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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."
For those of you that choose not to RTFA:
"SCO is full of shit. And oh yeah, Darl has got balls of steel."
SCO claim that there's a non compete clause in their contract with Novell, and hence, Novell may not compete with SCO.
Now, I don't see Novell running around like a madman shitting in their own bathwater and suing everyone who says "boo". Clear evidence that Novell is in no way competing with SCO's core business.
They are making all the right people mad, just like the Sex Pistols and some certain colonists before them (Boston Tea Party anyone?).
The question is, will anyone remember SCO in 5 years to mention them in the same breath as innovators like Samuel Adams and Sid Vicious? Or are they doomed to VH1 "Where are they now" type obscurity. I would hope for the former, because there is no question that what they are doing is important, and needs to be remembered.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
From Gartner's comments last week, it becomes clear that SCO's claims, press-releases and lawsuits are damaging the adoption of Linux, in the short-term, in corporate environments. I believe that is, partially, what RedHat's case against SCO is about.
So when do we expect that axe to fall? With the IBM case going into Oral arguments next month? Is there not anyway that this process can be accelerated by one of the judges, so that this hideous trainwreck can be put to bed.
Though Slashdot may not have anything to publish if there wan't a faily SCO story.
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
OSDL PDF/FSF HTML RPT WRT SCO GPL FUD
John.
The rest of this text is because the Slashdot lameness filter thinks that I am shouting which in fact I am now because the lameness filter is lame.
but it won't shut up SCO. There is money to be made and FUD to be spread.
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
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: 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
They've kept the Open Source world on the defensive. They experience consistent gains in the stock every time they announce a new initiative in their war on Free Software. They've been able to keep this going for far longer than I would have thought possible, and if this gets to trial the potential is there that they will prevail.
Who would have thought litigation was a way of making a living off of Free Software? I don't like what they're doing, but I have to confess my opinion of their strategy has changed. Fortunately, the rabid response they no doubt expected to provoke from the Open Source community hasn't manifested itself; I've been quite impressed with the professionalism and quality of the response as well. Keep posting these stories... we just can't get enough SCO.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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).
Welcome to the new diocese, Father. These upstanding lads are the choir...
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
I am not sure I follow this argument: Is it obvious (or known) that the code that SCO has distributed contains everything that, say, a RHAT distribution contains? Or could it (in principle) be that SCO's distro (old and unkempt as it is ;-) does not contain the "infringing" pieces while other distributions do?
Thanks.Similarly, has SCO distributed all of IBM's contributions to Linux (thus necessarily including the alleged trade secrets)?
Hey, did I miss some bad news for SCO? SCO stock jumped from 14$ to 16$.
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
Quoting the paper posted in the original article: "Unless SCO can show that the GPL is
a valid form of permission, and that it has never violated that permission's
terms, it loses the counterclaim, and should be answerable in damages not
only to IBM but to all kernel contributors."
Could this eventually be used to force SCO to pay kernel contributors because SCO was in fact infringing on their GPL'ed code?
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia (There is no great genius without a mixture of madness) - Aristotle
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My take on this is that (hopefully) just that will happen.
I think in the beginning, SCO looked at code, at what they owned (or thought they did) and saw many similarities and indeed identical parts with the next most popular OS, Linux. Instantly the idea of litigation entered their heads, and they proceeded without checking much further
Now, piece by piece their case has crumbled, and THEY KNOW IT. they can't NOT know it. They can't look at code they said was indicative of copying by linux but was proven to all be open and not know it. They can't look back at their own release of Linux under GPL and not know it. They can't look back at their release of older UNIX code under a BSD license and not know it. These are adults, they're not complete morons in that manner. They thought they had a case they could win, and they went ahead with pursuing it.
Oh they know for sure that their claim to code in Linux is tenuous, they're smart enough to know that. What they're failing to see is that there is a point, when you're losing, that you decide to call it a day, stop, see your mistakes and move on from them having learnt something.
Pressing ahead without fear indeed.
Curiously, what was Darl McBride and co up to BEFORE all this happened? what was his job? what kind of risks/payoffs did he work with before? perhaps that could give insight as to why they're not going "Oh fuck we're screwed, let's stop", but instead going "Oh fuck we're screwed, may as well dig deeper!"
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.
He used to work at Novell.
Darl McBride, Vice President and General Manager of Novell's Extended Networks Group, is responsible for engineering, development, and marketing at the company's Monterey, California site. Since 1988, McBride has held numerous senior management positions within Novell;
other industry experience includes assignments with Texas Instruments' Information Systems Group.
He was involved with selling UNIX IP away from Novell when he was with them. He then shifted piece by piece into a prime position at SCO, and suddenly he has control over IP he's worked with for decades. McBride isn't just a newcomer to all of this who saw a quick buck to be made, I believe he's been planning this for a long, long time. 10 years or more. He's sticking with it because to him it's personal.
RST
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.
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
Your point that "there is a point, when you're losing, that you decide to call it a day..." is normally valid, but I suspect won't apply here.
In this case, SCO's execs have a very clear reason for pushing on, regardless of the apparently diminishing likelihood of a win in court. SCO's share price has gone from about $1 to about $15 (at present), and the SCO execs (a) have a bunch of stock on their hands that's now worth 15x what it was (as others have said, they've been dumping it but they still hold quite a bit), and (b) have employment arrangements in place whereby they get paid a huge bonus if SCO's stock price continues to rise over 4 consecutive quarters. They're now well into their 3rd quarter of rises, so all they have to do is continue pushing for the next 4-5 months and they get their big bonuses. I'd expect the FUD to keep going, possibly getting wilder and sillier, until those bonuses get paid.
If those bonuses are paid in SCO stock, you can bet they'll be dumped fast and the share price will get smashed as a result. All the patsies left holding SCO stock will wonder what's happened...
*That's* the apparent and obvious motivation here, not a desire to do what's "good for the company".
To what degree is the mainstream media reviewing reports like this recent one from OSDL? If they are, they're certainly not reporting it. It's looking pretty biased to me!
...There's a chance for more "dramatic gains in the SCO stock price"
...The ability to yank one million lines of code out of five million is substantial; Investors seem to believe that SCO's suit has merit
So, to the average investor, SCO's claim that they matched 1 out of 5 million lines of code in Linux is pretty damning evidence.. whereas domain experts like us can easily see through these lies. Hopefully this comes to light in the courts, 'cause people like us are certainly screaming in a vacuum right now!
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?
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.