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More Damning SCO Evidence At Groklaw
An anonymous reader writes "There's a very interesting story up at Groklaw right now. PJ reports on new evidence that Chris Hellwig, a SCO employee, contributed code to SMP, XFS, and JFS and did so with the knowledge of his supervisor." Groklaw is thorough, and this is another good example of just quite how thorough.
He is in the top-ten list of commits to both the Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.5 tree according to the Bitkeeper statistics (which he hasn't faked himself but still should be taken with care).
After a number of smaller network administration and programming contracts he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution. Last year he joined the fileystem and storage group at SGI and is focussing on XFS for Linux now.
http://www.ukuug.org/bios+profiles/CHellwig.sht
Cross your heart and hope to die, SCO? Or cross your fingers behind your back? Let's see what the evidence shows.
SCO has specifically mentioned the following four as being code at issue in this case: JFS, NUMA, RCU, and SMP, and while it is conceivable that the "subject code" they are talking about in this response to IBM's interrogatory is referring to some other code, it seems reasonable to look at the code they have mentioned publicly. Actually, it's more than reasonable. It's our only choice, until they tell us exactly what code they are complaining about with specificity. Is it true that they never "authorized, approved or knowingly released" any of this code for inclusion in any Linux kernel or as part of any Linux distribution?
Let's start with JFS. In the case of JFS, they not only distributed Linux with JFS, one of Caldera's employees, Christoph Hellwig, contributed code to JFS, as Groklaw reported on July 18. Here is a snip from that article:
And he is listed on this page of JFS contributors. Here is IBM's page on Who Is Using JFS? and it lists United Linux. So they not only released a distro with JFS in it under the GPL, their employee helped make it h
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I believe you are thinking of Hanlon's razor, Occam's razor is more general.
sic transit gloria mundi
You have a point, but I do believe most of the /. community is not so much defending IBM, but damning SCO because they aren't following the rules. In a copyright infringement you are supposed to recieve a "Cease & Desist" order first. Not only did Linux users globally get a "Cease & Desist" order, but SCO has never told any of us what exactly we are supposed to Cease or Desist! You can't tell somebody "Stop that" and not answer the obvious "Stop what?" you will get in response. And insofar as IBM's involvement, we're sticking up for them because they're sticking up for us who can't afford to fight this bullshit.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
She's got my vote. But more importantly, she's got my cash. She has an innocuous little "Donate here" PayPal link on the left side of the page.
If you appreciate what she's doing, and the incredible amount of time and precision and effort behind it, take a minute and make a donation.
I finally got off my behind today and dropped her a few dollars.
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
Deals
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IANALBIAALS (but I am a law student)
Well, if the programmer had the OK to release this from a higher-up, or if he did so with a reasonable understanding that it was OK, he was acting within the scope of authority. At that point, SCO knew because he *was* SCO in terms of that transaction.
Similar thing happened with AT&T and BSD, IIRC. AT&T claimed that their code was in BSD. It went to court. It emerged that it was AT&T that had taken code from BSD, rather than the other way round. AT&T settled for an undisclosed amount.
Personally I lean toward the "SCO Upper Management is a bunch of fucking loonies" theory. Here's an article that puts concrete numbers on the effect SCO is having on linux adoption.
4 .a sp
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/linux/archives/00019
16% may be a big number or a small number, depending on your point of view, but it's not what I'd call a palpable blow to Linux.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Quothe Mr. Hellwig:
"It might be more interesting to look for stolen Linux code in Unixware,
I'd suggest with the support for a very well known Linux fileystem in
the Linux compat addon product for UnixWare.." (sic)
hint hint...
hint hint hint..
HINT HINT HINT HINT HINT!
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It's called the doctrine of 'apparant authority'. If Hellwig and his supervisor acted on behalf of SCO, presented themselves as being representatives of SCO, and there was no reason for Linus not to believe this, they are acting for SCO.
Now, go back and read the article(s). SCO was advertising (on their own or via UnitedLinux) many of the features they are now suing over. They knew what was going on. They condoned it. They are engaging in barratry.
IANAL; clearly, neither are you.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The evidence that SCO was broadly aware of this work lies in the SCO Linux 4 ("powered by UnitedLinux") marketing materials.
There is an interview from August last year where Darl McBride not only says that SCO Linux would be "certified enterprise-ready by IBM", he also says that he understood what Open Source was in 1994, when he was first shown Linux.
I do not believe that Darl McBride can continue to pretend that he (i) didn't know what the GPL was about, or (ii) that he didn't know that Linux was going to the Enterprise.
The Restatement 2d of Agency says the following:
7
Authority is the power of the agent to affect the legal relations of the principal by acts done in accordance with the principal's manifestations of consent to him.
26
Except for the execution of instruments under seal or for the performance of transactions required by statute to be authorized in a particular way, authority to do an act can be created by written or spoken words or other conduct of the principal which, reasonably interpreted, causes the agent to believe that the principal desires him so to act on the principal's account.
Where the agent is the employee and the principal is the employer.
As to whether or not a given jurisdiction follows the Restatement, that's not a question I can answer. What, incidentally, is your jurisdiction?
The statutory position (Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) ss 128-30) codifies the common law and allows certain "good faith" assumptions to be made, including that a person held out as an officer or agent is properly exercising the power customarily given to a person in that position. As the person giving away the code is a senior figure in SCO's open source operations it may be held, under Australian law, that the outsiders were entitled to assume that he was authorized to give away code on his corporate employer's behalf.
Again I have no idea of the general US position.
I realise some of those examples are criminal cases, but it doesnt matter: its symptomatic of the whole system. Im sure there are tons of other examples of cases with no merit at all still winning or having to be settled. Unfortunately, the facts have very little to do with our American "Justice" system.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
What PJ & company have done is assemble the pieces to show that what was being contributed by Christoph Hellwig (and other peons at SCO) was well understood by both his immediate boss and by corporate management. There is no plausible deniability.
Probably the best thing to come out of all the GrokLaw digging is this quote:
The full thread is here.They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Funny though, I'll bet most of the /. crowd was on the Caldera side of that one. How times change.
That's because MS did actually sabotage DR DOS. DR DOS was better than MS DOS but if you tried to run it underneath windows instead of MS DOS, you would get error messages about using an incompatible version of DOS. Everything still worked but it would pop up error messages anyway.
Time makes more converts than reason
1) IBM has more patents that M$
2) Meritless case has no affect on adoption according to gartner & the like. In fact, the opposite appears to be happening - more adoptions since lawsuit announced. CIO's aren't scared of this. I'll go dig up the graphs if I really have to, but I'm drunk and tired tonight, and tired of seeing them in the trade rags.
3) You have made it clear that you are worried about that which you should not be worried about.
I HAVE SPOKEN.
They've only filed one legal case.
Just one.
They've said that they'd file more.
Lots more.
Maybe lots and lots more.
But they've only filed one so far.
Barratry means filing multiple cases to harass someone. Like if I drag you into court on some charge (real or not). Then I file another one against you. Then another one.
It would be VERY INTERESTING if SCO did file more claims and a judge ruled that SCO was attempting to harass "Linux".
where is that 'donate via paypal' button on your site?
Front Page, left side, vertically between the links and the login form.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
And the thing about this whole situation is that IBM/Linux are indemnified due to "apparent authority"--that is, any employee of SCO can be assumed by an outside party to be acting with authority granted by SCO, if a "reasonable person" would believe they would have the authority.
In this case, it's clear a "reasonable person" would believe that the head of Caldera/SCO's UnitedLinux department would have code release authority, and thus the most SCO could do is go after their own employees for violating trade secret laws and their employment agreements that siad they couldn't release.
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
"Bah, bunch of losers, and I'm damned if I can understand why the VC and market analyst people cannot see that. There must be some kind of a soundproof barrier between reality and the guys bidding this crap on the marketplace floor..."
Look at the whole dotbomb crap, there were VC's everywhere that dumping Millions if not Billions into companies that did'nt even have a formal business plan.
Just because someone has some VC money, it does not grant them any amount of intelligence. In fact it appears to do quite the opposite.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.