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SCO Claims IBM/SGI Licenses are Revokable
shadow099 writes "SCO claims in an open letter writen by Blake Stowell, Director Public Relations SCO, that the Unix licenses to IBM and SGI can be revoked. " This is just the latest volley in the ongoing circus. It keeps getting funnier!
Do we have to hear about every time SCO takes a shit? I really don't care about the 4 weekly articles about them that says the same shit and then the posts that say the same shit. There has to be more interesting news articles to read about and discuss than SCO.
I'll get a few obvious observations out of the way.
First, they love to cite that original contract, but they don't talk about the addendums. There's a reason for that.
Secondly, even by that contract unamended, they would still have to actually specify what the supposed violations are before they could start the clock running so far as notice. They've steadfastly refused to do this, proving that they're acting in bad faith.
Third, just because they claim something is a violation doesn't make it so. If they really thought they had violations here, they'd be in a hurry to get to court, but instead they've been stalling.
So, in conclusion, more hot air from a guy that's known for it.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Invalidation of the GPL would mean that existing GPL'd software could be incorporated into commercial code without restriction or credit to the original author.
Actually, no, it wouldn't. In that case, standard copyright law would apply, which says that you can't distribute it, modified or not, without a valid license from the author. Copyright authors could still distribute their software under the GPL (it's a copyright license, so the copyright holder can't violate it). GPL v3 comes out (with a fix for whatever made GPL2 get thrown out), they release their software under GPL3, and all is good.
If needs be, Linux could be re-released under GPLv3 from a country which still accepts the licensing agreement. Then work continues as normal.
Contact Me (got tired of viruses emailing me).
So what usually happens if a company keeps using licensed material after the license has been revoked? They get sued, are found guilty of using intellectual property without a proper license and punished.
And of course licenses are revokable (unlike some people here seem to believe). Even if the license is fully paid, it can still be revoked if you are found in breach of the contract. Hell, IBM is using a similar argument against SCO's Linux.
BOO! TERRO
> SCO gave them that time.
Really? I thought they were required to give them two months from when they told them what the violations WERE, not from when they claimed that violations EXISTED.
Yes, just like how they caught Enron, WorldCOM and Comcast before it was too late. They are a hindsight organization, if ever there was one.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
SCO did not give them that time. They didn't spell out exactly what the breach was, much less what specific remedies would allow SGI to cure it. The contract requires SCO to specify those things before they can take action. That's the purpose of the waiting period- to give the licensee time to cure his breach and avoid losing his license. The clock can't start until SCO does its part, and by failing to detail the alleged wrongdoing on SGI's (or IBM's) part they've failed to abide by their side of the contract.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
SGI has in no way adimiited a breach of its license agreement. It has identified about 200 lines of code SVR4 code that very likely has already released to the public. In an adundance of caution, SGI has excised that code from its Linux distributions.
I really don't know where this idea of "SGI admitting fault" got started, but I can guess.
The court system in the US is less than predictable, and often makes ludicrous decisions in favor of seemingly frivolous lawsuits (see RJR Reynolds, McDonalds, and KB Toys.)
I quote this from Snopes, which I found in my research before posting this reply. Barbara stated it better than I could have: Only rarely do ridiculous lawsuits result in windfalls for the plaintiff; these cases are almost always either thrown out or the judgement goes for the defendant. Some celebrated "outrageous" suits wherein judgement went for the plaintiff prove upon closer examination to be far less "outrageous" than originally presented in the media. (For example, the "woman scalded by hot coffee" suit, which at first blush looked like the height of frivolity proved to be a perfectly legitimate action taken against a corporation that knew, thanks to a string of similar scaldings it had quietly been paying off, that its coffee was not just hot, but dangerously hot. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America provides an excellent description of this case).
Linux CAN lose, and defeat in just this one battle would be disasterous.
Remember, IBM is being sued, not "Linux". Linux is a product, not a company nor an organization, and IBM is not a Linux vendor. If SCO won in its case against IBM, there would be a chilling effect on Linux to be sure, but I have a hard time seeing it as "disasterous". In the event that IBM loses, it would have to pay damages to SCO and... that's it. SCO would be barred from suing Linux vendors or users because that would be "double dipping". SCO would have been awarded damages from IBM already and therefore relieved of its harm. Linux would be fixed based on discovery and court records and life would go on. Granted, it would be an indelible mark on the OS and wide-scale adoption would be hampered, but I don't think it would be disasterous.
Linux, on the other hand, would be utterly destroyed.
I highly doubt it. There's simply too much money invested. Do you honestly think that the hundreds of companies, including goliaths like IBM who has invested billions into Linux, are going to just throw up their hands and say "oh well, we give up"? Of course not! Within WEEKS (yes, WEEKS -- not months nor years) Linux, like a phoenix, would be reborn from its ashes. There's just too much force behind it.
Invalidation of the GPL would mean that existing GPL'd software could be incorporated into commercial code without restriction or credit to the original author.
This is very incorrect. First of all, SCO hasn't brought the GPL into the lawsuit, only IBM did in its countersuit. In the very unlikely scenario that the GPL is "invalidated" for some reason, the software doesn't become public domain for Pete's sake!! That's just silly and wrong. The GPL only grants rights, it does not take them away. If the GPL is invalidated, then the GPL'ed software would have no license at all, and people would not be legally allowed do anything at all with it, other than perhaps use it... and I'm not even sure about that.
However, most GPL'ed software says that the license is something along the lines of "version 2 or whatever is the latest version". If "version 2" of the GPL is invalidated, there would soon be a "version 3" that solved whatever grounds "version 2" was invalidated on that would be applied to GPL'ed software.
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Now suppose that SCO manages to make this stick. How can we ever again have confidence in proprietary licenses, if the customer can have its license revoked through no fault of its own, but through the fault (real or alleged) of its vendors? Or its vendor's vendor? Or its vendor's vendor's vendor's vendor, which turns out to be some small software house in Middle of Nowhere, Idaho, which the customer in question never even heard of?
The GPL, OTOH, specifically disclaims any right to terminate the rights of sublicensees:
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[1] Predicated, of course, on proving that IBM actually breached its license, but SCO would rather gloss over that unimportant detail.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
And this agenda is: Keep SCO in the news at all costs
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
When the initial charges were leveled against ibm and sco's stock price was in the tank, ibm had a tough decision. Whether to buy sco or fight them. Each time a new "open letter" is put out the chance that ibm will buy sco diminishes. The one great unknown is what will m$ do? After all bill could buy sco with the change he finds in couch. So why doesn't he do it? Because he doesn't believe sco has a case, even if he were to pick up the banner and run with it. After all his over-riding goal is to slow the adoption of linux and given the bungling, foot shooting excercise that sco is doing on a nearly daily basis he is not about to buy a sinking ship.
What seems most interesting is what will happen 3-5 years from now. Sco can only delay the law suits from Redhat and ibm for so long. They continue to alienate there distributors as well as squandering any good will within the development community that might have existed, based on there past performance. At the same time, sun is bleeding to death and can't sustain its support for sco. Sun's problems are really caused by poor management decisions and an inability anticipate the future of the server market.
To sgi's credit they moved quickly to identify and fix the problems they were responsible for. Whether sgi's license will be revoked can only be sorted out in court. This is a real serious problem for sco because they don't want to go to court. Given sgi's quick action to sco allegations it seem unlikely. But this is the us court system so it's probably a crap shoot. Ultimately, sco has only one card to play. They must prove they have some right to linux source code. Whether those rights are direct, as in copied code or whether they can "leverage" some rights by asserting claims of "derived" code remains to be proven. If they were hoping to settle this out of court that bet seems to have been a dismal failure for them since it looks like ibm is willing to go the distance.Only a very small number of companies are buying sco licenses while a very large number are continueing to deploy linux. This shows how the vast majority of people see the long term impact on linux.
Addendum X to the UNIX license with IBM says the license is irrevocable. There are no words in the license or addendum that say "oh, unless you do this, in which case we can revoke it". The license is irrevocable.
The license even makes things clearer: it says the license is perpetual. Now explain to me why the license would say perpetual and irrevocable and less than a page later give conditions for revocation? Hint: it doesn't.
The UNIX license with SGI might be different. Somehow I doubt it. I recall SGI saying that they also have an irrevocable agreement in an addendum.
The addendum says that the UNIX license can be enjoined if there are any violations. This means to force into compliance. Not to revoke. If the license is irrevocable and it states that the license is irrevocable then it'd hardly make sense if the license could actually be revoked.
In the most imaginative intepretation, enjoin could perhaps permit an injunction. But that will require a judge to decide, and SCO first has to submit a request for injunction to the court (and you might notice they haven't done that). The word "enjoin" definitely doesn't give SCO the right to revoke the license, because it's very clear that the license is irrevocable.