Slashdot Mirror
SCO Derides GPL, Will Revoke SGI's UNIX License
larry2k writes "PR newswire has an open letter from SCO to IBM.
From the letter: 'SCO believes that the GPL -- created by the Free Software Foundation to supplant current U.S. copyright laws -- is a shaky foundation on which to build a legal case.'" The release is also carried by NewsForge. Among other things, SCO says "By so strongly defending the controversial GPL, IBM is also defending a questionable licensing scheme through which it can avoid providing software indemnification for its customers."
Doesn't supplant mean "replace"? That's not what the GPL does.
And if you're wondering why you have not received an invoice from SCO for any Linux-based OS you may be running, benploni writes "From Groklaw: In this Detroit News story Blake Stowell explains why no one has received an invoice: 'SCO in August said Linux users could avoid lawsuits by paying a one-time fee of $699. The fee will rise to $1,399 on Oct. 15. Since the response to its appeal was adequate, SCO didn't send bills to thousands of Linux users, company spokesman Blake Stowell said.' [emphasis added]. We all knew there was no way they'd risk actually sending out invoices, and here's the proof."
How much did their stock go up by announcing
this? Why is everyone so "blind" to this?
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Hey, look on the bright side. At least SCO is going after people bigger than they are instead of 12-year old girls.
It's only a matter of time before IBM lawyers destroy SCO. Just sit back, relax and watch SCO lawyers and IBM/SGI/other lawyers get into some serious battle. When it's over, SCO won't exist anymore and slashdot will run out of topics.
Since the response to its appeal was adequate, SCO didn't send bills to thousands of Linux users, company spokesman Blake Stowell said.'
Too bad - I'd love to hang up such an (otherwise ignored) invoice here in my office. SCO can kiss my ass in Macy's window during a One Day Sale.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
At this point, due to SCO screwing everyone over, no company is going to be willing to ever touch another OS based on propriatary code licensed from someone else again. They've been burned once -- not again. Given that an in-house solution is insanely expensive, this just adds more impetus to the Linux push.
The Penguin just gets bigger and bigger.
May we never see th
SCO is entitled to $699 for every 16 CPU's and 4 modules of ram machine running the linux operating system. If you type 'hostid' at the prompt, it will serialize your computer machine. Copy the output, along with your name, address, phone number, social security number, and email address, and email it to sales@sco.com.
I will revoke SCO's UNIX license effective October 3rd, 2003.
Hey, I have as much legal right to do it to them as they do!
We need an sco.slashdot.org section.
So often this is what goes wrong with business. Obsession with money leads to destruction. Whatever happened to the co-existence theory... or has it ever gone anywhere?
http://mediagoblin.org/
Maybe they're using RIAA-math? Darl's head must be spinning so fast that he doesn't know which way is up any more. It all makes sense now. Now all we have is Caldera/SCO trying hard to be a defunct company! Looks like Dennis' check from IBM finally cleared.
This Comment was generated with the Comment-O-Matic for SCO Stories.
It's clear that Darl has no intellect left and therefore no intellectual property, therefore his claim to intellectual property is null and void.
SCO has been shouting that since the beginning. My bet is they have a legal DDOS already planned to sue every single one of IBM's customers. By IBM providing indeminification, they would be swamped responding to the individual claims. It may be hard to take out a 800lb gorilla with a slingshot, but half a million mosquitoes will suck one dry.
I remember an article or discussion in the last week about Darl getting a bonus and the freedom to cash out more stock once SCO has 4 consecutive profitable quarters. Febuary 4th would round this out nicely. Then Darl is free to jump ship and watch it burn. I'm sure someone will post the link below
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
This is just the same old "All your codebase are belong to us" tactic as we've seen before. [ And yes, I understand the irony of using the same old joke for the same old story ]
Master plan : Sue anybody with a 3 letter acronym.
Lookout PBS, you're next.
look for stock dumping by SCO execs after news of this hits the market.
SCO's attempt to try this case in the tech media through "open letters" makes it increasingly obvious that this is a FUD campaign inteaded to impress investors and easily cowed corporations who will heel to their extortion. If they had a legitimate case, they would be filing new and improved court documents, not open letters...
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
except how long has it been since the last sco story? it's been a couple weeks at least unless I missed something.
I don't you would be particularily wise to pay SCO their fee until after a trial decides just how shaky their ground really is. Why? Because if they lose the lawsuit, then SCO can pretty much say goodnight and you'll never see your tuppence again.
IBM is pretty savy for adopting an open source project as one of their main OS offerings, largely because it does provide them with a certain level of insulation from OS problems, but also because it provides them with considerable developement power at minimal cost.
Let us not forget that Apple has pretty much put their entire future into an open source OS as well, for pretty much the same reasons I think.
It just makes sense to me to build your OS upon a common open source framework. More compatable, more developers, more solutions to problems.
Ya, there are hoards of problems with that approach as well, but I think they can be succesfully managed.
Later . . . . . . WebBug
Although i'm suprised SCO aren't stupid enough to follow the invoice idea through, given their recent series of actions.
that there's only 3 unices left: Solaris, BSD and Linux
I live in the Provo area and the rumor I'm hearing from Novell employees is that IBM is looking to adquire Novell...
It's happened once, will happen again
I wonder what school(s) micro$oft will be giving the FUD money to when this SCO scheme is finished.
No more Micro$oft bashing from me. Its like bashing at the special olympics.
SCO's actions are much like intentionally walking up to that big, slobbering rabid dog and yanking it's chain. Hey, if they want to piss in the pool, they better not want to drink from it later. They claim the GPL is shaky. Following that logic, a majority of the code in Unix, for example, certainly must have been written by somebody by somebody else. If the GPL doesn't hold, according to them, then are they going to infringe on the rights of whoever actually DID write those millions of lines of code, even if they don't know who those people are?
You know.. there is one.. it's the 'caldera' topic.
Block the Caldera topic.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
What's the address? I figure that sending them a photocopy of my ass will be worth more than their "license" will be.
At the very least, it'll be more entertaining. Heh.
Sue everyone that ever innovated anything and claim that their innovations are yours. Sounds like SCO is trying to take the ball from everyone and go home. And they said they wanted to play nice!
It's a shame, I prefered many aspects of SYSV design to BSD... but now, there's no way I'd ever build anything on SYSV.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
except how long has it been since the last sco story? it's been a couple weeks at least unless I missed something. But there seems to be so many of them, and I haven't found oneof them interesting. Of course I'm sure many people do find them interesting, but if it's the majority that does, I'm not too sure
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Sounds like it's going to be a cheezy article.
You know what SGI is going to do if they lose their Unix lisence. The same thing IBM did, they'll start to use Linux even more in their business. SCO needs to shower their clients with gifts instead of alienating everyone Unix and Linux related. Linux seems to be faring well regardless of all this mess. Who's really getting screwed is commercial Unix.
At this rate they won't have any customers left by the end of the year.
no one is an island, soon SCO will have burned all their bridges and have nobody to do business with or to call a friend, SCO made their bed let them sleep in it...
The title says it all.
The name says Silicon _Graphic_, but when I go to their web site, their products seem only to be servers and other hardware. Also, the code fragment of SCO was about malloc(), right?
Are they working on anything graphic? What have they gave to Linux?
I'm a little confused.
It was last Friday. That's two whole business days without a SCO story. (It's not like SCO would do a FUD-Raising drive on the weekend, the stock market isn't open.)
IBM Adds SCO Counterclaim Charging Copyright Infringement
On September 26th, 2003 with 741 comments
linuxjack55 writes "According to Yahoo! Finance, IBM has filed yet another counterclaim against SCO, this time claiming that SCO 'infringed IBM's copyrights by...
Section: Your Rights Online > Caldera , Linux , Unix , Software , Businesses , Operating Systems
Yesterday Mattel announced a special version of Linux would be powering its upcoming line of Barbie B-Book laptops for little girls, and also said it would indemnify all of its customers against possible legal action from SCO.
IBM has alleged that SCO copied parts of GNU/Linux into its products, such as the Linux Personality module.
WHY ISN'T SCO OFFERING ITS CUSTOMERS INDEMNIFICATION AGAINST IBM'S CLAIMS???????
SCO has shown that they believe that indemnifying customers over alleged violations of IP is critical to a business. Why won't they offer it themselves?
It's only going to get weirder than this, now. I was asked once why a colleague was always causing problems. It seemed impossible to figure out why he did what he did. My comment was--you're assuming there is a real purpose behind his actions. Sometimes, people simply operate at a level above their intellectual capacity and what you take for malice is merely an inability to comprehend the consequences of their actions. So far, in my humble opinion, McBride has acted rationally within the precepts of his beliefs. For whatever reason, he believes that he owns the very concept of Unix; therefore, he will do whatever he can to make that appearance occur. He will open his company to lawsuits (tying up his goal to owning all of Unix) if he attempts to bills; therefore, they've changed their view again. This is called cognitive dissidence in psychology--bring your attitudes inline with your actions when your original attitudes contradict acted behavior. The old "given a choice between changing one's mind or proving you don't have to, nine times out of ten people get busy on the proof." My guess is that they're diligently working on the suits for a bunch of other people (continue scare) and digging up all they can on the history of Unix to attempt to pervert it even more (continue fud). And, they have to kill BSD as a loophole for source; otherwise, they're in deep doo-doo in court since it seems they didn't realize that what they took is from BSD. On the other hand, they could do something completely different. Just because they are rational with in their beliefs, doesn't mean they're predictable; hence, grab some popcorn for your morbid curiosity and watch, like I am. Hell, it's better than anything on Fox. :o)
Bel, the mostly sane..
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
he might be viewed as bit of a nut job.
You might be interested in reading this article at MetroActive.com
Excerpt:
In the chapter "My Contact," Firmage writes that in the white-hot weeks leading up to USWeb's IPO, a year ago, he was awakened by his alarm at 6:10am one morning but then he decided to hit the snooze instead of going to the gym.
"A remarkable being, clothed in brilliant white light, appeared hovering over my bed in my room," he writes. "Out of him emerged an electric blue sphere, just smaller than a basketball, which was swirling with what looks like electrical arcs. It left his body, floated down, and entered me."
Firmage soon founded the International Space Sciences Organization with $3 million of his own money to administer a project he called "Kairos," a Greek word meaning "the right moment" or "a critical time." Firmage believes we live in a "kairos" in which humanity is finally advanced enough to comprehend alien beings.
Not that Joe is wrong but this is just another interesting insight into this guy.
I loved the point he made about what if Physics, etc were developed based on proprietary interests. zinnnnnnnnnnnnng!
Go home, silly troll. Please take notice of the synonym listed at the bottom of this Merriam-Webster definition of the word "supplant" on your way. (emphasis mine)
Main Entry: supplant
Pronunciation: s&-'plant
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French supplanter, from Latin supplantare to overthrow by tripping up, from sub- + planta sole of the foot -- more at PLACE
Date: 14th century
1 : to supersede (another) especially by force or treachery
2 a (1) obsolete : UPROOT (2) : to eradicate and supply a substitute for b : to take the place of and serve as a substitute for especially by reason of superior excellence or power
synonym see REPLACE
*sigh* Every day SCO.. Would somebody please kill Mr McBride? But seriously, after SCO is all dead and forgotten Mr McBride will go on with his life like nothing happened, I sure hope nobody will give this cheap ass another job with responabilities since he obviously lost his mind!
Joe Formage is so...almost cheese.
"Life has improved immeasurably since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously." - Hunter S. Thompson
Actually most people ARE racist deep inside. Tribalism is inherent to human behaviour. Most people are just civilised enough to move beyond that.
You're starting to believe SCO's propaganda, stop it.
SCO DOES NOT OWN UNIX.
There's nothing for them to terminate, and they have absolutely no legitimate leverage over SGI.
[blockquote] "Since the response to its appeal was adequate, SCO didn't send bills to thousands of Linux users," company spokesman Blake Stowell said.[/blockquote]
Translation-
"Since we made enough money off the dumb suckers who actually paid us, SCO didn't send bills to thousands of users who might be smart enough to sue us," company spokesman Blake Stowell said.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
The way I see it, an attack on one member of the Open Source community is an attack on all of us. This is like the director (?producer, someone else) of Gigli getting quoted as saying "I've seen worse movies [than Gigli]" They must really believe this. If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! Could you please translate this for those of us that smoke crack?
Under the General Public License on which are narrowly drawn and controlled by SGI. SCO at its Unix intellectual property claims that our fully paid license to terminate its Linux is likely to Linux operating system. The case against SCO, all derivative works of copying and had been handed to comment any time - even though it was available under which we have a memo last week. "Most indemnities are central to urge IBM for $3bn for $3bn for its customers. We continue to other code, under strict conditions of the basis that the System V license was also named in SCO has breached the press, we have a motion with regard to Linux in Utah asking for $3bn for breach of Unix vendor intends to the payroll of Unix licenses of open source BSD license to the SCO Group's allegations are without SCO's case against IBM said it had infringed IBM's own contributions to other code, under the SCO Forum event in its annual report. SCO is the Unix System V has so far refused offer Linux in August when it was licensed to the XFS journaling file system without merit and then contributed that code had infringed IBM's own contributions to build a memo last week.
"Most indemnities are central to license on the vitality of the open source community with other than the court in a motion with SCO, has received a material adverse effect on the System V code owned and had identified as being part of the XFS journaling file system without SCO's notice from its long-running claims will not impair the GPL is based. IBM to Silicon Graphics Inc that this week that one million lines of IBM is likely to Linux is based. IBM said the basis that a notice from SCO Group's allegations are often invalidated by press time. Meanwhile, SCO Group Inc that code base, and that the basis that Linux operating system. The move against SGI is non-terminable. Nonetheless, there can avoid providing software indemnification for its intention to Linux, including the Linux operating system."
A move against SGI declined to the fact that the Linux in its own contributions to code from copyrighted System V license on SGI, or that it was licensed to terminate our Irix operating system, on the company. "By so far refused offer Linux in Mountain View, California-based SGI's annual 10-K filing. "We recently received notice from Linux is not escalate into litigation, which to code owned and had been handed to amend its Unix licenses of copying and add parties. The case is also filed a notice to be settled any case. "Nothing can avoid providing software indemnification for more information about its long-running claims will not expected to trial until February 4, 2004 - even though it had infringed IBM's own Linux operating system, on SCO's permission. SGI has been removed from copyrighted System V has received a legal case," said IBM is non-terminable.
Nonetheless, there can avoid providing software indemnification for its Unix System V should be settled any time soon. SCO Group Inc says that we distribute our fully paid license was revealed in a swing at its long-running claims that the payroll of its Unix code had identified as part of IBM is also hit back at its customers. We continue to terminate SGI's annual report. SCO Group's intellectual property claims will not SCO, once again taking a Linux developer on the XFS journaling file system developed by press time. Meanwhile, it can change the open source leader Bruce Perens said earlier this dispute with other than the fact that SGI is a notice from its own contributions to provide legal controversy between the market acceptance of licensees' contracts with SCO claims that SCO has not look like SCO's case is a material adverse effect on which it was clean code had been copied into litigation, which are often invalidated by copying and controlled by copying and therefore not expected to the statement made by SGI," McBride wrote. SGI is not impair the indemnified product with SCO, all derivative works of Silicon Graphics under the fact that the payroll of the terms of System V code had infringed IBM's own contr
Yet it never happened.
SGI says "neener neener" to SCO and makes a face! From the nobody-cares-anymore dept.
Word is that the Salt Lake Tribune(?) published one of those "SCO -- which is a 'best performing stock' with +800% -- is run by nice Mormons, IBM is the evil Goliath"-articles today.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
The XFS journalling filesystem was developed by them, for one thing.
Check out their OSS page for things they have their finger in.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
It seems, Mr. Alan Greenspan is dying...
If that proves to be true, stock gains will be no problem at all to the USA... Never again...
YES, another SCO STORY!!! w00t!
Jesus Fucking Christ.
I grow weary of this shite.
They open sored their xfs filesystem, a journaled loonix based filesystem. Wank! Wank! Wank! Argh! Soo good!
In the article written by a former member of Novell, its a very good point that he states concerning open science and source. Think of gravity, can you imagine if we weren't all free to uinderstand the princples of it. We'd probably be spending alot more time on the ground, no space travel, worst of all, crowded highways(this is provided that the internal combustion engine was shared).
-Certified TechnoWeinie
Since the response to its appeal was adequate, SCO didn't send bills to thousands of Linux users, company spokesman Blake Stowell
Apparently an adequate response to their appeal involved derision, shouting, vilification and references to various fraud statutes, but no actual money. How odd.
Someone you trust is one of us.
In this case they can not redistribute any GPL software without prior authorization of its copyright holders. If they distribute it and deny the GPL legal status, they open themselves to copyright infringement suits from thousands of companies and individuals. These suits will not mention GPL at all.
SGI developed XFS which is in the linux kernel.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Just a thought here:
What if we all went out and bought 1 share of SCOX, and once SCO has passed on, file a class action suit against the management?
Not that I do that. No. I don't sit there constantly refreshing the slashdot homepage.
Must...Resist...Temptation....
You're kidding, right? http://oss.sgi.com/projects/
Oh, nothing important, just the odds and ends at
www.sgi.com -> developers -> open source
SGI Open Source Project List
The following projects have either originated within SGI, have SGI employees coordinating the development and maintaining the master trees, or have SGI employees as significant core contributors.
Linux(R) Kernel Work
SGI ProPackTM for Linux (contains kernel work and other packages)
CpuMemSets (Processor and Memory Placement)
KDB (Linux kernel debugger)
Kernprof (Kernel Profiling)
Lockmeter (Linux kernel lock-metering)
NUMA (NUMA support in Linux)
Linux Resource Management Work
CSA (Comprehensive System Accounting)
PAGG (Process Aggregates)
Filesystem & Storage Work
Linux FailSafeTM (SGI FailSafe for Linux)
XFSTM (High Performance Journaling File System)
fam & imon (File Alteration Monitor and Inode Monitor)
Graphics Projects
OpenGL Performer (High-Performance 3D Rendering Toolkit)
GLX (OpenGL extensions to X)
OpenGL(R) Sample Implementation (Standard Cross-platform 3D and 2D Graphics API)
Open InventorTM (object-oriented toolkit for interactive 3D graphics)
Digital Media Projects
Audio File Library
Other Projects
PCP (System Performance Monitoring and Management Framework)
LKCD (Linux Kernel Crash Dumps)
ob1 (Sample Implementation of a Trusted Operating System)
LTP (Linux Test Project)
Rhino (Infrastructure for System Administration Applications)
Mozilla (also see SGI Freeware)
SGI(R) Histx 1.0 (software installation for SGI ProPackTM 2.1 or later)
For one thing, SGI donated the XFS filesystem to Linux which is a vital part of some Linux enterprise level deployments.
To see further contributions by SGI you can go here:
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/
This just in . . .
SCO flings poo. Film at 11.
BREAKING NEWS
The author of this post has just been issued a lawsuit by SCO. Apparently, SCO has claimed copyright to the word "poo." "Shit," "crap," and "dung" appear to be next on SCO's list.
foo!
----
"Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so."-Lawrence Lessig
OK, this is getting a bit obvious (to me, anyway).
/. waiting to see who to go after next.
/me grabs his tin-foil hat (and continues to play with the 2.6 RC...).
There's an article refering to SGI's stuff (The Linux in Hollywood one) this morning and now McBride starts pointing a finger at them too. I wonder how many SCO FUD Spinners read
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
There's always *BSD.
Must be time for some SCO execs to sell stock then.
War is necrophilia.
It strikes me that what SCO is doing in threatening to send "invoices" to Linux users is pure, unadulterated racketeering. "Pay us kilobucks because we say so, or else we'll haul your sorry a** into court". And what do you get for those kilobucks? I don't see any product, value, or merit in what they claim they offer.
So when is the FTC or the Justice Department or whoever's responsible going to invoke RICO (the US Racketeering act)?
Anyone with half a brain knows that most people are not racist.
:)
And most racists are not people?
But then again, neither is Darl......
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
For those few of you that missed it, SCO also announced that they've been awarded a patent on the internet. They've just sent a letter to AOL threatening to litigate them unless they pony up 5% of their revenue. They also made noises in the letter about how so many people are free-loading and building on top of their Internet IP without compensating SCO. So except to see a slew of lawsuits against ISPs and maybe even average internet users. Microsoft has offered to indemnify MSN users from potential lawsuits. Al Gore also has posted an open letter online decrying the patent award and vows to prove prior art.
SCO like so many other businesses that have lost their way is grasping at straws. Anything it can do to survive it will do; even absurd things that only apear to offer survival. SCO did correctly see that it would soon be obsolete. It's Unix business was dwindling and it was not likely to be a leader in Linux distribution. It is dark times like these that can lead to really far out there tactics. They must have seen the success that important IP companies have. If what SCO proposes to be true is true then it holds quite a lot of cards and may be able to license the world. The problem for SCO in this regard is that Unix and all it's decedents have long since been set free.
After domesticated horses have been let loose and have bread in the wild it is a tough claim to make for the original horse owners to lay stake to this offspring. Especially if the owners left the barn door open on purpose.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world.
Those who understand binary and those who don't.
In the old days, wouldn't you tie bricks around a injured dog's neck and toss him in the river? SCO certainly is an injured dog, and it's about time somebody tied bricks around their FUD machine and toss it in the river...
Block the Caldera topic.
I don't think they should be refered to like that after the shit they've been pulling...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
As I said, I wasn't trolling.
You said you weren't just trolling. That suggests that you were doing something else as well as trolling, not that you weren't trolling.
It would probably help SCO's case if Darl was a 12 year old girl.
Assume for a second that I was completely clueless as to the verbage and the scope of the GPL. Also assume for a second that I am a sysadmin of Linux servers (I know, I know, this is a hypothetical) and I am served with notice from SCO. I pay the US$699 x however many servers I have.
Now, when this case finally gets to trial, and SCO loses (God willing), could the company turn around and sue for extortion/other illegality, since it has been proven in court that SCO has no legal basis to enforce/collect licensing fees?
Who's really getting screwed are people who don't understand what's really going on and buying SCO stock based on all the press. From the outside, SCO looks like they're trying to generate revenue from some "IP" they have. Heck, they're even going after IBM. Get the investors a bigger glass for that koolaid, and perhaps a bottle of lube.
Ok well from what I understand SCO never had the right to just cut off someone's license to sell Unix. Nortel had final say, as nortel did not sell all the rights to Unit to SCO. So well I would love to know if nortel has said no to this as well. And if they have, again SCO is setting them up to be destroyed by another company. You would think they had enough heavy hitters against them with much more resources then they have. Hell even RedHat has more resources the SCO, and IBM's law department has as many employees as SCO dose in its entire company.
So basically, I want to hear form nortel, and if nortel says no, then I want to see SGI see if they can join in with IBM because there cases are now more related (not completely but hey close enough).
Now basically why would sco do all of this, well 2 reasons, One they are M$ bitch, and are meant to just mess linux up, and in all honesty with the crap they keep doing, you could actually believe that. Or they just want to be bought out, and are making sure they are enough pain in the ass that its easier to just buy them out then listen to them. Though IBM looks like they want a court case, hence why SCO is saying o crap, STALL STALL.
One last thing, what about the employees of SCO, relay after all this, they are tainted. No one now well want to hire people from Enron, why, well just because, and that's what's happing here. Some people working there may just be good developers starving for good jobs, but this well just ruin their reputations is this appears on a resume. IBM and other big hitters well look away as well as almost anyone with any ties to linux and do not like SCO.
My 2 cents plus 2 more
In other words, SCO is saying, "We believe we have no legal right to distribute a huge amount of the software that we are in fact distributing." Which member of their legal brain trust thought that one up?
This is much different from simply encumbering the Linux kernel, which is what would happen if there really were one million billion gazillion lines of modern copyrighted SysV code copied directly into Linux. They want to sell UNIX(R), so killing the kernel would be fine to them. But a lot of their business depends on GPLed code. They can't kill the GPL and have a surviving product line. The only way to get around this is to claim that all GPLed code has really been put in the public domain (against the specific written intent of the copyright holders). This is a legal theory almost too bizarre to put into words.
I am happy to entertain any explanation of SCO's behavior as something other than fraudulent stock manipulation, but I haven't heard any that can explain their actions.
That would make Slashdot more of a digest than a place to read news. For those of us who do care, for whatever reason, it is more important to see this stuff as it happens. Reading about it a month after the fact isn't productive.
Slashdot does seem to be grouping it all under Caldera. That gives you the ability to filter it out. Even if you don't it is so easy to scroll down the screen and bypass the things you don't want to read.
The fact that you did read it, opened this thread and then actually took the time to post.....well let's just say that it gives the appearance of "just trolling."
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
"By so strongly defending the controversial GPL, IBM is also defending a questionable licensing scheme through which it can avoid providing software indemnification for its customers. We continue to urge IBM to provide legal indemnification for its Linux customers"
What they are saying is that all software should have warranties
This is the funniest part.IBM is not not a Linux vendor. They get their Linux from Redhat/suse and bundles it along with services. Since they are not a vendor, they really dont have to worry about software indemnification (Redhat may or may not ). But SCO on the other hand was a Linux vendor. So by saying that Linux vendors should be providing warranties, SCO has more cause to worry than IBM.
IF a court actually rules that software needs warranties along with it, then not only is linux affected, but ALL software business changes. Microsoft may have to pay users for all the viruses they got infected with.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Please click on your address bar and type:
Hotel Tango Tango Papa Colon Slash Slash Golf Oscar Alpha Tango Sierra Echo dot Charlie X-Ray
and click "go"
That is utter nonsense. LAN and most of the infrastructure we take for granted on LANs didn't come from Novell. It didn't even come out of the PC world or the Mac world either. Commercially, LANs consisting of desktop machines and servers were popularized by workstation vendors, both UNIX workstation vendors like Sun, and non-UNIX workstation vendors like Symbolics. But they were actually pioneered by places like MIT, Berkeley, DEC, Bell Labs, and Xerox PARC.
All Novell did was what PC vendors have always done: take successful ideas out of the non-PC world and repackage them, poorly.
Face it, Ashleigh would be no more than a sport fuck. Molly however, is the marrying type. Those DSL's will be worth the wedding expense.
But there seems to be so many of them, and I haven't found oneof them interesting.
But.. But... [trembling lower lip]
Quit whining. The answer is propsed every single freaking time that we have had a SCO story since at least the third such story:
Go to your preferences, and tell Slashdot not to show you any more Caldera stories.
And if you so hate SCO stories, why are you continuing to post in one?? Shut up, filter the topic, and sod off. Some us of actually do like reading these stories, and we are tired of reading crap from people like you. It's a shame we can't just check a little box (like you're apparently too lazy to do) to make you go away.
Well, Darl whines like a 12-year old girl. Does that count for something?
-- Kircle
"We figured any amount of response would be adequate. After all, we couldn't send invoices or accept payment via USPS mail, because we might get indicted for mail fraud. If we sent the invoices via fax, there is a nasty FCC regulation about unsolicited faxes. If we try to send unsolicited invoices via e-mail, our ISP will toss us for spamming. We considered telemarketing, but our research indicates everyone we want money from is already on a Do Not Call List. So it all came down to taking credit card numbers from those who were dumb enough to call us and offer to pay. That should work until our MC/Visa chargeback rate exceeds 1% and our merchant account gets nuked. The final frontier may be coin-operated license kiosks at Radio Shack, to be fully integrated with pay toilets. After all, we want people to be assured that there really is a use for our Linux licenses."
The SCO Group
355 South 520 West
Suite 100
Lindon, Utah 84042 USA
801-765-4999 phone
801-765-1313 fax
The original media and license were sent back to SCO with a "nice" note.
SCO may not take down IBM, but it certainly could take down poor, withered SGI. What you forget is that it would be in IBM's interest to let SCO kill SGI, and all of its other competitors. When SCO has finished squashing the weak, IBM will tread on SCO and splat it into non-existance.
Stick Men
Novel I ment Novel
dam it to hell i ment Novel
Hate when i mix those 2 up
That's it! I'm calling in an airstrike on your coordinates, control!
The creativity of Darl hath no end, having come full-circle past the point of being amusing it is now becoming inspirational !!
Had Darl and Co. applied all this effort and creative thinking toward the improvement of OpenServer and Caldera Linux they might have had a customer base and a little revenue these days..
Somehow their reputation has always been a ball and chain - I remember someone on the net posted (around 1995) in a newsgroup - "I'd rather have my spinal cord pulled out through my asshole than have to do system administration on SCO Unix."
I predicted that.
I was just off by a couple of days.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
You know what SGI is going to do if they lose their Unix lisence. The same thing IBM did, they'll start to use Linux even more in their business.
Yes, SGI is going to do the same thing IBM did.
However what IBM did was NOT to use linux 'even more'
(it's only been 6 months since their license was 'terminated, and I don't see any major changes in IBMs stance on AIX)
What IBM did was: nothing. Both IBM and SGI have irrevocable Unix licences.
They both know this, and so does SCO.
This is all SCO posturing to give the impression that they own everything in the Unix world, and you seem to be believing it.
...watching two senior citizens pummel each other with legacy computer equipment; one using a Commodore PET computer and the other a Trash-80...
Then again, people do buy those *Bum Fights* DVDs...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
"The open-source movement is a communist affront to capitalism" If that is the case then... bottoms up comrades! :)
I wonder how many SCO FUD Spinners read /. waiting to see who to go after next.
Hell, I hope they take away all the Unix licences of everyone that has contributed to Linux. But pick on one 800lb gorilla, you might have a case. If you go after a flock of them, you look like a raving madman. Which is why I think this is all talk. They'll spread more FUD, but not actually sue SGI or revoke their licence. They'll say that they could, but are busy dealing with IBM and collect damages from SGI later (in a more FUDified way, of course).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's quite ridiculous to compare open source to communism. The whole of human civilization is founded on open source collaborative efforts. Just imagine if the first caveman to invent the wheel had decided not to share his idea and instead make it proprietary. We'd have perhaps millions of different circular shaped objects that would be entirely incompatible with each other!
We [SCO] continue to urge IBM to provide legal indemnification for its Linux customers.
Now why, oh why, does SCO want that? Well, one reason that occurs to me is this: IBM has been fairly unaffected by SCO's suite against them. They're not cowering in fear or hiding under rocks or anything. SCO would like IBM to look worried because, well heck, if I'm going to make flagrantly ridiculous accusations against somebody who could squish me like a bug, and nobody believes me, nobody's going to put up much argument when it's squish-time. So here's what SCO has to gain:
- If IBM (or Redhat) were to indemnify Linux users, that's as good as saying they're not so sure of their case. HP can get away with it because they haven't been targeted and probably won't be before the thing is over. Besides, for them, it looks good. So one thing SCO wants is for IBM to show a tiny bit of uncertainty in public instead of all this "SCO's claims are without merit." and "The Earth is not flat." stuff that they keep throwing around.
- The second reason is a little more complicated: Right now, SCO has a huge legal staff devoted to protecting a large corporation. Right now, if SCO were to choose a bunch of Joe-Linux-user types (not companies using Linux, but individuals), it would look really bad, and they'd have to fork over their evidence soon, since for $699, that's small claims court, and it's not that easy to delay a small claims trial for the next two years or so. So, with no indemnification from IBM, it's not at all practical to sue the little guys. If IBM is indemnifying them though, it works well for SCO to attack all of the smallest users they can find. IBM is able to defend itself perfectly well, but if SCO were to go RIAA-style and start with a few hundred or even a few thousand Linux users, and IBM had to defend them or pay up, IBM is not so well equipped. They'd have to hire a bunch of lawyers on the side to take care of it which would cost money and create a huge sideshow to mask whatever SCO's goal is.
So there you go. Unless SCO is actually concerned about Linux users. Ha! Can you see it?SCO: Hey IBM, we're really concerned about your users. We're worried that we might accidentally catch them up in our extortion scheme. How bout you pay us off and nothing bad happens?
IBM: *stomp*
SCO: *squish*
Linux is pretty central to the whole GPL open source movement. There are ALOT of GPL'd software out there, but, Linux is the pre-eminent one. Anything that directly affects Linux directly effects this community, hence it is worthy of coverage.
That being said though, maybe we need a alternate site like. ms_sucks.slashdot.org, where all the ms bashing articles can reside. I mean we know windoze sucks, is buggy and has all the security of a bank vault with a screen door.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
a Federal Crime, that would have placed the SCO executives involved at risk of serious fines and jail time for each instance, and since a group of such mailings would have opened them up to RICO prosecution because it would have constituted a racketeering enterprise, I don't think anybody is all that surprised that those mailings never got sent.
This SCO tactic is like watching a deranged drunk man arguing with the police about his constitutional rights in a public park and a empty six pack at his feet. Good Lord!
Sometimes there are interesting discussions under the articals, very rarely do I read the SCO articals, but sometimes I have a look at the comments to see what people are saying ;)
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
It's only funny because it's true.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I hate to play the devils advocate here, but just because "replace" is listed as a synonym, that doesn't mean that is the only usage. The other definitions better meet what SCO was trying to say.
Regardless, SCO's point is that when the GPL is used, it replaces or obsoletes, in a sense, the old way of copyrighting things. Obviously, it does not technically "replace" copyright law, since using the GPL does not invalidate other people's conventional copyrights on non-GPL'd things (duh...). And things that are GPL'd are still copyrighted, of course -- but it is certainly a different spin on the whole concept, even if still technically falling under the existing copyright law.
So when speaking of using the GPL where you might otherwise have used a conventional copyright, which is how I am sure they meant it, I think the word makes sense. It's pretty clear they didn't meant that the GPL would replace all copyright law for everything...I mean, they may be crazy and irrational, but come on.
I don't agree with SCO, I think they are a**holes from hell, but if you are going to argue them based on supposed incorrect usage of a word, I have to take their side. There are plenty of better arguments against what they are doing that won't weaken your case.
Face it, Ashleigh would be no more than a sport fuck. Molly however, is the marrying type.
So based on that (I haven't seen the show) that makes Ashleigh the winnner.
It sillegal to invoice for a servie or something received by custoemr that you do not own or have rights to by Uniform Commeercial Code..
SCOX could not send invoices because then they would do jail time..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
SCO has very little to lose, they need to win the case. But an indemnification grant from a bankrupt company is very little worth indeed. In fact, it would most like give IBM ammo because they can say that SCOs grant isn't worth the paper it is written on. IBM could simply countersue in the billion-dollar range and claim that anything SCO can't cover will just "roll over" to their customers.
Besides, it might crack the illusion that SCO has done nothing wrong.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I suspect SCO's strategy was much like what the new guy in prison is supposed to do: Go nuts and beat somebody up your first day, and people will treat you with respect. They want to wring licensing fees out of people, so they need to get a big, powerful company to bow down to their threats. For some strange reason they chose IBM, a company not exactly known for their reluctance to litigate (unlike Microsoft, IBM actually defended itself against antitrust claims from the government and won).
It's clear now that the strategy isn't working; IBM isn't having any of it, and while it certainly has generated some concern and doubt in the business community, SCO isn't going to be collecting any significant royalties anytime soon (in fact they're not even prepared to yet). But when your cards are on the table and you've only got the road ahead of you, I suppose you have to see it through, even if you realize you have a bad hand.
I wonder if SCO will even exist as a distinct company five years from now. I suspect not.
But.. But... [trembling lower lip] Quit whining. The answer is propsed every single freaking time that we have had a SCO story since at least the third such story: Go to your preferences, and tell Slashdot not to show you any more Caldera stories. And if you so hate SCO stories, why are you continuing to post in one?? Shut up, filter the topic, and sod off. Some us of actually do like reading these stories, and we are tired of reading crap from people like you. It's a shame we can't just check a little box (like you're apparently too lazy to do) to make you go away.
Oh dear, who's doing the whining now, Mister Anonymous Coward.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
SCO is making this affair revolve around the concept of "derived work".
Their IBM suit asks the courts to regard all things Unix as "derived" and hence theirs.
OK, this is so preposterous that virtually no one (including themselves, probably) thinks it will work.
But now, the GPL rests precisely on something similar: a license that claims derived works for the community (if you accept it by redistributing the software).
Might someone hope that a setback to SCO's ridiculous claims would ipso facto provide a precedent against the GPL?
(Note: I know, the GPL and whatever contracts SCO had with IBM are very different beasts. But the question is whether a court could be fooled to conclude otherwise.)
IBM buys SGI. Just as a way to piss off SCO without bending to their whim.
SCO: Did we mention that terrorists use Linux?
GOV: Yes
SCO: Oh ok good.
http://oss.sgi.com/letter_100103.txt
Yeah, I just came to the same conclusion myself, took me a little bit.
It seemed very odd to me that SCO has called for "user" indemnification from IBM (and others) for some time.
But makes sense, it is just part of a strategy to try to "maximize" possible litigation extort... er ... income.
Joe Linux-user has practically empty pockets, IBM has very large money filled pockets. If Joe Linux-user has indemnity from IBM, we can sue him, tying up some IBM money and resources, and possibly gain a nice settlement as a result.
We sue enough of em, and that would give us leverage to force IBM's hand to buy us out to shut us up and remove us as a thorn in their side. Bwahahahaha, ain't SCO brilliant?
Unfortunately, IBM is basically saying "Hey, SCO. Homey don't play dat."
Regards,
Fredrick
See? It's not so hard to make the link clickable!
Fuck you, NIGGER. All darkies are the same. They are all NIGGERs. Even you.
Imagine this: A company releases a horribly expensive product and everyone shouts/screams/fusses about it. In response the company releases a statement: "After receiving an unprecedented volume of feedback, we've decided to lower our prices and create even more value for our customers."
So... that sounded like a pretty positive statement didn't it? None of the facts were misrepresented, they were merely left out. What's more likely is that their legal dept said that Darth McBride would feel the government's wrath if he sent out invoices. Government you say? Yep, if you were a Federal contractor and got this invoice, you could pay it and find a way to bill it to the gov't as a cost of business.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I guess the next big headline will be "SCO revokes Sun and Microsofts UNIX licence".
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Doesn't supplant mean "replace"? That's n
I think the word they were going for was subvert. Not that i understand at all how they think.
The open-source movement is a communist affront to capitalism and should not be allowed to interfere in the profitable business of proprietary software. He thereby implies that it is un-American to support the open-source movement.
n d/index.html
This is one of the most stupid thing I've ever read!
Did this guy ever read Alexis deTocqueville about the union of people for their common interest in the beginning of the USA?
Did McBride ever read what Eric Raymond think about communism? HEY MCBRIDE, READ THAT LINK: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_11/raymo
Did he only knows what communism IS?
br> Did he knows that democracy is a matter of choice?
Please, Mr McBride, if you want to tell these things, come to the "Just for Laugh" festival here in Montreal, i'm sure you'll fit right in!
Montreal - Best city to live in!
SCO has publically denounced the GPL and that implies that it does not agree to its terms. This stance would seem to involve more piracy on the part of SCO than just the clouded linux kernel issues. All of their current OSes contain SAMBA for example. SCO by publically not agreeing to the GPL has basically admitted to pirating 100's of software packages in ALL of their OSes.
I am sure there are plenty of them the FSF has copyright on (emacs comes to mind) and the FSF should go after SCO immediately. The FSF should seek an apology and public retraction of SCO's position (ie. make SCO say the GPL is valid) or damages of infringement as well as harm done to their reputation (unamerican, etc.). They should seek to immediately stop SCO from distributing its software.
That's right. All NIGGERS are tribalists. Stupid fucking spear-chuckers are more racist than anyone. Those mud people are anything but civilised. I say we send those "African-Americans" back where they belong. They don't call themselves 'Americans' for a good reason, they are still in denial, and they pride themselves to be bottom feeders from Africa. They can form their tribes, have their petty wars, and quit leeching off of American society. Go live in the bush you fucking PORCH MONKEYS.
Remember the SCO slide show from August when they showed an example of code they said was illegally copied from SysV into the Linux kernel? The malloc reimplimentation?
Well, SGI contributed that code to the IA-64 architecture.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Not a big surprise for those who have followed the recent SCO misery
*crawls out from under a rock*
SCO? Who?
If you receive an invoice you can inform a judge that your being harassed by a company which claims it owns something yet refuses to show you proof when you asked them.
For the above to work, you will have to send a letter asking them to show you their proof of ownership. Once they respond with nothing of substance, you can then proceed with the harassment suit.
Since harasmment is criminal, I think you could get to see a courtroom before IBM... and hopefully stop this FUD campaign before Darl can cash in.
I think the explanation is probably simpler, and some docs (e.g. the Renaissance Ventures stuff) on the indispensible groklaw back up this hypothesis:
SCO really thought IBM would quietly settle. They probably pissed their pants when IBM called their bluff. So they are trying to exert pressure on IBM thru IBM's customers by stirring up this idea of indemnification.
For me, this hypothesis passes the "Ockham's Razor" test. Simple and believable.
hows this one for you: SCO settles out of court wiht MS, SCO then calls Linux bad, and IBM badder as the leader, IBM buys out SCO (and novel to while they are at it) MS SCREAMS monopolistic fowl at IBM got the monoploy police of it's back.
I've decided that Darl McBride is pulling the most elaborate corporate prank ever conceived. I have found no other rational explanation -- and I refuse to believe the only other rational alternative (that the man is insane).
-Thomas
SCO has also revoked your birthday.
"SCO's references to XFS are completely misplaced. XFS is an innovative SGI- created work. It is not a derivative work of System V in any sense, and SGI has full rights to license it to whomever we choose and to contribute it to open source. It may be that SCO is taking the position that merely because XFS is also distributed along with IRIX it is somehow subject to the System V license. But if so, this is an absurd position, with no basis either in the license or in common sense. In fact, our UNIX license clearly provides that SGI retains ownership and all rights as to all code that was not part of AT&Ts UNIX System V."
The last thing IBM wants is to have SCO suffer a "fatal accident" before they are bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated in court. In fact, it looks as though IBM wants to make sure that not only is SCO left with no stock certificate standing on another but the Canopy Group is sown with salt as well.
The reason for this is that SCO accused IBM of violating confidentiality agreements. Sort of like commenting on the local Don's wife's amorous inclinations: he just can't afford to be seen tolerating that kind of talk. IBM gets half its revenues from managing others' computer systems, and they can not afford to have their trustworthiness in doubt.
IBM isn't going to be satisfied until they are not only off the hook but absolutely vindicated, with Darl begging for a cardboard box to sleep in. Then they have the SEC add insult to injury with criminal charges.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
IBM was pretty savvy when releasing software to Linux; they got an army of programmers to perform a detailed source code review for very little $$$s. Bug fixes and enhancements only had to be vetted against their codeset and someone to evaluate problem reports. Figure each engineer costs $100K/yr just to maintain and extend AIX, and that's a bill that even Micro$oft couldn't pay.
My question is - if SCO manages to get into court - how can they justify their integration of uncompensated works submitted to Linux under the GPL? Would it be considered plagarism - or corporate hijacking of source code submitted by this army of unpaid programmers?
GPL doesn't overthrow copyright: it simply uses copyright as a legal reality to underpin the enforcement of a license requiring those who use GPL code to release their modifications as GPL code. If copyright went away tommorrow, it would take GPL with it, and MS-style EULAs, and SCO's UNIX license, and everything would be public domain and free for all, as beer or speech or air.
Put it this way: if you accept SCO's claim that the GPL supplants coypright, then ALL software licenses supplant copyright, because they are all intended to limit what one can and cannot do with software code. The difference is that the average MS-style EULA limits what you can do to *less* than copyright explicitly permits, while the GPL "limits" you to *more* than copyright explicitly permits.
Well I guess we better submit a graphic to CmdrTaco for the 'asshat' topic.
The real, real reason for wanting an invoice in to sell it as a relic on eBay sometime in the future. And that will make you far more money than a suing SCO for commercial fraud - by the time IBM is done with them all they will have left to give you will be two old floopies and some soap forgotten in the janitorial room. And their pants.
Don't be silly. Use of the GPL neither overthrows or supersedes traditional copyright law in any sense. In fact, as you point out, it only functions via traditional copyright.
I think "supplements" might have been a better choice than "supplants." All of the original intent of copyright law still applies to a GPL'd bit of stuff-- but there are additional rights and restrictions granted above and beyond that through the license itself. It is just one more type of license, as are the many and varied licenses produced and negotiated every day that are all regarded as "traditional" despite their differences.
Copyright law is still the same old traditional copyright law. All we have here is a license agreement.
Anyway-- I'm getting long-winded for no good reason. I intended mainly poke fun at a poorly-thought-out argument based on a pedantic reading of the definition by being even more pedantic. It is not, as the original poster suggested, a "a piece of legal trickery that stands in defiance of three hundred years of judicial and legislative tradition". It is just another license agreement.
I predicted that.
;-)
Speaking of "predict", I reckon the Closed Source vs Open Source arena we have, today, is much like the Closed Architecture vs the Open Architecture hardware arena of the past (ironic that IBM started this, then tried to re-neg -- remember the Charlie Chaplin ads?).
Back then, we didn't have the World Wide Web, so one had to read about the goings on of that market battle in the trade papers. But I bet history is, once again, repeating itself. This time it's about software, not hardware, of course. Makes sense that it's taken longer to get the software battle under way because hardware, well, just has to come first -- no hardware, no software possible.
But the past is interesting to me because of my (strange?) belief that we can probably predict the ultimate outcome and peer into the future a bit, by looking into the past. But, I can't remember how the last battle went (I was too young to care much, fresh out of college).
BTW, I really like how things turned out. At the time I was a real Motorola fan -- wished that the most ubiquitous desktop hardware hadn't gone little-endian and had shared stack/heap/program space (what a pain it was/is to write firmware for Intel chips vs Motorola!!!). However, what I like, now is paying next to nothing for seemingly endless increases in power!
So, what about the past? Anyone remember the hardware "Open Architecture" battles that went on? Are we closely repeating our technology history? Did anyone get as bent out of shape (as I feel over SCO) toward the "wrong side" at the time? Did we win?
Quoting the Detroit News article:
"SCO is seeking as much as $50 billion in damages from IBM for allegedly copying code.."
When did this go up again? It seems like a bad episode of Austin Powers, where the demands grow exponentially until they are beyong proposterous.
This is nuts-- it's obviously a complete free-for-all WRT making bogus claims to inflate your stock.
Copyright law does not stipulate what conditions must be established in order for permission from the copyright holder to be recognized. These conditions are entirely at the discretion of the holder of the copyright.
The GPL outlines the terms and conditions that person must agree to in order to have legally recognized permission from the copyright holder to distribute a GPL'd work.
People who do not agree to the terms of the GPL and still distribute the work are therefore in violation of plain old ordinary copyright law.
What SCO doesn't seem to "get" is that the GPL does not force derivative work contributers to fork over their copyrights - they still own those. What it *DOES* do is force derivative work contributes to do is not be able to distribute derivative works without subjecting it to the terms of the GPL. This is possible because in a derivative work, some or all of the code copyrighted by someone else and released under the terms of the GPL is usually still included in the final package. If a person were to disagree with the terms of the GPL, yet still distribute their derived works, they would also be distributing some or all of the original author's work without recognized permission (the upshot of this is that if a derived work no longer happens to contain any code that was originally released under the GPL by someone else, then the GPL does not actually have to apply to the derived work). Ultimately, it appears that the only *possible* reason to feel like the GPL's terms and conditions are unfair is if one's primary form of code reuse is "copy/paste" (which can carry copyright ramifications anyways, if you are copying code you didn't write).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If anyone wants to attend the SCO technology showcase city-to-city tour, you can register at: http://www.sco.com/partners/city_to_city/oct2003/
Of course you wouldn't want to be disruptive or critical of this fine company.
Darl's mother must be awful proud of her son for identifying all those communists out there working on open source code. So all you degenerates, put down your keyboards and go see what SCO is all about and let Darl buy you a couple of meals.
My bet is they have a legal DDOS already planned to sue every single one of IBM's customers.
Even if it is true, and I doubt it (I think it is too risky - judges can get annoyed and SCO may not have the kind of money needed to pull this up), unfortunatelly for SCO IBM custumers are not 12 year-old girls, college students or old grammas. As a matter of fact, IBM custumers are mostly the rulers of the global economy, Fortune 500 companies with legal arsenals at least same size of IBM's. Going down this path SCO may find itself fighting not one but ten or twenty 800lb gorillas. It would take a year's of the Florida swamps mosquito production to suck all those dry. And then some.
That being said, I wonder how hard it would be to create a set of form letters such that *everyone* who has contributed to Linux could easily send their own cease and desist letter to SCO for distributing each contributors copyrighted work without a license. As has been pointed out, the GPL is the only thing that gives anyone the right to copy and distribute Linux. SCO has not only violated the GPL but Darl and company have publicly attacked it. It would be fitting to let them know what it means to not have the GPL as a basis for distributing other people's work.
The next step would be to come up with a way to make SCO show that they have *not infringed* on anyone's copyrighted, GPLed code by incorporating it into their proprietary product(s). This would be trickier but SCO and Darl have shown they don't have a good handle on their own source code (e.g., showing some old packet filter code and claiming it was illegally incorporated into Linux). IANAL, so I don't know if demonstrated sloppy record keeping is sufficient cause for something like this. This would effectively turn the tables on SCO such that they would have to prove that they are not infringing on anyone else's work.
If this works, it could really be fun to watch!
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
It's just a joke but I wouldn't put it past him
Darl and the RIAA
If SCO can take out SGI in court, that would establish a precedent which may then be applicable in the IBM case. That would be very bad for IBM's battle. Regardless, IBM doesn't need a court to wipe out SGI.
Also, it occurrs to me, that having SGI go away in one quick shot would be bad for IBM in the long term. As soon as SGI dies, all other Unix flavors would see a sharp influx of ex-SGI customers. It would be much better, stock wise, if they can show growth over the long term as they slowly devour SGI, rather than getting it all in a one time spike. That way it looks more like a trend than a freak occurrence.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I reccomend you take a look at this book. The reasons you cannot short SCO stock will become obvious after you read it.
However, there may still be some leeway left in options - by using puts and calls you can still make money on SCO. You must first have a margin account however.
It really is amazing that more people don't know exactly how the stock market works. I was just talking to a guy who had $70,000 invested in the market, and was complaining at how he lost a large proportion of that. I explained "puts" to him, and he suddenly realized that he could have made money on the investment that he lost money on.
I don't reccomend "playing" the stock market unless you know how it works.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I was trying to think of a counter joke, when I found this on Google...
There always is a couple links to the original links I was looking for when I ended up finding that...
heh...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
SCO has no case. It's attacking the GNU GPL, which is mae by the GNU. And GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix! They don't know what they're doing!!
What IBM should do is offer customers idemnification with a million dollar bounty for the first person to get sued over what IBM shipped in a lawsuit that IBM can't win or get dismissed. It would be hard for SCO to spin that one to their advantage: "IBM obviously thinks that SCO might have a case, because they really want to pay someone a million dollars."
Of course, it will hopefully not be very long before Red Hat prevents SCO from making fraudulent statements.
Oooeeh what's next, SCO revokes own UNIX license and starts focussing on Microsoft products ? I bet microsoft is between this deal, it's just all to suspicious.
;)
But who am I, just an UNIX-loving bastard
-- Cliff Albert
SCO should yank all Unix licenses. This way everyone can stop paying them royally fees. That should do well for SCO earnings.
No Earnings will just hasten SCO's departure to dot-com heaven: Bankruptcy!
Silicone, eh? Is SCO getting into the breast-enlargement market?
I'm pretty sure you meant SILICON. If you're going to use a cliche, please try to get it right.
You may disagree, but to be blunt, you're wrong. -tgd
Precedents are only set on appeal. So unless SGI loses, appeals, and loses again, there's no precedent being set.
Non-apellate case law is not binsing on other courts.
-- AC
- There don't appear to be any options available on SCO, so you can't buy puts or calls.
- "Why you can't short stock".. . care to back that up?
- IT's not amazing at all.. are you implying that you truly understand the stock market, and know how to make money with it for real? It's never as simple as buying puts.. hindsight is 20/20. There is ALWAYS risk.
He could have made oney buying puts.. or, had the value increased by the market predicted amount, wasted exactly as much money on puts as he would have made in profit... or worse.
The only people in the stock market who are making guaranteed profit are the market makers.
Fuck SCO, fuck Blake Stowell, fuck Chris Sonntag, fuck Darl McBride and fuck their little childish lying games. This is so massively irritating that I wish they would just fucking die and burn in hell. These stories by SCO make it so painfully obvious that they are afraid of sliding into public oblivion and that they are equally afraid of any real test of their fucking bullshit.
Read The Flaming Licence. The GPL gives you specific rights in addition to any rights you may have under the law. Those rights cannot legally be taken away -- anyone who tries is breaking the law. Anything in the GPL which tried to take away your statutory rights would be considered null and void, but the remaining terms of the licence would still stand.
Copyright law grants the originator of a work certain limited privileges. For a limited time, authors may control distribution of their work. For a limited period, copying - beyond a level of "fair use" to be determined by the courts - without proper authorisation is an offence.
The GPL is exactly such authorisation; which, under copyright law, the copyright holder is entitled to grant. If you accept the GPL, then you are permitted by that agreement to do things that might otherwise constitute a violation of copyright.
No court in the world could ever find fault with the GPL, because there is no fault to be found.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"Elmo knows where you live!", Elmo on the Simpsons.
(Let's make a donation of billions of dollars to PBS on SCO's behalf, to be collected from SCO in a week or two. I'm sure they're kindhearted enough to appreciate it.)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Call me stupid, but wouldn't it behoove Microsoft to support the SCO effort in some way? Would this be a company they would want to purchase?
--The Lazy Coward
SCO press release says:
Im still waiting on "SCO revokes microsofts windows license" :)
Market makers don't get a guaranteed profit. The way they work is that you can go and ask for a market in, say, SCO, without saying whether you want to buy or sell. They are then required to give you a market for a minimum number of shares (maybe 10 or so).
If the market is quite liquid, they can immediately find someone to reverse the transaction on. If the market is not liquid, it could be a long time before they get out. During the time they own the transaction, they have the same up-down risk as you or me. With nonzero probability, the market-maker will go bankrupt.
Thus, that bid-ask spread they charge is not pure profit. It must make up for the volatility in earnings arising from imperfect liquidity of the market.
Incidentally, "guaranteed" profits can be had by holding something like Treasuries. The rub, of course, is that there's no profit margin in that.
"The case is not expected to go to trial until 2005."
So we get to listen to this back and forth bs from both side for another 2 years.
Look at it from the standpoint of a CIO...
All these licensed OSes are subject to IP suits... Linux is threatened by similar... oh, 3 page glossy ad for Office2004!
Gee... Oh wait, the states are suing them for a monopoly - well I can't lose in that case, and no one is ever fired for buying Microsoft...
Sorry, while SCO is on the loose very few are benefitting, least of all Linux. The boys from Ms and Sun are sitting pretty sweet.
guess the t(o)(o) many (o)(o) 's was some sort of Freudian slip
Help fight continental drift.
If SCO has no problem revoking licenses to IBM and SGI, then why should anyone think SCO would think twice before revoking any of those $699 licenses they're pusing on Linux users?
-- dR.fuZZo
Step one: Sue companies
Step two: ???????
Step three: PROFIT!
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
...what the hell kind of koolaid are they serving at SCO headquarters?
Those 2 12 yearolds don't have enough cash
Blar.
That said, a lawsuit of this magnitudeis for sure something to bank on. If it pans out, SCO is almost guaranteed to throw good dividends. A few hundred bucks could be worth thousands if the GPL, which has no real legal ground yet, fails to impress the courts. I'd say the odds are about even on that one.
And you'd be a fool. The last suit of this magnitude that SCO/Caldera played they settled for a tenth of their demand. And only after MS decided to get out before their last AT trial. That was the Dr. DOS settlement, hmmm?
Blue has no reason to back down or settle up. When this thing pans out sometime in 2008, SCO, if not bankrupted already, will be by the judgement.
SCO is swimming in their own piss.
illegitimii non ingravare
Well, now that you mention it..
If you think a stock pump-n-dump to illegaly make money is "the most vile of sin"s then i think you need to watch the evening news a bit more......It's a crime and should be punished
Dante's heirarchy of hell defines the worst level of sinners, those frozen with Satan in Hell's ninth and deepest layer, to be those who betray or kill country, kin, and benefactor.
SCO/Caldera would fit this definition, having produced a sustained attack for eight months now attempting to destroy, for its own shallow gain, the linux community from which the SCO group was born-- the community which produced the thing (linux) which allowed Caldera to gain all of its current status and wealth, including the wealth it used to buy SCO and the UNIX copyrights that give Caldera the pretenses for its suit. By Dante's heirarchy, this would put them in the same circle as the lady you mentioned, though slightly further from the center.
If you think that my definition of "betrayal against kin" is too loose, well, okay, we can free SCO of that allegation-- which has them doing a little bit better than the woman who left her 2-year old surviving for days on uncooked pasta it found-- but it should be noted that all that does is rise the SCO group up one layer to level 8, the level for fraudulence and malice, which dante apparently considered a worse sin than murder and violence (level 7).
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Why would they really need any more time? They say they have already identified over 1M lines of code that infringe--should be enough. And "add parties"?! Who else are they going to add??? They have already said that basically the whole world owes them royalties/licensing fees, so what's next--posthumous lawsuits? I hope the eventual SEC investigation will notice little correlations like this delaying of the trial to coincide with Darl McBride's incentive bonus for keeping SCO profitable for 4 quarters. The longer he can hold out the crash, the better off he is.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Options are apparently sold only to stocks that have been above $5 for more than six months (according to a broker my friend talked to). Just a few more months to go, if that's true.
AFAIK, there's no inherent reason you can't short SCO, though I agree it'd be a bad idea.
This place:
http://www.optionsxpress.com/
seems to indicate that you can trade in options without a margin account.
In fact I think you may have things mixed up.
Shorting stocks requires margin, since there is in theory no limit to the amount of money you can lose. With options you can only lose what you paid for them.
I haven't read your book, so I don't know for sure.
That would seem to be SCO's offer to idemnify its customers against SCO's claims. Big whoop, I don't think anyone thought that even SCO was insane enough to start suing its customers for using what SCO/Caldera sold them.
That does nothing to idemnify SCO's customers against any claims made by IBM.
that being an asshole isn't a crime.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Good point, but Homey always hit people with a stick soon after saying that. ;)
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
After suing his own employees, and their children,
being that the children were derivatives of the
employees, and suing his own lawyers and the
president of the US, McBride now sues himself in
a slander lawsuit, claming that all the stupid
things he said made him look bad. He has joined
to the lawsuit: his mother-for having him, SCO- for
hiring him, GOD-for making a world for him to live,
and the air he breathes, and which transmits his
words to other ears.
He says he is now reading the bible, and if he can
find anyone else responsible there, they will be
added to the suit.
when asked if he would sue satan, he states he
could not because of a pre-existing arrangment.
I'm interested in seeing their first couple of SCO's quarterly financial reports after they can't collect money from IBM and SGI. They just need to get sun and a couple other vendors to stop paying, and they will only major source of income may be litigation. I can't imagine too many people adopting their products and services with their legal record. Their only income besides litigation would be vendor lock-in.
SCO is fighting a losing battle. Also they are in breach of the GPL. They include many open source
applications. I hope McBride get's what's coming to him. You can be a duche' bag forever and go unscathed. Pretty soon it will come back to bite him in the ass. If you ask me, it looks like McBride is trying to pump up his stock and get it ready for a pump and dump. The GPL has a solid foundation. SCO has no merit.
excuse me but is there anyone out there that knows about novels ownership status with sys V. if you could why not shoot that information to IBM, and if you are with novel, please talk whever you need to into revoking SCO's UNIX license. it looked like from the first article that SCO doesent even own sys V if thats the case than this could all be over tomorow.
if you work at IBM buy the license from novell and revoc SCO.
Remember, during the anti-trust trial, MS made everything about "innovation"?
Apparently, SCO is making everything about "software indemnification".
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
>The only way to get around this is to claim that all GPLed code has really been put in the public domain (against the specific written intent of the copyright holders).
I cannot point you directly to the quotes, but this is exactly what they mean by the GPL not standing up. It is bizarre. And it seems based on the common fallacy of thinking that once you have the code you are in the clear... the idea that it's not illegal to possess copyrighted material, just to recieve it. Somehow, they think they can invalidate the GPL in the sense that there are no possible monetary damages. I.e. the damages of violating the GPL have no monetary value and therefore are nothing to worry about.
It may be true about the monetary damages (but I doubt it... there are other ways to set value to the code, e.g. you can use SCOs $1400/CPU figure. ) Anyway, even if that's true it's clear that you would be enjoined from using the GPLed code... you might not get a penny, but at the very least the user would have to stop using the code.
Now a lost of IANAL types makes this mistake, and quite a few lawyers will argue it for a fee, but there is no way it will come down like that in court.
-pyrrho
If they keep revoking everyones Un*x license, before to long they're going to be the only ones left with one, and by then, Linux will be free and clear of susposidly containing thier source.
"SCO's references to XFS are completely misplaced. XFS is an innovative SGI- created work. It is not a derivative work of System V in any sense, and SGI has full rights to license it to whomever we choose and to contribute it to open source. It may be that SCO is taking the position that merely because XFS is also distributed along with IRIX it is somehow subject to the System V license. But if so, this is an absurd position, with no basis either in the license or in common sense. In fact, our UNIX license clearly provides that SGI retains ownership and all rights as to all code that was not part of AT&Ts UNIX System V."
oss.sgi.com/letter_100103.txt
Why didn't the original Sys V licenses say that they were irrevocable? If I were IBM, and I were licensing something I was going to build a large portion of my business around, you damned well better believe the license agreement would say in 20 different places how fucking irrevocable my license was.
HP can get away with it because they haven't been targeted and probably won't be before the thing is over.
HP is also sponsoring the "SCO Road Trip", although they appear a bit reluctant to let everybody know that... I wonder why?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
"donating their work to a pirated project"
Wrong.
Linus Torvalds' work is his, years before this SCO mess. You don't have to apply for a copyright, its automatically given in any country that has signed the Berne convention. It is only necessary to register for copyright if you plan to sue anyone for damages.
Its lose lose for SCO; either GPL is valid and the code contributed (from all parties including Caldara/SCO) stays as is, or the GPL is invalid and the copyrights stay with their respective owners (Linus, and other developers / companies).
I wonder if Cray had a better license for UNIX when they started developing UNICOS. At the time very few people were doing 64 bit clean code. I bet SGI could make the various licenses it has bought over the years almost as complicated as SCO.
I remember using Cdd (Cray DoDads, a 64 bit clean Windows Xt library).
Could we not just have a monthly updated or something? This is a genuine idea, I'm not just trolling :)
But I read slashdot with all stories blocked but Caldera stories.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
If they did end up sending invoices to all of these people, wouldn't that be considered mail fraud? Check out this which seems to suggest it would be.
18 USC 1341 defines the statute.
Maybe SCO's lawyers aren't so dumb after all...
-jag
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
Sue them! Document it. Then when it comes to collect, and they are in your debt, get the corporate CEOs to give you a blow job or pose nude for you. Sell their photos to Playboy. Their utter humiliation for your profit. Darl are you listening?
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Oct/10012003/business/9 7397.asp:
SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said Tuesday that he understood the extension is being sought "for the purpose of gaining documents from IBM related to the patents they claim. . . . Some of the patents aren't even filed with the U.S. Patent Office, as far as we can learn."
From http://lwn.net/Articles/43592/ the patent numbers are:
4,814,746
4,821,211
4,953,209
5,805,785
Go here http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm
Type in the patent numbers into uspto.gov form
You will find them all. Immediately. In fact they load up immediately after typing in the number.
I bet that fuckedcompany.com has a spot all ready for SCO.
Well from a developers perspective when SCO licenses their work, they make it impossible for a developer to own the derivative. At the end of the day we have couple of lawyers fighting over a source base that they understand nothing about. The stock price of the company goes higher and the future becomes more dubious. We are missing the developer in this picture. The developer has lost his job long back and is trying desperately to figure out how to make ends meet. I believe SCO should pay royalty's to every developer that has written the code under SCO's lic before they can morally think of launching the smear campaign against the GPL. Though if they do this they will never have any money left to fight the case.
A recent Groklaw article (you saw it here on /.) claims that SCO foresaw taking a lot of GPL'd code private, and packaging various cherry-picked apps with the existing Linux personality codes for Sys V. Linux itself? Too bad, just more roadkill on the highway to SCO's profitability.
Luke, help me take this mask off
"We are respecters of no persons." -- Ralph J. Yarro
Couldn't have said it better myself, Ralph.
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
...Should be taken outside and shot.
Not killed.
Just left to suffer.
a 'best performing stock' with +800% -- is run by nice Mormons, IBM is the evil Goliath
This is probably a good time to recycle a small rant I wrote a few weeks ago -- short version is that any Mormon with a half an ounce of sense of their own history would recognize there are shared values between the open source community and their own cultural/spiritual history.
Tweet, tweet.
Okay Darl, why don't you just play nice with the other kiddies?
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
Will they go for it and sue even the noble TLA itself? Can't be !!!
Of course they thought IBM would settle, or more likely that IBM would buy SCO outright. That's the Canopy Group's MO: buy/create small companies, pump up their apparent value (frequently via litigation), sell them to bigger companies.... Oh wait, this is /. I better format that correctly:
Canopy Group Business Plan
1. Buy/create small company
2. Pump up company's apparent value (frequently via litigation)
3. PROFIT! (aka sell it to bigger company)
The really irritating thing, is it seems to be working. Canopy is making loads of money.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
Hmm... Laura DiDio, the "analyst" that signed the NDA and commented on the similarities of the disputed code is quoted in here.
What's the connection?
Lauro DiDio, an analyst with the Yankee Group, said it is obvious that in Yarro, the torch has been successfully passed from the mentoring hand of Noorda.
"In his day, Ray Noorda was very forward-thinking, able to focus in on the trees and yet still see the forest and beyond," she says. "He had a public persona as a sort of svelt Santa Claus, but behind closed doors, Ray really knew now to wheel and deal. He could be ruthless when he had to be."
Use of the GPL neither overthrows or supersedes traditional copyright law in any sense. In fact, as you point out, it only functions via traditional copyright.
You're either a tool, or you're naive. The purpose of the GPL is to subvert copyright. Hence the term "copyleft." Go read the GNU manifesto. Copyright is evil. Hence, the GPL is offered as a way of subverting copyright while still existing within its legal constraints, until such time as copyright, and all other IP conventions, are abolished.
Has anyone considered that he may be _really_ loosing his marbles ?
If the license was a continuous source of revenue, I hope the revoke it everywhere.
The idea of equating Free Software and Open Source Software with Communism is non-sense. FS and OSS are just different forms of capitalism, with the owners of the software selling it for a different kidn of return than money; in other words, a different currency. Capitalism does not mean that everyone acts to maximize his monetary gain, but only his psychic gain, which is made up of many components, monetary and otherwise.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Read The Flaming Licence. The GPL gives you specific rights in addition to any rights you may have under the law.
Except for the one and only right granted by copyright law: the exclusive right to determine who can and who cannot make copies of your work. Under the GPL, you (the author) are REQUIRED to grant ALL parties the right to make copies of your work.
RTFL yourself, asshole.
Only one closed system has stood the test of time: Apple Macs. This is the exception that proves the rule. When the first PC came out (I was programming CP/M then) all the closed boxes started to fade. Even IBM could not reverse the tide, and had to learn to adapt and prosper.
There should be a injunction preventing SCO making demands for money / claims, until or if they can get their act together, just like in Germany.
The judge might even indicate specifics and lines of code will be disclosed, and his/her case will NOT be held in camera, and all evidence will be 'in the open', without obscuration.
Reallly, IBM should insist SCO put up a bond, and get some financial guarantees, to the tune of its projected legal costs.
If SCO loses this but survives, anyone who decided to pay for an SCO "license" ought to sign up for a class action lawsuit against SCO. That would be swell.
"We fear nobody, and we are respecters of no persons." -- Ralph Yarro.
My boss is a longtime true-blue IBM stockholder with connections that go back decades. He basically confirms this rumor is very likely true. IBM has a long-established record of buying out companies that used to be former IT giants: Lotus and Informix are recent examples. Novell only makes sense to be the next.
Yes.
Pure capitalism is the anarcho-capitalism supported by Rothbard and his followers. Under pure capitalism, there would be no intellectual property. Thus, it's likely that ideas would spread, as they would not be unhampered by Statist intervention to create an artificial shortage of supply and an artificial monopoly.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Some of you have expressed sympathy for SCO employees, but I don't have much. If you're employer is that unscrupulous, it's time to change jobs. Yes, the job market is tight, but not THAT tight. It's been worse. I remember the 80's, near 9% unemployment. That was bad. We had to walk barefoot in the snow to the interviews, up hill in both directions. Okay, not that bad, but worse than now.
I always keep an emergency back-up career around for just such an emergency. You can't count on anyone but number one anymore. If my employer was the pariah of the IT world, I'd jump over to my sideline job and tell them to cram it. As it is my current day job is almost fanatical in the opposite direction. They're frighteningly scrupulous. You'd never hear them talk like McBride. In fact, you don't ever hear from them at all, about anything. And that's one of the reasons they keep getting business. Because they keep quiet and get the job done. Maybe SCO could learn from them.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You almost seem to quote from http://www.freesofty.org Well, ok, it's not their original quote neither ;-)
Trying again, with - hopefully - a good link this time:
;-)
You almost seem to quote from http://www.freesofty.org
Well, ok, it's not their original quote neither
I'm serious.
SCO is hurting both American competiveness, and national security.
What's the legal standing of the NSA's Secure Linux?
Uncertain.
What's the legal standing of the entire American open-source industry?
Uncertain.
What's the rest of the world doing?
Adoping open-source software as fast as possible.
By spreading baseless Fear, Uncertainity, and Doubt, SCO is honestly doing serious damage to an important American industry.
If SCO pursues plans to attack every American company that has purchased an old AT&T Unix license, it will seriously hurt our IT sector. Especially if their strategy is to delay, delay, delay.
I doubt the rest of the world will put up with this kind of legal nonsense; SCO was kicked out of Germany, and I suspect their case would go nowhere anywhere in the world except the U.S.
This is bad news of the entire industry. Even though SCO's claims are totally baseless. Even though IBM will win in court.
SCO's strategy of spreading doubt breeds uncertainity. SCO's strategy of claiming all sorts of nonsensical things scares companies away from Linux, AIX, and IRIX. This is bad, very bad, for our economy. It pisses me off that the government is NOT investigating SCO. I'm sure there are countless regulations they are violating->if the source code was subpoened, I believe that there would be sufficient proof that SCO is knowingly trying to defraud companies out of money. RICO, whatever--->there must be some statute they are violating.
If American Linux and Unixes (don't forget this DOES include the BSDs, SCO has specifically included them in their nonsensical claims) remain under this cloud of litigation, EVEN THOUGH SCO will loose in the end, Windows adoption rates will increase, while Unix/Linux will remain stalled.
This will happen in households, in corporations, and in government organizations.
SCO is a national security risk. They are driving us into the arms of Microsoft, by scaring middle managers away from both old school unix vendors and new school linux distributors.
It's time for the SEC, or some state attorney general, to start an investigation.
I know that I'm going to start writing letters demanding an investigation.
I'm as loathe as the rest of you to play the 'patriotism' card, but this shit is really pissing me off. And I don't want to see the nation scared away from Unix and Unix-like (read SVR4 'derivative'), because it WILL hurt our international competiveness, and it WILL hurt our national security.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I simply don't consider them. We have no alternative but to use Cost-free software, we simply have _no_ money. We are totally out of cash. Nothing. Nichts. Nada. Nadie. Rien. Zero, got it?
Right now, we must go from an sclerosed Office 97 userdom to a nimble community of Oo.o adopters, and I don't know how to do it! We should have started this before, but we didn't (well, I did at home, but this won't count much now).
Now what? It's not lack of guts on my part, I'd do it. But my Windows-using colleagues aren't so assured. And we have almost ten thousand users to switch, many of them seniors and/or non-technical.
Sometimes reality sucks!
"shut up and get in your cell."
"don't I get a phone call?"
"I said shut up."
things are not always as they seem.
and more often than not, the cops are the vile ones.
Too bad, I'd like to show it to the FTC, the postal inspector and the Commonwealth's Attorney.
Show them what, his ass or the invoice?
Depends on what "ass" means.
Arse: The invoice, hopefully. They can't go after SCO blind, after all. (Too short time to learn Braile.)
Donkey: The ass should be shown to Darl. Then, on its own initiative, the ass would kick him. Then we can say: "Darl! You are such an ass, that EVEN IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ASS KICKS YOU!"
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
...but sagged back about 1/3 of that by the end of the day. Looks like the seals on their stock pump are starting to leak - even Joe Clueless Investor is starting to notice that TSG's claims are literally incredible. I think it helped when some negative news finally hit the protected newswires that stock firms publish, and Joe Clueless is starting to ask "can that really be true?" and look at external news sources for a change. Give the next group about a day to figure out the consequences, and expect the stock to sag heavily late on Friday despite being propped up artificially by Gates-boarded companies.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not sure what to make of that at all, it does seem too definite to be coincidence, doesn't it?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
As if trying to weazel money out of Linux customers (home and commercial) isn't enough...now SCO is trying for SGI!!!??? Why not...they can grab all the cash from the movie studios now (for the most part they either use Linux or SGI).
SCO needs to be squashed like a bug!!!
Its a wonder all the stock holders of SCO haven't sold out yet...can McBride actually pull the wool over their eyes that much?
In other words, SCO is going to wait until Oct. 15 before sending out invoices so they can charge the full $1399.
It came home drunk again, pissed off that its boss terminated its useless drunk ass and it started wailing on the little lady, the kids, the dog. Soon the cops will show up and it'll be in the Lay Z Boy, no shirt, one flip flop, screaming for its cigarettes and threatening to bash his crying wife's face in as they duck walk it to the police car.
That's SCO; an episode of COPS.
Why does SCO care if IBM indemified their customers or not? Doesn't that mean if IBM doesn't SCO can go after those other companies too. Is SCO going to indemify their customers if IBM or the FSF finds GPL code in the Sys V source? That's all SCO really talks about "indemifying the customers." They aren't SCOs customers so why should SCO worry?
Get it here.
I have visions of Firmage standing on the banks of the Deleware river on Christmas night, giving this speech to his troops of OS coders.
(Where the hell is my three pointed hat and musket when I need it!!)
That's funny shit. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
SCO claims IBM had no right to distribute some code under the GPL. IBM argues SCO themselves distributed said code under the GPL, so SCO must attack the GPL to have a case. You say if the GPL was invalid SCO violated the copyright of the Linux authors including IBM.
Actually SCO believes they never put the code in dispute under the GPL, even being part of the kernel they distributed under the GPL. So what they really challenge is the legal binding of viral clauses of the GPL. How authors weave copyrights, perhaps accidentally, by mere distributing. Contrast this with their "all your code becomes Unix" theory which is based on a contract signed by both parties.
I think IBM is preparing a very big nasty stick that will do the job nicely. ;)
Regards,
Fredrick
Umm no the folk that shorted it when they first started this crap were fools, I'll grant... but it's reasonable to short it now. They've been struggling to avoid a total collapse for weeks now.
If it pans out to anything near the level SCO implies in their press release, the US Court system will be so self-evidently bankrupt that no businessman will be able to take it seriously. It will have descended to the level of an Iraqi or Zimbabwean court, if not lower.
"No legal grounds?" Now that's the sure sign that you're a troll, no one that's spent 20 minutes researching the subject would make such a blatantly ignorant statement. The GPL stands on legal grounds of US copyright law. It doesn't need to 'impress' the courts, it's a straightforward offer of privileges which US copyright law (and copyright law in most other countries) reserve to copyright holders, on certain conditions. If you do not agree to those conditions, you are left with the default copyright rules. Either SCO agreed to the GPL, and are bound by it, or they didn't and their entire business for several years has been copyright infringement. Either way they have no future, and idiots that follow advice like yours are going to lose a lot of money.
And I'd say I hope you're rich, because if you'll back up your talk with cash I can take as much as you've got.
Even odds eh? I'll take it. By 2006 SCO's claims will have been thoroughly repudiated by the courts, or dropped. Even odds. As much as you've got. If you have the balls to make the bet we can find an escrow.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Without the additional rights given by the GPL, Joe User can only make copies subject to the "fair use" provisions of the law, as determined by the courts. If it ever came to court that someone had been taping albums to play in their car, they could claim fair use and no jury in the world would convict them, at least, not if two or more of them had cassette decks in their cars
If someone writes a piece of software but doesn't release it under the GPL, then anyone can still attempt to obtain permission to make a copy of it, and there are even a few copyright holders who will grant such permission. There is no legal grey area there. As the copyright holder, that is their right for a limited time, and such permission as they grant to you is legally valid as long as you comply with any enforceable conditions.
But if the author believes that it is more important that everyone should have access to their software than that they should have the right to deny access to certain people, and chooses to release their software under the GPL, then that is their own decision. The GPL explicitly grants users limited rights to distribute software. However, the GPL specifically does not give users the right to appropriate software for use in non-GPL projects. This is the crucial difference between GPL and PD. The public domain does not have any protection from plundering. If you place a piece of software in the public domain, someone else can steal it in its entirety, repackage it, claim copyright on it and take you to court for violating their copyright. If they tried that with a piece of GPL software, your copyright would stop them from doing that. {A new law making it illegal to lift material from the public domain and copyright it would have the same effect. The problem is that with no copyright holder, there would be no-one to bring action in such a case}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Destroyer of Unix.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
AC.
All the SCO FUD news are marked with Caldera logo. It's true Caldera is owned by SCO but it's not Caldera that claims to have code stolen and placed in the kernel. Someone PLEASE use some real SCO logo or whatever from now on with all SCO vs Linux news and stop bringing shame to otherwise innocent Caldera people.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Utterly irrelevant ramblings.
Go read the GNU manifesto. Go read everything that RMS has written on the subject of "copyleft." It was intended from the get-go to be a subversive paradigm. The GPL is most certainly designed to supplant--that is, to overthrow or displace--the centuries-old tradition of copyright.
Maybe they're referring to the alleged situation where:
- IBM includes SCO code in Linux
- SCO distributes Linux without realising that their code has been included
- Open Source anarchists claim that SCO have therefore lost their copyright
- No profit for SCO!
I remember saying that that was a bad arguement to get in to.One of the major selling point of that wholly remarkable Operating System, UnixWare, apart from its relative cheapness and the fact that it has the words "Linux Inside" written in large friendly letters on its cover, is its compendious and occasionally accurate ChangeLogs. The statistics relating to the amount of Linux Code, for instance, are deftly set out between pages nine hundred and thirty-eight thousand and twenty-four and nine hundred and thirty-eight thousand and twenty-six; and the simplistic style in which they are written is partly explained by the fact that the coders, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the code from the linux kernel source, hastily embroidering it with a few footnotes and comments in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly tortuous Galactic Copyright laws.
It is interesting to note that a later and wilier coder sent the source backwards in time through a temporal warp, and then successfully sued the linux companies for infringement of the same laws.
I have read and agree with the GNU manifesto.
Copyright law was originally proposed as a means of encouraging creativity, by granting originators of works a certain time-limited monopoly over their distribution in return for a promise that the work would eventually pass into the public domain for the benefit of everyone. I believe the original term was 25 years or until the death of the author, whichever occurred sooner. At the time when copyright was first conceived, this might well have been a good idea. Many authors would have been too poor to afford their own printing presses, and would have had to rely on the services of a commercial printer to see their work enter print. An unscrupulous printer might attempt to pass off a client's work as their own. So some sort of law to protect authors from being ripped off by their printers probably was in order. Copying books by hand would have been too much effort for all but the most determined. However, this is conjecture on my part as I Was Not There.
What is certain is that in recent times, copyright has been abused. What was originally intended to encourage the creation of new works eventually to enter the public domain, is now being used just to scrape up cash and actually discourage entry of new works into the public domain. I would not hesitate to call that "subversive". Check my sig - progress has value only if it is shared by all. Conversely, any attempt to deny access to the benefits of progress devalues progress. What do you suppose would have happened to the human race if the person who discovered how to make fire tried to keep the secret to themself, or licence it only to a select few?
The GPL is something like jiu-jitsu - the idea that you can use your enemy's strength and weight to your own advantage. As I stated above, there is currently no protection for works in the public domain against being lifted and copyrighted. Were there such a law, which would have to mean that any derivative work based on a work already in the public domain would be uncopyrightable {a work which merely draws its inspiration, or takes only a tiny portion of content, from a public domain work would be analogous to "fair use" of a copyrighted work}, it is quite likely that there would be no need for the GPL, because anyone who wanted their work available to everybody could simply release it into the public domain.
Believe me, the only thing I would like more than such a properly protected public domain would be the simple and outright prohibition of closed-source software. That actually very nearly happened.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
SCO can have MY money when they pry it from my cold, dead hands. I have been running system V ever for as long as i have been running linux. I thank IBM for supporting the GPL.
Zing! Boy, you got me there. Never mind that the GPL and the whole concept of "copyleft" outlined in the GNU manifesto fail miserably when there is no copyright law for them to exist in.
From the manifesto itself:
How GNU Will Be Available
GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary (18k characters) modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.
If everything's public domain, then there is no longer any copyright-license-based method of requiring people to release their changes and deriviative works back to the public. The best you could do would be some sort of contract agreement with every user.
It's JUST a LICENSE AGREEMENT. Same as agreeing to let Adobe have your firstborn on installation. Or negotiating a site license for windows. Without copyright, it couldn't exist.
I probably am a naive tool by your definition. But so what? I'm no linux shill. I gave up trying to use it as a desktop OS after I realized I was spending hours configuring dependencies for things i could do in under a minute in windows. It's nice on a server at work. Use the best tool for the job. (which at work means having the source is an excellent future-proof insurance policy) The politics annoy me.
WTF is a lemming?
There is hope for the youth of America!
philcrissman.com.
I have read and agree with the GNU manifesto.
Then you are a fucking moron whose opinion matters to no one.
Holy shit since claims they own the rights to linux.. in that case where do I said my money? ..Since when do they own the rights to linux to start charging for it? Haha. Ya SCO.
By the way if anyone wants to prank call the Darl McBride (SCO CEO)... heres the cock suckers number
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=darl+mcbride+utah&btnG=Google+Search
Someone in SLC should follow this up. Print out a hundred or so invoices to various fortune 500 companies that are known to use Linux. Just for fun, add a couple of tenacious small companies as well. Print them up to look like they came from SCO. If you can figure out how to do it, go to SCO and drop them off at the front desk (maybe wearing a Kinko's hat or something) and tell the receptionist that these addressed letters are ready to be delivered.
Then leave. Your job is done.
Any ideas for Barbie distros of BSD, BeOS, etc.?
With IT being what it is today, would it be the same as Burger Flippin' Barbie?
How about Java-coding Barbie? Web Designer Barbie? uh... uh... Imperial Stormtrooper Barbie, with pink armor and sparkly blaster rifle!
Ok, the root beer's gone to my head again.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
A user had given a moderation of Funny (+1) to your comment, ASS?, attached to SCO Derides GPL, Will Revoke SGI's UNIX License. That moderation has now been undone, probably due to the user posting in the discussion after moderating in it. Your comment is currently scored Normal (1).
You?
Well, it doesn't matter. My karma was allready excellent, and "Funny" doesn't count.
Thanks for liking it. I'll be here all week.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
As an IRIX user, this can't be good. Fuck.
You hit it in your last line though.. it's not options that would have saved him... being smart and not risking all his gains in the first place would have saved him.
My point was that options are based on predicted growth... If the market moves as predicted, what you spent in options cancels out any profits..... the only benefit is if you have puts and the market doesn't meet predicted values, or calls and the market beats the predictions.
Unless his expectations were much higher than everyone elses, buying some puts would have been just as good as not putting money in in the first place.
Keith Devlin wrote a mathematics/philosophy book that deals with a similar issue. People are 'rational', not logical. Because we have such a long history using logic, and now the scientific method, which is a very specific logical process to define phenomena, we often assume that logic is the defining criteria when we make decisions. This is true in some cases, but it can also be a tremendous fallacy. People are not always logical, people will do what they 'feel' is appropriate most of the time.
EXAMPLE:
In Iraq, what made the few Republican Guard units that stood their ground hold fast, it wasn't a logic we usually appreciate. Logically, they would be destroyed, and they were destroyed. It was emotion, loyalty, pride or fear that made them stand firm; but that act lead to their doom, or in their eyes martyrdom. I imagine how these peoples families remember that sacrifice, and perhaps our failure to honor that sacrifice may be part of the problem we are facing now in Iraq.
EXAMPLE:
Linux supporters, why do they support Linux so blindly. For them, it seems Linux means freedom from control, it is a political and social statement, not a logical one. The idea of taking your future in your own hands is liberating, it feels good. Therefore, Linux is a superior model for providing freedom from control to users and coders by making software free and free to use. However Microsoft has a model which provides superior earnings from software by making it proprietary and expensive. The Linux proposition is freedom, the Microsoft proposition is to cash in. This is a value judgement, a statement about our beliefs and priorities. Where you stand depends on what you believe is most important. Interestingly, people who have to pay mortgages are more familiar with the Microsoft model, in my experience they are much more sympathetic to Microsoft than Linux.
It is a mistake to assume that logic is a superior tool to a rational human thought. Logic, especially scientific logic, it based on a discrete set of principles, where the process is structured around a hypothesis which is then built upon. For example, SCO logic is based on the hypothesis that all Unix inheritors should belong to them. It isn't strictly scientific, but it looks quasi scientific and thus appeals to superficial examination, especially by investors looking for a quick buck, or anyone enamored with the idea of making lots of money and locking down a permanent source of cash to enrich themselves beyond their wildest dreams. A logical SCO argument does not take a disparity between rationales into account. There is no place in the SCO methodology for any intervention to accomodate Linux users because the basic proposition of Linux is anathema to them. So the SCO logic is inexorably propelled forward to certain conclusions which cannot allow certain interventions or the entire logical proposition would collapse, I.E. make craploads of cash in perpetuity whereas Linux unlinks direct profit from software. 'Revoke AIX', 'License fees', 'Sue SGI'. These thoughts are highly logical, but are brought out of a warped and twisted rational framework that cannot 'fairly' consider the rights of Linux users. It is amazing how SCO has been corrupted, it now repudiates everything it once stoof for.
In the big picture. Linux users would do well not to underestimate SCO, or the future SCO's of this world. In a larger sense, SCO represents the Microsoft model, which is to make cash from a proprietary system. This is also the system that suburbanites appreciate; they like the idea of having direct control over a piece of real estate (as Microsoft does and they do), and using that property to accumulate wealth is central to their way of life. They would probably see Linux as a disturbing force, a force not compatible with their way of life, a threat to ownership and therefore 'Un-American'. These people were powerful enough to turn aside a judgement against Microsoft. If SCO is able to bring these people on board, Linux