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SCO Letter to Fortune 1500 Now Online
e6003 writes "The text of the extortion letters that SCO sent out in May 2003 to the 1500 largest US companies is now online. Read in all its glory the lies and misconceptions that SCO has about Linux and the kernel development process. Pamela Jones, the proprietor of Groklaw, suggests Linus Torvalds would have a great case for defamation as a result of this letter and subsequent events."
can be found here.
Did you have to link Groklaw? Its not fair to /. the happy fun (para)legal site.
For your information, the text of the letter has been available here for a few months.
The only reason this is news is that its a document attached to the court docket for the December the 5th hearing on the motions to compel discovery.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
Spell it correctly and it works.
http://www.sco.com/scosource/
This worries me. Either people are so dumb, or SCO has some ace up its a^Hsleeve.
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The submitter:
Pamela Jones, the proprietor of Groklaw, suggests Linus Torvalds would have a great case for defamation as a result of this letter
The article:
Now that Linus has a lawyer, maybe they'll take note and consider if the necessary elements for an action for defamation are now available. They are hard cases to win, particularly for a public figure, so they may not want to go that route
The requirements to file a suit? Yes. A "great case"? Hell no.
Execs have been successfully sued for bleeding a company dry (e.g., granting themselves huge bonuses while the company is clearly going bankrupt). Such conduct is illegal, though hard to prove except when it is egregiously obvious. Usually it's the ripped-off investors who sue. There have been cases of investors successfully going after the personal assets of execs when it can be showed that they did something specifically illegal, such as making false statements to investors.
I suspect, though, that a clear case may be harder to make this time. Hopefully, the best that will happen is that lots of screwed investors will realize they were duped by their "advisors," and will take their business elsewhere.
Suing for libel would be difficult in any case, as it's hard to sue for libel in general (at least in the US).
It's scheduled for April 11, 2005. It will be amazing if SCO can make it long enough to see even the beginning of the IBM and Red Hat trials.
...without knowing much about other industries in Utah, I would think that a state government would be reluctant to cut off a tax revenue stream of millions...at least until illegality is blantantly staring them in the face.
Oh well.
Please check this article from OSDN. Linux kernel developers are well known and actually SCO's definition for commercial software "built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers" describes better the reality of Linux Kernel development.
I certainly hope that RedHat has time to enter this letter as evidence in their lawsuit against SCO for Lanham Act violations.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Maybe IBM could lend him one of their lawyers.
Heck, there are probably a number of lawyers who would take the case pro bono just for the publicity. You can't get a much more sympathetic plaintiff.
He also needn't file a multimillion dollar suit. He could choose to ask for one dollar, plus costs, and an injunction against further libellous statements. He doesn't look greedy, and SCO still faces a court declaration that their remarks are defamatory.
Still, it would probably end up soaking up a good bit of his time, and he has better things to do...
~Idarubicin
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
would they HAVE to sue me? Because if they don't - they aren't enforcing protection of their IP, and therefore ... relinquish it or something. Kind of like it's the responsibility of a Trademark holder to enforce their ownership of the trademark, or it becomes public domain, or something.
:)
No. If a trademark owner doesn't enforce their rights, it is possible for the trademark to become public domain. This does not apply to copyright and patents (SCO doesn't even own the UNIX(TM) trademark, the Open Group does).
You don't lose your copyrights and patents if you don't prosecute violators. Copyright lasts until it expires (a long time, due to Disney's legislation), and patents last 20 years.
(obviously I don't really understand the issues I'm asking about)
That's ok... at least you ask, unlike many slashdotters
This letter implies then, that SCO is indemnifying all it's customers if the gcc and Samba that adds most of the value to their OS contains somebody else's "intellectual property"? And that they've put this code through a rigorous screening process, which somehow the Linux kernel hasn't gone through? That seems somewhat doubtful, seeing as how they themselves were providing customers with the same Linux kernel they now claim is infringing. And what's with "intellectual property and other rights"??? Are they refering to patents? No, they have no Unix patents. Are they refering to trademarks? No, they don't own the Unix trademark. Here's an idea: if you mean "copyrights", why not just say "copyrights"? Also, they claim to have suspended all Linux activity back in March -- aren't they still distributing it?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Well, I was carefully selected and screened and build propietary, secure software.
I can't program for shit compared to Linus and Co.
This space for rent.
> I seem to recall reading Darl McBride mention communism in this respect in a
> recent interview to a newsmagazine (The Economist I think), or...
good memory. here's the article:
http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2 02 0889
sorry, you have to have a subscription, so here's the text, infringed copyrights and all. first, however, a link (I think it works for nonsuscribers) to the accompanying pic of Darl looking like he just doesn't understand what the heck the whole brouhaha's all about; why don't those goddamn commies just.... but I digress. anyway, too bad he didn't step in any dog poo right before the photographer showed up and took the wide-angle study of the soles of his shoes.
http://economist.com/images/20030830/3503WB0.jpg
Of monkeys and penguins
Aug 28th 2003
From The Economist print edition
Darl McBride, capitalist crusader against the commie horde of Linux users
SCO, for anyone who has never heard of the company, is pronounced "skoh", as in Scopes. Indeed "the SCO case" of 2003 sounds increasingly like the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, which pitted religious fundamentalists against progressives wanting to teach Darwin alongside the Bible in American classrooms. The SCO case plays the same role in a culture war now consuming the software industry. On one side are the equivalents of the fundamentalists--buttoned-down types clinging to proprietary and closed computer systems. Facing them are today's evolutionists--the pony-tailed set championing collaboration and openness in the form of Linux, an operating system that anybody can download and customise for nothing. The 1925 trial had a monkey as its symbol; the 2003 case has the Linux trademark, a cute penguin.
Leading the fundamentalists is Darl McBride, who was hired as SCO's chief executive a year ago. SCO was called Caldera at the time, and was in a sorry state. It distributed Linux, but was bad at it and made losses. Caldera had, however, recently bought the rights to UNIX, an old operating system, from a Californian firm, Santa Cruz Operations, which in turn had bought them from Novell, which had got them from AT&T. Mr McBride, like several directors at Caldera, has worked for Novell and is a devout Mormon. He seemed a natural choice to rescue the firm.
Immediately, he says, he started
thinking about "how to monetise our assets"--ie, Caldera's rights to UNIX. Roughly as apes and humans allegedly have common ancestors, several operating systems can trace their lineage to UNIX, including Linux. Sure enough, says Mr McBride, he soon found "massive and widespread violations" of Caldera's intellectual property in the Linux code. At a more general level (and surprisingly for a Linux distributor), he found the entire free-software trend "communistic", he says: "We don't get the whole free-lunch thing."
So Mr McBride prepared for war. He changed Caldera's name to SCO (the initials of the less obscure Santa Cruz Operations), and hired David Boies, a lawyer who had gained an international reputation by representing the American government against Microsoft, and then Al Gore in the hanging-chads episode in Florida in 2000. Then he opened fire. In March, he sued IBM, a huge backer of Linux, for damages of $1 billion, later upping this to $3 billion. In June, he opened a new front by threatening 1,500 companies that use Linux. In July, he said that licence fees would be $699 per server.
At first, industry gossip was that Mr McBride's strategy was simply to manoeuvre IBM into ending SCO's misery by buying the firm. There were precedents. Before Mr McBride's time, Caldera's owners once profitably sued Microsoft. And in 1998, Mr McBride himself won what he calls a "seven-figure settlement" by suing his employer at the time, IKON Office Solutions (who, he says, had breached contract by urging him to move to an office outside Utah). The Linux battle, however, "is not about suing but about doing the right thin
What you're describing is communism. Socialism isn't about forcing people to work for a common good. In fact forcing people to do anything AGAINST their will is one of the things socialism is against.
Mainly, socialism consists of making sure
1) Those who work for an employer can't be abused (e.g. summarily dismissed, locked out, paid different rates - trades unions stuff)
2) Ensuring the better off in society take care of those at the lower end of the scale.
The most successfully socialist countries are in Scandanavia where taxes are huge (up to 75%) but things like dental care and hosptials are free for all, drugs are subsidised by the government, there are adult education schemes, the whole lot of it. And while people are being gouged in terms of tax, their standard of living is nonetheless increased as it all gets returned to them in kind.
This is the big difference between socialism and capitalism, socialism you give up significant funds to better society, which will in turn better your life. In capitalism you make and hold onto as much money as possible, so you can afford to better your life, as society won't do it for you.
By and large the core policy of socialism is donating to society for the benefit of all. In one sense it's a form of charity, except more reasoned, and engineered so you get something back from your donation.
It is has nothing to do with communism (which incidentally has nothing to do with the totalitarian regimes practised in China, Cuba and formerly (presently?!) the USSR).
I too read the letter, and I don't see where the objection is - not in that letter at any rate. Then again, my own back is not up against the wall here, as I pay for my software (am not a freebie junkie).
The first contention is that proprietary code can get into Linux, and I really don't see how Linus could effectively prevent this in the long haul. As a matter of fact, if the code were taken from a proprietary system, how would Linus or any of the others be aware of this? They've never seen the code, and cannot see the code by definition.
The second contention is that the Linux development model is somehow shabbier than the 'cathedral' model, and this takes a bit to go along with. If programmers out there are intent on producing results, even to the extent they nick code from other sources, how does the one model exhibit superiority over the other? This opinion is much more difficult to maintain.
Pamela has, as always, done an excellent job, but I fear the reactions SCO are getting from the open source community are exactly what they are after. It's almost inconceivable that SCO are going this route alone, without at least the tacit nod of approval from, for example, Bill Gates and Scott McNealy. They're a desperate company; their distro sucks; they've turned bitter and are clutching at straws. But this is not to say that others, such as the above mentioned, are not today part of the plot.
For the gist of the SCO debacle seems to be to 'wing it' and cause as much unrest and dissention in the open source community as possible. The prospect of actually winning a case against IBM has to be less than nil; therefore, the meaning of all this nonsense has to be in the nonsense itself.
As the Halloween Documents have been on the table for so long, as these documents clearly state what Microsoft are prepared to do to stop Linux and open source, it would be the coincidence of the millennium if Bill Gates and company were not involved.
For Darl McBride cannot hope to save his ass by suing IBM. That will come to naught, and he knows it. With all the fuss going on, there is no hope for direct revenues. What is there - and there must be something there - has to be 'under the table'.
It would therefore seem to me that the proper reaction to the latest moves by SCO would be to not react at all.