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...'"

Comments

Lawsuits as Legacy?

[fuzzybunny]

"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."

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...

Re:Why was it sealed?

[rongage]

Typically, especially in a civil suit, a case can be sealed on request of both parties involved. This is typically done when one of the parties (usually some company) doesn't want "damning evidence or testimony" to be made public. This company would most likely propose a settlement offer that is contingent on the case being sealed and that the other party be prohibited from discussing the case publically.

In short, it's to prevent bad publicity from getting out.

Remember the battle-cry of the Slashdot'er - IANAL!!!

Fix this issue

[devnullkac]

Ralph Yarro, chief executive of the Canopy Group: "The question is: 'How can we fix this issue and move forward?' " he said. "I'd like to see Linux survive."

How about specifying the violations so they can be corrected in all Linux distributions?

Re:Fix this issue

[CmdrGravy]

he said. "I'd like to see Linux survive."

This kind of statement really pisses me off. It implies that Linux is somehow in danger of not "surviving" which is clearly not the case at all.

GPL involvment

[geschild]

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.

Re:GPL involvment

[Greyfox]

So far, not one company that's found to be infringing on the GPL has been inclined to take it to court. I guarantee you that IP lawyers in every IT firm in the USA has looked at the GPL long and hard, and they've all come to the same decision about it. That's why no one's dared take it to court. If a company thought it could just loot the OSS code base wholesale, it'd do so in an instant. Companies and their boards don't have morals, they just exist to make money. Upper management goes through a special operation to remove any hint of a conscience.

IBM's legal department is probably bigger than the entirety of SCO. They employ a lot of really bright lawyers and those guys do their homework. They wouldn't be fighting the fight if they thought they could lose, and I suspect they have several knockout punches which they will unveil at the appropriately embarassing times.

Coolest story bit: GPL upheld in court/litigation

[23]

Applying my "grep -i $anything_interesting $daily_sco_story" yields:

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

Offshore IT

[tiny69]

In a telephone interview, Canopy's chief executive acknowledged that Lineo had infringed on MontaVista's copyrights but blamed the transgression on the work of Hexamark Technologies, an Indian outsourcing company that worked for Lineo.

Here is something that many companies that are pushing all of their IT offshore may not have thought about. The developers in some third world country may either not care about intellectual propertiy infringement issues or copying others work may be legal in that country (i.e. - they don't have laws saying that it is illegal). But that doesn't help the company that has pushed their business offshore to make a quick buck on cheap labor and may very well be setting themselves up for failure. Getting sued because of something the company you out sourced to did will eat up any profits from working with that company.