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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..."
They actually may have to, as the claim is that their attempt to get licences amounts to extortion. If the ACCC sees this as a case of extortion they may be asked to show proof or face court. The Australian Competition and Comsumer Comission actually has some teeth. This may actually be an inetresting one to keep an eye on.
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
It appears that the ACCC is much more competent than the SEC.
This comment:
It asked the ACCC to investigate SCO's activities in light of "unsubstantiated claims and extortive legal threats for money" against possibly hundreds of thousands of Australians.
shows that the ACCC really understands what's going on.
With all of the complaints I've sent to the SEC (and I'm sure thousands of other Slashdot and Groklaw readers have done the same), I'm surprised that the SEC hasn't done anything yet. But in any case, I don't think the SEC won't be able to sit around idly once IBM is through with SCO.
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.
sco cant explain...sco cant sell in oz... simple :-)
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
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.
...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.
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?
And before anyone makes some noise about "their execs are dumping their stock holdings now" remember
;-)
If my memory differs, can I make noise anyway?
that the one exec who has been selling his stock
Yahoo lists sales from their Senior Executive Vice President Reginald Charles Broughton, their Chief Financial Officer Robert K. Bench, their Vice President Jeff Hunsaker, their Senior Vice President Michael Sean Wilson, and their Controller/Vice President Michael Olson. Last I checked the total sales were up over $2.5 million dollars, and I've been told that the only reason Darl isn't getting in on the action yet is that his contract doesn't give him his stock options until they've had four quarters of payola (er... profit) from Microsoft and Sun.
had filed a plan with the SEC back in January to do so.
And as long as they then suddenly realized that they should trump up a multibillion dollar lawsuit and have it ready to make public less than two months later, that's fine. According to analyst Laura Didio, on the other hand, SCO was deciding what to do about "blatant SGI violations" more than a year ago, in which case the fact that several of their execs filed to sell most of their stock shortly afterward seems a lot less coincidental.