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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."
Clear evidence that Novell is in no way competing with SCO's core business.
Of course there is no competition; Novell is a software company whereas SCO is a litigation company.
Trolling is a art,
There is nothing in there that hasn't been said on slashdot previously better, with more detail, and more concisely... I don't even know why they bothered writing such a weak rehash of the news.
What better title can you have than that? I mean, it speaks soo deeply of SCO's stratgies. Without Fear seems to stand for SCO's complete lack of healthy fear that keeps one from doing something fscking stupid, and I think that Without Research speaks for itself. It takes talent to come up with a title that grabs one like that. I know it seems silly to put so much focus on a title- I know "you can't judge a book by its cover," but people do it, and it's good to be able to take advantage of that. Kudos to the authors.
#define DRM chmod 000
While I agree with most things said in this paper it's just propaganda as well. There's the header Just The Facts and in the first paragraph under this header you can find the phrase SCO's cavalier attitude toward copyright law - that's not a fact, it's an interpretation. This could well have been just a mistake (Which of course I do not believe either - still you can't call it fact!)
You've got to question a report from the OSDL on the issue... but likely I bet you most people will just bash the SCO.
If the SCO releases a report saying the exact opposite, you'd use it as toilet paper. I'm not sayin the OSDL report is bad, its probably pretty accurate, but... what we need is a good 3rd party to anaylze this issue!
SCO executives should be in court for stock manipulation and fraudulent billings.
Personally, I'm hoping most of the "Where are they now?" stories 5 years from now will contain some mention of a Federal Penitentery.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
It looks as if SCO really has no other recourse now except to just give up and wither away. They've tried to massage the facts to make their case believable; they've tried to use laws in an unlawful manner to break the GPL; and now that they've been exposed as a sham, what will they do now?
I hope that when a judge actually sits down and bangs his gavel, he'll take one look at SCO's case and throw it out. At this point there's almost no possible way that SCO could produce anything that would make their case believable, IMO.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
innovators like...Sid Vicious
Shooting heroin, playing root bass lines in eighth-note patterns for a punk band and murdering your girlfriend is innovative? In any case, I'd be willing to bet people will remember SCO better than you remember the Sex Pistols.
You don't find SCO's claims that copyright law supports their claims, but at the same time copyright law does not support the GPL, to be prima facia evidence of a cavalier attitude? Look Darl, you can't have it both ways. That's what the article is trying to point out.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
What about the contract dispute between IBM and SCO? If it is shown that IBM incorrectly included derivitive works of unix into linux, then SCO wins. This is where the "millions of lines of code" come from. This is not same as the few hundred lines of "copied code".
The argument by SCO, to be fair, is that given that their SysV code is in Linux, Novell was distributing SysV code, against the non-compete. But as you said, given also that SCO is not the original SCO, the clause is meaningless. I sorta doubt they'll sue. But you never know.
DR-DOS.
Rambus where are you now?
P.S. sig=funny but Cults are marked by using cognitive dissonance for recruitment. e.g LDS
Logically, that will have to wait until the share price drops to nothing and it surfaces that the SCO execs have in fact dumped their stock for a sizeable chunk of change. It's hard to prove a "pump and dump" is going on when the stock price has risen from $1 or so and is still sitting around $15.
You then have to assume the SCO execs are going to be living somewhere from which the US government can extradite them. My betting is that places like Nth Korea, Niugini, the Dominican Republic and Cuba might be the subject of future travel plans for these guys.
I think they will sue. Its their core business now, remember? They are suing everything and everybody in sight, why stop at Novell. Darl would sue himself if his lawyers could think of a way to profit by it.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
The vorst thing that could happen was for this to be resolved out of court. A court is a very nive place to get to information else unavaliable, like, for instance, what the fsck did Microsoft get a license for? The arent in the unix business by any mesure and i cant remember one single product that even touches unix coming from MS. In a court this kind of info might be revealed. If its apperent that they did not buy a license but instead just gave money under the table to fuel anti-linux FUD they will be hated, much more than today. Same goes for Sun for that matter.
The money trail into SCO needs to be resolved since there are some suspicious trails leading back towards Redmond.
Even if this is almost thinfoil-hat material Microsoft has pulled worse stunts than this before and under much less pressure than right now. They have a busuness modell that demands increased revenues each year and if the revenue drops even a bit they are down the tube. Id really like to know just how much stock is inside Microsoft and how fast people would sell if it stops gaining value in current pace.
By this i conclude that they dont have to loose any significant portion of the market to be toast. All it takes is a slowdown in their growth.
Wirh longhorn so far ahead and the impossibility for them to release yet another crappy OS again they have to slow linux implementation down until Longhorn is ready. If linux gains to much momentum now it will be almost impossible to stop, almost exactly like when Win95 was introduced and OS/2 came in too late.
HTTP/1.1 400
This is wrong. If Linux contains any formerly trade secreted code at all, that status has been forfeited not because of the GPL, but because it was published in the first place without their permission, and SCO would actually legitimately be entitled to compensation for damages (assuming that their IP was misappopriated in the first place, which I doubt).
What SCO does not have the authority to do is insist that their formerly trade-secret code remain inside of Linux while they want to continue to charge a license fee for it (SCO's obvious strategy being that by not revealing where the infringing code is, the likelihood of it getting removed is almost nil). The GPL expressly prohibits this, and SCO can't do a thing about this matter as long as the GPL remains a legal way of giving copyright permission.
Now the question becomes *WHY* shouldn't the GPL be a valid form of copyright permission? Just because it enforces derivative works to be subject to the same license is not a valid excuse by itself because derivative works would still contain some or all of the original work.
Put in the context of what is more commonly seen as normal copyright, if a person were to want to publish a book containing a portion of another work that was copyrighted by someone else, the second author would still need permission from the first author to publish his own book. The only way he can avoid needing permission is to simply not include the material copyrighted by another.
Bottom line. SCO is out of luck.
When Caldera originally bought the UNIX IP I wondered if something of this sort might not end up happening, remembering the Microsoft littigation.
The parallels are closer than many in the Linux community generally admit. Linux is after all a much closer copy of and owes far more to Unix than MSDOS ever did to C/PM.
Caldera bought their rights to both DRDOS and UNIX through Novell. After an initial dismal attempt to sell the software as a business they then turned to littigation as the way to make it pay. Only difference this time round is that it is the Linux community ox that is being gored.
I didn't think the original Caldera/Microsoft case had any merit either. Same tactics, barely credible claims of copied IP followed by protracted littigation where the plaintif seems to have no interest in moving the case forward, just making sure the case does not get dismissed or come to trial or get to a point where an external observer could judge the strength of Caldera's case.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
"SCO is full of shit. And oh yeah, Darl has got balls of steel."
Pretty much sums up the last 20 SCO press release.
While it's indeed shit, the particulars of the shit in question vary from one voiding to another. And if we're not careful, a piece is likely to stick.
This posting is not about SCO's latest press/anal release. It's about a detailed lab report on SCO's fecal output. And the particulars of the report are very useful for forming a treatment plan - or for arranging a suitable quarantine or form of euthenasia for SCO - to prevent an epidemic.
So let's not just dismiss all SCO suit articles out of hand as redundant, shall we?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You are wrong, it is a fact that SCO has a cavalier attitude toward copyright law. It isn't a scientific fact, but it is still truly factual. Not all facts are scientific. SCO has been recklessly abusing the legal system, I don't see anything unfactual about that. This is in a context where SCO puts a legal paradox in front of a judge, and are just about certain to lose because they both use and deny themselves use of the GPL; that proposition seems to be as factual as it is contradictory. They even claim the GPL is against the US constitution! That is ludicrously true and a fact. It seems very truthful and factual to say that SCO is acting outside the norms of accepted behavior and making arguments which don't make logical sense in addition to trampling on the rights of the open source community and damaging their copyrighted holdings in Linux, AKA they are being 'cavalier'. Facts are not necessarily truths, but the truth is a fact. DEAL WITH IT BUCKO! This is whoop ass factuality!
Please, everyone, THINK before you go throwing your support behind a concept which is, in its most basic form, designed to undermine our fundamental rights and values.
I have thought about it, and I think that the coming era of commoditized operating system software will be at least as big a boon programmers as the coming of commodity hardware was 15-20 years ago.
I'm thinking about how Apple decided to go with a "closed" hardware platform and MS decided to go with the "open" one. Apple released the first MacIntosh in 1984, and it wasn't until 1990 that MS had a workable Windows. Despite Apple's huge head start, MS won the race and become the dominant desktop OS. Why? Because MS customers could buy cheap commodity PC's that anyone could build, but Apple customers had to pay top dollar for a special computer only Apple could build.
Face it: Most customers don't want a computer, they want what a computer can do. MS won the race by realizing this, but they want to deny the next step in the logic: People don't want to buy an OS any more than they wanted to buy the computer. Applications are what customers want, and having to pay extra for a proprietary OS may be holding back the application market just as much as having to buy a proprietary computer held back Apple.
We've been creating operating systems for almost a half-century now. A lot of the basics were ironed out a long time ago. It's stupid for people to go on paying high prices for something that's been around for so long.
If you're a programmer, you should welcome Linux the same way a home builder would welcome the availability of inexpensive building materials and tools.
They are suing everything and everybody in sight, why stop at Novell.
AFAIK, they've only sued IBM so far. They're just making obscene gestures at everyone else.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
"I'm thinking that the the financial/business media is leaning towards SCO side since SCO represents a more conventional corporate america, and Linux / GPL threatens that model?"
Maybe not consciously, but my guess would be yes. Plus, this is the equivalent to the "finding buried treasure in backyard" dream for an intellectual property corporation, if it could be made to happen - that has a certain allure.
Bernie lamented the choice of some programmers to charge more than reasonable media, copying, and shipping costs for a copy of some source they wrote.
So what was he saying? That code redistributors should give away their hard work for free out of the goodness of their hearts forever and always?
Bernie was a professor. I presume that his viewpoint was that of an academic, treating software development as research for publication, not a consumable commodity.
How exactly, do you suppose, our civilization would work if everyone did that?
In the same way that academia has ALWAYS worked: Academics do work for reputation points (much like open-source). Sponsors fund applied research directed at their particular problems while patrons fund basic research for the longer-term benefits it provides. A PARTICULAR patron of basic research doesn't know that the things his PARTICULAR contribution supported will benefit him personally. But DOES know that, on the average, such patronage will result in benefits for him (and others like him).
Remember that writing the original software may be expensive work, but copying it once it is written is nearly free. If the software does enough to pay for itself, its cost is already covered. Copying and giving away any useful portion (that isn't your company's particular buisness advantage) has a large net benefit to the commons and a tiny cost to the contributer.
It was the lack of freely-reusable source code, which forced me to spend extra time re-inventing a plethora of wheels before "assembling the wagons".
So you want someone to provide you free resources for you to build your company on? Again, this is an unsustainable model for software development! Someone, somewhere, has to pay for your "free wheels". If it were that easy, why doesn't the government give us all "free cars"? After all, that seems to be a big impediment to many people's career aspirations.
As I pointed out above, creating additional instances of a piece of software costs almost nothing (unlike creating additional instances of cars). That makes the economic proposition MUCH different.
I would pay for my "free" software by contributing non-mission-specific components that I wrote to the commons. This is a win-win proposition:
- I benefit because the amount of effort I save by incorporating and perhaps tuning, rather than writing, open-source software is FAR greater than the amount I contribute - even if I HADN'T had to write that contribution anyhow to get my job done. I benefit even more if I contribute a fix or enhancement to some maintained package - because it becomes part of the release and I can then upgrade to a later version and incorporate other fixes or enhancements without having to redo my changes.
- Others benefit because they get my contribution, which they otherwise would not have had. My contribution might be small - but with a large number of people making small contributions the commons continues to expand.
As for major packages (like OSes, compilers, and the plethora of other open-source tools), some will be maintained by people who can build a business model around them (i.e. by charging for convenient packaging, support, or customization) or find some other business benefit for doing so (such as being the arbiter of a defacto standard), while others will be built and maintained by academics (for carreer advancement), hobbyists (for fun and recognition), and zealots (for the good feeling of having benefitted mankind and/or influenced history).
There are a plethora of ways to be "paid" for writing software, beyond the simplistic model of taking a cut derived from retail sales.
As to the sustanability of the model: The longer it runs, the greater the benefit/cost ratio. Software contributed to the commons doesn't go away, either with time or when someone "takes" a copy. The benefits go on and on, while the cost of each contribution
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way