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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."
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).
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!
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
>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.
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
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.
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 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.
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These are important distinctions to make. Claiming free software is socialist is akin to claiming that a traditional family unit is communist.