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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
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.
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.
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
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.
Personally, I think the delay with the SCO issue has been that it's just not as important as some of the other major cases they have been dealing with lately (i.e. Pan Pharmacueticals and the ever popular kicking the sh*t out of Telstra). Now that the guns are turned on SCO, I suspect that SCO is in for an interesting time indeed.
For instance, when I lodged my complaint with the ACCC, the person who answered the phone already knew all about the issue. This implies that lots of complaints were lodged and that the ACCC has a large body of evidence already.
It's popcorn time...
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
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.
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?
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