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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?
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
That might work in the USA but other countries actually have working legal systems.
-- RTFM:Slackware::Beer:Saturday
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!.
sco cant explain...sco cant sell in oz... simple :-)
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
Whoever heard of a govt telling a software company what to do.
Yeah, in this country it's the other way around.
Hm.... "In Soviet Russia..." Nah.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
sco cant explain...sco cant sell in oz... simple :-)
I wonder how badly it will hurt them to lose their customer in Australia, anyway...
Like what I said? You might like my music
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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