Slashdot Mirror
ACCC Asks SCO To Explain Themselves
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) governmental organization has issued a request to SCO to provide information regarding complaints filed with it, according to The Age. This deals with issues regarding SCO's IP claims, and statements regarding the need for commercial Linux users to obtain a Unix licence. With any luck, that'll be Slashdot's daily dose of SCO news..."
isn't gonna explain themselves. That part is pretty clear already...
here
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
We hear about it in October. Do I get the impression this is not being treated witha great deal of seriousness?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
> With any luck, that'll be Slashdot's daily dose of SCO news...
No, with any luck there will be another story today about the SEC suspending trading of SCOX and the FBI carting Canopy Group's board and execs off to jail.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Something tells me they still won't release any actual code and provide proof that it was/is theirs. Nothing new from SCO...
A blog like any other.
This is one small step for mankind, and hopefully one giant leap into the inferno for SCO.
This is a major Australian newspaper, it isn't going to get slashdotted, he's just blatant karma-whoring.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Let's see how many /.-isms I can throw into a single sentence:
The SCOmbag behind this fiaSCO, $CO is SCOspiciously silent when people say, "show me the SCOurce"!
How's that? What did I miss?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
... has got a lotta 'splainen to do.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I guess they should get a form letter back... "Thank you for taking interest in our Linux license program. Please visit our website for further details and be sure to sign up for our mailing list".
SCO will just tell them exactly what we've already heard them say: that Linux is a derivative of Unix and therefore the property of SCO blah blah blah blah blah.
While that bullshit may qualify as an explanation, it certainly doesn't qualify as any sort of justification, which is what I think they should *REALLY* be asking SCO to do.
Oh, unfortunately for SCO, justifying their actions would require them to reveal the code.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Well you see Mr. Crocodile Hunter, Sir, the problem
all started when developers started using the
following snippets of code:
main()
{alarm(10);sleep(5);write(1," something",12);exit(0);}
As you can clearly see, the way () is used, is an
obviously blatant rip-off of the way our patents
are written. Sure there are open source zealots
and we love them all, but realistically speaking
Mr. Dundee your honor, your aboriginee, we feel
it is unfair for anyone to use main() without a
brand new SCO license.
Thank you your boomerang tossing mate.
MoFscker
Huh what kind of a strange form of government is this. Whoever heard of a govt telling a software company what to do.
War is necrophilia.
They made it legal to chip PS2's and XBoxes... They have teeth in Oz and we like them. They are on the side of good.
No surprise there. The only time I've ever seen a goverment 'watchdog' group do anything was when they took the franchise away from a region rail operator in the UK. By and large all they seem to do is go 'Stoppit. Or we'll cry.'
So why do Australia's biggest companies campaign so strongly against it?
Having the ability to deny companies that want to merge with or buy out each other doesn't seem to correlate with having very little power.
Only a month ago, they refused to allow Qantas and Air New Zealand to merge. Today they won in the high court against Visy Paper for anti-competitive practices.
With luck, high profile cases like this will actually make the Americans realise that they're being screwed with and make them start demanding to get back their rights.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is actually better than a lawsuit. The ACCC has real teeth in Australia and can demand and enforce instant compliance. The fact that they use these powers for somewhat dubious outcomes is a point of contention here, but a referral their way has to be at least investigated.
These guys love publicity and this is win/win for them. They get to flex some muscle and no Aussie company(read Packer or Murdoch) will be asked to do anything.
And how is your "working legal system" going to affect a US corporation? Australia... Isn't that where the term "Kangaroo Court" originated from?
You see, we SCO execs were rich, but not filthy rich
So Darl, and a bunch of the guys decided to go around making absurd claims about how everyone and their grandmother who had access to the System V code dumped said code (which we will claim we own (yes, even the public domain parts) for the purposes of said absurd claims) into Linux.
Thus, with promises of massive payoffs from those hapless users who unkowingly used what we claim is our property, the uniformed MBA's over on wall street will want to buy our otherwise worhtless stock. And then; 3. Profit!.
I work for dell in the servers division and we get a monthly newsletter. When the SCO news broke, the blurb was something like "IBM got sued by sco", anything bad for IBM is good for us
In Later weeks it was more like "they are threatening us" but Redhat will fight for us, we need not worry
This weeks newsletter is the best. It actually uses the word FUD against sco, also pretty much rooting for IBM.The blurb was something like, IBM has a great amount of IP and SCO stands no chance. We wont indemnify customers yet, but we are thinking about it.
It looks like old enemies are being pushed to the same side of the table, united against a common enemy.
Not here in the southern hemisphere it isn't; July is a winter month; right now it's springtime.
Unless, of course, you were talking about SCO?!?
The liver is evil and must be punished.
The article is from down under, therefore it must be mirrored upside-down.
.smialc sti dednapxe neht dna smialc eht revo OCS deus-retnuoc sah MBI
,xinU nwo sti rof ecnecil s'MBI gniwardhtiw saw ti dias ti nehw enuJ ni noillib 3$SU ot MBI tsniaga smialc sti dednapxe retal OCS .thgirypoc lautcelletni fo noitaloiv rof elbail yllagel eb dluoc yeht taht sresu xuniL laicremmoc denraw dna xinU fo evitavired desirohtuanu na saw xuniL taht demialc osla OCS
,ecnerefretni suoitrot ,sterces edart fo noitairporppasim" rof ,MBI tsniaga tiuswal rallod-noillib a delif OCS ,hcraM nI
,yna fi ,tahw denimreted ro deviecer sah ti stnialpmoc eht eusrup ot noisiced yna edam ton sah ti taht su deifiton sah CCCA ehT"
,gnitekram a ,airotciV ecruoS nepO yb yluJ ni delif saw tnialpmoc ehT
,ecnecil xinU a niatbo ot sresu xuniL laicremmoc rof deen eht gnidrager stnemetats dna smialc PI s'OCS tuoba ,ti htiw delif stnialpmoc gnidrager noitamrofni edivorp ot puorG OCS eht deksa sah noissimmoC remusnoC dna noititepmoC nailartsuA ehT
,8 rebotcO
----
.OCS tsniaga esac a delif sah taH deR
.XIA
".tcartnoc fo hcaerb dna noititepmoc riafnu
.dias ti ",ekat lliw ti noitca
.yriuqni s'CCCA eht ot dnopser ot dednetni ynapmoc eht dias gnilif CES tsetal s'OCS
.snailartsuA fo sdnasuoht fo sderdnuh ylbissop tsniaga "yenom rof staerht lagel evitrotxe dna smialc detaitnatsbusnu" fo thgil ni seitivitca s'OCS etagitsevni ot CCCA eht deksa tI
.puorg sucof dna ycacovda
.noissimmoC egnahcxE dna seitiruceS SU eht htiw gnilif ylretrauq tsetal s'ynapmoc eht ot gnidrocca
3002
esehgraV maS yB
tnialpmoc s'puorg ciV revo OCS morf sliated skees CCCA
Can someone throw a few troll points his way? I'm all out.
MS would sort things out while being totally unbiased...yeah, right.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
...before these idiots go out of business given that their big revenue plan is litigation based.
Personally I can't wait, first I won't have my blood pressure spike every time I read slashdot and second I can get back to hating someone (i.e. M$) slightly less deserving who despite their unholy aliance with Satan and low quality products, ACTUALLY PRODUCE SOMETHING. Get a clue SCO, you're a bunch of freaking looters waiting for the electricity to go out so you can break windows and steal shit.
dream on...
Dear Mr. Anonymous Coward. What cave have you been residing in? No troll intended but in all honesty are you really that out of touch? Microsoft has nothing against Linux? Microsoft named Linux #2 on its list of potential threats to its revenue stream and market plan in their 10Q report. Number 1 was the down economy and it's effects on IT spending.
How can you say with a straight face that Microsoft has nothing against Linux. After calling Linux and the GPL a cancer, unAmerican, and just short of out and out a socialist product bent on destroying all things proprietary.
Please, for your sake and others please think about what your posting so as not to embarrass yourself.
I think that refers to a British rump court in having nothing to do with Australians except they might be on the end of ones actions.
Much of the complaining was about publicity. For example, when the ACCC (under Alan Fels) investigated fuel price fixing, they made a big deal in the media about it and announced the raids they performed to find documentary evidence. Nothing came out of it. Big business complained that this amounted to a trial by media, and that they were entitled to some kind of privacy if there was no concrete proof of wrong-doing. I haven't heard quite as much complaining since Graeme Samuels took over. There are a few particular medium sized businesses that are particularly vocal in their complaints.
I think there are also plenty of examples to show where the ACCC doesn't seem to achieve their goals. If they were so powerful and effective, would we really have the outrageous banking costs that we have? Would Telstra get away with half the stuff it does?
The earliest recorded usage was in the US in 1853. There's absolutely no indication the term originated in Australia, though there is apparently some evidence linking it to the California goldrush, where it may have been used as early as 1849. Many Australian prospectors took place, and one explanation for the term is that it was coined by Australian prospectors referring to the way claim-jumpers were prosecuted outside the legal system. In other words: It was likely a termed coined by Australians to refer to the (lack of) justice in the US.
When did they say anything like this, and when did you become Microsofts PR?
Actually, I think you'll find it's probably a US-originated term.
http://www.wordorigins.org/wordork.htm
Thats just normal competition, not being hellbent or trying to abuse there monopoly or anything. I would say something different on Netscape, or Netscape Firebird
A very long one!
I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability. -- Oscar Wilde
I really hate to be the one to point this out, but you could replace
"[insert some insane reason as a result of #1 here]"
with
"we hope everyone will be stupid enough to believe us."
and I think that the thing would still work in the same circumstances, except on #3 SCO could just tell the truth.
"I believe this code forms some sort of argument in this debate, but I'm not sure whether it's for or against." -- Duff
Apparently in the same way that US law affects non-US corporations and individuals.
The term may have come from Australia but boy do the Americans like theirs!
You've said that the offending code cannot be 'cleaned' from Linux. Why not?
Sontag: I'm not sure that it can't be. The question becomes, will it? Beyond the 80 or so lines of code that we show under nondisclosure to interested parties, we have identified some examples of more than a million lines of code that have gone into Linux in the form of programs and files such as NUMA (non-uniform memory access), RCU (read, copy, update), and the JFS (the Journal File System from AIX).
So all they got is just 80 lines of code, don't they? That's the whole story ... after all, even in the unlikely event that the court decides adding RCU,NUMA etc. to linux is a breach of contract, they clearly don't have any IP claims over this code.
In other words: if you follow closely what SCO are saying, you realise that all the IP claims they may (and then again, may not) have is not more than 80 lines of code. Isn't it lovely?
With any luck, that'll be Slashdot's daily dose of SCO news...
Accompanying any news that might pose a threat to share price, we can expect even more outrageous claims from SCO today in response.
Yeah, it's legal to chip the machines. Just a pity it's illegal to buy the chips. (As the law stands, owning a chipped machine isn't illegal, and chipping a machine isn't legal, but buying or importing a mod chip is. If you had a chip before the law was passed, you're sitting sweet, but if you didn't, tough luck)
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Qantas & Air NZ merger is bad bad bad.
ACCC did good.
Isn't that where Arnie's from?
No, seriously - it's the land where men are men and sheep are petrified.
And thanks to the ACCC the poor sods Down Under have no idea what it's like to get 1mbps at home. The US, Korea, Japan and even Europe are way ahead. Or am I misinformed?
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
And went into a big music shop and I swear there was more music there from aussies (kylie, inxs, men at work, midnight oil) than austrians (falco, dj otzi). WTF?
The ACCC is the organisation established to administer the Trade Practices Act (and the prices surveillance act). The TPA is a remarkable piece of legislation conceived by one of the great legislators, a guy called Lionel Murphy, whose life was an extraordinary one. Amongst other things, Attorney General, High Court Judge, convicted criminal? He was responsible for ushering in the Family Law Act and the TPA in Australia in the 70's. Both of which were revolutionary.
The TPA was one of the first codifications of the rights of consumers anywhere and the powers established enable the ACCC to pierce through all the crap that anti-competitives put in the way of a realistic investigation into their behaviour. The power of the ACCC derives from the legislation and the rule of law not from the arbitrary exercise of power by the organisation itself.
The important thing is to remember that the power is in the law and not just the ACCC
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Woah...time for a "I for one welcome ... them to manage stuff elsewhere as well" ;)
The SCO Group ANZ seem to be pretty reasonable compared to D'ohl, but I really do hope they get shut down in Oz, or at least fined into submission. It might lead the producers of some of the vertical market apps that I occasionally bandage up to port their product to a UNIX platform in which gormlessness features less strikingly.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
SEC: Pay them the money!
IBM: Why?
SEC: They have sources...?
IBM: That's not source!
SCOX: Uh...?
IBM: This is source.
SCOX: Aiiiieeee! <runs away>
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Best /. ID number ever.
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
The "80" they showed weren't owned by SCOX, in fact they may get into breach-of-copyright trouble if certain BSD developers complain about SCOX filing off the copyrights and BSD licence banners. Which might explain why they're - to quote Linus - "playing it like the Raelians".
SCOX's claim, if you can believe this, is that because IBM, SGI et al created JFS (which I don't use), NUMA (which I don't use) etc while they were licencees for the UnixWare sources, SCOX controls the rights to those technologies. This despite at least IBM's contract explicitly leaving the rights to such works in IBM's hands even if they had been derived from the UnixWare sources (which they weren't).
I'm sort of wondering if/how SCOX got any rights to even use any of the listed technologies, since they don't hold any of the patents on them, but IBM do.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Does this mean we can look forward to Darl McBride releasing a cover of an early Who song?
(Picture of Darl breaking rocks in a chain gang.)
Aerobics.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
But since they're not telling use what is the code in Linux they claim they own, and we don't have access to their code, we're just speculating. I agree the poor examples they displayed at the SCOforum is a good indication the number of lines may very well be zero, but we couldn't be 100% sure.
Now at least we have an upper-bound for the number of lines of code they're talking about, and even this upper-bound is not very impressive.
After calling Linux and the GPL a cancer
If SCO are right in any of their claims, closed source is a lot worse in that respect than any GPL code could ever be.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Geography for USians: It's that island close to the south pole, south-east of California.:-)
Sebastian
Maybe they will be forced to show the supposed "rogue code!"
When the real person to blame is Paul Keating pulled out of the openskys agreement between New Zealand and Australia. Air New Zealand tried to enter into the Australian market, they were told that they had to purchase Ansett or otherwise sod off.
Air New Zealand bought Ansett thinking that they could run it properly, what they found out is that the company had already been run into the ground, Australia is over run by militant unions meaning that ANY resutructuring they tried in the 12 months or so they owned it basically was stopped by the union.
Btw, the assertion by Unions that Air New Zealand had invested no money into Ansett, incorrect. I know of atleast 7 programmers who were working on a completely news, integrated system to replace the old one. There was also browsing done by Air New Zealand for new planes to replace the aging Ansett fleet.
If you want someone to blame for Ansetts collapse, blame the Unions and the Australian government. UNLIKE Australia, the New Zealand government DOESN'T give hand outs to companies, Air New Zealand UNLIKE QUANTAS, actually HAVE TO COMPETE for public service contracts.
Australia on the other hand simply hand out contracts to QUANTAS with out ANY competitive bids and worse still, its the public who is paying for this via higher taxes. Can any of you say, "corporate welfare"?
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
Ahh, Mr. McBride... Your "Anonymous Coward" facade isn't fooling any of us.
south-east of California.:-)
Actually it's south-west of California.
Unix is like the trunk of a car. We own that car. Everything that gets put into that trunk automatically becomes ours. Therefore, everything you put into Unix becomes ours. Got a Unix box? It's ours. Put another piece of software into it, then that becomes ours too. See, it's that simple. Don't you get it?
It's not the "blimey" department, that's England.
:)
Australia is the "struth" or "crikey" department.
I may be wrong, but I think this is what is called dry humor. Hard to pull off in text form. So for everyone berating him for his statements, stay calm, take a breath and realize that someone who knew about NFS and POSIX wouldn't really be claiming that Microsoft had nothing against Linux.
Probably so, as it is easy to hide the fact that you have copied code, especially if you use a different compiler, or even different CPU, so there is little evidence of similarity at the binary level. I suspect that lots of lazy programmers copy other people's source, if they can get to see it, and of course project managers anxious to meet their targets will turn a blind eye or even encourage it. I am mainly a hardware designer, and I know it happens there too, people take the chance that the competition will be too busy to check the product to see if it is a rip-off of theirs. One unscrupulous employer I worked for (not for long!) copied someone else's hardware in minute detail, including the mistakes which added cost and reduced performance.
The motives are different in Open Source, but maybe someone there was lazy also.
Question: Has M$ used any code copied improperly from anywhere, especially GPLed code? If so, their obvious backing of SCO will be their undoing, once the GPL is tested in court.
And remember, it is the BIG island, not the two little ones you come to first, populated mainly by sheep.
Insert Company 1 is suing Insert Company 2 for using Insert Code without permission.
However, this code has been found in prior works, specifically Insert Product.
Naturally the slashdot community is Insert Emotion.
Attempt 1:
Company 1: SCO
Company 2: RedHat
Code: Unix V code
Product: BSD
Emotion: outraged
Attempt 1:
Company 1: Eolas
Company 2: Microsoft
Code: ActiveX code
Product: Viola Browser
Emotion: overjoyed
Hypocrites.
gd23ka wrote:
Hey! Our U.S. legal system deeply resembles your remark!
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
Can be found here:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/loche/rogue/
No sig
There are two points in it.
0 90 42543818
1) SCO is doing nothing but delay delay delay.
2) RedHat's discovery requests make it clear - they are going for the juggular. They are requesting Linux Kernel Personality code.. oh, and all of their other code. The reason why is clear - to determine if SCO has violated the GPL by putting Linux code in SCO UNIX products....
which would explain why SCO is so interested in seeing the GPL be voided in court in the IBM case - the most likely scenarios is that SCO has been stealing GPL code for their software, esp the Linux Kernel Personality - while claming that Linux has stolen SCO code in it.
Let me say that again....
SCO has every reason in the world to see the GPL killed. That reason is that they have (most likely) been using GPL'd code in their proprietary code. They want to see the GPL nulled and voided so that when "they win their case", they can, at a later date, keep right on using Linux code in their shitty products.
They are stalling and filing frivolous motions (like to dismiss) to get them to the point where the dumping can really rake in some money. But Red Hat is obviously onto this - by their discovery requests.
I wonder if they'll just Koresh themselves into their little SCO compound when it becomes obvious that they can no longer prevent the world from finding out that this was all a house of cards pump-and-dump, and that the only ones who've been truly in violation of "stealing IP" was them.
http://www.groklaw.com/article.php?story=200310
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
They'll explain they don't have any intention to go after the end user and close their australian branch...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Ah, the irony. The mods mod down someone praising them. If logic applies to them, this should get me some karma: MODS SUCK DIE MODS DIE. There, I insulted them. If praising them gets modded down, it's karma rtime!!!
point them to the famous Linus interview where he said "SCO is smoking crack"?
I think that explains it best.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
... plead insanity! Come on, you know it's true.
Bitter and proud of it.
The important thing is to remember that the power is in the law and not just the ACCC
The distinction is meaningless in the real world.
We say "police powers" not "the power of the law exercised by the police", for example.
Obviously the power of any such institution is derived from the law - corporations don't do what you ask them to just because you say please.
Much of the complaining was about publicity.
That's true.
However, complaining isn't what I was referring to, I said "campaigning". I was referring to their attempts to get the Government to reduce the powers of the ACCC.
I think there are also plenty of examples to show where the ACCC doesn't seem to achieve their goals. If they were so powerful and effective, would we really have the outrageous banking costs that we have? Would Telstra get away with half the stuff it does?
Of course they don't succeed at everything they set out to do. Sometimes the companies are actually in the right and there was no infringement of regulation. Sometimes the law isn't "strong" enough and makes it virtually impossible to convict (having to . Sometimes the evidence just can't be found.
They aren't all powerful.
Do you also think the police aren't "effective" because there are some unsolved crimes.
You've said that the offending code cannot be 'cleaned' from Linux. Why not?
Chris Sontag, SCO:
I'm not sure that it can't be. The question becomes, will it? Beyond the 80 or so lines of code that we show under nondisclosure to interested parties, we have identified some examples of more than a million lines of code that have gone into Linux in the form of programs and files such as NUMA (non-uniform memory access), RCU (read, copy, update), and the JFS (the Journal File System from AIX). I haven't seen anyone in the Linux community racing to remove these million lines of code from Linux yet. And even if this code were to be removed, should not SCO receive some kind of compensation from those commercial users whose businesses benefited from using it? It's much more than an issue of cleaning.
I sure wish we could get a lead on what they're smokin'. I still say it surpasses anything that's ever been discovered anywhere else on the planet.
SCO wanted UnixWare to be THE unix on intel software. Period. When IBM blew the Monterey project away and supported Linux instead, SCO got all pissy that thier vendor lock-in plan failed, and is now suing for all that classic bsd public-domain code in old linux kernels.
It's all they have left, so if they stall the court case as long as they can, fud the hell out of the community, and pump n dump thier stock, they can still walk away stinking rich, just like they planned to when they were going to monopolize unix on intel with UnixWare.
Have you ever seen UnixWare btw? It's rougher than Redhat 4.2 was!
Go ahead and explain away. SCO stock is traded in New York and regulated by the SEC. Austrailia has no role in any of this.
Their government can demand explanations all they want. They may even get them. What's the expression they use there....it doesn't matter a pair of dingos kidneys.
Keep your eye on the bouncing ball. This isn't about software, OS, licenses or patents. This is all about a sucking sound in the bank vault.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
The distinction is meaningless in the real world.
I disagree, the distinction is important because a failure of the ACCC to act according to the law has a remedy in Australian Law and a citizen can take such failures to variously, Ombudsman, Administrative Appeals Tribunals or perhaps even the judiciary.
What is important is that it is the application of the laws rather than the arbitrary action of the officials mandated with the power that separates "rule of law" societies from tyrranies. It is too easy to forget that if one lives in such a "rule of law" state, then we ought not to accept institutions where such arbitrary largess is possible and my point was just a reminder of this and the fact that capturing of regulators by the regulated is less of a problem when the law is the source of the power
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Seems like not many noticed this was done with tongue-in-cheek... :-P Oh well :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!