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SCO Invokes DMCA, Names Headers, Novell Steps In
Sparky writes "We've already heard that SCO have invoked the DMCA via 'letters sent to select Fortune 1000 Linux end users.' The specifics come via a copy of the letter reprinted at LWN.net - they've decided that they own the copyright to about 65 header files contained in Linux - largely errno.h, signal.h and ioctl.h." balloonpup also notes "CNet News has reported that SCO has reported a fourth quarter loss of $1.6 million, owing mostly to hefty legal fees in its war against Linux. SCO said they would have reported $7.4 million in earnings, if not for the $9 million payout to their lawyers. Way to go, SCO!" Many readers also point out a Groklaw article indicating Novell has registered for the copyrights on multiple versions of Unix with the U.S. Copyright Office, so that "both the SCO Group and Novell have registered for UNIX System V copyrights for the same code."
Well in one of the articals they clame that there is a deal that BSD is alowed to use them but not linux. But you are still right it is BS
If the above information is correct, SCO revenue in Q1/2004 will be around 15 M$ and net loss could be >5-10 M$. It seems they don't get more money soon, they will be out of business before summer.
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
After seeing the number posted on /., I dialed it up and listened. I have to say that, even though I know what they are doing is messed up, they put some very posive spin on thier situation, albiet that is the purpose of this conference call.
One of the first questions in the Q and A period was "If I pay the $699, do I have rights to use the source and continue to run Linux?" Darl very neatly sidestepped half the question and answered "Yes, you can continue to run the binary (emphasis mine) within the agreement."
From that, I take it that if you pay, you can run the kernel, but they won't say you can play with it.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
SCO is a member of the Open Group and participated in the development of those standards. The FTC has sued Rambus for doing the same thing with JEDEC DRAM standards-- you can't participate in standards development if you're later going to claim ownership of the technologies involved!
SCO Group Fourth Quarter 2003 Webcast and Conference Call
Heres the freebsd version of errno.h.
/* Operation not permitted */ /* No such file or directory */ /* No such process */ /* Interrupted system call */ /* Input/output error */ /* Device not configured */ /* Argument list too long */
#define EPERM 1
#define ENOENT 2
#define ESRCH 3
#define EINTR 4
#define EIO 5
#define ENXIO 6
#define E2BIG 7
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/base defs/errno.h.html#tag_13_10
Do these guys have any brains at all?
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
These comments are directly from the POSIX standard:
a se defs/errno.h.html#tag_13_10
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/b
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
For that matter, I could also say:
(printf("Hello, world!\n"));
The parens may be superflous, but they certainly don't hurt anything, and in fact they can allow you to play some cool tricks, such as redefining return:
#define return(x) {printf("Returning from %s:%d\n", __FILE__, __LINE__);return x;}
NO. You cannot slap another license or copyright header on BSD code. I do not know how this rumour got started, but the BSD license is very clear. You must retain the BSD copyright notice in the source code, and, in the case of binary redistribution, you must have the software display the BSD license. If you read the copyright information for MS Windows, for example, either on the Windows installation CD, or, IIRC, at the bottom of the EULA flashed during installation, the BSD copyright notice is there.
If a Linux kernel programmer took some header files from FreeBSD or 4.4BSD, for example, but removed the BSD copyright notice, that is a violation of the BSD license terms. HOWEVER, that does not mean that SCO was wronged. The only party that could sue for violation of the BSD license is, of course, the Regents of the University of California. AFAIK, but IANAL.
Note: this is to the replies, not to the parent.
I have a little reality check for you people who think SCO is gonna get shit for this little pump and dump:
-Our esteemed Commander and Cheif pumped and dumped his little oil company and sold all his shares 2 days before it went bankrupt. The appropriate investigative organizations where politely told to bug off.
-The above's best friend and cheif campain supporter via donations was the CEO of Enron. Need I say more?
-Worldcom went bankrupt over executive fraud and now has a cushy contract in Iraq.
-Microsoft pretty much got let off the hook as soon as someone they "donated" money to got the presidency.
-Our Vice President is busy riding a gigantic $100,000 a month retirement golden parachute from his company, Halburton, with strangely enough is getting the most, best, and highest paying government contracts.
What makes you guys think that ANYTHING bad will happen to SCO because of what they are doing? Wake up.
This is all of course assuming memory serves me correctly.
The parent link is not correct. But This is
Accept hypothetically that some Linux coder got a little too happy with his cut and paste from BSD code and left out some copyrights.
It's not like that. The coder could well have been Linus himself, and the reason is below (verbatim copy of a comment posted to LWN, emphasis mine):
(Posted Dec 22, 2003 18:03 UTC (Mon) by doitroygsbre) (Post reply)
IANAL
Ok, I read an article on groklaw (I think) that made a pretty good guess as to what SCO's claim is. They are claiming that the settlement reached between BSD and novell required that certain files in BSD have copyright notices added. The files that SCO is complaining about were added to linux before the settlement was reached and since the settlement was only made known to Novell and the BSD developers (sorry, can't quite remember exactly who was involved in the settlement) no one knew to add the copyright notices to linux. Now that SCO has possibly inherited the Novell side of the settlement, they're trying to claim copyright infringement because linux has these files without the notices. Even though they were released under the BSD license without the notices before the settlement.
Oh well, I'm starting to wonder if I'll live long enough to see this whole mess sorted
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
if you read page 33 (section 2.4) and later of the POSIX 1996 standard, all those comment strings are direct quotes from the description in the standard.
examples:
(p33):
[E2BIG] Arg list too long
The sum of the number of bytes used by....
(p36):
[EPERM] Operation not permitted
An attempt was made to...
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
>In Linux 2.0.36 kernel there is a networking headder file where the BSD licence is gone and the coder admits that they took the code from FreeBSD.
>So you say 'coder got a little too happy' I say 'thief' and Darl has to have lawyers convince a judge that is was a theft.
Copyright violations aren't theft, they're (follow this closely, it's tricky) copyright violations. They are not called theft because they're different. Different act, different name. Told you it was tricky.
Where does Darl come in? It's BSD's copyright; did BSD make Darl their agent? I don't think so. If there was a screwup (which remains to be shown), the quarrel is between BSD and Linux, with no room at all in there for SCO.
>>Then all that needs to be done is add the copyright notices back in.
>Gee, what about actual PUNISHMENT for breaking the law?
The usual, when there's a GPL violation, is that the violation cease, at least when the FSF is enforcing the terms of the agreement. I suspect that it would take some pretty egregious bad behavior, and some serious profits involved, to get a court to actually see monetary damages as being in any way appropriate.
See what I've been reading.
From:
t io n=m&board=1600684464&tid=cald&sid=1600684464&mid=7 4550
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&ac
To All Licensees, Distributors of Any Version of BSD:
As you know, certain of the Berkeley Software Distribution ("BSD") source code files require that further distributions of products containing all or portions of the software, acknowledge within their advertising materials that such products contain software developed by UC Berkeley and its contributors.
Specifically, the provision reads:
" * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
* must display the following acknowledgement:
* This product includes software developed by the University of
* California, Berkeley and its contributors."
Effective immediately, licensees and distributors are no longer required to include the acknowledgement within advertising materials. Accordingly, the foregoing paragraph of those BSD Unix files containing it is hereby deleted in its entirety.
William Hoskins
Director, Office of Technology Licensing
University of California, Berkeley
æeee!
Oh, but SCO uses different errno.h files depending on the situation. I tried hard to include a fragment of the errno.h but the lameness filter totally prevented me from doing that. It complained about too many junk characters, but how can I be responsible for the junk in SCO header files? Some logic from errno.h:
"old, crufty environment" -> oldstyle/errno.h
"Xpg4v2 environment" -> xpgv2/errno.h
"Xpg4 environment" -> xpg4/errno.h
"Posix environment" -> posix/errno.h
"Pure Ansi/ISO environment" -> ansi/errno.h
"Old, Tbird compatible environment" -> ods_30_compat/errno.h
"Normal, default environment" -> just the standard errno.h file
Some of the comments, dated 94/12/04:
Portions Copyright (C) 1983-1995 The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
The information in this file is provided for the exclusive use of the licensees of The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. Such users have the right to use, modify, and incorporate this code into other products for purposes authorized by the license agreement provided they include this notice and the associated copyright notice with any such product. The information in this file is provided "AS IS" without warranty.
Portions Copyright (c) 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. Portions Copyright (c) 1979 - 1990 AT&T All Rights Reserved
THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. The copyright notice above does not evidence any actual or intended publication of such source code.
Here are the comments from an older version of the same file, specifically 91/06/06. I wonder why they've dropped Microsoft from the copyrights list?
UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T
Portions Copyright 1976-1990 AT&T
Portions Copyright 1980-1989 Microsoft Corporation
Portions Copyright (C) 1983-1991 The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The information in this file is provided for the exclusive use of the licensees of The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. Such users have the right to use, modify, and incorporate this code into other products for purposes authorized by the license agreement provided they include this notice and the associated copyright notice with any such product. The information in this file is provided "AS IS" without warranty.
Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988 AT&T
All Rights Reserved
THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
The copyright notice above does not evidence any
actual or intended publication of such source code.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
now, the compiler-supplied errno.h in
looking at the errno.h included with kernel source, it looks like a relatively boilerplate file. just a bunch of #defines for error codes. the only way you could really infer copyright infringement is from the comments on each line that says what the error code means. however, i would think that all these are documented somewhere, so even if SCO's file is identical, it's still arguable that in both cases the comments were copied verbatim from some specification document (where copying is possibly allowed).
looking through the files listed, it seems like all of them fall under this general premise - boilerplate kernel constants and macros for very basic stuff that's really hard and silly to try to implement any other way.
blah, SCO can bite me.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Nope.
The corporation is its own entity. That's the whole point of a corporation - the business' liabilities are incurred by the corporation, not by its owners, so that if it fails, the owners don't lose their asses.
When you attack a corporation, you attack a business entity. The owners (shareholders) have nothing to do with it; in fact shareholders have a right to anonymity. Why do you think nobody goes to jail when Exxon destroys hundreds of miles of Alaskan coastline, but if you take your dirty oil and dump it in the storm drain and get caughty you get fined and maybe thrown in jail? It's because the shareholders aren't personally liable for the actions of the corporation. Again. That's the whole point of the corporation.
This takes a leap of one level of abstraction to get, so I can see why a lot of people don't comprehend this. Libertarians and conservatives tend to be concrete-reasoning keep-it-simple-stupid types that can't recognize a non-corporeal entity - unless it's a middle eastern diety that's been pounded into their head from birth.
Ya that'd be great, a system where voting for someone can CAUSE them to lose.
... + 100!/98! + 100!/99!
/. ) imagine the news trying to explain HOW a candidate won.
7 votes for A, B, C
6 votes for B, A, C
5 votes for C, B, A
3 votes for D, C, B
D gets dropped, then B gets dropped, and finally A wins (A:13 vs C:8).
But if the last three voters instead voted A, D, C, B then A loses BECAUSE they voted for A:
7 votes for A, B, C
6 votes for B, A, C
5 votes for C, B, A
3 votes for A, D, C, B
D gets dropped, then C gets dropped, and finally B wins (B:11 vs A:10)
In instant RunOff Voting there are the following problems:
-Raising your vote for someone can cause them to lose (Monotonicity Criterion)
-Lowering your vote for someone can cause them to win (Monotonicity Criterion)
-A one on one comparison between the winner and any other candidate should show the winner being preferred in every pair. IRV doesn't do this. (Condorcet Criterion)
-Doesn't scale at all. The possible votes are basically a factorial. Sorry if its hard to describe the formulaes. But the number of possibilites without truncation is N! with truncation its the summation of permutations. sPn (where s=1 to n-1) xPy = x!/(x-y)!
California's recall would of just not scaled with IRV. Suppose 100 candidates then the number of possible votes is 100! + 100!/2! + 100!/3! +
-It's not easy to understand by the common guy (not
For detailed explanation of these problems:
http://electionmethods.org/evaluation.htm
A condorcet method would be a more sound election method, because basically the voter ranks the candidates. Then the method sees which candidates are preferred by one-on-one comparisons. Joe Shmoe can understand this because when the news comes on, it just shows the comparison of the winner to every other candidate.
Bill Hicks on the two-party system:
I'll show you politics in America: "I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Wait, there's one guy holding up both puppets!" "Shut up! Go back to bed America. Your government is in control. Here's Love Connection, watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer, you fucking morons!"
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'm sure this will be posted a billion times on /. but here is what Linux said in response.
http:/ /marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=107212899 108511
hehe
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
previous pump-n-dump speculation mentioned that there needed to be 4 quarters of profitabliy before Darl got a big bonus kick-in
That wasn't really speculation... That part of Darl's contract was documented in one of SCO's SEC filings. If he made SCO made a profit for four consecutive quarters then Darl would get 150,000 stock options.
If you read the article though, he still gets a ton of options regardless of the four quarters of profitability... It will be interesting to watch when they start to vest.
I will not post the file here, but a couple of points are obvious.
1. The comments between the two versions are different. Even specific error message comments vary, such as:
and on and on.
2. There are a bunch of defines in Linux that don't exist in SCO.
3. Some of the defines are completely for different things:
4. The SCO file has a bunch of errors for things like TCP errors that aren't in the Linux file at all.
5. The formatting of comments is very different.
In general, there is no way that the Linux code is a simple cut and paste of the SCO code, at least at this level.
Maybe the code started out closer, but all that is left is symbols and numbers. The numbers are arbitrary and vary from target to target. The symbols are a part of the POSIX spec. The files are available under a BSD license. Just how is this infringing on SCO's copyright and even if it were, just what are the damages.
Two were from Cygwin, but the other two were Microsoft's.
For instance, c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Vc7\include\errno.h says it is copyright Microsoft. This file includes preprocessor directives that seem strangely familiar
#define EPERM 1
#define ENOENT 2
#define ESRCH 3
#define EINTR 4
#define EIO 5
etc.
Which look sufficiently like what SCO is claiming is their copyrighted code!
This is fun!
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Can SCO really be that incompetent?
Also, you might be interested to know that legally owned / properly licensed fully automatic weapons are almost NEVER used in the commission of armed crimes. I don't have a direct link handy, but that's from the FBI's own crime statistics.
That statistic applies to most legally owned and properly licensed firearms. Not just fully automatic weapons. Even legally owned and properly licensed handguns are rarely used in the commission of crime, even in states that permit concealed carry. While the numbers aren't quite as low as they are for fully automatic weapons and other similarly licensed arms they are still quite low.
The essential truth is few law abiding firearms owners ever commit armed crimes. On the other hand plenty of crimes are prevented by legally owned civilian firearms every day.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Linus commented that he himself remembers writing those files. Well, thanks to Kernel.org and a little too much time on my hands, I did a little exploring.
/*Argument list too long*/ /*Arg list too long*/
Kernel 2.6.0 has errno.h in two files. To make my life a little easier, I combined the two files, errno.h and errno-base.h. In Kernel 2.3.50 it is one file.
Well, as we know, SCO is claiming that 2.4.21 is the kernel that started with the problems. If that is the case, assuming that SCO actually has a case then we have a problem.
But the thing is that the errno.h and errno-base.h in 2.6.0 and the errno.h in 2.3.50 have only one difference other than being split up and the appropriate location indicators. THe only difference is:
#define E2BIG 7
#define E2BIG 7
So if you buy SCO's argument they are saying that a comment is to blame on this. Again, this is an SCO FUD campaign, but come on.
Thanks to diff for the comparision.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.