some in the Open Source community by pointing out obvious intellectual property problems that exist in the current Linux software development model.
Mr. McBride,
Response to Paragraph 1 of your "Open Letter":
This is very difficult to respond to, because your analysis of the issues and of the reasons for the Open Source community's anger is, in the words of the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli, "so bad it's not even wrong."
For instance, your own lawsuit against IBM does not allege that "SCO's proprietary Unix code has been illegally copied into Linux" -- it alleges that code *owned* by IBM but under contractual "control" rights to SCO has been copied into Linux. Surely, you don't dispute that IBM owns the relevant copyrights and patents to NUMA, JFS, and RCU?
Or do you dispute Section 2 of Exhibit C on your web site, the ATT-IBM sideletter agreement, which states in part, "we (ATT) agree that modifications and derivative works prepared by or for you (IBM) are owned by you"?
The truth is there are many reasons the Open source community is angered with you and the actions of The SCO Group and The Canopy Group, none of which have to do with "intellectual
At the risk of falling into the correlation/causation trap, it is far more likely that open source devs share more community characteristics than black people.
You cannot generalise from a person, or even several people, to an entire community.
Agreed. But are you arguing that ESR shouldn't inform the proper authorities about the crime he knows has been committed?
That would, IMO, be the right thing to do - stop the activities of someone whose actions harm the community and its reputation, and demonstrate (if demonstration is needed) that we have respect for the law. On this point, Mr McBride is right.
Gerv
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
I remember after everyone analysed the SCOForum code prominent people saying things like that (eg. Open Source coders violated SCO's license because they didn't include the BSD attribution statement) and I knew right away they made a huge mistake. I'm sorry to see it's been confirmed.
Anyone who purports to speak for this community should realise the stakes involved and wise up.
In the efforts of Messrs Perens and Raymond to be balanced and reasonable they have given the enemy (Daryl McBeezlebub) significant ammunition. Quoting people out of context is part of lawsuit public relations 101. SCO will hammer away and keep repeating this like an autistic child and unfortunately some weak minded people will be swayed by this argument. If you ever watch television talk shows this is the most common technique for winning arguments.
I think Linux is still winning the public relations war but really, please don't accept collective guilt unless you personally fucked up. Because for all we know SGI has legitimate rights to that code.
- You may re-publish this material. You may excerpt it, reformat it and translate it as necessary for your presentation. You may not edit it to deliberately misrepresent my opinion.
Isn't Darl taking Bruce's words out of context and misrepresenting them? Copyright violation, anyone?....Bruce said:
"The other SCO code snippet Perens walks through had to do with memory allocation functions in Unix System V and Linux. He says there was, in fact, "an error in the Linux developer's process," specifically a programmer at SGI, and he says while the Linux community had the legal right to this code, it didn't belong in Linux and was therefore removed."
Was twisted by SCO into:
"an admission by Open Source leader Bruce Perens that UNIX System V code (owned by SCO) is, in fact, in Linux, and it shouldn't be there. Mr Perens stated that there is "an error in the Linux developer's process" which allowed Unix System V code that "didn't belong in Linux" to end up in the Linux kernel"
So by saying it was REMOVED (we will say it slow so you can follow along Darl), Bruce Perens admitted that it ended up in the Linux kernel? Can SCO tell the truth at all, or do they all just live on Bizarro world?
Insert pithy comment here.
May I suggest that we just ignore this new troll from McBride?
It add nothing substantially new to the discussion.
The only thing McBride hopes to accomplish with this letter is to discredit the community once again. It makes no sense to dissect the letter and refute every false claim, because this will either be ignored or countered with more lies. Can we just stay calm and think of ways to get through to the few uninformed decision makers who believe the libel.
What you say might be true, but it's far from clear. The code was also present in the 32V version of Unix, and if SGI copied from that, the lack of AT&T copyright notice would be explained by the fact that it was never there in the first place!
Since the code was clearly modified after being extracted from whatever version of Unix (it contains Linux-specific locking calls), it will probably be impossible to tell whether it was improperly copied from System V or properly copied from 32V.
By prefacing his "no warranty" line with a patronizing "Open Source must become more mature" statement he gets two for one. We, of course, recognize this to be yet another of the blatiantly false bits of tripe that McBride has come to be known for. Despite its misleading "Open letter to the Open Source Community" title we are not the target audience for this; the target audience is the managers who make the financial decisions, but don't actually know what is going on. His careful implication that propriatary software is warranted may be effective with them...
Finally, we have his implication, again never explicitly stated, that Open Source is nothing more than a bunch of neo-hippies. Since most managerial types are politically conservative, and old enough to remember and dislike hippies, this implication is intended to strike at the average manager's prejudices. If he can get "Open Source == Damn Hippies" into many people's heads he believes, possibly rightly, that this will create a more hostile environment towards Open Source (much like the current "Open Souce == Communist" line of BS).
On a related note, I'll also point out a bit of his tripe that is aimed at us. His repeated implications that the Open Source concept were fine as long as we were working with toy systems, but now that we want to be grown ups we must adapt to the prevailing (propriatary) business model. This is intended specifically to cause doubt and fear in the Open Source community. Those who haven't given the isssue much thought may agree with this. It is nonesense. The Open Source model is a competitor to the Propriatary model. It is not inferior, and it may be superior. When Henry Ford invented the assembly line he did not think to himself "Well, I guess the Assembly Line was OK as a toy system, but now that I want to be a big boy I'd better switch over to the way everyone else does it." So too, must we refuse to be tricked into believing that the Open Source development model is for children. It is not. It is new, it is different, and it must compete in order to prove its superiority.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
The full text of the subpoena contains several provisions whereby Canopy may apply to withold documents. These provisions include the protection of privelege, litigation strategy, and trade secrets. I expect Canopy's lawyers to avail themselves of these provisions.
I've worked at an ISP for seven years, and in that time have seen my fair share of abusive and illegal online activity. In cases where legal action is sought, the proper authorities often don't want you to say anything to anyone, including the victim(s). I've received subpoenas for evidence from various state and federal entities over the years, and most contained some provision for maintaining confidentiality of both the evidence and the subpoena itself. They do not want to tip off the alleged perpetrator and give them an opportunity to try to elude investigators or destroy evidence.
----
a paragraph-by-paragraph interpretation
of what he really meant to say
----
blah blah blah opening fluff
what we're doing is beneficial for us and for our secret
backer in Redmond because we want to spread as much fear about Linux
as possible before 90% of the people realize it is a superior product
to Windows for a cheaper price
whine whine whine, our website got DoS'd
keep attacking us and your company will fire you when they
find out that you're a Linux advocate because they will
just associate you with other open source "outlaws"
now I'm going to talk about how we paid people to put
System V code into Linux. normally these people would
be fired and sued, but we would rather go after Linux.
now I want to talk about why the Linux model can never
succeed because nobody can possibly ever be sure that
people with access to System V source won't sneakily
inject more into Linux. The Catch-22 here is that the
people auditing Linux code most likely don't have access
to AIX, IRIX, Solaris, etc source code. "Hey Bill, isn't
this great!! we're gonna make a fortune on this lawsuit!"
Now I'm going to spend 10 paragraphs explaining copyright
laws, but I will conveniently omit the reasons why we are
persuing the *product* of a crime rather than the people
that perpetrated the crime itself. Remember how I mentioned
the SGI programmer and how we know plenty more like him?
Well we're letting him off the hook because his criminal
acts have been the best thing that ever happened to SCO
and SCO's Redmond backer.
Finally I would like to end by justifying SCO's behavior
on the whole. Why should we go around suing the living daylights
out of everyone and spreading FUD about a platform
that was the result of countless volunteer hours and
philantropic contributions? Because we can! Isn't this great?
We live in a world where this behavior is not only allowed,
but also encouraged!! Now just wait until Bill^H^H^H we
pay off a few judges and lawmakers and have Linux officially
owned by SCO so at long last Windows^H^H^H we can prevail!
Sincerely,
Jerkoff McBride
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
'ancient unix' isn't valid for commercial purposes even though it was licensed under a BSD license.
Oops, SCO OpenUnix or whatever they call it this week just lost the X Window system, developed by MIT and released under a BSD-like license. Darn, the TCP/IP support written at Berkely and released under a BSD license isn't valid for commercial purposes either.
There seems to be more of this open source stuff around than SCO are aware of...
No, but when someone like ESR decides to make it sound as though the Open Source community both claims this person as a member and then takes no steps to bring this person to justice for an obvious criminal act, that reflects negatively on the Open Source community as a whole. But then I absolutely rejected ESR as a "leader" some time ago, myself.
Personally I'm waiting for Darl to write an open letter to those of us in the Free Software movement-- one where he recognizes the philosophical underpinnings behind the movement as valid desires and stays away from the distracting nonsense about business models.
And anyway... has SCO specifically accused any software of being infringing other than the Linux kernel itself? If only Linux is (allegedly) infringing that would make all this talk about development models (in addition to all the business model garbage) a lot of hot air (i.e. BS). Have they mentioned that any of the BSDs may be infringing? How about the HURD? How about the larger GNU system? Perl? Ruby? Apache? MySQL or PostgreSQL? KDE? Well, SCO? When are you going to stop with the unsupported vague assertions and give us actionable information?
I do not have a signature
Darl sez: The second development was an admission by Open Source leader Bruce Perens that UNIX System V code (owned by SCO) is, in fact, in Linux, and it shouldn't be there. Mr Perens stated that there is "an error in the Linux developer's process" which allowed Unix System V code that "didn't belong in Linux" to end up in the Linux kernel (source: ComputerWire, August 25, 2003). Mr Perens continued with a string of arguments to justify the "error in the Linux developer's process."
But Bruce actually said: In this case, there was an error in the Linux developer's process (at SGI), and we lucked out that it wasn't worse. It turns out that we have a legal right to use the code in question, but it doesn't belong in Linux and has been removed.
And at the top of Bruce's slide show analysis: You may re-publish this material. You may excerpt it, reformat it and translate it as necessary for your presentation. You may not edit it to deliberately misrepresent my opinion.
Get 'em Bruce!
the no