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VikingBrad writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on Dr Warwick Toomey of The Unix Heritage Society claiming that SCO may not know the origin of code in System V, including claims that there is a lot of BSD software in Sys V."
Alex writes "I wondered where the 100k+ lines of copied code
in the linux kernel would come from in comparison
to the SCO Unixware stuff. Then a thought popped
up in my head: what if they just compared linewise?
All those empty lines in the code would have the
same content. But how many empty lines are in the
Linux Kernel Code? This small shell script counts them for you:
emptylines=0; function parse_dir () { for file in $1/*; do if [ -d "$file" ]; then parse_dir $file; else while read line; do if [ "$line" = "" ]; then emptylines=$[$emptylines+1]; echo $emptylines; fi; done
Kernel 2.4.22, yet cleaned of the code which SCO
claimed was stolen, has still 733140 empty lines, probably copied and pasted by the bad, bad kernel developers from the good, good SCO guys..."
You can copy them, but not steal them. Unless you delete the lines that were there, but I doubt that happened. How illogical.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
The average investor only sees one side of this story. We need more coverage of our side.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
They wouldn't even need to include things like empty lines to get a large number of matches, in a line-by-line comparison...
How many of the following do you suppose exist in any large code base?
int i;
int j;
for(i=0;i<size;i++)
if(flag)
if(!flag)
while(!done)
while(count)
memset(data, 0, sizeof(data));
I could go on, but don't really need to. At least in most code I've seen, almost every single function would contain at least one of just what I presented above (taking into consideration a few other common variable names for similar purposes, of course).
Not an impressive way to measure plaguerism.
did you hear it...? i swear i heard the cheers of the opensource community echoing around the world...
You see an awfully lot of them alone on a line, too...
I'm already a fan of this guy; when does slashcode come up with something that is more fitting so I can 'upgrade' my profile on him?
Imho this guy deserves a medal. Being attacked by a lying snake like that, and still keeping up good manners. Bravo.
This is more than about the Linux kernel's good reputation, though; this entire SCO debacle goes to the heart of the Linux development model. SCO is essentially saying "you guys are a bunch of irresponsible, un-accountable code thieves". Simply abandoning the Linux kernel not only affirms SCO's bullshit, but it hamstrings the entire process by which it was developed and makes the whole open source community look bad.
It's not about the kernel, it's about the process.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Would the conduct SCO has been engaging in to this point be enough to qualify for a charge of barratry? They've moved to provide no legal basis, are refusing all good will efforts to negotiate, and have engaged in a form of corporate slander of the worst sort. I would think that with the intensely corporation-friendly legal system we have here in the US, that there must be some method by which IBM and other vendors such as SGI and Linux distributors could make some pretty substantial claims of interference or possibly even extortion. Hell, if I recieved a bill from SCO, I'd most likely contact the feds to look into charging SCO with extortion - they're sending a bill for something they can't prove they own, and threatening consequences if I don't pay.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
I agree on the facts bit, but that hasn't stopped SCO from doing press releases. I'd honestly like to see ESR follow up on the "slanderous" bits from the response statement and take SCO to court though -- except that he'd have to foot the bill himself while McBride can use the corporate lawyers of SCO. Not a good case.
As for doing a press release -- it may not cost much, but unless you're a publicly listed company or some other well known entity (research/consulting group, non-profit group, etc. -- with the emphasis on "well known") it won't do you any good. There's a ton of cranks out there putting out press releases daily on everything from UFOs to perpetual motion machines.
The reality is that Redhat, SuSE, IBM, Novell, or some other large company would have to put out the press release to do any good. Redhat and IBM are currently engaged in legal actions and aren't likely to do so, since it could be used as evidence at that point. SuSE could, but being a foreign company it would largely be ignored by the US press and financial media (that whole "well known" bit). Novell seems to have backed out of the case after dropping a bombshell (and a dud -- which was rather embarassing for them I'm sure).
I'm sure there's other outlets available -- research groups and major trade or mainstream papers seem the most obvious -- but they're still fairly inaccessible.
which begs the question. when it's all over if they lose do they have to give the money back???
Probably they won't have to repay any licence fees, at least not unless they're separately sued by the fee payers which is unlikely to happen. Those paying the fees know, or should know, that the case is unproven. SCO have been very careful to advise potential licencees to consult their own attorneys etc.
However, the end result of the IBM countersuit and the Red Hat suit is likely to extinguish any cash or other assets SCO has, whether form Linux licences or anywhere else, if SCO does lose. The arguable damage to those businesses is going to be massive and SCO just won't have that sort of money. And quite right too, if they aren't legally in the right then they deserve to lose everything over this.
Of course, dividends already paid out to investors and money paid to, for example, other Canopy companies for legitimate services is another matter entirely. I'm sure we'd all agree that that shouldn't be affected and that they should be allowed the proceeds of their legitimate investments.
Ralphie Yarro
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
The bulk number of identical lines is, as others have pointed out, meaningless.
What would be interesting would be a count of the number of consecutive identical lines.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that number would be vanishingly small. Where non-zero, it's probably because both codebases contain code licensed under the UC Regents.
.@.
ESR and Perens can be considered, for the purposes of this particular statement, well-known, since they're referred to by name in SCO's press release.
I'd personally like to see ESR and Perens sue McBride personally, since the slanderous letter seems to be from him, rather than officially from SCO. Furthermore, McBride, unlike SCO, will probably not be bankrupt before a slander lawsuit could complete.
Don't think for one second the ass monkeys at SCO wouldn't claim something similar against "the next big thing". What's needed here is a crushing defeat of SCO (I mean losing in court, fines, delisting, bankruptcy, and SEC criminal charges) to discourage any copy-cat claims in the future.
The problem is that the court system is notoriously slow and SCO is milking that lag to the best of it's ability. SCO's day in court will come in April 2005 and they're going to get slaughtered but until then the best we can do is to keep refuting any evidence they leak or make public and keep our cool. There's an old saying that "it's the quiet ones you have to watch out for" and I fully expect IBM to prove that true in 2005.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
One of the biggest problems with this response to the SCO FUD campaign is that while SCO enjoys excellent access to the mainstream press, both IT press and popular press, the Open Source community responses do not. So, no one out there really hears the Open Source side. This is one good reason that McBride et al keep releasing all this patently absurd hogwash; they know the press will bite, and ignore the other side.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Generally accurate. However, taking something does at least strongly imply that the previous person no longer has it. If I make an exact replica of your car, I don't think you would claim I'd taken your car. If that included replicating your copyrighted paintwork I don't think you could reasonably claim that I'd 'taken' your copyright. You'd still have copyright.
Certainly as a matter of law, copying something is not the same as theft. Copyright infringement is covered by different laws to theft and carries different penalties.
Of course, if someone wants to use the word for emotional impact then when challenged they can always say they were speaking figuratively. Like saying prices are "extortionate" or "daylight robbery" or that someone is "getting away with murder" doesn't mean those offences are literally involved. It only get amusing when someone is challenged and tries to insist that copying something really is theft.
We should all take a look at how this letter was written, and why, and try to apply it to our own comments in this forum. Thanks for the great example, guys!
TrollTech needs to find someone who'll buy them out of Canopy completely.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
What is with the presumptive use of 'us' in your posts? Speak for yourself, and do not hide in (or speak for) a nonexistant crowd.
=========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
File a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. Mention how you feel that they are attempting to extort money from you. The FTC DOES take these matters seriously. If they receive many complaints about a particular company, they will be very inclined to launch an investigation. The mere mention of an FTC investigation is not good news for a company, nor its stock.
File a complaint online
Take a more active role in this. Don't just vent your frustrations on /. where no one outside our community will hear.
-- Slash
McBride has given speeches and issued written statements. IANAL, but that sounds like both slander and libel to me.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I don't the the poster was making any connection to the LDS church, that just happened to be in the quote that he put in. I have to agree with you though, religion has nothing to do with this whole thing and I find it unfortuate that the Mormon church (or any church for that matter) could get associated with this kind of nonscence. Let's keep religion out of it. Yes, the company is in Utah, a lot of them are probably Mormon, but if they were in Mexico, they would probably all be catholic. So what? It doen't have anything to do with the phyco Mc'bribe' or the actions of SCO.
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
Annual B.S. Award... like the vaporware award.
If anyone wants to start it up, I nominate Bush for first place, Blair for second place and MS for third (credit goes for teaching Bush how to control the media and claim everyone supports him, by telling everyone that.....)
Of course I nominate SCO for fourth place. For certainly trhey make the top 5 list.
Basically, "The Man" has been given unlimited mod powers to further the corporate conservative agenda.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
No. Not accurate. From the grandparent:
So, I think steal applies [to alleged copied code in Linux], at least according to dictionary.com, because to steal is to take property, and property can be somethign intangible like a copyright.
Absolute hogwash. If you were to abscond with the copyright itself, then perhaps you would have stolen something, because only one entity can claim to have the copyright on a work. However, making a copy does not constitute theft. Please, please research common law on property. Property theft is a crime because it deprives the rightful owner of his possessions. "Offenses" such as copyright infringement are not crimes.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
No doubt it would cost quite a bit.
However, this fiasco is good for the OSS community because it is going through an exercise of contending with some thorny IP issues and ultimately the sturdiness of the GPL.
If the community uses this opportunity to learn more about auditing code and its genealogy it will be better prepared to deal with the next challenger, who will most likely be a bit more savvy than SCO.
One of his presumptions is that, 'In advancing his own welfare, a businessman will also advance the welfare of his entire community'. To reverse that logic, I'd say that to powerfully advance his own welare as a 'good' capitalist, a businessman should necessarily benefit his entire community.
In eiter case, Smith's treatise presumes that people play in a reasonably fair manner within the constraints of capitalism. He did not take into account the effects of what I would refer to as meta-game shenanigans like using legal technicalities to usurp the works of others (and thus provide a disincentive to advancing the welfare of the whole.).
McBride and his allies at SCO are an example of these metagame players -- attempting to use rules far outside the domain of the market to shift ownership of the resources being created without really creating any of his own. Although he hids behind a mask of 'last defender of the free enterprise system', he is in fact one of those most earnestly undermining that system from within.
"Patriotism is tha last refuse of the scoundrel". . - (reference anyone?)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
properties such as copyrights and trademarks
If copyrights are considered property, then why don't copyright owners have to pay a property tax?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well, not quite. The IP is still owned by the contributor. It's just irrevocably licensed through the GNU Public License or another "free" license.
"Open Source" is not in the public domain, but for practical purposes it is not owned. You will only get in trouble if you publish your derivative work without abiding by the license terms.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
You are underestimating the press love of a good mudslinging. The savefarscape.com people organized themselves pretty damn well and ended up getting repeated mention on CNN and newswires. Lots of national publications picked the story up. Seems to me it would be a lot easier to get time with a story like this.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I think the only thing that will stop SCO now is bankruptcy. The only question is whether or not they lose the lawsuit first. Actually, considering Bush v. Gore, I suppose it is possible they could win it, but the more you learn about the history of the code in question, the less likely it seems. More likely someone else can sue SCO for prior IP violations.
Anyway, on the topic of fostering SCO's bankruptcy, don't forget that they do have a revenue stream besides stock speculation. True, more like a trickle in relative terms, but still worth dealing with if it will generate some more bad press. AFaIK, the big drip in that other revenue stream is McDonalds, and I still think they deserve a boycott. M$-style motto:
McDonalds: You deserve a boycott today!
By the way, I contacted McDonalds to ask them if they are still SCO's star customers, and they came back with the stone wall. Or maybe it was just a really ignorant marketroid?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
So...ESR is bad in general, because he likes guns, and has a collection. He hasn't really gunned anyone down yet. Nope. Or even really shot at anyone. Or, say, facilitated weapons to other people so THEY could hurt other people. So, really, all the evil he's done is...not much...um...at all? So he likes guns. Guns can kill people, or destroy. But they also can defend. You didn't see anyone fighting Hitler with bows and arrows, did you? so...anyways, guns are not all bad. And having guns doesn't make you bad.
Ok, so if guns don't necessarily make you bad, then i'd say ESR's contributions to Linux are tremendous, and thus he's a pretty cool guy in my book. And the fact that his beliefs aren't those of everyone else in OSS makes me a bit more comfortable hanging out with the slashbots - we aren't all liberal, or all conservative, or all anything else. I think that's cool.
And comparing owning guns and advocating gun owner's rights to raping, ravaging, and defiling children sexually is just idiotic. That's lunacy dude.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Even defined as to "take property without permission" and with the loose definition it still doesn't work because it is the copyright or patent etc. that is the property, not the work or idea that it covers. Someone owns the copyright to the text of a book, they don't own the text itself. You can probably think of some way to steal a copyright (most likely involving fraud I guess) but you can't steal a copyrighted work (other than a physical representation). You can copy a work without permission and so infringe on the copyright but this is entirely different. Copyright infringement was only a civil matter until recently after all. If it was stealing then it would be covered under existing laws against theft but it took all the recent ammendments to the copyright legislation to make it a crime.
Anyway before you start quoting dictionary definitions you have to realize that dictionaries are descriptive not proscriptive. They just describe the current general usage of words rather than proscribing their definative meaning. Since most people are idiots, even if there wasn't deliberate attempts to reshape the meanings of words, a description of how a word is generally used is likely to be contaminated by the idiocy of the general public. When you add in the fact that the media, who are the enemy here, are in a perfect position to manipulate the general usage of words to be whatever they want, and you see that Orwell's Newspeak is far from fiction.
Since when were all the Kernel developers making Linux for businesses? In the open letter, Daryl was all about saying that we're damaging our hopes and dreams for Linux in businesses.
I don't know about you, but I could give a rats ass about weather or not the business world finds Linux acceptable or not. I highly doubt the developers and all the other OSS folks or me will stop developing and working on Linux regardless of what anyone says or thinks.
It's nice to have drivers from businesses that make hardware and all that, but we didn't have them before and we surely shouldn't become reliant on them.
Therefore all the crap that Daryl is trying to use to scare us with, shouldn't work.
Personally, I think that this stupid obsession with getting everyone and their mom to use Linux as their desktop OS at home and in business is going to hurt Linux more than anything because of the comprimises that will need to be implemented to get them aboard.
At least McBride doesn't have to worry about interview infringement over "stealing lines" from the Bruce Perens interview. Taking them that far out of context oughta qualify them as being his own and not Perens's thoughts.
You
Get on that stock board, post a message with the subject "SCOX ==> $0, read this", and link it to the latest slashdot article on the topic.
If it is a genuine pump and dump there are a handful of paid cheerleaders out there who are trying to bury any sensible discussion so the 'marks' don't see it by filling that board with SCOX rah rah rah nonsense. Amp the signal to noise ratio to the point where the cluelesss day traders know this thing is a pig in a poke and you'll do way more damage than ranting on slashdot about the subject.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Is it possible for many of these open source projects to modify their licenses such that they specifically exclude SCO distributing them?
Yes, it is possible, but:
* It would make the license GPL-incompatible, at the very least
* For a large project, every single developer would have to consent to the relicensing of their contribution.
* It could not apply retroactively to older versions.
More feasible, IMHO, is dropping support for SCO's platforms. They don't appear to really have enough developers to reverse the changes if they are deep enough. But even this isn't a perfect idea, since after all it punishes users of SCO, rather than SCO themselves, and could hurt the public perception of the "open source community".
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
"Member is responsible for the content and accuracy of all news copy and other information submitted by it. Because of the volume of information and copy submitted to PR Newswire, PR Newswire cannot be responsible for verifying any facts contained therein. Member represents and warrants to PR Newswire that (i) it has the right to deliver to PR Newswire all information and copy submitted to it, (ii) it will comply with all applicable laws, rules and regulations, including but not limited to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 and laws relating to "spam", and (iii) no information or copy submitted by Member will contain any content that is obscene, libelous, slanderous or otherwise defamatory, false or misleading or which violates any copyright, right of privacy or publicity or other right of any person. Member shall indemnify and hold harmless PR Newswire, its affiliated companies and its third party vendors, including distributors, from and against any and all claims, losses, damages, liabilities, costs and expenses (including reasonable attorney's fees) arising out of or relating to any breach by Member of the foregoing representations and warranties or otherwise arising out of or relating to the contents or nature of copy and other information provided by Member.
(emphasis mine)
I suggest that Bruce and Eric file a complaint with PR Newswire that Darl and SCO are not complying with their terms and conditions.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben