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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."
For those of you wondering what this whole SCO vs. Linux thing was about, I can finally reveal the truth.
:(
As chairman and CEO of Canopy I've done a lot for the Open Source community. I've promoted investments in companies like Linux Networx, who make the third fastest supercomputer in the world and use Linux to do it. Companies like Lineo the masters of embedded Linux. Also Trolltech producing the incredible QT widget set used by the KDE project. And of course Caldera, producing the finest Linux distribution and pushing forwards the United Linux initiative.
But one shadow lay over my record of achievements. Despite all I had done for the Linux and Open Source communities, I still had never achieved the triumph I most desperately sought. Not once had an article I submitted been accepted by Slashdot
I'm sure my fellow Slashdotters can understand how this gnawed away at my soul.
Together with Darl McBride and David Boies I hatched a master plan, to achieve my dream of an accepted Slashdot article or to destroy Linux trying.
Caldera would purchase IP rights from the Santa Cruz Operation and with funding from Sun and Microsoft would use them as the springboard to launch a devastating legal and PR blitz against Linux. As part of this Darl would write a searing open letter to the Open Source community, drawing responses in return. One of these from Groklaw would give me the opportunity I needed...
As you can see everything has gone exactly to plan. I have my successful Slashdot submission, and I'm sure that looking back on it you can all see it was worth any 'collateral damage' along the way.
Darl, you can call off the dogs now.
God bless you all.
Ralphie
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
September 19, 2003 Torvalds Announces Linux "A Hoax" SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- In a shocking announcement Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system kernel, revealed that the wildly successful Linux was "an elaborate hoax." "Alan [Cox] and I just made it up," said Torvalds, "We wanted to have our own OS but didn't know how to make one and neither of us could afford a subscription to MSDN. It's been real hell faking all of those patch submissions for the last twelve years. I'm just glad it's over." Torvalds went on to describe how Linux has been assembled over the years from stolen code, mostly from SCO's Unixware server operating system. Large portions were also lifted from Novell's NetWare 3 and Microsoft's Altair BASIC. When asked if he felt any remorse over the affair he replied, "Sorta. But everybody does it. The KDE project is mostly de-compiled Windows code and Eric Raymond copied 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' verbatim from an MIT enrollment brochure. Most open-source developers are just coders who couldn't hack it in the real world where everybody runs Windows." Concluding his announcement Torvalds encouraged Linux users to "either purchase a legitimate license from SCO or install GNU HURD." Alan Cox declined to comment.
Everyone who is concerned about this issue should read this letter, they're really giving the GPL some shark's teeth.
On a more serious note, maybe this is what it takes to get some real "street cred" for Free SW/Open Source among Corporate Amerika. It's just a bummer for me that things have to go *that* far in the 1st place.
C|N>K
And here I am getting all my news from scodot...
Your company's website does almost nothing to explain what it is your company does. Did you use some sort of automatic business phrase generation program to create it?
"A dynamic operating company"
What the hell does that mean?
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.
open letters: C,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z
one closed region: A,D,O,P,Q,R
two closed regions: B
Despite the publicity SCO's claims are receiving, they are actually unimportant. There is no legal leg for them to stand on. This back and forth debate is uninteresting. Yes, SCO's claims were outrageous, but that is obvious even without someone pointing it out in detail.
So in response, I am writing a closed letter to both SCO and the open source community. And no one can read it since it's closed. So there!
If you can identify any infringing source code, please do so, prove it is infringing, and let us remove it, because we surely do not want it.
We do not need or want your legacy UNIX source code
which reveals that your call for indemnification is, to put it bluntly, FUD
We would think, however, that a capable information technology company that sells web services software would have the technical know-how to handle a DDoS attack, if that is really what happened. Most such companies do handle them without being brought to their knees for a week. We are glad that you say you have since learned technical steps you can take to protect yourself in the future.
Your inability to make your Linux business a success, while unfortunate for you, parallels your company's failure to make your UNIX business a success
If you're looking for a successful business model, you might consider the tried and true model of satisfied customers.
Man, that was a fun read!
I have noticed that they have not FILED any copyright infringement actions, despite their numerous allegations that Linux infringes on their copyrighted code and mentions of the rights of copyright holders in their legal pleadings and press releases. No matter how loudly they proclaim infringement of copyright, they aren't willing to use the appropriate federal laws (USC-17) to protect this supposedly infringed upon "IP". I wonder why.
If SCO has copyright material that has been infringed upon, they have to go to the INFRINGER (whoever has access to their code and copied it, meaning the code and not just a work-alike clean-room code, into the kernel) for damages. End users and unwitting publishers of infringing materials are not listed in USC-17 as liable for infringement. You can't get damages from a publisher if one author of a short story collection lied about the authorship, nor can you collect from the bookstores and purchasers.
If they have proof that Red Hat is distributing infringing material, they first have to notify RH what the infringing material is. As the innocently infringing publisher, RH has the chance to double check the material, and either remove it or check its pedigree dispute the infringing nature of it.
The only time a publisher can be nailed for damages is if the plaitiff can prove they knew, or could reasonable have been expected to know, that a work was copyright. This covers sleazy anthology publishers who don't bother to get permissions and pay royalties, and anyone stupid enough to accept a well-known work of fiction from anyone but the real author.
This letter has a certain, "Declaration of Independence" feel to it. I like how it lists the crimes of King Darl.
Esoteric reference.
It's been floating around for a while, and The Inq has a companion research link where you can verify all the assertions in the Groklaw letter.
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.
Your inability to make your Linux business a success, while unfortunate for you, parallels your company's failure to make your UNIX business a success. Perhaps the problem isn't Linux, the GPL, or the open source business model.
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?
"The record shows which method has done a better job of policing source code, which reveals that your call for indemnification is, to put it bluntly, FUD."
So are they saying Fear Uncertanty & Doubt?
or should I read:
"...your call for indemnification is, to put it bluntly, F**cked Up Darl."
*sigh* why does this always get modded up?
It was resolved by being disproved. The complaint was based on the mistaken view that the only way to get those structures was from Soren when in fact the author of those headders had gotten the documentation from the manufacturer.
The similarities are easilly explained by the fact that the structures use standard variable names and are in a layout dictated by the hardware.
In short: there was no coppying.
> 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.)
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
Thank you for writing a coherent, polite and clear response to SCO. I believe that your methods will get us faster and better results than the usual loose cannons.
-- $G
You should know that this person is taking highly rated comments from the Yahoo finance message board and posting them on slashdot without proper attributions. I wrote the text in the above comment on the Yahoo finance message board as jqtechworker. You can see the original post here. I do not mind that my words have been copied. But fucking christ, at least reference the link and author.
Here is the original post.