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Groklaw Sends A Dear Darl Letter

Posted by timothy on from the deserves-to-be-framed dept.

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."

8 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Beating Darl at his Own Game by billstr78 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Beating Darl at his Own Game by Enahs · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Rumor has it that both Linux and SCO are using BSD code. It's not surprising given that BSD was a real UNIX and all, and that BSD and AT&T shared at one point (note: I have no idea where the XENIX*cough*SCO source code came from, so I'm just pulling this out my ass) AND the nasty legal battle to open the sources of BSD in the past tends to make me think that SCO is really in violation of the BSD license.

      No need to put my fingers in my ears or claim it's a conspiracy anyway. The offending code has allegedly already been removed.

      --
      Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
  2. DOC by potpie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This letter has a certain, "Declaration of Independence" feel to it. I like how it lists the crimes of King Darl.

    --
    Esoteric reference.
  3. Letter asks: Where's the code? by Tirel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.)

  4. You're looking at the website wrong by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. A good letter, but... by mertner · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

    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 :) I'm thinking it will be at less than $1 a year from now - but Wall Street does not appear to agree thus far...?

    --
    -- As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
  6. Re:Ouchhh!..or is it??? by emurphy42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > what LKP exactly is

    http://www.sco.com/products/lkp/

    "The Linux(R) Kernel Personality (LKP) for UnixWare 7.1.3 provides Linux environment hosted on the UnixWare kernel. This environment does not contain a Linux kernel, but does contain the PRMs needed to run most Linux applications. By invoking the UnixWare kernel to run the Linux application, the application gets all of the performance and scalability advantages that UnixWare delivers. Linux applications that are disk or database intensive, or require support for a large number of users, typically perform with greater stability, reliability, and scalability when deployed on the UnixWare LKP environment."

    "Since UnixWare is much more powerful, scalable and secure than Linux, customers may replace multiple Linux servers with a single, more powerful UnixWare server."

    Goddamn, you can't make up stuff this funny!

    (I also liked the "Flame Editor" link at the bottom of The Inquirer's page. Apparently all their articles use that wording.)

  7. SCOX is not up on normal market demand.. by burnin1965 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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