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
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!
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;
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.
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
I live in the Provo area and the rumor I'm hearing from Novell employees is that IBM is looking to adquire Novell...
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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."
...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*
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
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*
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.
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.
IBM buys SGI. Just as a way to piss off SCO without bending to their whim.
http://oss.sgi.com/letter_100103.txt
SCO has also revoked your birthday.
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?
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'
The SCO Group
355 South 520 West
Suite 100
Lindon, Utah 84042 USA
801-765-4999 phone
801-765-1313 fax
Actually, if i wanted to do some harm, I would suggest that the masses do the same thing that was recently done to a notorious spammer: search for "free catalog" on the internet and fill in the information with Darl's name and SCO's information. If a few thousand people did a few hundred catalog requests each, this would mean about a ton of mail a day.
Now, I am sure they get a ton of mail as it is, normal mail, bills, hate mail, etc. but this still sucks to have to deal with. DDOM (distributed denial of mail)
If you have the bucks, and use a good LD service like the 10-10-987 at 3 cents a minute, you could just fax them thousands of pages that have only one word on the front. I bet they use a paper fax machine. At least it would tie it up for legitimate use if enough people would war dial it. Would also work with the regular number, with people keeping their phone tied up by asking stupid questions.
I guess we could all order pizzas from the local dominoes to be delivered there, but I think they would catch on to 10,000 pizza's being ordered and thats not fair to them....
Yea, nasty kiddie stuff, but fun as hell to at least think about.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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
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."