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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.
Yeah, that just smacks of credability....
Can anyone please mod the letter SCO sent +5 Funny? ...
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
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.
Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software
No. Commercial software is built by people who write software that's sold for money.
I've sold software, so it's commercial software. It was written by a friend and myself over a few weeks worth of late nights.
When it comes to commercial software made by vendors who make a business of writing & selling software, then it's written by the coders who can best pass job interviews.
"carefully selected and screened teams of programmers" my ass.
about the demand for virgin sacrifices in front if statues of Mr McBride.
Seriously though, Id I'd received that letter I'd have laughed at it, kind of like I laughed at the plumber who tried to charge me 100 for an alleged adjustment to my shower when he fitted a new boiler. No details of the alleged IP infringements, nothing, but that seems to be their game plan and surely it can't stand up in court if their not prepared to disclose what the problem is.
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.
Perhaps Linus has a case for defamation, but I would thing that the case for fraud would be much stronger. SCO is trying to get people to pay them licensing fees based on a set of claims that are clearly false. While I am not a lawyer, it would seem to me this is very much fraudulent, and some state's (Utah especially) should take an interest in this.
Anyone know if "Darl" is a Nigerian name?
The resemblance is uncanny...
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!
If you take the word "Linux" and replace it with "Microsoft Windows" in SCO's claims, you will see how ridiculous their claims are about end users being liable for copyright infringment.
Imagine if Microsoft added some copyrighted code to Windows and they didn't license the use of that code from the owner. Would the code owner be able to sue end users of Windows for license payments?
I believe SCO would only be able to go after users if they owned patents on the code and the users were actually using features in the software that used the patented code. Even then, Microsoft, the distributor of Windows, has been sued multiple times for patent infringement (Timeline, EOLAS, InterTrust), so even in patent cases, the distributor tends to be sued, not the users.
If you also compare SCO's claims to other types of copyright infringment, such as plagiarism in a book, magazine or newspaper, or illegal sound samples in a music CD, it is very clear that copyright infringment liability for users doesn't exist. The people who are benefiting financially from the illegal code, the distributors, should be liable.
Even if users were somehow liable, they are guilty of unintentional infringement, which means SCO cannot get punitive damages or attorney fees. And SCO will have a very difficult time proving significant actual damages.
A lawsuit against most Linux-using companies, even if successful, would almost certainly be a net loss for them. I hope most of the companies that SCO is thinking of targeting are smart enough to see this and decide to fight them in court instead of rolling over and paying the protection money.
That was really dumb...reading McBride's blackmail letter while drinking a glass of
wine...
Oh well, now I get to see how tough this 20" flat panel really is!
I must react.
Isn't General Unix Philosophy "Make small simple tools which consist of small sections of code. Every of them do one specific thing, but do it in the best way. And at last but not least combine them thru all kinds of Interproces and other types of communications between them to provide solutions for bigger problems"
Correct me if I'm wrong.
No matter what is said on /. or other like minded places it should be noted that this whole fiasco has stifled the open source movement in the court of public opinion. FUD is a very good tactic indeed. The common software buyer will see another question mark regarding Linux and that is all that matters. the facts are irrelevant here and the techies are missing this. I am not sure what the answer to this problem is but no matter what your opinion is, the fact is that Linux is being stopped dead in its' tracks. It is in all commercial software makers benefit to keep the FUD regarding Linux rolling in the public press. Does this letter say anything as far as code goes - NO. Does this help the PR machine to keep Linux as a fringe, maybe illegal OS - YES.
Everybody seems to want to fight this by way of technical discussion when it has nothing to do with technical merit at all. SCO stock is still high even with all of the geeks ranting and raving. This will be in the courts for years and SCO et al will be reaping the rewards the whole time.
This is not a Code war, it is a PR war and the geeks are losing. PR is what is needed.
Stay tuned for new sig...
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 best part is this line, used to describe the kernel developers:
Numerous unrelated and unknown software developers..
I mean, do they think that everybody at Microsoft is releated to each other?
Hmm - come to think of it, this might explain everything - SCO expects all of their employees to be inbred! What they became is the tech equvalent of Deliverance!
Quoting the letter...
There is no mechanism inherent in the Linux development process to assure that intellectual property rights, confidentiality or security are protected. The Linux process does not prevent inclusion of code that has been stolen outright; or developed by improper use of proprietary methods and concepts.
Wha-? What about, oh, openly distributed source code??
Isn't SCO in the process of trying to protect its own IP right now? Does he expect us to believe that SCO discovered IBM's putative IP transgressions without looking at the Linux source code?
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
... they STOLE the precious... he LIES... nasty tricksey Linux developers... but they're his friends... but they keeps the precious for themselves... but they love Linus... but they stole the precious....
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.
SCO telling IBM about the software design process is like someone telling a Bedouin about sand or a fish about water.
The only difference between the Titanic and SCO is that the Titanic had paying customers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IMHO anyone interested in this case should read the George Harrison vs the Chiffon's copyright judgment over the song My Sweet Lord and He's so fine
You can find it here THE "MY SWEET LORD"/"HE'S SO FINE" PLAGIARISM SUIT
First off - I did not pay any attention to this when it was in the news. I am not a beatle fan nor a Chiffon fan. So probably I'm impartial.
To summarize the summary, the judge in the case held that Harrison may have "subconciously" copied the notes. Personally I think the judge had a grudge. I see so little similarity between these songs that noone will convince me there is plagerism here.
Music is a combination of structure, rhythm and lyrics and in this case, there are differences in all three areas.
So the case basically illustrates the nature of an artist being permanently tainted by something he inavertantly hears. The question that must be asked is if a programmer can be permanently tainted by what he sees.
If as is claimed, many of the programmers who worked on Linux also worked on unix then one might be able to argue that some of their ideas were a subconcious memory of the code they saw before and that hense, the new work is really derived.
This would mean that any programmer who takes a job jeopardises his freedom to write programs for as long as he lives. This would mean that any writer who reads might somehow jeopardise his freedom to write since his new works might somehow bear some obscure resemblance to something he might inadvertantly have read perhaps years before.
This issue here is that the programmer has a much harder problem to contend with because not only must he NOT write the same code as he might have seen before, that code must in fact work in a similar or identical fashion as the code that came before.
On the other hand, this hypothesis brings into question the issue of whether SCO's System V code is in fact plagerizm free. Clearly as ESR has demonstrated large portions of System V were derived from BSD and not only this, AT&T blatently removed the attributions from a lot of BSD code and ignored the BSD copyrights when they included it into System V. Effectivly AT&T tried to steal other people's Intellectual Property.
So what SCO has to understand is that it cuts both ways. If SCO has any claim on Linux then it will be perfectly clear that the developers of UNIX who did not work for AT&T have the same claim on SCO's claimed Intellectual Property.
This means that SCO should be vulnerable to law suits where they claim IP in derived works of others and these claims should be enforcable even though the code was released under the BSD license.
If you go to ESR's website and read the analysis of the example code that SCO released, then you can see very clearly that as ESR says, the code in System V was derived from a common ancestor. Since this is the case SCO cannot control it. Authors have the right to control the character of the derived works as well as what it is used for. This right prevents people from perverting the intended purpose of the original work. An example of a pervertion might be to turn Mickey Mouse into a porn star.
Clearly SCO is trying to pervert the intent of the BSD licening with this law suit. The free nature of the software the original Unix developers created is part of their intellectual property. That SCO is attempting to do now what AT&T tried to do years ago is blatently apparent.
Part of the reason AT&T lost is because they tried to steal other people's work and present it as their own (through the removal of the attributions). Not only this, AT&T then tried to prevent the original authors from being able to use their own work. How is this any different here? If any significant amount of the code SCO lays claim to is in fact derived from other people's work, then SCO lays themselves wide open. Perhaps this is why they won't release any "evidence".