Slashdot Mirror
NY Times Reveals SCO/Canopy Group Hypocrisy
rjamestaylor writes "The New York Times reports that 'SCO, the company that touched off a computer industry slugfest last spring by suing I.B.M. over its use of Unix software, may find itself embarrassed by a similar claim against a company once related to SCO.' Note that the reporter, John Markoff, ties together Noorda's Canopy Group companies, revealing that: 'Canopy is now SCO's largest shareholder, with two seats on the company's board, and has played an important role, analysts say, in shaping SCO's legal strategy.' He even quotes SCOSource shill Laura Didio as saying, 'All roads lead to Canopy...'"
I thought he was a bad guy...Free Kevin and all. Now he's not? Slashdot is confusing my Slashbot mind...
Article
I'm sure Mr. Yarro would love to see Linux survice, just as much as Microsoft would have loved to see Netscape survive.
This isn't really the same thing. SCO hasn't sued IBM for copyright violation. They've sued for breech of contract.
"It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the SCO" - with apologies to Churchill.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Mr. Yarro said: "I know I've been painted in a rough light. I hope that our companies are our legacy and not our lawsuits."
You bet. After a while, nobody will remember Canopy from anything else than their lawsuits. And I also hope that Yarro and friends have a nice little cell in their PMITA prison, preferably with a hugely popular LUG consisting mainly of ethnic guys who work out a lot.
Damn, the whole SCO management could make an entertaining episode of Oz.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
remeber the Kevin affair.
I dont care what he reporting on, first of all it seems like something the /. community has known for quite sometime. Its Canopy
hes a sensationalist, plain and simple.
It's a bit late for that, isn't it? While on the one hand, the massive publicity of the SCO lawsuits may have had, to some degree, the effect of creating some doubt in the minds of cautious CIOs/CTOs, by associating the word "Linux" with "unresolved, potentially damaging IP issues", the comparative lack of visibility of anything actually produced by SCO, combined with the massive media coverage of their seeming focus on litigation will certainly badly tarnish what's left of that company after this whole thing is over.
Large companies, which are normally fairly conservative on adoption of "new" technologies, will be just as loath to look at anything coming from a company so strongly perceived to be as lawsuit-happy as SCO...
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
IANAL.
I'm curious as to the circumstances under which a case can be sealed. I thought it would be to protect victims, or national secrets, etc. The article suggests this case would have had a bearing on SCO vs IBM, could SCO get the case sealed for that purpose? If so, how is that legal!!
Is there a way to find out how much the SCO board Members have made Selling of their stock since they filed the lawsuit?
SEC will be looking into this soon. The girliest screem on the roller-coaster as it goes down will be Darl...
All roads do not lead to canopy. Yours leads to a federal-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison.
Although I'm curious as to how cases in the US legal system can be sealed, I think this will not have much influence on the case of IBM suing SCO for breaching the GPL, as IBM has already subpoened Canopy records. I think the IBM legal team knows full well that canopy is behind it, and if it turns out that GPL software is in SCO without copyright notices, then Darl and Co are in for a lot of pain.
How about specifying the violations so they can be corrected in all Linux distributions?
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
According to the article, Montavista found GPL-ed code in Lineo's product.
Possible implications:
- the issue who copied from whom has become a lot more important to the SCO court-case
- Lineo broke the GPL and decided to settle. Why? Did Lineo think that the GPL does hold water? Any way you turn this, it looks no good for SCO and their bickering over the GPL being 'invalid'.
- The GPL was the basis for law-suit. Just because it was settled out of court doesn't take anything away from that fact. Another strengthening.
- How is SCO going to deal with IBM's and RedHats quid pro quo: innocent infringement? Innocent infringement means that, although an infringement is aknowlegded by the accused party, the infringement was done unknowingly. In the SCO case it would then become very hard to get any compensation because:
a) damage will be hard to show anyway (it is probably easily provable that SCO lost more customers because of the lawsuit than because of infringment of any kind).
b) if any damage is shown, compensation will be low if at all applicable because it was due to 'innocent infringement'.
c) !!!
d) Loss for SCO/MS because the victory for IBM, SGI and RedHat will be complete.
Karma? What's that again?
I don't know about the IT industry in general, but as far as I can see SCO has made nothing but a fool of itself. Even with those people who aren't Linux fanatics. I've been registred with Caldera as a customer for years and ever since that huge, over the top designed super-glossy flyer came in the mail, along with United Linux 1.0 CDs with all kinds of hand-out gadgets making a big boohay about how Caldera was now SCO Group and all that, I started doubting that this company was going the right way. Especially after they offered to change the test version of 'their' United Linux (which was done almost 100% by SuSE) into a licensed version for 650$. Nobody in the industry with more than 2 braincells and even the slightest insight into OSS has since then taken SCO Group for granted.
After the recent months of exitement - which were almost exclusively limited to exited geek-only discussions about in which way SCO would damage Linux Services amoungst the people of trade - everyone I know of has marked off this SCO issue as resolved. Apart from SCO sometimes still being good for the one or other joke at the watercooler it's all just business as usual, with this SCO farce becoming a part of the long list of corporate IT history footnotes.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Since it is becoming more and more clear that Canopy is pulling the strings behind the SCO lawsuit, is it time, as a community, to put the heat on Canopy as a whole? Some of the other Canopy holdings are a bit of a surprise, given the direction SCO is going. Canopy happens to be big investors in Trolltech, the makers of QT. There's also some company named Linux Networx, a builder of Linux-based clusters. There are many other companies listed right on Canopy's web page. Perhaps some polite but strongly worded emails from Linux community members with relationships to these companies (e.g., KDE developers, etc.) might convince Canopy that their current direction will be detrimental to their larger business interests. Maybe it's even time to talk about a boycott of these companies' products. It's not like SCO and Canopy are playing clean here, after all. Thoughts?
This from the termcap file which ESR maintains:
.Ohhhhhhhhhhh, plagerism and deliberate commercial fraud based on same?
# COPYRIGHTS AND OTHER DELUSIONS
#
# The BSD ancestor of this file had a standard Regents of the University of
# California copyright with dates from 1980 to 1993.
#
# Some information has been merged in from a terminfo file SCO distributes.
# It has an obnoxious boilerplate copyright which I'm ignoring because they
# took so much of the content from the ancestral BSD versions of this file
# and didn't attribute it, thereby violating the BSD Regents' copyright.
#
# Not that anyone should care. However many valid functions copyrights may
# serve, putting one on a termcap/terminfo file with hundreds of anonymous
# contributors makes about as much sense as copyrighting a wall-full of
# graffiti -- it's legally dubious, ethically bogus, and patently ridiculous.
#
# This file deliberately has no copyright. It belongs to no one and everyone.
# If you claim you own it, you will merely succeed in looking like a fool.
# Use it as you like. Use it at your own risk. Copy and redistribute freely.
# There are no guarantees anywhere. Svaha!
#
They've been caught at this many times, most recently in obfuscated slides they showed to the press.
Many of their copyright violations claims come from taking BSD code, stripping the copyright notices from it and adding their own.
This is how they come about "ownership" of code in Linux.
I really don't what what could be lower than stealing code that is free for anybody to "steal" at will.
Unless it's. .
They seem to have invented hypocrisy to the second power.
Go get 'em Red Hat!
KFG
from the story link and your link (and from google's news/tech page). Since I don't have flash (anti-flash), I can't see what's going on.
I checked the source, and don't see any links to another page.
Can someone please post the story?
Thanks a bunch!
Facts from the story: Montavista writes software under GPL. Lineo uses said software but removes copyright notices. Montavista sues Lineo over that (copyrights must be retained under the GPL)! Montavista wins (settlement).
How cool is that. And here we have people bitching that something as the GPL won't hold up to any major court challenge.
Smile, people. This is really cool considering that numerous people believe the GPL won't stand a chance in court.
roland
It would be useful to see a chart representing SCO stock dumps, their value compared to their official press releases and big media coverage dates. They always replied that stock sells were automatic, but how about seeing what happened just before and after every single transaction?
NY Times article
When will SCO sue themselves?
It would be useful to see a chart representing SCO stock dumps, their value variations compared to their official press releases and big media coverage dates.
They always replied that stock sells were automatic, but how about seeing what happened just before and after every single transaction?
"Mr. Yarro, who is also chairman of SCO and led Canopy's lawsuit against Microsoft, argued that his company is not trying to destroy Linux but was simply asserting its intellectual property rights.
"The question is: 'How can we fix this issue and move forward?' " he said. "I'd like to see Linux survive.""
Yes, I'm sure that's 'simply' what he's doing. Well then Mr. Yarro how about simply TELLING everyone where the problems lie so they can be fixed?
Canopy is a bullshit firm designed to do nothing more than be a corporate leech. Man, I'd love to see these guys go down on this...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Anyone else sense a greater conspiracy here?
*ducks*
We've been bitchin' on SCO for months and at every story somebody posts "Right NOW is the time to sell your stock...." but the truth is simple for all to see: Canopy is a bunch of lawyers with a BIG trackrecord, so you can bet McBride has his ass covered SEC-wise. SCO was dead in the water before this started and they knew it. So McBride and his buddies will screw over SCO, give all the employees a pink slip and all the customers season tickets to go-fuck-yourself-land. Then they will walk away with so much cash you will wish you did it yourself. And there is nothing we can do about it.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Didn't they owe us some answers to some questions from several months ago? What was the problem? Were the questions too hard for them?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's a settlement, not a win.
Lineo settled to avoid setting a precedent upholding the GPL which would likely later damage SCO's case (in case copying was going on, but in the other direction.)
Freakin mods with no sense of humor. Obviously I wasn't the only one given the other posts...
In SCO's August 5 press release SCO said introductory pricing on their SCO IP License for Linux would be available "through October 15th, 2003".
Well it's getting pretty close to the deadline, so I thought I'd check out the current situation. One page of SCO's site says the introductory pricing is available until October 31st (but I need to sign an NDA before I can be told it's terms according to item 5!), but another page of SCO's site says the introductory pricing is only available until October 1st.
Laura Dildo.
Could you please translate this for those of us that smoke crack? Now all we have is Caldera/SCO trying hard to be a defunct company! I need to wrap something around my torso before I bust my gut laughing.
This Comment was generated with the Comment-O-Matic for SCO Stories.
StickMan
www.rageagainst.net
http://www.sco.com/scosource/description.html
The "introductory" period for their fraud is already over, but they have failed to upgrade the prices..
Wasn't John Markoff the fellow that wrote about Kevin Mitnick in the New York Times and got him arrested by hyping him up with fallacies?
Here's from the flash ROM image update I downloaded/burnt a few weeks ago:
This should remind everyone why a totally open framework is preferable. Familiar Linux / MiniGUI seems the way to go now.Why would anyone care about this stupid server OS? It clearly will never make it onto the desktop in any significant numbers, so who cares except for a few nasty multinational corporations and a few Unix-loving geeks.
Because we all know whoever makes it to the storied and fabled desktop awaits untold riches and power beyond your wildest belief.
... and furthermore
If this is so bloody boring, why the hell are you wasting time reading about it?
This server timeout thing causing duplicate posts is getting annoying.
Huh? Pick a fight on a topic, and then say the position is "awkward" when the topic becomes the core issue, rather than a footnote to the lawsuit?
Truth really is stranger than fiction...
Has anybody considered the effect the SCO lawsuit will have on Linux distributions outside of the US Borders? Probably next to none.
SCO's efforts to generate revenues by suing large domestic corporations will only hurt America and Americans.
Linux is bigger than our country. It has a worldwide base and worldwide support. Even if it were declared unusable in the US, it would still exist everywhere else in the world.
And we would be stuck with Windows...
The fact the are willing to embarass themselves to try this kind of long shot is very telling of how desperate they are.
Lineo was sued last year by MontaVista, a maker of software for specialized computers used in consumer and industrial applications that is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. The MontaVista executives said they had been notified that software their programmers had written and licensed under the GNU General Public License - the license that governs companies that distribute Linux software - had appeared, with copyrights removed, in Lineo's software. The license, which allows for the free distribution of software, still requires that the copyright notices be retained.
For the folks whose misunderstanding of copyright law makes them make dumb statements like "the gpl hasn't been tested in court!", well, it's your lucky day. It's been "tested", and it won.
But most of us already knew that, since it's really basic copyright law...
Do you have ESP?
Trolltech should come clean on their
relations with Canopy.
"Major Investor" could also mean that
Canopy has special rights like warrants.
"Major Investor" could mean Canopy owns
the debt on Trolltech.
Again, Trolltech needs to come clean.
KDE zealots voting "+4" interesting on
comments that dis-associate Trolltech from
Canopy is not good enough.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
Isn't Lineo a spin-off from SCO?
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
I prefer "laura didiot" myself...
According to internal MS numbers, it is already approaching 10% of smb. So apparently, MS cares.
Every time I frequent the SCO message boards on Usenet, all I see are SCO employees rightously defending remarks from linux users about how SCO is a fraudulent company....
They go on to say things like "SCOsource is only about 10 people out of the whole company, but unfortunately the most vocal" and go on and on about how SCO is a good company with good products, just that unfortunately the SCOsource department is bad.
So... I'm guessing after SCO goes under, wouldn't the top management be liable for damages as they deliberatly put their own employees out of work? I mean, if SCO does happen to survive, the damage has been done by dirtying it's name.
I disagree: Linux is a free OS, which means no money . Untold riches won't be had by anyone.
Futhermore KDE Gnome are the suckiest GUIs I have ever seen, clearly examples of afterthoughtware, which is about as useful as vaporware.
It's the New York Times. Better double-check the facts to make sure they're not lying yet again.
Wow, Canopy sounds like another PanIP. "They've played this very cleverly." Yeah, hooray for them, for being clever little weasels and hiring top grade lawyers. That's what business is all about. Yay!
But anyway, any IP issues SCO may have had in the past are not relevant to their current legal claims, and won't deter them looking like asses making them. Companies don't worry about corporate image in the same way you and I might worry about our personal reputations. Businesses customers don't care much whether their suppliers are playing the good guys or the bad guys, and the consumer public's memory can be erased by time, advertising and low prices. Corporate image is just another asset, like landscaping. For "embarrassment" substitute "the cost of damage control."
Sarcasm is useless literary tool here. :(
... and furthermore
We should be reading this article with the same degree of skepticism that we would read an article written by Jason Blair.
Has the slashdot community forgotten how Markoff reported Kevin Mitnick's case?
example from 2600 and another
One thing you missed - "Lineo, was spun out of Caldera in 1999 and sold to Motorola last December." In other words, Lineo (who violated the GPL) used to be SCO. A bit more circumstantial evidence that SCO may be ripping off GPL code. *cough* LKP *cough*.
Litigious bastards
How about modding this comment down ????
Something nobody seems to have noted is that this article appeared in a publication read by "normal" people.
Sure, sure. We can joke about the NYT, and throw our criticisms about the author; but this is an article in a major newspaper that's critical of SCO.
It's a good thing (tm).
Even if it's light (anorexic) on details, it mentions that SCO is suing IBM, then alludes to stock scams, perpetual legal action, hypocrisy, etc.
I never thought I'd say it; but WAY TO GO NYT!!
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
the Canopy group and it's ill-conceived demon spawn and the relationships between them make my head hurt.
I wish they would all go away.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
this guy is a proven wanker.
Of course, we could re-write the offending bits, but perhaps SCO manages to get that info sealed. Or perhaps, even if re-written, SCO claims that the new code is tainted by knowledge of the now removed code.
I hope IBM goes for a full win, rather than an easy settle.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
Weel, if they settled, it did not get to court and Motevista did not 'win' it's case in court, just like the RIAA hasn't 'won' any of it's court cases against filesharers.
Without seeing the settlement agreement, we can 't tell whehter the GPL was invovled at all in the settlement. Settlement agreements can indicate no admission of wrongdoing - they merely state that the issue will be dropped by one party for the following concessions of the other party (generally $$$$)
SCO has killed Unix-branded Unix. Can you imagine any company willing to buy a license after SCO started suing some of the licensees (IBM, SGI)? The effort to start a new OS from scratch is enormous. (See BeOS.) Any new OS is going to be based on BSD or Linux. (See Apple.)
There will never be a new SystemV-based Unix, which means SCO can never sell another license. And most of the current licensees (not including MS and SUN) paid AT&T in full for perpetual licenses, so there is little revenue from the current licensees.
Lawsuits as a business model is all that SCO has left.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
An extreme form of biting the hand that feeds you....or a dog that eats its own poop....or sitting on one's own whoopie cushion.
"SCO picked a big fight and it flowed over to the Linux environment and we found ourselves in an awkward position," he said. "For better or for worse it's one of the cautions and dangers and flaws for the model. It happened to Lineo and has happened to several others."
Shite! Utter gobshite! "It flowed over". The mercenary, spineless, immoral sister fuckers have relentlessly saught to scare users away from linux by threatening law suits and charging for their binary only licences, under false pretence and hitherto baseless accusations, for the sole purposes of artificially inflating their own stock prices, and then have the audacity to go on record in the popular press and say that they never really meant for any of this to happen. And worst still, the casual reader might actually buy into this tripe.
I can't wait to see these excuses of human beings get stamped out like the vile, repugnant, disease ridden cockroaches they are!
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
:D
It appears that Caldera cut Lineo loose before MontaVista came into being. Darn Shame too, It would have been some fun to track copying back to Caldera.
It'll never happen. KDE zealots are content to know that Trolltech tell them SCO/Canopy are "only" 6% owners. And mod up anyone saying so... despite and don't bother to think it through.
You can trust Trolltech, after all. They wouldn't lie, or suddenly start throwing IP lawsuits around. Or take shitloads of money from Microsoft. Pfff...
I don't understand. What are you suggesting? What do ducks have to do with it?
Howard the Duck was always running into elaborate conspiracies. Is that what you mean?
Ducks like water. They love a good rain. Is that what you mean by bringing canopies and umbrellas into the conversation?
But then why would they go after Linux? Is this some vendetta against the penguins? But why? Penguins love water. Or is it that the Linux penguins remind them of bad days at a Catholic school? Maybe they hated one of the Batman films.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
It never stops to amaze me the length to which some /.ers will go to try to find faults with how economics work.
If the company outsourcing does not stipulate that the contractor has to respect the local copyright law then they deserve whatever they get, which would be the same in any other case since a company is open to the same improperties without mattering at all the location of the consulting company. A local outsourcing company could also introduce copyrighted work, so I see this lame attempt to seed FUD associating this problem with overseas outsourcing as a very crass reasoning aimed to explaining, once again, how some countries lack a competitive advantage.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have heard that SCO is trying to claim that XFS and other file systems are "derivative" works... In the linux kernel, you can have proprietary (closed source) modules/drivers because Linus in his great wisdom decided that a module/driver was not a derivative work of linux. File systems can and are implemented as modules. I can remember when file systems werent implemented as modules.
So.. Has anyone heard of anything that SCO has claimed as infringing that isnt currently implemented as a module/driver?
Read/Copy/Update has been decided is owned by IBM.
I am not trying to claim RCU is not owned by IBM... However for this example, assume the RCU ownership was unknown... I dont think RCU would be implemented as a module. So was RCU implemented inside the SysV kernel not as a module. Then would it not be considered a derivative work of SysV? Linus would say yes, it is derivative. (wouldnt he?)
It would be sort of bothersome if we had to claim non driver/module source as not derivative. It would go against Linus's initial dilineation/stance.
is a leveraged buyout. A company can buy back all of its outstanding stock. It is leveraged if they borrow money to do so. The board of directors (elected by the shareholders) makes this decision. They cannot buy the stock back at any price they want. They have to buy it back at the fair market price. This is also not available simply to a major share holder, the board has to do it. A tender offer is when some person or group offers to buy stock at a certain premium price as long as they can get a certain percentage of it. Thus, a certain percentage of shareholders have to agree to it.
... to cry scream and whine as the inferior unix eats your lunch. You will collapse in a heaving heap when you see inferior unix take your polished Windows from your machine and piss on it. And it won't even bother to be better.
Believe me, I know.
-former VMS user.
.... just when I was looking for my Trolltech shares...
-pyrrho
Just be sure to make the trade before they declare bankruptcy, otherwise you lose your investment.
True, but a settlement is still a "win" in the sense of a moral victory. After all, they would not have settled at all if they thought they could have won.
Even though OpenBSD is a derivative of BSD, they have taken off the BSD copyright as well. Their /etc/termcap file says the same thing. So does the one on many Linux systems. (Look for it in Caldera Linux?)
==========
There are two types of people: those who are in the world, and those who aren't.
doesn't exist. Google doesn't know about them.
In fact, Hexamark is the first word ever for me
that google has come back with a blank.
so what about the rest of the story? How do
we know that the rest of it isn't fictional
either.
Especially if you're a Pom, where the word for the clothing you were thinking of is "trousers", but "pants" brings lingerie to mind.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The idea that IBM would use "innocent infringement" as a defense is utter nonsense. This not a defense at all. It sounds like a trap. SCO and Canopy would be very happy to lure IBM in this kind of admission of guilt.
I think you're misreading the article. As I read it, the article isn't suggesting that IBM would itself use the "innocent infringement" argument as a defense; it's saying that if IBM knew that a Canopy company had used that argument, which implies that said company acknowledged the validity of the GPL, then IBM could use that fact as a defense against SCO's claims that the GPL is invalid.
Or I could be way off base . . .
an you imagine any company willing to buy a license after SCO started suing some of the licensees (IBM, SGI)?
I don't have to.
What you say is true in the strict sense. However, I am not sure that the conclusion you are drawing about old code not "tainting" new code is correct. Otherwise why would one need "cleanroom" implementataions of software?
If the code were covered under patent, even the cleanroom version would be in violation. Instead, under copyright, you need to be able to prove that the new code isn't "derived" from the earlier code. Knowlegde of the earlier code is said to "taint" the authorship of the second set of code.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
Copyrights are a concept, they are retained no matter what. But in copyright law, copyright notices have to be retained. This has nothing to do with the GNU GPL.
Moderators, how can you justify this being rated 4?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Seen at an Internet bulletin board (around 1994):
For me the biggest shock is that court documents can be sealed for no good reson (like protecting the identity of a minor)
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.