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SCO Madness Reigns Supreme
Roblimo knows good, honest Constitutional argumentation when he sees it, and over on NewsForge amplifies SCO's claims that the GPL is unconstitutional.
Dopey Panda writes "Looks like SCO has become just a bit worried about their liabilities for distributing the Linux kernel. Starting November 1 you will have to be a registered SCO customer to be able to access their FTP site. So that leaves just a couple days for you to download your own genuine SCO-approved GPL code!"
And perhaps today's most interesting SCO submission: 1HandClapping writes "In alwayson-network.com, Mark F. Radcliffe (HIAL) writes about a little-reported aspect of the SCO vs IBM case: 'Novell, as part of its sale of the UNIX licenses to SCO, retained the right to require SCO to "amend, supplement, modify or waive any right" under the license agreements (and if SCO did not comply, Novell could exercise those rights itself on SCO's behalf). At IBM's request, Novell employed this right and demanded that SCO waive IBM's purported violations. When SCO did not do so, Novell exercised its right to waive the violations on SCO's behalf. Basically, this defense destroys the core of the SCO case: IBM's violation of its UNIX license with SCO.'"
Consider that Noorda has been around the tech industry a LONG time, that he has been involved in a lot of companys, he presumably knows who the A-team and B-team players are, and that he appears to dislike Microsoft a little bit.
So - he takes one of the organizations under his control. He fills it with C-team players. He fills (or prompts someone to fill) the C-team with truthful but misleading information about SCO's purported "intellectual property". He advises them to go after the biggest target first.
Then he sits back and watches while SCO leads a hopeless charge against IBM. This has the dual effect of (a) laying down case law _supporting_ the GPL that Microsoft will have a very hard time overturning (b) smoking out various linkages and anti-competitive behaviour on Microsoft's part.
Crazy, but I have a hard time seeing why else SCO is being so incompetent.
By now, hasn't SCO contradicted themselves so many times on so many issues they're estoppeled from any course of action whatsoever?
Maybe just a non-lawyer's wishful thinking...
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I posted this to LWN earlier....
It's important to understand that this really is a war, and SCO has a point, albeit not one that sane people should accept.
The GPL is a truly revolutionary license, it is *designed*, as SCO says, to reduce the financial value of proprietary software. Yes, GPL software is freer than public domain, in the sense that the source code can never be taken proprietary (other than by the original author) and redistributed.
SCO's argument will likely be that this contravenes Congress's will, by creating a commons under rules other than those established by law.
SCO will say that GPLed code cannot be restricted by export controls, thus violates national security laws.
According to SCO, GPL purports to grant *too much freedom* and therefore, according to this argument, the lesser freedom of the public domain is and should be the appropriate terms by which previously GPLed code should be distributable.
By this reasoning, then, SCO will claim it has every right to use GPL code in its proprietary distributions, but on the other hand, can contend that its own code (or code which IBM created under a license which grants SCO ownership of their code) was never intended (by SCO) to be released under GPL nor public domain.
Now, to fully understand these arguments, you must put yourself in the mindset of a madman. Which, undoubtedly, Darl McBride is. Microsoft and others have surely encouraged his delusional state, and given him the resources he needs to pursue his dreams of world domination, with the understanding that even if SCO has no chance of succeeding in the final analysis, the legal case can and will create FUD to slow the adoption of Linux and buy time for proprietary firms.
If this is a war, SCO is a foot soldier. SCO will die, of course, but that's what foot soldiers are expected to do.
Peace and love, y'all
1. File law suits
2. Get the licensing declared illegal
3. Profits
The only thing is getting everything released under the GPL in the last three years turned over to public domain would trampel the very concept of a copyright. It is a nice idea for SCO, but in reality they have to be smoking crack to think that this one will work. I honestly can not see it happening.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
i used to say...
SCO has every reason in the world to see the GPL killed. That reason is that they have (most likely) been using GPL'd code in their proprietary code. They want to see the GPL nulled and voided so that when "they win their case", they can, at a later date, keep right on using Linux code in their shitty products.
now, it looks like i need to amend it slightly...
SCO has every reason in the world to see all GPL software made public domain. That reason is that they have (most likely) been using GPL'd code in their proprietary code. They want to see the GPL nulled and voided so that when "they win their case", they can, at a later date, keep right on using Linux code in their shitty products, as well as to prevent being sued into oblivion by a horde of GPL contibutors.
it sucks being right.
I'm telling you - we need to see SCO's "closed source" product code - for there, you will see that they have been going what they have accuesed everyone else of doing.
There is NO other reason for wanting all GPL code made "public domain".
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
SCO is obviously out to destroy the open source community, but their method is more subtle than previously thought. They just make an outrageous claim and then watch all the open source developers spend their time flaming on ./ rather than doing real work. Pretty sneaky...
Sheer genius!
"Never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity."
SCO's book value will be either billions of dollars or zero dollars after this case is over, and now we've got law professors calling their case "bizarre and ridiculous" - isn't that the sort of thing SCOX shareholders might find interesting? Yet unless you go into the discussion forums there's not a peep about it on finance.yahoo.com, fool.com... marketwatch.com is the only site I can find that's actually linking to any of these stories.
So I'm throwing out two questions:
Is there anything we can do to make the financial folks more aware of this? Every time a deceitful SCO executive makes another $100,000 stock sale to ignorant traders, Adam Smith does another 360 in his grave.
Is there some better news source I should be using for the stocks I buy? I may sound like I'm mocking the "ignorant traders", but how can I be sure I'm not inadvertently funding some con artist myself?
America is not the world. (Reminded about my earlier gaffe about Canadians, perhaps I should say "the USA is not the world.)
If the GPL is ruled unconstitutional in the USA then the rest of the world simply goes for a dual license. With apologies to all the sane people in the USA, I go for something along the lines of: "GPL applicable outside the USA. No licensing terms available within the USA." We move repositories of GPL stuff out of the USA and the rest of the world gets on with business as usual, apart from possibly a few years setback having to replace key developers. The USA, meanwhile, carries on smoking its crack pipe.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
1. IBM, we sue you for leaking a few lines of our code into Linux.
2. IBM, we sue you because you leaked thousands of lines of our code into Linux.
3. IBM, we sue you because we own Unix and you developed software for Linux.
4. Linux was based on Unix and Unix has 2,000,000+ lines of code. Linux contains all our code!
4. IBM, we sue you... not quite sure why now... We own Linux. Everyone give use $699 or else.
5. All software written under the GPL in the last 3 years is free because the GPL is stupid and it just should be ours anyway.
6. All software ever written is ours.
7. ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
SCO and Microsoft aren't the first people to dislike the GNU Public Virus. It's a licensing approach that's very aggressively designed to promote certain ideas about how Free Software should work, and there are alternative viewpoints even among people who *do* like free software. However, SCO does appear to be the first group that's sufficiently well-funded, aggressive, and boneheaded to attack it with a large crash-and-burn lawsuit.
They do have a partial case - the Unix source license terms were always unclear and dodgy in terms of exactly how closely derived something from Unix source had to be covered, and it's possible that IBM or Sequent or SGI slipped close enough to the edge to sue, but the BSD lawsuits pretty much established that reverse-engineered work-almost-alikes are ok, at least with sufficiently careful clean-room techniques, and IBM has more experienced software-issue lawyers than anybody except possibly Microsoft or remotely possibly the US Government (who also suffer from combinations of malice and incompetence.) However, SCO's distribution of Linux 2.4.x weakens their position substantially.
Me? I've probably still got my Usenix "Mentally Contaminated" pin from a few years ago, though Unix source has evolved a bit from the System V Release 2.0p days when I last looked at licensed kernel source, or from the early 90s when I was using licensed user-space code, and it's amazing how much bit-rot can set in...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I contacted the SEC about SCO, and they called me back!
I posted a comment with more information about this yesterday....
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
More importantly (and more accurately), Eben Moglen "could be thought of" as the FSF's Legal Counsel. Why do you think that anyone cares whether you think RMS's actions are acceptable?
Nobody rammed the GPL down my throat. Some people offered some software under a licence they selected. I chose to use the software. Occasionally I have redistributed this software, under the rights and conditions granted to me by the GPL.
There is a certain art in trolling. You have to stay just the right side of acting like an obnoxious idiot, otherwise you'll just get patronised by people who are cleverer than you are.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Have you ever heard a representative of one company or another say, "I'm sorry, but we cannot comment on legal matters?"
There is a very good reason why you should keep your trap shut when you're involved in a lawsuit: "Everything you say can and will be used against you in court." Now I KNOW you've heard that one.
You do not discuss legal action until the case is over with. Time and time again, SCO's refusal to keep their lips zipped has fed IBM more fuel for their own counter-suits and defense. Everything they have said can and will be used against them by IBM.
IBM is not making the same mistake.
I also feel that their brevity and silence makes the cloud forming over SCO only seem darker, but that's just my own bias talking there. The reality is that what you don't say won't come back to haunt you later.
Only one problem, the 9th and 10th Amendments have been effectively removed from the US Constituition. When was the last time a major case turned on one of them? For if the Courts were t rediscover them they would be forced to strike down most of the Federal Government.
Example: I have the babble box on in the background right now, happen to be on CNNFN and was half listening to a discussion about a new proposed EPA rule requiring apartments to install water meters on each unit in the name of water conservation. The discussion covered a lot of issues, whether it would actually save water, how hard it would be to retrofit existing structures, blah blah. At no point was the most important question asked. What section of the US Constituition granted the Federal Government the power to regulate water supply to dwellings? Since there is no such section, the clear language of those same Amendments mean it HAS no such authority. Most of the EPA, FDA, HUD, etc. etc. are illegal according to the Constituition but violate their edicts and you will go directly to jail, not pass go and never find a lawyer willing to take your 200/hr to use the 9th or 10th Amendment in your defense.
The Constituition uses shockingly clear and direct language, but it still gets ignored.
Amendment 9:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 10:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Democrat delenda est
While most of your post is accurate and informative, I have to dispute one point: nobody could make money selling Multics, or they'd still be selling it today. GE tried and failed, Honeywell tried and failed, and no one else was stupid enough to buy it after that. (I am a former Multician.) Multics was very good at a bunch of things, but it was never designed to be ported to different hardware, and it just cost too damn much to run and maintain.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.