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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."
Seems to me like they can get away with showing greek code anyway.
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?
"So, you see... we're associated with a Unix, and, you're associated with a Unix... well, you're financial obligations here should be obvious."
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
- 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????SCO claims Gibraltar.
Why not use systematic biologist or linguists?
The world is full of systematic biologists which uncover relationships (natural history) between organisms every day. The may use DNA, anatomy or even ethology. Why not have a group of them analysing the raw data. Their methods have now been adopted by several linguists.
But, the linguists problems differ from that of most biologists, there is much infiltration of words from various languages into one language, therewith obscuring the true relationship between languages.
Maybe these guys can use an "objective method" to deduce the origins of various code snippets.
It's clear that SCO has filed its suit against IBM with absolutely no chance of winning (much like the fox news vs al franken "fair and balanced" suit). Not only has SCO filed a frivilous suit (a civil cause of action to do so) but has made baseless threats causing undue emotional distress to many users of Linux. Once SCO's suit is dismissed, look for some really nice lawsuits right back at 'em from many different parties. Should make for good popcorn munching entertainment. If it were me, I would sue Darly McB individually, in his personal capacity, as well as SCO.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
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..."
First off, you fail to explain or indicate why you think Linus Tourvalds is being hypocritical.
SCO is giving the open source community a look at the problems in the code
This is a flat-out lie.
the time has come to actually step up and figure out what's going on.
"The open source community" has TRIED, time and time again, to figure out what is going on. SCO will not *tell* anyone. The Linux developers community WANTS to have the copyright issues resolved. However, they cannot read SCO's mind! There is a clear and documented method of dealing with copyright infringements in the linux kernel; the time and source of all contributions is logged, and if at any point someone identifies infringing code it can be noted as such and removed. HOWEVER: The linux community cannot remove SCO's code unless they know what it is!!! SCO ardently refuses to give any indication what this mystery code is.
The fact they seem intent on preventing the linux developers from gaining the information of what to remove to fix the infringement has led some to believe this code does not exist.
the people that leech off the hard work of others
Who do you refer to here?
Just in case someone doesn't understand this and wants to know more about what "shorting" a stock means:
http://www.fool.com/FoolFAQ/FoolFAQ0033.htm
Hmm... I wonder if a modification of BLAST would work. It looks for DNA (or protein) sequence homology of a given sample vs. the genome of an organism or many organisms.
It would be interesting to do something like take all the whitespace out from the source tree and tar all the files together and use it as a "genome" to BLAST snippits of (likewise "compressed") code snippits.
Normal (DNA) BLAST results return with a similarity ratio and go on to show where they are/aren't homologous. I'm not sure how it would deal with expanding the relatively small nucleotide "alphabet" to that of source code.
Hmmm..
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
The question of code history is one I asked a *long* time ago; probably the first I heard of this SCO bs. I believe they wrote a little C program that crawls the source tree and looks for similar lines of code. Hell, I could write a program like that, make it compare two source trees that make up 10,000 lines of code, and have it print out that 1,000,000 of those 10,000 lines are identical. Just like the ad for PC-Lint in the programming magazines.
Darl McBride's silly little company is acting just like the idiot who was sitting in a cafe one day. When the waitress came to take his order, the man asked her to sign and date some official documents certifying that he had been in that cafe at that time and date, with records of what he ordered, how long he stayed, etc. The waitress was confused about this, but the man claimed that he was very paranoid of someday being framed of a crime, and therefore wanted a written alibi for every waking moment of his life. He shows the waitress a calendar book with exact notations of every step he had ever taken. Suddenly, the police storms into the establishment and asks the gentleman if he goes by such and such a name. He answers affirmatively. They asked him if he had been involved in a jewelry store robbery which took place at 1221 East West Street several nights prior, at 12:31 AM. As he had proof of everything he had ever done, he opened his book, flipped to the day and hour in question, and read aloud from his book, "Jewelry store robbery at 1221 East West Street, 12:31 AM." Before he realized what a stupid error he had made, the police snatched him and he was off to jail.
With that in mind, here is an open letter to SCO CEO Darl McBride:
Dear Darl,
I do not believe any of your company's claims. In fact, I believe quite the opposite: I believe that SCO's software is composed 100% of code your company deliberately stole from other companies. Because your company stole code from the Linux kernel, you later found that code and wrongly believe that the theft occured in the other direction. Further, I strongly believe that with your company's shoddy record keeping, you cannot prove the origin of your code, so it is therefore impossible to prove your false claims of its being misappropriated into Linux. I further believe that even if your company could produce such proof, the effects of doing so would be adverse for you, as the records would clearly indicate the thefts that SCO deliberately performed.
Oh yeah, and one other thing: In your poorly written, grammatically incorrect, misspelled "open letter" to the free software community, you deliberately took some quotes out of context. This was silly because the misquoted documents are readily available for all to see your blatent and stupid attempt. To demonstrate the effect of misquoting, I offer the following text, quoted directly from your letter:
How does that feel, Darl?Sincerely,
rice burners suck
Chief Karma Whore
Slashdot
Not just that, IBM can go after SCO for intentional interference, abuse of process, and malicious prosecution.
Fight Spammers!
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.
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 have been watching the SCO stock price for the last couple of months. When the SCO forum code was debunked, I looked expecting to see the stock price fall off a cliff. That's how it works isn't it? company suffers major bad news, stock price falls.
But no. The stock price went up, up and away, on blocks of very small shares.
It's clearly being heavily manipulated. But why? The best theory I've seen is that amateur investors are encouraged to sell this stock short, on the assumption that it's going to zero one way or another. Good assumption, but naive investment strategy. What happens then is that the price is manipulated way up. Eventually the short sellers are forced to buy at the higher market price to stop their losses. Who do they buy from? Why, the insiders and stock manipulators, who then laugh all the way to the bank.
Go and have a look on the Yahoo finance forums. The scam is so obvious, it's unbelievable that the mainstream media aren't picking up on it.
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.
Arrg!
No, BLAST won't work. ESR's SHRED won't work. These are, at heart, text matching algorithms, which are easily defeated and of little relevance. Let me explain.
Any simple code obfuscation techniques (changing variable names, adding/removing comments, inserting newlines, changing for loops to while loops, etc.) will totally defeat SHRED and will likely give BLAST a hard time, if not break it entirely.
Why? SHRED searches for lines with identical MD5 sums. If every/most line of purloined code has been changed, even slightly, SHRED fails. BLAST works by finding "seed" regions of identity and then growing those regions out to "near matches." Unfortunately, the idea of a "near match" is a lot more clear cut in DNA/protein than in code, and the initial seeding breaks if the code has been obfuscated at all.
SCO would (wisely) never accept a negative SHRED or BLAST result as proof for just these reasons.
What is necessary is a comparison of the code structure, NOT the simple text of the code. Stanford's, for example (and many other) CS department detects cheating by chewing through source files and turning them into an intermediate representation (think: parse tree) which describe directly the STRUCTURE and FUNCTION of a bit of code in a way that is completely divorced from the text of that code. To find out if people cheated, they compare the parse trees from their code -- not the text of the code.
In this way, they can easily detect (with a surprisingly low false positive rate) when two pieces of textually different code actually stemmed from the same source (but one was then obfuscated to cover up the cheating.)
This is the way to compare code fragments. Not borrowing text-matching (or near-matching) from unrelated disciplines.
> would sue Darly McB individually, in his personal capacity, as well
> as SCO.
Darl bashing is even more fun now that we know he actually reads Slashdot! The Linuxworld piece links to a Computer World Interview with McBride. In the last question, Darl admits that he reads our rants on Slashdot and it hurts his feelings:
So Darl, if you are reading this: fuck you! We know your evidence is bogus, we are on to your stock scams (e.g. the Vultus "acquisition"), and we laugh at your suggestions that we cooperate to "monetize Linux". Give it up now, before we finally convince the SEC to launch an official investigation.
-Fyodor
Concerned about your network security? Try the free Nmap Security Scanner
This just shows how thorough SCO really is. The article says: That this code "emanated" from SGI was news to SCO.
:-)
Well, the linux code clearly states
* Copyright (C) 1992 - 1997, 2000-2002 Silicon Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved.
I hope they know how Silicon Graphics Inc. relates to SGI
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.
I remember someone saying basicly SCOs case against IBM is not that IBM took code from SCO and put it in Linux.
But that any code IBM wrote for AIX (under the SCO liccens) is SCOs property as AIX uses SCOs intelectual property as a code base.
In public SCO clames the issue is purely a matter of SCO property in Linux. Then SCO uses this and related FUD to frighten everyone into NOT suing SCO when SCO dose things like sell Linux binarys or bill Linux users for SCOs intelectual property. Things SCO has no legal right to do.
SCO basicly acts like they own Linux when they have no legal clame to it and use public clames and FUD to frighen anyone who might challange SCOs ownership clame into sillence.
The key is that SCO must win this lawsute against IBM.
What SCO is clamming is that any code writen for Unix while under liccens from SCO is automaticly SCOs property. I sereously doupt there is any language in SCOs liccens to back up this clame as IBM would not sign a contract with such an extream clame. IBM knows better. I think SCO is using the case of "implied ownership" and you probably won't find that term or anything like that term in legal text becouse I don't think implied ownership is recognised.
Microsoft attempted to pull something similar to what SCO is pulling way back. The part when SCO clames that SOME of SCO code is in Linux makes ALL of Linux now SCOs property.
Microsoft worked with IBM to improve OS/2. Microsoft then released Microsoft OS/2. The corts rulling is relevent to this in many ways.
First it clames that IBM retains ownership of the name OS/2 and the code IBM wrote for OS/2.
But it also clames that any code Microsoft added to OS/2 Microsoft may use any way Microsoft fits. They however do not have any right to code IBM wrote.
So basicly IBM did not give Microsoft the rights to IBMs code or OS/2 trademark. The Linux community did not give SCO rights to the Linux code or Linux trademark outside of the terms of the GPL liccens.
Microsoft did give IBM code so IBM can use it in OS/2 but Microsoft may also use that same code anyplace else Microsoft wants. IBM did put code in IBMs flavor of Unix and didn't actually give it to SCO so it's not clear if SCO can do ANYTHING with the code. But IBM still retains ownership of that code should IBM use it in Linux, OS/2 or any other IBM product.
Finally IBM clames to have not extracted any code from AIX for Linux to prevent contaminating Linux with someone elses intelectual property.
Becouse the infringment is supposidly between AIX and Linux not Unixware and Linux it's quite likely in my opinion that SCO dosen't actually have the code in question to make any compairisons with and instead SCO is using a compleatly diffrent approch by using behavure as the metric. But as any good programmer will know you can arrive at the same behavure with diffrent code.
IBM could shread AIX and Linux and post the results...
I don't actually exist.
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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 Q&A with McBride in Computer world contains one of the first clear (re)statements of SCO's (current) intent. In the interview, McBride's tone towards Linux is carefully conciliatory, conveying an attitude of "We accept that Linux will be around for a while, so let's find a way to work things out."
The 'problem' with Linux that needs to be resolved, he says, is the GPL. Or, as McBride puts it:
"If we're going into a new business environment around Linux, well, let's ask the question right upfront: Does the free business model work? Everything we've looked at, whether it's free Internet, free telecom, free music, all of these things tend to, for one reason or another, not work over an extended period of time. Clearly, the free model just about killed our company, and I would argue that it's going to kill a lot of other software companies if the GPL [General Public License] is able to gain a foothold and run rampant throughout the industry."
This statement first trots out the old "free software means free as in beer" misinformation and then proceeds with the explicit mud slinging about how the GPL will "kill" alot of companies if it is permitted to "gain a foothold" and "run rampant." Yikes! Scary stuff, if it were true. This bit of FUD is well formulated to push the fear buttons of your friendly neighborhood PHB.
And it raises many more questions. Like:
(1) Will the mainstream media eventually bite this SCO spin and spread the slander against the GPL?
(2) Will a significant portion of the open source community one day buy into this characterization of the problem, and allow the thin edge of the wedge that McBride has presented to fracture the community?
(3) Is Microsoft behind this FUD campaign against the GPL, which, at minimum, they must find exceptionally agreeable?
(4) Even if Microsoft and SCO aren't coordinating their attacks against the GPL and the open source community, do the similarities in their attacks indicate a fundamental hostility that we can expect capitalists to hold against the free software model?
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.