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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..."
here
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
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.
true, but they still are alive and kicking in oz for certain platforms but are being phased out by linux, solaris or *bsd
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
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.
That's because the SEC can't do something until there is an actual crime committed. When it comes to appearances and "guessing", the SEC is completely powerless to do anything.
And before anyone makes some noise about "their execs are dumping their stock holdings now", remember that the one exec who has been selling his stock had filed a plan with the SEC back in January to do so.
The best (and arguably only) place for us to file complaints with is the Federal Trade Commission. Even then, it takes more than "they might be doing something wrong" to get them to take notice. The federal entities can not act preemptively (except the millitary, but that's another story) so they can not stop SCO from being annoying.
Some have made noise asking why the courts don't stop SCO. Again, they can't until someone goes through the motions of filing a lawsuit asking the courts to do so. The courts cannot act preemptively.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
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
south-east of California.:-)
Actually it's south-west of California.
And remember, it is the BIG island, not the two little ones you come to first, populated mainly by sheep.