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More on SCO Code Snippets
anoopsinha writes "A story in linuxworld reports that SCO itself has no idea what the history of a particular snippet of code might be - even a high profile snippet like the one SCO highlighted at SCO Forum. Having no idea if its claims have merit has not stopped SCO so far, so we can expect more from SCO along the lines of big claims with no merit."
Mr. Nauvek isn't kidding,
SCO's press releases are just echoing back what Perens, or what that Groklaw guys say in
twisted words.
Let's just not talk about SCO anymore. We're just giving them ideas for press releases that pump up their stock price.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Now might be a good time to short that SCO stock
So now they admit that they had no idea about the validity of their own claims. Why is this not surpising?
- SCO shows code snippets to stockholders and says "here are infringing code snippets"
- People actually look at code snippets, point out they are non-infringing
- SCO says "Well, THAT was not an example of an INFRINGING code snippet. It was just an example of a code snippet. We haven't shown you the REAL infringing code snippets yet, but they're doozies."
- There are no ill effects to SCO whatsoever from the fact they showed non-infringing code snippets to their investors and to the press and presented them as infringing code snippets whatsoever, SCOs investors remain unaware of this, and little to no-one in the "mainstream" (non-geek) press covers this.
WTF????Mostly because I'm sure there are no real geeks working for SCO anymore. None that are worth a damn proably.
I invision that building being a bunch of yes men and raid attack lawers who have the combigned morals of Stalin, Goering, and Ghengis Kahn all rolled up into one.
Oh, you said greek! Well, what I said still holds true.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
So, for all purposes, it's safe to say SCO and its crack legal team just can't do the deeper historical analysis needed here. Would a junior programmer be able to produce the findings that the open source community can? No way. Such an individual simply would not have the depth of historical knowledge to know where to look.
This is a rather daft assumption. The junior programmer doesn't need to know the history of the code. Simply that the code is the same. Then all he needs to do is compare it with BSD and any other publically available kernels to eliminate any that may have had a common ancestry. The rest of the work could be left to someone who's good at researching in books,
And there's no reason that SCO couldn't hire someone with "depth of historical knowledge to know where to look". Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond aren't the only people with this knowledge. We don't know what SCO are doing, or what they're planning. Their public statements may be misleading simply because they don't want to show their hand. The code they did show may have been a gamble that didn't pay off. There may still be many lines of code that were stolen from SCO Unix.
Do we really know how likely SCO's claims are to be true? Personally, I think that the Linux community is pretty proud of having "done it themselves" and doesn't want to use SCO's code at all. In fact, it's a very bad thing for the GPL if people put code under the GPL illegally.
The only way people will trust open source is to trust the open source developers. As more and more people are warming up to the idea that "free software isn't junk" the last thing needed is for consumers and companies to think that it was all done using someone else's code.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
This is a lawyer' dream retirement project...at least until SCO runs out of cash. Since this is a public company the Feds and State can get involved and end this non-sense er I mean string it out for years with no meaningful outcome.
Those that do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
SCO thought that exact code alignment could be used to sway the general public into accepting thier argument. It's backfiring, like so many of their tactics.
But the real crux of their argument is that *every* modern OS violates their "Intellectual Property" (bad phrase) rights stemming from SysV Unix.
That includes the BSD's.
That includes Windows.
Every OS that does basically what you could with SysV Unix is in violation, whether there's code sharing or not. It's a very disturbing concept, and the implications are chilling. It is absolutely imperitive that SCO lose this case.
If sco have to resort to an outside team (ex-MIT people), does this mean they have no internal programmers free to look at the code ? or does it mean they don't trust those that they do ?
;-)
Or is their single programmer tied up in trying to fix bugs in their existing products ?
Finally, MIT/Ex-MIT people, were they staff/lecturers, or just people that attended MIT ? What are their qualifications ?
I personally think this is an exercise in pumping the stock, and scaring someone enough that the will take over the company (and hope that they dont notice the cupboard is bare)
EXACTLY. More to the point, in the traditional system, a company has a distinct motive for stealing code--to make more money/gain market share. While I'm not saying Linux doesn't make money, there are some differences behind the philosophies and how this works.
With proprietary software, you don't see the code. If you steal code, you have a better chance of getting away with it AND you can be more competitive.
With open source software everyone gets to see what you've done! That's the rule! There is more motive to create your own code or use other open sourced code under this system than taking it illegally. Doing so is more harmful than good.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
A lot of people have been complaining about this SCO echo chamber thing, but they are missing a big point.
It does not matter how much slashdot, groklaw, memepool, kuro5hin or metafilter or whoever cover the SCO nonsense. Ignoring it, or covering it until it's blue in the face, will not help or hurt SCO's case.
The one and only thing that matters is: Are investment news sites, and the sites read by executives and people who buy stock, covering it?
Since these sites will *do* things like take press releases and reprint them without investigating the veracity of their content, yes, they are, and will no matter what we do. If all SCO-unfriendly (i would call this "is aware of the facts of the situation") news sites dropped their SCO coverage, press-release-friendly/sco-friendly news sources-- the ones executives and stockholders read-- would continue to run their stories. This would mean that the people who are causing SCO's stock to be pumped up would still be getting the constant source of PR (lies?) from SCO, but it would mean that there would be no dissenting voices elsewhere in the media.
Dissenting voices elsewhere in the media, if they *exist*, however, may eventually have the effect, eventually, somehow, of effecting the stock-news sites. Once this begins to happen, and the stock-news sites begin to report on the actual situation rather than SCO's single (imaginary?) side of the story, SCO's stock will be toast.
In the long run all that matters is getting SCO's stock price to drop, becuase all that matters to those fueling SCO's nonsense is getting it to rise...
There is such a thing as bad publicity.
I'm not a SCO supporter by any means, but these guys have a history of suing people and winning. I know we all asume that McBride is a moron, but what if he's actually clever. They could be "throwing" everyone off by making themselves look like idiots. Has it dawned on anyone that maybe the code snippets that were leaked were meant to be leaked? Perhaps they knew someone would be there with a camera and stick the pictures out on the Internet.
;-)
So while the community is thinking everything is just fine because SCO doesn't have jack, they are sitting on one or two really excellent examples of IP ownership they haven't released yet. This way when the code is released we will all be caught with our jaws gaping open and our feet stuffed into them. They are just down the street from me, I know some of these guys. They are slippery. The best way to kill a fox is not by chasing it.
Now maybe what they do have is small and can be replaced simply. That doesn't matter because on the phsycological front the open source / free software camp just took a hit. Unfortunatly it's too late to do anything about it.
I think a good approch is the "show us the code" approch. Not the "you must be an idiot smoking crack" approch. Hubris is a good thing when hacking code, but not when dealing with a bunch of lawyers. I urge a level headed course of action rather than a kick SCO's butt becuase there is no way we can be wrong action. Use caution - I promise there is an "Ace" up their sleave. Or at least a "Queen of Hearts".
There's a lot of issues surrounding this case, but let's start with the request for a Bruce Perens or Eric Raymond: These guys repeatedly offered they're assistance in looking at the code to identify any possibly infringing snippets, but they require that the NDA is dropped for them. SCO refuses to let them do this, seemingly afraid that the infringing snippets will 'disappear' from the kernel source, hence losing a case against all those commercial users of Linux they want to sue.
And to have all those people claiming it's pump and dump of SCO stock, think of this: Some execs have call options (right to buy at a certain price) that can't be exercised till somewhere in 2004. That means they have to keep the SCO stock price up till they can exercise the options. With a case like this, I wonder if that's possible: sooner or later the 'regular joe' catches on, and the stock will end up in a free-fall, and if printed on paper, making geek toilet paper (But that might make the demand among us geeks so high the price gets back up). Next to that, they sold quite some stock, but so far it's been in 5000 - 10000 chunks, While they own 10 - 20 times that much each. If they really wanted to get rich, they would dump it as fast as they could, and leave the country.
My guess is they started seriously believing they have a case, but now continue in order not to lose their face. I think McBride and his servants have lost a lot of sleep over this case by now, and will have a lot of sleepless nights in he near future.
Sometimes I wonder why the courts don't just put SCO out of its misery...
I mean isn't it pretty apparent to everyone that these are some last rites? These are just theatrics as a last dying attempt in vengeance against their bane. I mean this makes SCO look really really awful as they writhe in agony, striking out as spitefully as they can at the IBM/Linux partnership.
I don't think anyone can take this whole charade seriously. I hope this abuse of the court system doesn't go unpunished. Has anyone ever considered how quickly things move along and get developed in the techological world? Does anyone see how grossly slow and inadequate the traditional court system is at handling things of this nature? With legal battles, appeals, loopholes, etc. by the time anyone wins a case they're looking at technology that older than dirt.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
If you had been shorting SCOX all this time.
They're around $18 right now. In May they were in the $3s.
Feast your eyes on this lovely chart.
SCO is doing what Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and so many other companies have done. They do absolutely anything, legal or not, ethical or not, to pump that stock. And keep in mind that for the stock to trade higher and higher means that people have been standing in line to buy it. Those asses share some of the blame. It's just a bunch of people trading, overall, lots of the world's time, energy, and money, for a little personal gain.
Fuck them.
Fuck McBride. His method of improving SCO's business here brings into serious question the supposed successes he ha d at other companies.
Speaking of the snake, does anyone have personal information on him? It would be a real shame if he personally were to receive indications of the world's negative feelings about him...
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I don't believe that the SCO claims have any real merit. But this article seemed to be making a big deal out of Darl McBride saying in his Q&A that he didn't previously know that the code in question had been contributed by SGI. So far as I can see he didn't say anything of the kind.
"In this Q&A, CEO McBride states, 'Well, at SCO Forum, there were some folks that came out and basically sniffed out some of the [disputed System V] code we were showing and [concluded] that it emanated from SGI.' That this code "emanated" from SGI was news to SCO."
I don't see how you can get from Darl's quote to the conclusion that the source being SGI was news to him. All he says is that people outside of SCO worked out where the code came from, which is why he's commenting on it publicly. Nothing there implies either way whether he knew about it before.
Once you remove this strange interpretation of his quote there doesn't seem to be anything left to base the article on.
There are plenty of legitimate flaws in SCO's case. This doesn't seem to be one of them.
Why not use systematic biologist or linguists?
If the problem were text comparison, I'd call for someone from the English department who makes critical editions, as it's the most similar to the human processes working on text, not independent words or natural forces working anything.
But I don't think that's the problem. What they need is a computer science historian (aka a long-bearded Unix geek), and copies of every Unix source released. Given that, it shouldn't be hard to find all the copies of that malloc function, or the fact that the Berkeley Packet Filter was also showing up in BSD releases and originally came from Berkeley. But they don't seem to be bothering to do that kind of deep research.
I am more waiting for their Waterloo.
bash$
They can either learn a process or learn things about specific pieces of code this way. If they learn about pieces of code, they present code at trial that stood up to public scruitiny in their practice runs before the trial. If they learned a process, then they hire people to do the same sorts of reasoning the public used to debunk their practice runs, and by that means find a better chunk of code to demonstrate at trial.
It would seem rational for them to do a few more rehersals before show time.
It would also seem rational for the open source community to refuse to play this game by not giving them further accurate information about the validity of their public claims before the trial. But since the open source community has no central control, there's no way to make that happen.
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Posting to Slashdot on SCO's balderdash is preaching to the choir. Try chatting up your local investment firm manager. Bring your same verve for debunking SCO's house of cards to a financial investment manager. Got a 401K? An RRSP? Call your broker/advisor/coin tosser and tell them to drop SCO from YOUR portfolio. And explain to them why they should. Yeah, I know, who's going to listen to one complaint? Slashdot has more than a few readers, and I imagine some of them have investments. SCO stepped on your turf. So take the fight back to theirs.
The best part of "our" case is that we're right. We're just. We're honest. Assuming this is Darl McBride's real personal info, isn't it out of line to start fucking with him?
Yes, I think he's as much of a prick as anyone else and that he and his cohorts deserve, to some degree, a horrible and painful fate, but I will NOT resort to lowering the bar and hitting below the belt. And furthermore, I'd urge you to do the same. The guy has a family. Leave them out of it. Let him suffer his due when this ends and he's in jail.
Which makes me wonder... what the fuck is SCO using for version control if they can't look at the history of their own code?
And if SCO does submit changelogs (or is forced to divulge them during the discovery process), is there any way that IBM will be able to determine whether those changelogs were forged or not?
Given the recent history of SCO making demonstrably false statements in the press, I'm beginning to think that they might well do the same when it gest to the courtroom - except with non-demonstrably false statements.
If they do it, it's called perjury. But if they forge a set of CVS or RCS changelogs, how the hell do you prove it?
Yes probably.
But even when they are paid they'll run out of money anytime and the company is dead. Even a single person like SCO's boss can't be that stupid.
Ok, they GOT paid the UNIX licenses from Sun and MS.
It won't have that big impact on Linux anyway. We'll see how this all ends. I agree, they won't win as it looks currently.
Sure they do, notably in the case filed by Redhat
The IBM case is a little more focued around what constitute "Derived Code" so maybe less so there.
That being said the 10'th claim in IBM's response states that SCO is not intitled to any relief since they didn't do anything to mitigate damages. The latter is an affirmative defense, and the fact thay took the time and effort to release press release after press release yet did nothing to mitigate the alledged damages makes it almost impossible for them to win this case
Lastly they have to crawl the first 9 barrieres first.
Help fight continental drift.
That's like saying that because George W. Bush benifited so much from his own political FUD campain after 9/11 he must be behind the attacks on the World Trade Center. While either is possible, it really needs more evidence to make such an assertion. Microsoft might just be jumping at an opertunity.
Little Brother, watching the watchers