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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."
I wonder how it feels to be the laughing-stock of the thechnology world? At some poing they'll get it throught their heads that there is no way they can win this battle. I'd expect that even their employees think they are on a sinking ship.
My
... the development process for Linux has differed substantially from the development for other enterprise operating systems
So, they're admitting that it's an enterprise operating system and not a piece of fluff like winXPhome?
Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software."
Riiiight. Someone better tell Microsoft they've been doing it wrong.
You will notice some grammar errors, but they are SCO's, not Ralle's.
I would've expected that, having driven away all the respectable engineers, SCO would be full of management dweebs who only knew about how to present themselves. But it seems these bozos even slept through English comp classes. Or maybe their spending so much of their money on lawyers that they can't afford competent secretaries.
Would there be any legal basis for suing SCO executives who either sold their stocks or had public comments about the case (read here our good friend Darl) under a civil court of law for damages?
I can't see how this would be out of reach for someone like Linus who has been publicly targeted by SCO.
Even if linux is shown to violate SCO's IP, ar the end users liable? They bought a product that the vendor said was legal, so it would be up to the vendors to sal with the reprocussions, even if they haven;t imdenified their customers, right? Does SCO think that companies this big will fall for this bs. Especially with a broken URL. Btw, why don't the other linux vendfors imdenify their customers. Id doesn't seem like it would actually be any added liability (especially since SCO doens't really stand a chance).
umm hello?
perhaps you hadn't heard the news about sco lately - inany event, sco is offering financial incentives for linux users to switch to ms windows from what I understand.
He won't get involved any more than he has to. He'd certainly defend himself if sued, but the guy would rather be worrying about the technical stuff. He's not going to get involved, no matter how nasty the other side is.
Of course, I'd like him to, just to crush SCO. But I'm not even sure that Linus has that kind of cash. Last I heard, Linux had given him lots of opportunities and a steady paycheck, but no millionaire-level fortune.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
It does appear that people are finally catching on to the scam though; the one year chart seems to show signs of the stock starting to show the end of its upward trend from March through November. I really can't see thing getting to court somehow, which is a shame, because it would have been a fairly good test case for Linux and the GPL.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Yeah, this letter just about sums up Darl's stupidity.
Not to plug myself or anything, but I did reg scolawsuit.com, scolicense.com, scoreport.com, and scofiles.com and scofile.com, and pointed them all to a small web site. I also got a few web addresses to do a 90 day countdown thing. It'll be up tomorrow, hopefully.
Oh, look. You can get SCO to ring you up and discuss buying a license:
a ll .html
http://www.sco.com/solution_builder/request_a_c
Isn't there a US white pages on CDROM somewhere?
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Now they claim "including confidentiality of the methods and concepts involved in software design". I guess we cannot program any more as they claim methods and concepts of software design are their property. Better inform all the colleges with comp sci degrees.
Daryl-the-Dingus says those Linux geeks don't even warant their product, but last time I read a EULA, anybody's EULA, it said they promise nothing, owe nothing, warant nothing, and will take responsibility for nothing.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insuficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
You make an interesting allusion...
- Jim Jones prepped his people with paranoid tales of how the heathen were coming to get them. Daryl preaches that OSS programmers are unwashed commies out to destroy honest proprietary programmer's families.
- The murders at Jones-towne were triggered by an ivestigation from a Congressman who was about to make Jones' abuses public. So we should expect the sweet, cherry-berry flavored goodbye at SCO when the SEC announces their pump-and-dump investigation of Daryl and Co.
- Jim Jones whole career was based on a self-destructive pack of lies. Daryl... well, you get the idea!
Any technology distinguisable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
>the leftwing element of slashdot :-) That's amusing if nothing else. But lower your rifle for now.
h p
Heh.
Seriously, I am not a communist, though my political stance is *entirely irrelevant* to the issue, just as it is with most FOSS advocates -- contrarily to what SCO would like to have public opinion believe.
As for lack of sources : I seem to recall reading Darl McBride mention communism in this respect in a recent interview to a newsmagazine (The Economist I think), or at the very least, hint not-so-subtly towards most Americans' (though unfortunately you come across that elsewhere as well) paranoid fear of communism in the hopes that it will lower public respect of Free Software.
For myself I am not -emphatically not- "describing business/economics" here - merely emitting a partial and personal opinion on the way it is most often done in today's software market ; a market I choose to act in (this is one of the bases of capitalism, and not endangered by FOSS ideas) by not contributing to the omnipresence of proprietary software (the business model of which explicitly seeks to bind customers to a certain vendor by numerous varieties of coercion, e.g. standard setting by virtue of a quasi-monopoly, please refer to Halloween Documents for examples [1]), but supporting Free initiatives.
As for "eaten up with socialist thought"... Do you miss the easy manichean days of the Cold War, or...?
Slashdot never seemed politically biased to me, unless it was in favor of democracy and the liberties gained since the French Revolution; nothing to be afraid of (as if Socialism was).
[1]http://opensource.org/halloween/halloween1.p
In their FAQ about buying a license, question 45 recognizes the AT&T-Berkeley settlement:
I am running BSD. Am I required to purchase a license?
No, you do not need to purchase a SCO IP license to run BSD.
It was also been included in its entirity in a number of news stories about that time.
I was rather suprised to see it surface again almost as a fresh issue.
Alright, not ontopic, but something I just thought of... /. name). Well, yep. I was... Want to know what's worse? I had tickets to this year's French GP.
Is there anything you can put in a license that would stop SCO (and any related cos) using the mass of OS software they employ in their products? I know they already have what they have, but future releases?
I don't know much about the GPL, but I think I remember that you can't tag on additional clauses to it, so maybe this isn't possible.
A while a go, I remember some talk about gcc dropping support for the SCO OSes. What happened there? Anyways, that seems like a nice approach - starve the fuckers of what they depend on. But, as I said above, maybe the GPL doesn't allow it. Don't want to be as bad as them, after all.
BTW, someone on here once asked me if I was a DC fan (cos of the DC in the
much of Linux has been built from contributions by numerous unrelated and unknown software developers
Then they say:
Many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developers who had access to UNIX source code distributed by AT&T and were subject to confidentiality agreements.
Well, which is it? Unknown software developers or old UNIX developers with access to AT&T source code? Those are pretty specific qualifications but, as usual, SCO doesn't supply a single example.
I think it's a shame on our legal system that a case so obviously contrived is allowed to see the light of day. It's one thing to come up with a bullshit case, but it should at least have to be good bullshit. It should have a shred of credibility. This is so bogus it's an insult to minimal intelligence.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Authored by: hanzie on Thursday, November 27 2003 @ 07:59 PM EST
Daryl is not stupid.
Could you have raised SCO's share price 1500% in less than a year. Could you have made SCO profitable? No way. The sheer fact that you're outraged shows you didn't have what it takes to build up a company which had, and still has, nothing.
Could you have kept your face straight when telling that pack of lies, knowing that you were going to rake in millions by just blathering for a year?
After 4 quarters, he's GONE. He's already made it to the third.
McBride has a degree in Computer Science from BYU. He is as conversant with software as his detractors. His understanding of this case and it's personal ramifications are better known to him than anyone else on the planet, groklaw included. He has known longer than anyone else that his claims have absolutely no merit. Good heavens, he made them up. It wouldn't be possible to fabricate the lies SCO has told without knowing the truth.
Daryl McBride will never be in court. He will be in the tropics long before any judgement can affect him. That has been the plan all along. He and the rest of the in-crowd are going to get their stock options and bonuses.
Microsoft is going to foot the legal bill, again, and stall everything as long as they can. Every day of delay is several million in sales worldwide. Sales that are threatened by any viable competition.
This was never SCO vs IBM. This has always been MS vs Linux.
I imagine it went like this: McBride called up Gates and said "I can throw a wrench into Linux for at least a couple of years, mabye forever. It will cost about 20 Million up front and there's absolutely no risk to MS. You'll probably even make money on the scheme itself. Are you in?"
And Daryl was in Seattle three hours later.
The rest is currently unfolding history.
It's called the technique of the "Big Lie". You tell a lie so enormous and outrageous, people believe you actually have credibility, because no reasonable, right-thinking person would make such an incredible claim without some kind of truth to back them up.
This is what allows con men to get away with what they do - they act as though they're 100% in the right, and in the absence of any cohesive resistance, people are swayed because, hey, who wants to be wrong? (ie, who wants to be embarassed.)
The current situation has troubled me because SCO has dominated the market share of the press via press releases (just as the lawmakers have dominated the press with the passage of their "anti-spam" bill.) It doesn't matter that 99.99% of what they say is utter bullshit that will eventually land them in court for libel, fraud, and stock manipulation. In the absence of somebody releasing a big fat claim to the contrary, people are inclined to belive what the mainstream press tell them, and the mainstream press isn't exactly doing investigative reporting of SCO (that I know of.)
Indeed, the GPL prohibits additional restrictions placed on the uses of the software. That is to say you can't deny that the software you have released under the GPL to be used by what ever group of people we are supposed to dislike this week.
But what has happened with GCC, is the authors just aren't going to put any effort into maintaining the port to SCO's OSes. So they aren't saying it can't be used under SCO, they just won't put the work into making it compile and function correctly. If someone at SCO wishes to do that, they may go right ahead. But of course they have to release their changes back to the public.
i can't tell if you're a troll, or if you seriously believe that.
if you follow bugtraq and full-disclosure, you'll see a constant stream of security fixes from the sco security team. for roughly the same packages as redhat/debian/suse/etc.. (where applicable)
so no sco isn't "behind" in security fixes. most projects are "code once, modify slightly" anyway (hell, if debian can make their own patch, im sure sco can too)
I don't know about where YOU come from
That'd be Australia. We have this great thing called Medicare, which is a public healthcare system. Well it was good, until the current government started to disassemble it, and is currently in the process of converting the Australian medical system to be more like the American one... from all accounts, the old way (socialist) was much better.
5468652047616D65
Does SCO actually pay much tax? I'd have thought that Novell (also from Utah) pays a lot more.
is so clearly black and white. I can now look onto the ways of my friends and peers who have assisted homeless shelters, batterred womens shelters, food-for-cheap units, and the like, and pity them, for they accomplish nothing. I can look on adbusters, the cult surrounding NO LOGO, my local universitie's student newspaper, union, health plan, dental plan, the eff, as completely despotic and fascist orginizations that bring great harm on everyone who is a member of them.
I can look on the entire Debian Linux distrobution and know that they have accomplished nothing, because nothing collectivist has ever done good, and i must actively fear them because they seek to destroy me, as a user.
That the community environment that thekult (direct action cyberpunk orginization) fosterred, and that to an extent still goes on at rantradio(a not-for-profit, non-commercial, independant internet radio station) must be fought against at all costs. That everything that isn't greed driven is immoral, and counterproductive.
[/sarcasm]
Sure, there are socialist international orginizations, countries, states, unions, orginizations, communes, cliques and whathaveyou that have gone bad. I've seen examples of all of the above. but this does not imply that everything that is done in the name of collective productivity, in the name of humanity as a whole, or a section of humanity...FOR the good of everyone instead of a select few, is in vain.
there are arguments to that effect, but they are not the ones you appear to represent.
but even Plato was keen to point out that good states inevidibly corrupt, and the dialectic will eventually 0wn you.
Hell even the idea of a _corporation_ itself is slightly solcialistic...
while some people seem to think that in order to be pro socialism in any or all ways, is to think that you MUST be the same sort of socialist that would support the regeimes that have failed miserably, and furthermore, that these same sort of regeimes follow from any other kind of socialism by default when both of these things are false. just as not all countries have turned out to be war-driven imperialist states attempting to conquor the world and enslave everyone...likewise there are orginizations that are collective in ideal that do not end up turning to disaster.
i tend to see the suspended state, either way, as pretty ideal, in case my examples havn't shown this... socialist infrastructure paves the way for True Capitalist Progress(it's amazing how worker productivity can be when your work-force is not working with broken limbs they cannot fix, and plauge they cannot cure) as one example,
another example a feudal/exploitive/"corpolitical" imaginary fascist prison-state where most people in a country are imprisoned for free hard labour...and then a state within this state building itself up zion style to house those who are interested in life, in the collective goodwill of themselves, their families, and their communities.
no one in the MIDDLE state would complain about the lack of civil liberty, even if freedoms such as the freedoms of religion and press were not extant.
but no doubt even this state within a state idea i have can be corrupted...
i think i've gone on to far and have wanderred from my original intent somewhat. but make no mistake, your black and white fallacy filled way of thinking about the whole order-of-mankind-orginization leaves a sour taste in my mouth, at least.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
These are important distinctions to make. Claiming free software is socialist is akin to claiming that a traditional family unit is communist.
If SCO goes belly up, what happens to its assets? They get sold to creditors (or perhaps creditors have the option to influence/controll these assets.
If enough people sue SCO and win large judgements, perhaps the UNIX souce could be released under the BSD licence?
IANAL
I do not think this is a real problem. In the Harrison vs. Chiffons case, it was addressing a specific combination of musical notes. Copyright is limited to the expression and not the result.
SCO is not suing anyone for copyright infringement, despite the stupidity of Darl McBride's letter and his numerous other ramblings. The obfuscation and derivative arguments from SCO are not copyright arguments. They are arguments about potential contractual violations from IBM. It is the contract between IBM and AT&T (now SCO) that has the derivative works restriction.
The fact is, you can create duplications of software all day long and you won't violate any copyrights if you are creating your own source code. You may violate other things like trademarks or contractual restrictions you had from the original company, but you won't violate a copyright.
The Harrison case, therefore, is completely inapplicable to the original SCO vs. IBM case. As I understand it, IBM did counterclaim that SCO had violated IBM copyrights by taking copyrighted code and incorporating it into SCO's Unix distribution and/or Caldera's Linux distribution.
SCO's underlying problem is that they sued IBM for one thing and then have a PR program in place complaining about an entirely different thing. Now the two things have gotten jumbled together.
In the last year I have been involved with a company run by a man as dishonest as McBride. He literally stole a dozen computers and all the software and data on them. When the police came he simply lied to them and said they were his.
In addition he has been publishing material writen by and for our company with our copyright notice on every page but with a little sticker over the copyright notice on the first page. When copyright law was invoked he simply lied and said we had given him permission to do this.
The law will eventually grind around to dealing with this but by then he will have declared himself bankrupt (all his assets are in his wife's name) and moved on to his next crime.
What this has shown me is that the law is very ill-equipped to handle someone who, like McBride, is totally dishonest and prepared to say anything with no shame or morallity nor any interest in how it affects other peoples' lives. Quite simply, it takes a lot more time and effort to stop bastards like this than they have to expend to make money this way; their part is easy.
But then, I suppose, if stealing things wasn't easier than getting your own people like McBride wouldn't bother doing it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
If you think this is offtopic, at least read the whole post before you mod it this way.
First of all, most communists fail to realize how pro-Capitalism Marx actually was. Marx was pro-globalism befure this debate even surfaced. So the idea that left-wing slashdotters have much in common with Marx is rather... insane...
Personally I think that Marx made a few fundamental errors in his line of thinking, and communism (esp. Soviet-style communism) will not be the system that replaces capitalism. In many ways, Communism is simply a blend of some capitalism ideals mixed with a very strong neo-feudal state. It has ONLY prospered where it was taking over from agrarian or feudal states and has NEVER successfully supplanted an established capitalist democracy. In fact the African nations that allied themselves with the USSR are today often MORE capitalist and democratic than many of those that allied themseves with the US. Democratic capitalism supplants feudal communism, not the other way around.
There is, however, a point at which Open Source, though certainly not Communist, is certainly a direct challenge to the prevailing notion of Capitalism today. This is, however a difference more subtle than is commonly understood-- that although many if not most players in the Open Source world are Capitalists, they are a different kind of Capitalist than those that run Microsoft, GE, Lucent, etc.
The difference is how intellectual property is seen-- to the early information-age Capitalist, anything to which one can claim proprietary rights is capital, to be conserved and sold. To the open source capitalist, the only true intellectual property is the brain power of the employees-- that source code, etc. is best spent *purchasing community.* Open source thus places ad-hoc community at the center of production instead of the State (Feudalism/Communism) or the Business (Capitalism). This is not limited to source code, but applies to any intellectual endeavor; NASA has experimented with using these methodologies in other ways too, such as clasifying crators on Mars.
Open Source is competitive because it offers two advantages over proprietary development techniques:
1) Greater efficiency-- fewer reinventions of the wheel are needed becase there is a large quantity of work done under compatible licenses.
2) Greater flexibility-- the network of developers can add whatever features the customers need and, regardless of licenses used, benefit more by contributing these additions to the community.
One of the things that SCO has been very public about is how their fight is about intellectual property rights and the future of software development. They are very much correct but are on the wrong side, despite the fact that they might not actually have much of a case.
The letter/artical is interesting in how it again tries to make this point, but tries to make intellectual property rights the issue by comparing themselves with the music industry.
Do I think Microsoft is involved in this case? Indirectly perhaps, but I don't think they have so much as called anyone at SCO to "discuss" the situation. I think it is more likely that the SCO and Microsoft execs see eye to eye enough that they regurgitate eachothers' PR as if it were their own. Again Microsoft is a transitional player-- caught in the IP game, but aware of the value of open source community. So they are SCARED that they will be unable to maintain their current position. Same with SCO.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
So often open software gets beaten over the head for being communistic. It is communitarian, but it is closer to free market libertarianism than communism.
The marginal cost of the production of software is now zero. It really is economic to give it away.
Adam Smith would have welcomed free software with open arms. This is hopefully the 'invisible hand' that will dismantle Microsoft's monopoly.
I have always said that if monks or Native Americans wanted to live together in a commune to share resources and help each other out, it was just fine, and indeed, that is a form of voluntary "communism." However, if someone puts a gun to your head and makes you join a group of people against your will, well that is a whole new ball game.
One of the arguments for socialism is that the early Christians were socialist. Well, there is a huge difference between someone being kind-hearted and sharing...and the government stealing from you and forcing you to give to things you would not necessarily give to if you had been given a real choice.
You know what the difference is between theft at gun point and theft by taxes? In the former they send you to prison. In the latter, they send you to Congress!
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
What does stop GPL software including gcc dead in its tracks is if it has been illegally comingled with non-free software, and I think the area which almost certainly violates the GPL is the "Linux Personality Module". That needs very close examination, it may be that there is a substantial violation, maybe even sufficient to get an injunction against SCO. It could even result in SCO having to publish their kernel source. Now that would be a nice end to McBride's main source of revenue, other than stock market fraud, and Bill's petty cash, of course.