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Groklaw Sends A Dear Darl Letter
Ralph Yarro writes "The Inquirer is carrying the text of an open letter sent to Darl McBride from members of the open source community at Groklaw. This is a lengthy and detailed response to the open letter Darl sent a while back."
Obviously, the SCO FUD machine will not halt under it's own misguided intentions. So it only makes sense that members of the community fight SCO on thier own grounds and at thier own game. It looks like the Linux owners claim of protection under the GPL is far a far stronger argument for suit than any 10 lines of copied source embedded deep within the kernel. It fills me with pride to read the calm, well thought words of a community under fire. I will sleep a little better at night knowing that serious action is awaiting SCO at the end of thier grab for cash profit scheme.
This letter has a certain, "Declaration of Independence" feel to it. I like how it lists the crimes of King Darl.
Esoteric reference.
That's the first time I see this connection being made. I'm not familiar with SCO's products, so if someone may give a bit more info on what LKP exactly is I should be grateful.
Also, is this some new "official" rumour or it's being floating around for a while????
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
If the comparison shows "no code matches" you can say so. A SCO licensee saying "We've looked into the problem ourselves, and feel Linux is unique." tells nothing about SCO, or their secrets. If the comparison suggests SCO adopted Linux code, one would be obligated to report same to proper authorities. NDA, or not. As a licensee failure to report, indeed failure to do the due diligence of this test, may rope you into commission of willful infringement and/or conspiracy to do so. If the comparison suggests infringements, and you cannot determine the source, you may be obligated to determine same under rules of due diligence. This would include filing appropriate reports with authorities. If the comparison suggests Linux adopted SCO code, then you, as one SCO licensee to another, can likely exchange that information. Further, you or your guilty peers could (and probably must) publish corrections for your error. Now, the comparator won't catch is code that's been "infected" by SCO's newly envisoned concept of the world's first, *truely* deadly, viral license. IBM claims to hold valid copyrights as independent works for code they also contributed to the Unix V codebase. SCO claims to "control" any and all such code, and all that came in contact with it, however remotely. (Yes, I assume SCO fells they now excercise license control over nearly all of IBM's code base assets. Mainframe to wrist watch. I can't imagine how their theory can hold otherwise, actually.)
They're a ventrue capital firm. They don't "do" anything. They invest money in other companies that "do stuff", so that they can "do" it better, and Canopy can take a bit in return for their investment.
What I don't get is the stock price. SCOX has gone up, and up, and up, and is now at more than $19. This in spite of several pieces of evidence suggesting SCO has no case at all, and no evidence that they have a case that is worth anything (Just lots of bluster).
:) I'm thinking it will be at less than $1 a year from now - but Wall Street does not appear to agree thus far...?
Do the Wall Street types know something that we don't about the likelihood of SCO actually winning in court, or are they just massively ignorant about how much SCO is going to go down once this issue gets heard in a court of law?
I think both of those alternatives are scary. Particlarly as i sold short SCOX at $16
-- As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
There was a case where some RedHat employee submitted BSD licensed code to the Linux kernel without following the license, i.e. he claimed to have written it himself instead of including the original copyright notice as demanded by the BSD license. Here is the corresponding slashdot story.
While this was pretty ugly, it has been resolved quickly. So, while it is incorrect to say that there "has never been a claim of copyright infringement", you cannot blame anyone for not dealing with it properly. SCO could have had the same proper treatment, if they only had told people what code exactly would be the problem, but until now, they refused to.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I hope everyone here takes the time to read this well written, documented and thoroughly enjoyable "Open Letter". It should be the example of every discourse that happens on ./ - especially when compared to SCO's letter. Each point of the original letter was carefully, thoroughly, and fairly addressed. There was quite a bit of documentation backing up each claim, and there was a healthy expectation that SCO should be following specific guidelines, along with an understanding and explanation of how those guidelines had been agreed upon by SCO. There were carefully phrased warnings of the consequences of breaking these agreements, without resorting to threats. Note: these warnings did not discuss the havoc that these remedies would cause for SCO, so I am defining them as being warnings instead of threats. Anyway, point is, this letter is a good example that our community should attempt to emulate, in my humble (but correct) opinion.
One closed region: a b d e g o p q
Ah, but "g" is ambiguous; in courier, it's one closed, but in Times, it's two closed regions.
(Is there a point to this?)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Hehe. Or maybe they just lacked the faith and started whining "I wanna go home" and "I want my TV" (yes, I am aware that there were no TV's back then) and stuff, so they were punished and never reached California. Or maybe they just got lost as they had no biblical pillar of fire showing them the way.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
If you compare the data at ThomsonFN.com that shows some information on who is buying and selling you will notice something peculiar about SCOX.
SCOX
RHAT
IBM
MSFT
If you look at the pie charts at the bottom of the pages, it seems that only retail traders are willing to let anyone know they are buying/selling SCOX. For the most part the known SCOX traders are people using online trading or calling up their broker and making a trade request.
There are virtually no institutional traders who are willing to publicly advertise they are trading SCOX.
Now all of these charts show a large portion of traders that are unknown, however, I have a suspicion that the unknown traders in SCOX are the driving force behind raising the stock price. And my suspicion tells me that it may be for two reasons, 1) it creates an impression that the market has faith in the SCO case and expects a big windfall coming to SCO, and 2) with SCO execs dumping stock this is one way that someone could provide a payoff without directly transfering cash to SCO or its execs.
Of course this is purely speculation and I could just be paranoid. You'll have to make your own judgement as to what the numbers mean.
burnin
Now, can't Red Hat issue a press release with an executive summary of the Groklaw community answer to SCO's open letter, simply saying they agree and pointing to the Inquirer? Considering the publication on a major IT newssource this is material news.
Totally agree. Too many words, even when correct, lose their power to convince.
You praise this letter's "lack of smug sarcasm"; that may be true, compared to the common exchanges by these combatants, but from the perspective of a CIO/CTO desk the letter is still pretty smarmy and superior.
It's like '80's Apple users talking about the PC world: "We know we're right and everybody else does too, but we'll do you a favor and take you through this argument once more...because you're such a dope." Success will come when the open source position is seen as mainstream, rather than the nerdy fringe. (Which is tough, as long as 80% of the market is focused on the latest Windows bug.)
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld