Slashdot Mirror
OSDL Releases New Paper on SCO's Claims
Ridgelift writes "The Open Source Development Labs have released a paper entitled SCO: Without Fear and Without Research [PDF, HTML version at the FSF] where Eben Moglen debunks SCO's claims to copyright infringement, and also discusses how they contradict themselves by citing that the GPL is both invalid and provides them legal protection. More information at the OSDL site and via an Internet.com article."
The article is a good summary for those of you tuning in late, or if you are perhaps a bit confused by the whole mess. Like the majority of the SCO news of late, it merely rehashes the situation, but it does provide a clearly articulated dissection of SCO's crack-induced legal arguments.
On the count of three, everybody make the obligatory SCO and/or Darl McBride is insane/Satan/Microsoft's toady comments. Ready? 1, 2, . . .
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
On Newsforge there is an article worth ignoring;
towit:"Lawsuit Drops 'Nuclear Bomb' on Software Industry".
The article needs a bit a research, to bad the author didn't.
A good example of write first, find out later.
SCO: Without Fear and Without Research
Eben Moglen
Monday 24 November 2003
There's a traditional definition of a shyster: a lawyer who, when the law is against him, pounds on the facts; when the facts are against him, pounds on the law; and when both the facts and the law are against him, pounds on the table. The SCO Group's continuing attempts to increase its market value at the expense of free software developers, distributors and users through outlandish legal theories and unsubstantiated factual claims show that the old saying hasn't lost its relevance.
Just The Facts
SCO continues to claim in public statements about its lawsuit against IBM that it can show infringement of its copyrights in Unix Sys V source code by the free software operating system kernel called Linux. But on the one occasion when SCO has publicly shown what it claimed were examples of code from Linux taken from Unix Sys V, its demonstration backfired, showing instead SCO's cavalier attitude toward copyright law and its even greater sloppiness at factual research.
On August 18, 2003, SCO's CEO, Darl McBride, offered a slide presentation of supposed examples of infringing literal copying from Sys V to Linux at a public speech in Las Vegas. Within hours the free software and open source communities had analyzed SCO's supposed best evidence, and the results were not encouraging for those investors and others who hope SCO knows what it is talking about.[1]
In Las Vegas Mr. McBride offered two examples of code from the Linux program that were supposedly copied from Sys V. The first implements the "Berkeley Packet Filter" (BPF) firewall. Indeed, the Linux kernel program contains a BPF implementation, but it is the original work of Linux developer Jay Schulist. Nor did SCO ever hold an ownership interest in the original BPF implementation, which as the very name shows was originally part of BSD Unix, and which was copied, perfectly legally, into SCO's Sys V Unix from BSD. Because the BPF implementations in Sys V and Linux have a common intellectual ancestor and perform the same function, SCO's "pattern-matching" search of the two code bases turned up an apparent example of copying. But SCO didn't do enough research to realize that the work they were claiming was infringed wasn't their own (probably because they had "carelessly" removed the original copyright notice).
Mr. McBride's second example was only slightly less unconvincing. Mr McBride showed several dozen lines of memory allocation code from "Linux," which was identical to code from Sys V. Once again, however, it turned out that SCO had relied on "pattern-matching" in the source code without ascertaining the actual history and copyright status of the work as to which it claimed ownership and infringement. The C code shown in the slides was first incorporated in Unix Version 3, and was written in 1973; it descends from an earlier version published by Donald Knuth in his classic The Art of Computer Programming in 1968. AT&T claimed this code, among other portions of its Unix OS, as infringed by the University of California in the BSD litigation, and was denied a preliminary injunction on the ground that it could not show a likelihood of success on its copyright claim, because it had published the code without copyright notices and therefore, under pre-1976 US copyright law, had put the code in the public domain. In 2002, SCO's predecessor Caldera released this code again under a license that permitted free copying and redistribution. Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) then used the code in the variant of the Linux program for "Trillium" 64-bit architecture computers it was planning to sell but never shipped. In incorporating the code, SGI violated the terms of Caldera's license by erroneously removing Caldera's (incorrect) copyright notice.
Thus SCO's second example was of supposedly impermissible copying of code that was in the public domain to begin with, and which SCO itself had released under a free software license after erroneou
There is no non-compete clause. There is some fairly limited language in regard to Novell not selling or providing monetary incentives to its salespeople with respect to System V, but even that clause is rendered inoperative due to a Change of Control clause that went into effect when Caldera purchased the Unix assets from Old SCO (now Tarantella).
The only thing I liked about SCO was a software app called MERGE, but now you can find the exact same thing called "Win4lin" for linux. Lets you virtualize your System to run 2 OS's at the same time.
This is the only company I could see SCO sue, the developers from NetTraverse used to work at SCO.
BTW, the article is a rehash. Every lawyer says the GPL is enforceable.
there was a positive report in Barron's magazine by, guess who, a Deutsche Bank anal-yst indicating that SCO stock might be worth 185$ (-20% for Boies) if they succeed (see CBS Marketwatch, the original article is unaccessible w/o paid registration) They probably mention that the stock could go to zero as well, but for a trader that doesn't matter, he can probably make big bucks just surfing the ups and downs.
This is also being discussed over at Groklaw, which any of you who still are reading Caldera stories should know about by now...
I assume you meant you hope their suit against IBM is throw out. We want the IBM suit against SCO to proceed all the way to trial and to reach judgement. This will give legal precedent in support of the GPL. Precendent is a big deal. Many companies settle out of court even when they're right just to avoid the possibility of setting a precedent.
How about Gartner:
Quoting, so in case you don't want to follow that link and leave the comfort of slashdot:
Admittedly, Garner does recommend delaying new high-performance deployments for a few months to see what happens with SCO.
Or how about IDC's August 2003 survey. Again, quoting:
Or perhaps you want to know what IDC really thinks rather than just a survey result. Well, quoting once more (though you could easily follow the link to see this same text):
Notice that this was written only last month. Apparantly they don't think SCO's going to have much impact. Saddly, there any many other IDC documents where you have to pay to even find out their opinion... the abstracts are so generic you don't even get a hint until you pay. But I suppose that's how the stay in business.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Option number two. Boies can sell off his SCOX stock in March 2004 (IIRC). That's all the longer he's got to keep up the farce of having a real case.
I too think that Prof. Moglen's article's title "SCO: Without Fear and Without Research" is a fine title.
But the Slashdot thread title "OSDL Releases New Paper on SCO's Claims" steers the reader's attention to the wrong movement. I find it interesting that in this instance, the chief counsel for the Free Software Foundation is writing about the GNU General Public License (which both predate the Open Source movement by many years) and yet his work is credited to the so-called "Open Source Development Labs" (OSDL).
The Open Source movement stands for a different philosophy than the Free Software movement. Perhaps people who submit articles for Slashdot don't commonly know who Eben Moglen is, what he does, or what movement's interests he represents.
Digital Citizen
can be found in Lewis A. Mettler, Esq.'s blog.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Sure..
Right here for the IBM case and here's the RedHat one.
The case isn't going into oral arguments, rather there will be a presentation of oral arguments on IBM:s two motions to compel discovery and SCO:s single motion to compel. This will lead to a ruling on the motions, nothing else.
What we can hope for here is that IBM's motions to compel will be upheld, and SCO will be ordered to provide details on exactly -what- they claim was illegaly put into Linux, within a set time frame.
But the case isn't over by a long shot.
NUMA is a hardware design. It has nothing to do with Unix, except for the fact that various Unix vendors have built NUMA hardware.
Somehow I don't think something will be ruled inadmissable simply because it's common knowledge. If that were the case math could not be used in the courtroom ;)
Err, uhmm, what are you smoking. These are completely different cases. Caldera didn't sue Microsoft for any IP claims, but for anti-competitive behavior. It was widely held at the time that if MS hadn't settled, the evidence would have been enough to catapult the ant-trust trial forward.
Are you trying to say SCO now has some incriminating emails from the Linux community that the DOJ might find interesting?
A good stock scam trumps facts and logic everytime.
Of course, it's just a stock scam. Scox is making this stuff up as they go along. And why not? It works, it works like all hell.
Only one person from the Enron scandle was sentanced to do any time. And Enron hurt a lot more people than scox.
The SEC, FTC, DOJ, or any Attorney General could shut scox down in a heart-beat. Just like Germany did, Germany put an end to scox's scam over there months ago. But the US justice system would rather look the other way while scox insiders laugh at them. Scox insiders are laughing all the way to the bank. And there is nothing the US justice system will do.
SCO is getting close to the first "put up or shut up" point. .
They have only sued one party, IBM.
Sure they have been threatening to sue everybody
but so far they have not.