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."

Comments

DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[rkz]

This article really shows why it is time for the DMCA to go. Anyone who happens to create any sort of device that someone figures out a way to use it to circumvent anything can be sued under the DMCA. (See also the Sklyarov incident.) Remember when someone discovered that you could use a Sharpie to circumvent the copy protection on a CD?
Manufacturers/programmers/whatever should never be responsible for what anyone does outside the intended uses.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[bethane]

The DMCA was created in the spirit that new forms of electronic media were not safe from potential copyright violations, and the act did what it set out to do. Yet it also did a great deal more as special interests and corporate schmoozers managed to get their paws on the bill and turn it into more of a "dominant market player protection act" than anything else. We all agree that the amount of innovation stifled using the DMCA as justification is staggering. Yet electronic media should also be protected from the loopholes the bill originally solved. Here are a few potential solutions:

1) Remove the current DMCA and amend it such that only specific uses of media are prohibited. Allow for the use of back-engineering tools with HARSH punishments for people who knowingly use them to break copyrighted material with intent to distribute. This leaves the burden of proof with a prosecutors instead of the "guilty-til-proven- innocent" tactics of the RIAA et. al.

2) Make a specific statement for "loser pays": anyone suing under using this legislation who loses the case pays for the legal costs of both parties. Settlements don't count, and this will outright favor the bigger players, but in the American climate of "legal attrition" as a business strategy I see no other effective means of trying to relieve this aspect of the DMCA problem.

3) Allow publications on computer security to be done freely and thoroughly if tied to legitimate academic or corporate entities. Hold computer manufacturers liable if one of their components has a security flaw that causes eggregious commercial/monetary damage but which could have been fixed by repair of one of these published flaws.

4) Ensure that American laws apply only to American citizens with the express wording that products purchased in other parts of the world which belong to the consumer are theirs to do with as they please. A clause allowing rightful action to take whatever steps necessary to use that product would be nice (mod chips et. al)

Pointing fingers makes us feel good, but unless we propose alternatives and compromises, are we really doing anything but venting? Does anyone else have potential solutions/thoughts on how to resolve this issue?

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[turbod]

The gun industry is trying to get that point across as well. I honestly hope they succeed. Almost every device on the planet can be used in a nefarious manner, but it seems some opportunistic folks in the world think they should get paid by the device's creators when someone actually does something with the device that it was not intended to do.

I would disagree with you on your subject title though... not all YMCAs are plagued with moral improprieties.

TurboD

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution is easy.

Get rid of the law.
Replace it with nothing.

Circumventing copyright protection should not be illegal. US copyright law grants the enduser the right to make a backup copy of any copyrighted material he owns. Also anyone is free to make copies of uncopyrighted material. The DMCA clearly violates established consumers rights.

What it amounts to is a law saying that it is illegal to pick locks. Well then what do you do if you are locked out of your house or car?

The DMCA does nothing to stop copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is illegal to begin with. Making it 'more' illegal isn't going to stop anyone who was going to commite the crime in the first place.

Say a thief is going to break into your home to steal your tv. Making it illegal to pick locks isnt really going to deter him. All it will lead to is poorly designed locks.

In short there is no reason to make a law to protect something that is already protected by law.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Jerf]

How about instead of patching the law with new special cases for electronic media, we recognize that the law is fundamentally broken and come up with coherent answers for the general case?

We've passed the point where the law can be patched back into usefulness; it's time to rethink on a more fundamental level.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Simonetta]

The writer above has lots of good ideas for reforming the American DMCA law, but it goes against the current American political climate for any positive changes to take place.

The trend of the Americans to start using their vast police and military internal forces to enforce the whims of corporate copyright laws will multiply the effect of the parallel trend of outsourcing their technological corporate infrastructure to the third world. They are inducing a massive shift of their technological industry to the third world, without any thought given to the long-term consequences of such a strategy.
By the time that they realize how much these two trends are reinforcing each, their positive-feedback loop of technological suicide will be too far advanced to retard or reverse.

In another generation or two, America will be the new Argentina. Or even worse off considering that they created so much global hatred toward themselves in their schitzo period (1980-2010; when their mounting arrogance and delusional-self congratuation inversely paralleled their financial global decline) that the rest of the world will have no interest in revitalizing them.

In 2004 the smart young Americans are beginning to question the alternatives to being so closely tied to this declining empire, even if they rarely publicly acknowledge their doubts. Which is probably just as well, given the jingoistic politcal climate there.

An excellent overview of this trend is found in the book "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg. They missed the revolution that technology is creating in corporate copyright, but they foresaw everything else.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[shaitand]

"The DMCA was created in the spirit that new forms of electronic media were not safe from potential copyright violations, and the act did what it set out to do."

Except that existing copyright law already made copyright violations illegal whether on a fancy new media or not. The DMCA was never needed to begin with. Being on digital media doesn't invalidate copyright on material under the laws that have been around since 1976.

"Pointing fingers makes us feel good, but unless we propose alternatives and compromises, are we really doing anything but venting? Does anyone else have potential solutions/thoughts on how to resolve this issue?"

What compromise? This law never had a purpose to begin with except to enact additional restrictions on certain types of copyrighted media. Why on earth do people feel that every few years the same issues of corporate interest need to be raised again and that the people should "compromise" a little further. We compromised when we created copyright, we compromised again in 1976, they compromised DESPITE US in 2000. Exactly how far do you feel we should compromise before we draw the line and say we won't give another inch, in fact we are taking back a few we shouldn't have ever given in the first place?

If you start with harsh restrictions on a subject, then compromise, the end result is more harsh than what you had to start with EVERY time. Now you do it on the same subject every few years over and over again and you have a pattern that results in giving more and more ground until you look back and realize that there isn't anymore ground to give and their just making up new bullshit ways to screw you now.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Hornsby]

The DMCA is unconstitutional, anti-competitive, anti-innovative, and anti-american; however, after a careful perusal, I can't find anything inherently homosexual or happy about the law. Maybe you can enlighten me.

(Score:-1, Homophobic)

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[ameoba]

Personally, I think the DMCA should stand. What we need to do is get the STFU passed into law so we can have headlines like:

SCO, "DMCA"; FSF, "STFU"

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Pionar]

What it amounts to is a law saying that it is illegal to pick locks. Well then what do you do if you are locked out of your house or car?

Close, but not quite. A better analogy would be to make it illegal to make a hairpin, as it could be used to pick a lock. It's the instrument that the DMCA bans, not the action. The action (of breaking a lock that wasn't yours) was already illegal. Piracy has always been illegal, it just wasn't illegal to make the tools until the DMCA.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Lumpy]

Allow for the use of back-engineering tools with HARSH punishments for people who knowingly use them to break copyrighted material with intent to distribute.

I call bullshit. only a person that is so seperated from reality would say such a thing.

PROPER punishment for illegal use. Sorry but someone violating the DMCA should get 1/10th the punishment than a mass murderer. Currently under US laws if you violate the DMCA, you will get a lighter sentence if you grab a shotgun and kill a few officers when they come to get you.

Copyright violation is a very very VERY MINOR offense and needs to be treated as such with only MONETARY damages.

sending anyone to prison for anything as silly as a stupid copyright violation is absolute stupidity.

you know this, and until this is how it is written I violently oppose any such legislation and those that support it.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Zak3056]

The gun industry is trying to get that point across as well. I honestly hope they succeed. Almost every device on the planet can be used in a nefarious manner, but it seems some opportunistic folks in the world think they should get paid by the device's creators when someone actually does something with the device that it was not intended to do.

I have to say that I have a problem with your statement--and my sig should leave no doubt as to my opinion of the issue. Guns are designed to kill people. DeCSS is designed to decrypt DVDs. This is the intended operation, and anybody telling a jury that someone is "doing something witht the device it was never intended to do" is a liar and is going to come off as such.

What you should have said is "criminal acts commited by third parties" which is the crux of the defense of gun manufacturers, Jon Johansen, etc. And a defense I agree with. DeCSS can be used to watch a movie on a non-supported platform. Guns can be used for by the police, or for self defense, or for hunting. The acts of criminals should not impact legal use by the rest of society--THAT is the point you should be making.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[GrenDel Fuego]

I disagree.

The DMCA also makes it illegal to "pick the lock" as well, not just the creation of the tool to pick the lock. And it doesn't distinguish between locks you own and locks you don't own.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[escher]

Because he's right.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[andman42]

>> What it amounts to is a law saying that it is illegal to pick locks. Well then what do you do if you are locked out of your house or car?

> A better analogy would be to make it illegal to make a hairpin, as it could be used to pick a lock

Stop, you're both right. The DMCA bans both circumventing copyright protections (picking the lock) and tools for performing this circumvention (the hairpin).

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Pitawg]

Make an original file, program, or image, run it trough a one-time-hash using the DMCA text. Have a friend post on some site how to crack your file using the DMCA text. Would it not reuire the DMCA to be banned?

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[SirWhoopass]

Well, this is an obvious troll but it seems the mods bit.

Let's pretend all your arguments are correct. The United States is going to collapse. Even still, the US is a massive country with a huge wealth of natural resources within its borders. It also has a powerful military to defend those borders. Argentina was never like the US.

If you want to pursue an analogy, then the US is headed to being another Russia. Russia may not be what it was at the height of the Soviet Union, but Russia is nothing like Argentina.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[shane_rimmer]

Not to mention the fact that they would both be guilty of sharing the information on how to use said hairpin to circumvent said home security device.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[swillden]

The DMCA also makes it illegal to "pick the lock" as well

Sort of. Title 17, section 1201 (a)(1)(A) says that it's illegal to "pick the lock". However, section 1203, which describes the civil remedies available, says that "any person injured by a violation of section 1201 or 1202 may bring civil action", so since no one can claim injury from fair use civil remedies are not available. Also, the criminal penalties in section 1204 only apply to "Any person who violates section 1201 or 1202 willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain", so, again, most fair use is clearly not prosecutable.

So circumvention for benign purposes is illegal, but has no penalty.

Creation of circumvention devices is trickier. Even if you don't gain financially from the devices, if some of your users use them to make infringing copies and the copyright holder can claim injury, you may be subject ot a civil suit. Further, if you do sell the devices you are clearly subject to criminal prosecution.

IANAL.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

"The United States is going to collapse."

All empires collapse. History allows for no exceptions. I live in the home of the previous Empire, Britain, and we got out of it quite lightly.

Pray you don't go down like the Romans.

"Argentina was never like the US."

True. It was never as powerful or dangerous.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Deagol]

Even if you want to make sure that hunting stays legal, is it so unreasonable to make sure that it is hard to make the gun automatic, that the clip has fewer than 8 rounds in it?

Yeah, if that DC Sniper didn't have full-auto capability, he wouldn't have been able to take down so many people. Oh, wait a minute...

You see, if I walked into a random schoolyard and started shooting, does it fundamentally matter if I'm using a single-shot muzzle-loader rifle or a modified full-auto AR-15 with a 30-round clip? I'm still a monster, right?

Sure, in practical matters, there may be more dead bodies to clean up if I had a full- (or even semi-) auto, but the fact remains that I am a disturbed person who broke the law. If all guns vanished today, if I were that disturbed, I'd simply walk into the school yard with a 3-iron and start whackin' heads on the kindergarten jungle-gym. Are you going to argue that golf club makers should make their clubs less useful for clubbing someone to death?

And I don't buy the argument that guns are specifically designed to kill/injure people. They're designed to hurl small chunks of metal, accurately, for long distances, and at very high velocities. What people choose to do with them is their own business -- until they break the law.

Yes, this is a rather morbib way to make my point, but I hate it when people still insist on blaming the instrument of crime, rather than the criminal.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[mpe]

The DMCA does nothing to stop copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is illegal to begin with. Making it 'more' illegal isn't going to stop anyone who was going to commite the crime in the first place.

It's more to make those who are passing the laws feel they are doing their job.

Say a thief is going to break into your home to steal your tv. Making it illegal to pick locks isnt really going to deter him. All it will lead to is poorly designed locks.

It can lead to all sorts of other issues. Especially if picking locks viewed as a more serious crime than burglary.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[alienw]

Guess what, the act you describe is covered by many state laws. In fact, in many states simple possession of lockpicking tools is a felony. Even if you intend to pick only your own locks.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Tassach]

"Loser Pays" is a *horrible* idea for tort reform. It puts the little guy at an even worse disadvantage. It gives the big guy an even bigger stick with which to threaten the little guy.

Instead of getting sued for $2000 for sharing MP3s, imagine being liable for $2000 in damages plus $20000 in legal fees, over and above what you have to pay your lawyer. With loser pays, there's no incentive for a big corporation NOT to sue -- they already have a platoon of lawyers on retainer, if they're not busy suing someone the company's not getting their money's worth. For a big corp, legal fees are already a sunk cost -- loser pays just gives them more of an incentive to sue so that they can recover what they've already spent on retainers. An individual's legal costs are going to be peanuts compared to what they already spend.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[SirWhoopass]

I won't claim that anything will last forever, least of all the United States. My argument was that, within a generation, the US would not resemble Argentina.

On a side note, the US isn't quite like previous western empires (Britain, Rome). It has no far flung colonies to support, defend, or suppress. It did once, Cuba and the Phillipines for example. Some states could leave and it could fall from within, that almost happened once before. I certainly don't think it will stay this way forever, I just believe that it will have to be different than previous "empires".

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

"It has no far flung colonies to support, defend, or suppress."

Iraq? Afgahnistan?

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[crankyspice]

"US copyright law grants the enduser the right to make a backup copy of any copyrighted material he owns"

Um, no, it doesn't. Software you *own* (not software that's licensed; guess which one most software is?), under section 117, and private audio copying under the Audio Home Recording Act, are exceptions to the rule. Take another look at 17 USC 106. Reproduction is an exclusive right, still.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Angst Badger]

DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

Would you say the DMCA is more niggery than the NAACP? How about being more kikey than the ADL?

And if not, why not? It's the same difference -- casual and stupid use of an offensive slur.

Whatever point you may have had was obscured by the white hood.

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[Ancil]

What do you do if you are locked out of your house or car?

Buy a new house or car, of course. The law was written by the people who make houses and cars; what would you expect?

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[einTier]

Right. That's why a better analogy (which is still flawed) is that of a crowbar.

The DMCA effectively outlaws the use or mere possession of a crowbar, because someone might use one to break open a door. Never mind that they have plenty of legitimate, useful uses besides breaking open a door -- or that you might have a need to break open your own door.

But the DMCA goes further than that. It's also illegal for me to sell one to you, or even give one to you, or to manufacture such an item. I can't even tell you where to buy one, even though I know the hardware store on Spicewood Springs sells them. I also can't tell you how to use a crowbar, and I certainly can't tell you how you might theoretically use one to break open a locked door -- even if you own the door in question. I can barely even acknowledge that such a tool exists.

Oh, and if you manage to find one, and manage to figure out how to break your door open with it, and you manage to get rid of the crowbar before the law shows up, you can still be arrested just for breaking your own locks!

Re:DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA

[BitterOak]

In fact, in many states simple possession of lockpicking tools is a felony.

Can you name any? The only one I'm aware of is the District of Columbia, which technically isn't a state.

Copyrighted Errors

[unixbum]

so does this mean that my errors are copyrighted matierial?

That's what usually happens

[eln]

As with most lawsuits, especially ones that drag out like this, the only people that really win are the lawyers.

Re:That's what usually happens

[PunXX0r]

Hrm.

I doubt that I will feel that "only the Lawyers won" when SCO is a distant, unpleasant memory thanks to the IBM countersuit. In fact, I think that there will be enough win to go around for every person interested-in, contributing-to, or using FOSS.

I agree that it is much easier to over-simplify this, but let's be honest... even if it takes lawyers to crush SCO, it will be a win for everyone when they are gone.

Re:That's what usually happens

[Deagol]

Tell me about it. I have on my desk two checks from Citibank: $0.24 and $0.35. They are the results of some lawsuit against Citibank and AT&T Universal Card.

I don't know how much I really got screwed (hell, I didn't even know there was a lawsuit -- I wonder how they even found my current adddress!). The letter states it was "not practical to provide individual caculations" for the refunds. Yeah, right!

I know sure as shit that the lawyers got a hell of a lot more than two checks totalling less than a dollar!

Re:That's what usually happens

[msobkow]

A lot of those delays stem from the simple fact that legal staff usually haven't got the vaguest understanding of how software is architected or compiled. They don't know that half the headers mentioned are part of ANSI and ISO C/C++ standards.

They don't know that every single platform with a C compiler since the early '80s has had an "errno.h" header file.

It's about time some limits were imposed in US courts, as in:

You have 12 months to prepare your case, unless the defending party opts to extend. Under no circumstances may the preparation extend beyond 24 months. Should your claims prove false, you will be responsible for all legal costs and damages direct and incidental, not only for the defendant, but for any business in the court's jurisdiction whose financial performance can reasonably be presumed to be affected by the accusations.

Then maybe the world can get back to doing business instead of letting these useless "IP companies" affect billions of dollars of purchase and deployment decisions, without fear of repercussions for their fraud.

Re:That's what usually happens

[kcornia]

My wife and I were just trying to figure out how much it must have cost to create and send the check we just got for .28 from ATT.

We didn't even get to the cost for the bank to process it, we had to come to work.

I know I know, offtopic. I just found it hilarious that I got a check for 28 friggin' cents!

Re:That's what usually happens

[roomisigloomis]

Two farmers are fighting over a cow. One grabs the cow's tail and pulls while the other farmer grabs the cow's head and pulls. This last for a long time. While all this pulling is going on, the two farmers' lawyers sit in the middle and milk it.

Re:That's what usually happens

[forand]

I would be very scared if something like this occured in the criminal courts system. While the defendant has a right to a speedy trial they should also have a right to gather as much evidence as possible to defend themselves. Usually there are limits imposed by the judges so it does not become a stalling tactic but it seems possible that one might need more than two years to get all the evidence if you have to deal with other companies or entities not wanting to give it to you. Now for civil cases it is another story but again setting hard limits is almost always a bad idea IMHO.

Re:That's what usually happens

[kelnos]

A lot of those delays stem from the simple fact that legal staff usually haven't got the vaguest understanding of how software is architected or compiled. They don't know that half the headers mentioned are part of ANSI and ISO C/C++ standards.

that is, unfortunately, irrelevant. if the file was blatantly copied from someone else's copyrighted implementation, then that does indeed constitute infringement. i don't think this is the case, i'm just playing devil's advocate.

They don't know that every single platform with a C compiler since the early '80s has had an "errno.h" header file.

i think you're confusing the compiler-supplied /usr/include/errno.h with the file that SCO is claiming is infringing. this file is a part of the kernel source, and would usually live at /usr/src/linux/include/asm-*/errno.h. (same or similar goes for the other allegedly-infringing files.)

now, the compiler-supplied errno.h in /usr/include contains a prominent copyright notice by the free software foundation. somehow i doubt they falsified that, and, even if they did, SCO would/should be going after the FSF and glibc and not linus torvalds and linux.

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.

Big Red takes aim

[Crashmarik]

This is just novells first step.

The next step will be their own series of letters to SCO reminding them of their contractual obligations to Novell.

If you don't have a product sue!

[mpost4]

I doubt that they are lossing money only over the lawsuit. Also the info for erron could be derived by other methodes, it would be considered comman knolage for all unix programmers, so if they had to implement a compatablity layer, they could do it from memory.

also with Novel's Copyright on it, it seams to me that Novel's came first, so SCO could be a nice target if (big IF) they win this case, it has seamed to me that Novel does not want to see this case go though.

SCO is a dead company that just wants to be bought out, and they did not get IBM to buy them out liked they hoped.

Re:If you don't have a product sue!

[willtsmith]

SCO just keeps getting funnier every day. I've stopped being angry and have chalked it all up to entertainment.

The fact that they are now claiming copyrights on HEADER FILES is the ultimate testament to the weakness of their cases.

I mean, how could one re-engineer APIs without replicating headers. If Linux is in violation, than BSD must be in violation as well. They should be suing Apple.

Re:If you don't have a product sue!

[mpost4]

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

Re:If you don't have a product sue!

[Admiral Llama]

Hey, I saw ctype.c in there too. What's next, stdio?

"You have a printf, we have a printf. Cough up!"

Re:If you don't have a product sue!

[rgmoore]

Why should the Linux ones have to? Linus isn't a party to the USL/BSDI lawsuit, so he isn't bound by the terms of the settlement. There's no reason to think that there are any valid copyrights to files involved in the suit (USL settled because the judge was threatening to rule that their copyrights were invalid) so there's no need for any copyright notice unless it's forced by some other legal reason, like the settlement. And that's assuming that the files actually are copied and haven't been re-implemented from scratch using the POSIX standards.

clue me in....

[Anonymous Coward]

arent the headers (especially some of those, like errno.h) published publically as ISO/ANSI C and/or UNIX Definition documents? Hence, if they look similar, it's because they're defined standards from various standards committees? Perhaps someone should point out the document name and number and page numbers.

Re:clue me in....

[Maul]

This letter is designed for PHB's who will look at it and then look at Linux and say "Crap! errno.h IS in Linux," not people who look at it and think of defined standards and realize that SCO is stooping to the lowest levels in order to keep their schemes going.

Re:clue me in....

[msgmonkey]

Generally all those C/Unix headers come under general umbrella of POSIX compliance. I think what they are saying is that the files are directly lifted from BSD and that the settlement with BSD forbode redistribution.

This is strange in that 1) the full outcome of the settlement was sealed AFAIK and 2) the headers in question are licensed under the BSD license which would have been known of in 1.

Like has been mentioned earlier by many people here, maybe SCO want to re-open the BSD case as this seems to be there only line of defense.

Re:clue me in....

[PineGreen]

Well, probably, the problem is, however, that all the comments are exactly the same, so it is unlikely two people would come with exactly same description... i.e. the errno.h has things like:

#define EPERM 1 /* Operation not permitted */
#define ENOENT 2 /* No such file or directory */
#define ESRCH 3 /* No such process */
#define EINTR 4 /* Interrupted system call */
#define EIO 5 /* I/O error */
#define ENXIO 6 /* No such device or address */
#define E2BIG 7 /* Arg list too long */

etc. So if you say "arg list too long", instead of say, "too many arguments" in all comments, it is very likely that the actual .h was stolen... Not that I want to support SCO...

Re:clue me in....

[xactoguy]

So if you say "arg list too long", instead of say, "too many arguments" in all comments, it is very likely that the actual .h was stolen... Not that I want to support SCO... The only problem being that there are only so many ways in which to express something like that, so it's still not a complete proof. I do agree that is probably where the argument hinges, though.

Re:clue me in....

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:clue me in....

[jenkin sear]

Or, they have a common ancestor, under a legitimate license, that both were derived from.

Re:clue me in....

[Anonymous Coward]

Heres the freebsd version of errno.h.

#define EPERM 1 /* Operation not permitted */
#define ENOENT 2 /* No such file or directory */
#define ESRCH 3 /* No such process */
#define EINTR 4 /* Interrupted system call */
#define EIO 5 /* Input/output error */
#define ENXIO 6 /* Device not configured */
#define E2BIG 7 /* Argument list too long */

Re:clue me in....

[minkwe]

These comments are directly from the POSIX standard:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/ba se defs/errno.h.html#tag_13_10

Re:clue me in....

[gonar]

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...

Re:clue me in....

[snake_dad]

The PHB's are gonna love this response at Groklaw :)

Here is the letter from SCO warning recipients of alleged copyright violations. I must tell you that the list of files has everyone I am hearing from falling on the floor laughing. We will be issuing a statement explaining why as soon as they recover.

Re:clue me in....

[TekPolitik]

...I must tell you that the list of files has everyone I am hearing from falling on the floor laughing. We will be issuing a statement explaining why as soon as they recover.

The brief reason why is that these are interface files. It has been established for over a decade that there is no breach of copyright when interface files have been copied, even if they have been literally ripped off (Computer Associates v Altai). Even I thought they'd come up with something better than this, and I've thought they were full of it from day one. That's why Groklaw are doubled over laughing - SCO have literally come up with the weakest possible argument they could have attempted.

Re:You people called it upon yourselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Darl?

Law is Hard

[moehoward]

This stuff is too complicated for me to understand. Why didn't a slashdot editor add a quirky, sarcastic, biased comment so I would know how to think?

I don't want to read all those links. Is there any way that I can make fun of Microsoft based on any of this? That would make it easier. TIA

Re:Law is Hard

[Robotron2084]

Hopefully this can help you understand the situation:

Penguin Blood Ninja Fiasco!!

Shameless self plug....

Re:Law is Hard

[Dr. GeneMachine]

Hey - if you can't bash M$ based on any of this, you might try bashing the french, the democrats, the republicans, arguing pro/contra gun control or advocate the libertarians. There are so many popular troll contests going on at the moment! Sign up and join one!

Pull troops out of Iraq...

[Genghis9]

...and deploy them to SCO headquarters. There are WMD's (weenies of mass dumbness) in that building and they have to go, NOW!

A more fun (accurate?) version of this posting...

[coupland]

"We've already heard that SCO have invoked the winged minions of hell via 'voodoo dools shaped like the CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies.' The specifics come via a photo of a doll made to look like Samuel J. Palmisano of IBM - they've decided that they own the souls of about 65 CEOs running Linux - largely IBM, HP and Ford." balloonpup also notes "CNet News has reported that SCO has reported a fourth quarter loss of $1.6 million, owing mostly to hefty witchdoctor and soothsayer 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 the Prince of Darkness. Way to go, SCO!" Many readers also point out a Groklaw article indicating Novell has been praying for the souls of CEOs running Linux with the Holy Catholic Church, so that "both the SCO Group and Novell have claimed the souls of the same people."

I feel so dirty but...

[nocomment]

GO NOVELL! GO IBM! :-) It may seem strange, but I really am feeling some sort of loyalty to these two companies. I am way more likely to use them in future than I think I would have before the whole SCO debacle. Although I'd still never ever in the coldest darkest hour in hell use netware or AIX again(blech).

Re:I feel so dirty but...

[asr_man]

GO NOVELL! GO IBM! :-) It may seem strange, but I really am feeling some sort of loyalty to these two companies.

It's called Afghan Loyalty.

9 million?

[westcourt_monk]

I love it... 9 million to lawyers, -1.6 to report to it's investors and they are no where. If they win I imagine they stand to make 10x whatever they pay for lawyers but how much do they have to put out before it is not longer worth the risk?

The investors must be getting worried.

Re:9 million?

[michael_cain]

I love it... 9 million to lawyers, -1.6 to report to it's investors and they are no where. If they win I imagine they stand to make 10x whatever they pay for lawyers but how much do they have to put out before it is not longer worth the risk?

The investors must be getting worried.

There are multiple reasons why you might purchase a particular stock. Sometimes it's because you believe it's a good company with great products. Sometimes it's because you're willing to risk some money speculating on a low-probability high-return outcome. If you bought SCO recently for the first reason, well, you're an idiot. If you bought it for the second reason, you don't really care what the share price or the operating results are -- you care what the judge in the case has said recently. If SCO were to eventually win $1B from IBM, the bulk of what remains after the legal fees will almost certainly be distributed as a special one-time dividend, enriching the insiders, the Canary Group, and some gamblers who were willing to hold on through all of the legal proceedings and appeals. Roughly 75% of SCOX is held by insiders and institutions.

For the right kind of fund, buying 50,000 shares back when it was selling for $3 might have been a very reasonable gamble. Suppose the dividend is $100 per share -- that's a 33-to-1 payoff and might justify "backing" a legal case with 20-to-1 odds. At today's price of about $18, the potential return would only be 5.5-to-1, no longer worth the gamble.

Re:9 million?

[milo_Gwalthny]

In other words, the legal case is all they got so they might as well invest their shekels there.

login.h

[mios]

I think I'm going to file a claim that I own a copyright to login.h ... this way, everytime anyone logs into their system I should be entitled to some roylaties ... this should work ...

checking out insider holdings

[greechneb]

Larry Gasparro is the last to cash out with nearly $500k in December - Look at the latest holdings of the insider roster

BENCH, ROBERT K.
Chief Investment Officer
8-Oct-03 214,243 Shares Left

BROUGHTON, REGINALD CHARLES
Senior Vice President
17-Sep-03 95,000 Shares left

GASPARRO, LARRY
Vice President
10-Dec-03 0 Shares Left

HUNSAKER, JEFF F.
Vice President
13-Aug-03 20,494 Shares Left

OLSON, MICHAEL P
Vice President
11-Nov-03 47,330 Shares Left

WILSON, MICHAEL
Senior Vice President
14-Jul-03 0 Shares Left

WILSON, MICHAEL SEAN
Senior Vice President
15-Jul-03 0 Shares Left

Notice How little the insiders still actually own (Aside from Robert Bench)? Smells fishy to me

Re:checking out insider holdings

[eln]

I've been practicing to be a psychic so let's see how I'm doing so far...

I see these men having big problems with the SEC in the future.

Re:checking out insider holdings

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ruckus and tomfoolery, indeed!

[FunWithHeadlines]

Poor SCO, no one takes them seriously any more. "We own Linux-- er, UNIX, um I mean, some of it, or do we Novell? And we're going to sue everybody in existence for theft-- uh, copyright violations of this code-- oops, not that code, don't look at the man behind the curtain, we mean this code over here -- what? not that code either? OK, I mean these header files -- um, you can't copyright ideas, you have to patent them, and we have plenty of patents -- we don't? Well, we'll be threaten-- um, sending letters to our partners (aren't you happy to be doing business with SCO?) telling to to keep their noses clean and line up for a nose inspection -- what, Novell just copyrighted the same stuff we claim to have copyrighted? Don't tell the judge that! Yikes! What's our stock doing now?! Quick read this press release about, um, yeah, that's it: we just got DDoSed, um, Again! Yeah, that'll work....what's that you say? How much are we paying our lawyers for this nonsense? It's contingency, people, don't worry. Contingency all the way...except for the huge fees we pay along the way...and 20% of the company...but otherwise not much -- and yes, that just wiped out any chance of profits in this quarter, but don't worry, next quarter the legal fees go up and we still don't have any licensees yet. But step right up with $699 and you can be the first on the block to say you got rooked--, uh squared yourself with the law-- um, not really the law, with our lawyers, yeah, that's it."

not just Linux...

[TheSHAD0W]

SCO has now asserted ownership over not just Linux, but every single C/C++ compiler out there, and every OS based on C, including the BSD variants and all the other versions of Unix out there.

Re:not just Linux...

[kalidasa]

Next, they'll be asserting ownership over stdio.h and Hello,World.

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello, Darl\n");
return (0);
}

Hey, did I just violate a SCO license?

Re:not just Linux...

[EricTheGreen]

This is just step #2 in their master plan. The final claim will be ownership of the '\n' character.

Re:not just Linux...

[scotch]

return is not a function. HTH.

Re:not just Linux...

[musikit]

i see this alot in text book examples of writing C code. i never understood it other then the fact that using parens () forces the evaluation of what is in them before continuing with the rest of the statement. however i could have sworn that return had the lowest priority of all operators.

I ask because 1. i am not a C/C++ expert (i do program in it alot) and 2. i've very interested

Q: can anyone provide me with sample code that will return one result with using parens () and a different result without the parens ()?

ex.

return X
vs.
return (X)

can someone give me an X for which

return X != return (X)

Re:not just Linux...

[pclminion]

I'm sure he realizes it isn't a function. Using parentheses around a return expression is a matter of convention. Some people do it, some people don't.

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;}

Re:not just Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop! Stop!! You're violating the SCO license!

Re: Re:not just Linux...

[frostman]

Dear EricTheGreen,

Your recent Slashdot post, titled "Re:not just Linux..." and currently moderated at +4/Funny, is in violation of the DMCA.

As you are probably aware, we have granted the general public a limited license to the character '\n' and this license does not include its representation in "escaped" format ('\n').

We hereby order you to remove the comment or to change it so that the copyrighted character in question is displayed in its properly licensed format, namely:

Be advised that this also applies to any posts you may make in the future, regardless of how they are moderated, and that similar restrictions apply to the character '\r' to which we own the copyright jointly with the Microsoft Corporation.

Failure to comply will result in legal fees.

Sincerely,

Dewey, Cheatham & Howe, on behalf of SCO.

What an odd business model

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO said they would have reported $7.4 million in earnings, if not for the $9 million payout to their lawyers.

So SCO has changed from a technology company to an employment agency for lawyers? I'd be interest to see what the step was just before "Profit!"

Re:What an odd business model

[RetroGeek]

I'd be interest to see what the step was just before "Profit!"

??
Profit!

Re:What an odd business model

[MachDelta]

Lobotomy?

Re:SCO v. Novell

[pizzaman100]

Jeez, how many more companies and people are SCO trying to piss off... I wonder wtf is driving them to cause all this trouble

SCO knows that without the lawsuits they have a losing business model. If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em, and hope that 1)One of the charges stick, or 2)Somebody buys you out.

This isn't the first time that someone has tried this.

With great power...

[Quixadhal]

...comes great responsibility.

If SCO wants to claim ownership of things in errno.h, then I want monetary compensation for each and every segfault, since they are now SCO's responsibility, not mine!

Boy, no more having to double-check pointers in my code, whoo hoo!

Re:With great power...

[taniwha]

yeah one guy at work remarked this morning "cool now I don't have to check error returns ..."

DMCA vs Godwin's Law

[NialScorva]

There needs to be some equivalent to Godwin's Law for the DMCA. How does "Given enough time, all legal battles in the tech industry will invoke the DMCA. This generally means that all constructive arguments have ended."

Re:DMCA vs Godwin's Law

[demigod]

Hence forth this shall be know as NialScorva's Law.

Hrm? Facinating

[downix]

SCO is claiming that those headers were retrieved from BSDi. Well, there are folk out here that know more about headers than I, where did they come from?

Also, someone told me once that the BSD and GPL licenses were not in-exclusion, but that they could co-inhabit the same code. BSD has one set of limits, namely giving of copyright notice while GPL has other limits tied to it, but they were not mutually exclusive.

Even better news from SCO SEC filing

[zzabur]

Revenue from SCOsource licenses is expected to be minimal in the first quarter as the Company finalizes license agreements with vendors and continues to implement its intellectual property license initiative...

...Operating expenses relating to the Company's UNIX business are anticipated to remain flat during fiscal 2004. Expenses associated with SCOsource initiatives are expected to increase in fiscal 2004 as the Company pursues and expands the scope of its legal strategy to enforce and protect its UNIX intellectual property...

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.

Re:Even better news from SCO SEC filing

[gamma male]

Not only do they need more money, but they need the money to be free. If they accept additional investment, like PIPE's, Boies' firm would get a contingency payout, and Baystar/RBC has the right to then veto the action as it would dilute the value of their PIPE.

About the only way that SCO can get money, is thru their existing heritage UNIX business, and their joing UNIX and Linux SCO Source venture. While SCO's got 15 million or so total from UNIX SCO Source, that appears to be dried up, and I doubt even MS will buy more of it. SCO seems to not yet have made a single dollar from Linux SCO Source.

I guess in theory, MS could realize that they've got a few linux machines for the purpose of knowing their enemy, and decide to fork over some money for them, but as MS won't admit to over a few hundred (at most!) linux boxen they won't even be able to cover Darl's $250K/year salary.

It looks increasingly like all the real cards have been played, and SCO is left grasping at straws trying to play out this game a bit longer.

SCO admitted ABI code was GPL

[cmcguffin]

In this interview from February, SCO themselves claimed the ABI code was GPLd:

MozillaQuest Magazine: Regarding binfmt_coff, abi-util, lcall7, abi-svr4, abi-sco; are any of these modules SCO IP?

Blake Stowell: No, none of the code in the Linux ABI modules contains SCO IP. This code is under the GPL and it re-implements publicly documented interfaces. We do not have an issue with the Linux ABI modules. The IP that we are licensing is all in the shared libraries - these libraries are needed by many OpenServer applications *in addition* to the Linux ABI.

Re:SCO admitted ABI code was GPL

[DaveAtFraud]

Your quote of Blake Stowell's interview is consistent with everything in the letter *except* the list of header files. The letter seems to be addressed specifically to existing SCO Unixware customers and seems to be aimed at keeping them from fleeing Unixware by way of running their old SCO applications under Linux using the Linux ABI.

I would think asserting an absurd copyright to a bunch of standard header files would weaken SCO's claim with little or nothing in return since their claim to hold copyright to these files will be rapidly shown to be false. On the other hand, they can probably claim that running some SCO Unixware programs under Linux using the Linux ABI violates some portion of the SCO EULA. The only thing I can think of is they are attempting to assert copyright to the defining ABI header files as a means of making the EULA violation enforceable under copyright law.

Odd coincidence: a finding in SCO's favor that an unauthorized, third-party ABI infringes their copyright would also allow Microsoft to go after Lindows and WINE.

I listened to the call

[El_Smack]

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.

Is it enough to change the comments at the top?

[BerntB]

SCO's only argument is that free distribution of errno.h (etc) is allowed -- but not with a GNU copyright header?!

It should then be enough to copy the BSD comments in the beginning and replace the copyright on errno.h, signal.h, etc.

Or?

(As another user noted, errno.h et al are also parts of ANSI standards for C...)

Otherwise -- thanks, SCO -- finally I might get a kick on my backside to take the trouble to install and try OpenBSD! :-)

Re:Is it enough to change the comments at the top?

[jonbryce]

Which of course is rubbish. The BSD licence allows you to put a GPL copyright header on it, or even an MS EULA on it.

Re:Is it enough to change the comments at the top?

[Edward Scissorhands]

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.

Re:Is it enough to change the comments at the top?

[Minna Kirai]

I do not know how this rumour

It's not a rumor, it's true. Your very own post shows how it's true.

First you say "You cannot slap another license or copyright header on BSD code." Then you go on with "You must retain the BSD copyright notice in the source code, and, in the case of binary redistribution,"

What you might not understand is that the latter statement doesn't prevent the former. It's entirely possible to slap another license on BSD code, while still retaining the previous copyright statement.

Just take a BSD program, modify two lines, paste the GPL to the front of the file, and you're done (when a file is under multiple licenses, anyone wanting to copy it must obey all of them.)

Adding additional copyright headers happens all the time with real code: any company that has touched a file will append it's own notice to the top, while leaving the others intact.

Dear Santa

[neurojab]

Dear Santa,

My christmas wish is for the SCO stockholders to wake up and realize they're being taken for a ride. That way the rest of the world could get on with their lives without worrying about being bitten in the ankles by Daryl McBride. For Daryl, I wish a long stay in the relaxing resort for his kind of folk known as Utah State Prison. I wish for him a large roommate named Bubba.

Peace.
An ordinary Linux user.

Re:Dear Santa

[thales]

Dear Santa,

I Would like the SEC to implement a freeze on the buying and selling of SCOX so that the slimeballs playing the pump & dump scam will take it in the ass when the stock collapses.

The smear continues

[crimethinker]

Can't you just feel the love?

The company has not made available for export, directly or indirectly, any part of UNIX covered by their agreement to any country that is currently prohibited from receiving supercomputing technology, including Syria, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and any other such country, through a distribution under the General Public License (GPL) for Linux, or otherwise.

That's right, boys and girls, the GPL is a tool for TERRORISTS and COMMUNISTS!

Every day I see SCO's stock price and I mutter to myself, "it's just not fair."

-paul

Could I use that excuse?

[UnknowingFool]

SCO said they would have reported $7.4 million in earnings, if not for the $9 million payout to their lawyers.

Damn, can I use that excuse? I would have been in the black this month if I had not had to pay my bills. But seriously, this really tells a great deal of SCO's financial picture. Their money is running out. Their legal bills are mounting. This letter is nothing more than it appears: Desperation to get any last revenue that they can get.

On another note, has anybody looked at the headers that SCO has mentioned. I'm willing to bet that some of them are legacy to BSD not SCO.

drinking game:

[gotem]

take a sip everytime the letter says "copyright"

The FreeBSD file says:

[Anonymous Coward]

From /usr/include/sys/ipc.h

* Copyright (c) 1988 University of Utah.
* Copyright (c) 1990, 1993
* The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
* (c) UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
* All or some portions of this file are derived from material licensed
* to the University of California by American Telephone and Telegraph
* Co. or Unix System Laboratories, Inc. and are reproduced herein with
* the permission of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
*
* This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by
* the Systems Programming Group of the University of Utah Computer
* Science Department.
*
* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
* modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
* are met:
* 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

The Linux code I just looked at is lacking the copyright notice like the above.

If taken from BSD or SYSV, it is a licence violation because of clause #1.

Re:The FreeBSD file says:

[Crispy Critters]

"The Linux code I just looked at is lacking the copyright notice like the above."

Accept hypothetically that some Linux coder got a little too happy with his cut and paste from BSD code and left out some copyrights. Then all that needs to be done is add the copyright notices back in.

Now the important question: How has SCO been monetarily damaged by the lack of BSD copyright notices in a few header files? About 37 cents? 'Cause all they can do is ask for damages and that the copyright notices be fixed.

Re:The FreeBSD file says:

[plj]

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

Re:The FreeBSD file says:

[RealAlaskan]

>>Accept hypothetically that some Linux coder got a little too happy with his cut and paste from BSD code and left out some copyrights.

>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.

I worry it could be worse

[Dr. Spork]

Novell might be thinking: "Hey, if the millions of legal fees actually produce some settlements for SCO, we can ride their gravy train with no investment at all; If a judge rules that someone owes SCO money, we will be owed that very same money. That would be money for nuthin, who can turn that down?"

So, I hope Novell has their heart in the right place. But really, this depends on the judges. To sue over header files is so damn crazy, the real winners are obviously the people who ran off with $9 million in legal fees. What did the lawyers tell SCO that made them think this is a good investment when the case is so absurdly flimsy? That must have been a home-run sales pitch!

Re:I worry it could be worse

[psychoid]

Think about it:
Novell is a company who used to be REALLY BIG then got spanked by the Great Beast in Redmond because of their marketing-department-that-couldn't. They had the best enterprise products, but nobody wanted to write apps on the NetWare platform. They've been in steady decline since '96.

NetWare is dying and Novell needs a new platform. Linux is perfect because people are writing applications for it. So, in Novell's thinking, if they can deploy the NetWare services like file/print/Directory/Web Svcs on a Linux kernel, they have the best of both worlds.

The one thing that they have to be conscious of, and I believe they have, is their perception in the OSS community. Novell knows that they need community approval in order to be successful. If the community dislikes what they're doing, people won't buy their products and they will become irrelevant.

So, I re-iterate that Novell has to be one of the "good guys" or they will just end up screwing themselves.

Novell can now sue SCO!

[codepunk]

Now isn't this funny, Novell can sue SCO former Caldera for copyright and contract breach. Caldera placed the old SYS V code under a open source license and made it available for download. So what gave Caldera the right's to do this if the code is Novell's?

Makes for Interesting Thought!

Re:AIX (ot)

[finkployd]

Same here, but I would contend that AIX really shines in huge enterprise settings, which most people have never come in contact with and do not really see the benefits of it.

Finkployd

This is worth a lawsuit?!

[RyanFenton]

Error numbers, IO control function names, and abstract type specifications? Repeated 6 times, once for each platform?

This is a joke. Less than a joke - this is like the framework of a joke, without the topics or punchline filled in. It's like Microsoft hiring Yakov Smirnoff to sue anyone on Slashdot who had a .sig that could be seen as somewhat like his humor style.

Ryan Fenton

TTV, behind the code.

[Libertarian_Geek]

When all of this is said and done, TechTV needs to do a "Behind The Music" style documentary. Just let your imaginations run wild on this one. How about some ideas? Darl with a bad comb-over talking about how the technical community turned their backs on him during his cry for help. An exclusive interview with Tux.

HA HA HA, SCO!

[herrvinny]

Wow, two SCO stories in one day. It might be better just to dedicate a brand new /. section on sco (sco.slashdot.org or caldera.slashdot.org, etc).

Yes, SCO is definitely going down. Anyone have new ideas on what I should put up on SCO Report or SCO Countdown?

Re:You people called it upon yourselves

[ivanmarsh]

There are VERY strict controls over what gets into the kernel.

This is nothing but FUD.

System 7 and ancient code

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many of these headers are from System 7 and the ancient code that SCO itself made available?

Look at the monkey!

[Zelatrix]

Claiming copyright on this list of files is so nonsensical, it must be a distraction tactic.

After all, SCO have already stated that 2.2 does not infringe.

So what are we supposed to not be looking at at the moment? Oh look, the quarterly financial statement just got published. And even booking revunue on shipment rather than payment (along with other dodgy accounting practices) couldn't stop a net loss.

Something crooked is going on here. This letter is an irrelevance.

Breakdown

[chaoticset]

Profit for SCO's lawyers: 9 million
Earnings for SCO: -1.6 million
Watching SCO die and set a precedent for anybody who tries stupid legal things with Linux: Priceless

A few .h files?

[panZ]

Gee, my company's error.h and types.h are similar. Oh wait, every god-damn company I've ever worked for has similar .h files because this is basic, common interface shit.
Its like saying "we patented the play, pause, record and rewind buttons on our model of VCR, the rest of you fuckers with tape, CD and DVD players on the market better pay us for this inovative interface!"
I don't know whether to laugh or cry over this.

Re:A few .h files?

[panZ]

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

What happened to '4 quarters of profitabiity'? ...

[compactable]

... previous pump-n-dump speculation mentioned that there needed to be 4 quarters of profitabliy before Darl got a big bonus kick-in - this appears not to have happened. Am I missing something obvious, was this 100% fabrication, or did Darl get nailed here?

Thanks for clarifying, if possible

Listen to their conference call here

[ssheth]

SCO Group Fourth Quarter 2003 Webcast and Conference Call

False economy

[base_chakra]

SCO said they would have reported $7.4 million in earnings, if not for the $9 million payout to their lawyers.

Of course, if they hadn't paid a team of lawyers $9 million, then they wouldn't have had any net earnings to report (again).

In other news

[nsushkin]

In other news, SCO filse a patent for the use of integers 1-7 for error numbers.

The Q and A part of the call

[El_Smack]

After Darl and Co. had finished, but before most of the FUD could settle, was a Q and A period.
One of the most interesting questions was "Of the really large Linux users, how many have licenced from you?" The answer was "We haven't had anyone over the 5000 CPU amount buy a licence, but a couple of them are thinking about it."

Or, in other words: "No one big is buying our BS, cause they have a legal team that knows we are full of it. Or at least is willing to wait it out and see where the chips fall, rather than believing our hype."
To me, that speaks volumes about their case.

No substance

[RDPIII]

So they're claiming they own the copyright on errno.h. This is insane. Even if there are substantial similarities between Linux's various errno.h-s and SCO's version, how many ways are there to implement errno.h? It's a bunch of friggin' macro definitions with more or less standard names and more or less standard values. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought one could only copyright original works, but what's original about a bunch of #define-s?

trump cards

[thoolihan]

Novell should have a pretty powerful position in this. Having formerly possessed the code, they could site a lot of examples of exposing the code to various companies and members of the public. Thus negating the strength of SCO's claims that these things are trade secrets or other types of information that *in legal eyes* deserves special protection. But, with as many companies as there are involved, who knows how this will shake down.

-t

At first glance...

[jd]

I wasn't reading clearly, or something. I could have sworn the title read "SCO invokes Devil, Hades steps in".

On second thought, maybe that wasn't so inaccurate.

The important question, I think

[mcc]

By sending out these clearly fraudulent DMCA notices-- which at best claim copyright over something which is uncopyrightable, and at worst is an attempt by a third party to claim that it is illegal for people to use the materials owned by the BSD raegents under the BSD license in the manner in which the BSD raegents intended the BSD license to be used-- has SCO opened itself up to legal action?

SCO has in the past managed to sidestep most allegations of fraud by being horrendously vague. They said that they were owned money but never sent any invoices, sidestepping mail fraud. They tried to present things as if you needed an SCO license to use linux, but if you tried to talk to talk to them, they were actually selling UnixWare licenses and not in the process actually distributing linux to you, sidestepping GPL violations. However, this is entirely non-vague. It seems to me that SCO has stepped over some sort of line here and this is actionable.

I know that the DMCA does not seem to have many consequences for people who send out bad takedown notices, but surely there must be something preventing company A from finding lists of competitor B's customers and sending them takedown notices for using some portion of competitor B's product that company A does not, in fact, own.

At the least, can this be added to the lanham act/ restraint of trade/ libel or whatever countersuits that Redhat and IBM have going? What are the options from here, and what will actually happen?

Re:The important question, I think

[Canis]

They bandy the DMCA about a lot, but it's not an official DMCA 'takedown' notice. If it were, it'd be a whole lot more interesting: A 'takedown' notice requires you to make a declaration under penalty of perjury.

errno.h and signal.h are from POSIX

[minkwe]

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/base defs/errno.h.html#tag_13_10

Do these guys have any brains at all?

Re:errno.h and signal.h are from POSIX

[Kevinv]

Your url has an extra space in it. Run the base defs into one word and it'll work.

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/base defs/errno.h.html#tag_13_10

Screw this

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pulling out my Commodore 64, so I don't have to put up with all this BS. Oh. Wait. It runs Microsoft Basic.... damnit, there is no escape!!!

Headers

[tiny69]

So SCO is claiming ownership of a bunch of #define, #ifdef, #ifndef, and struct statements. What happened to the millions of lines of code that Linux was infringing on? Even IF (big if) they can prove ownership of those files, about all they can claim is Copyright infringement. I don't see how trade secrets, methods, or know-how (SCO's words since they can't claim anything stronger) can be found in header files.

The lawsuit against IBM is still a contract dispute. Even though SCO claimed they would be adding Copyright infringement claims against IBM, they have yet to do so. My guess is they haven't made any Copyright infringement claims yet because even they are not 100% sure if they really own any of the code. And making false claims in court would kill their lawsuit.

When Caldera first obtained the old UNIX source code, they wanted to release ALL of it under an Open Source license. But they were not able to because to many other people and companies still have rights via Copyright to the code the other parties added.

The letter that SCO is sending out is just one more thing that will come back to haunt them.

Re:SCO v. Novell

[cyberconte]

Great. Now if Novell gets any patents *they* will be able to sue and try to claim ownership of linux.

Just what we need...

Re:Vote bush out of office

[Anonymous Coward]

When will you Libertarians just give up?! The LP (and I should know... I've been reading their newsletter for a year now) is hardly the party to join if you care about reforming things like the DMCA. The vast majority of the LP membership seems to believe that works of authorship (i.e. the stories, source code-- the ideas themselves) are the product of labor and deserving of the same protections as any other sort of property. This mentality is one that would not only endorse the current copyright regime, but strengthen it to the point where copyright infringement was legally indistinguishable from actual theft and where copyright terms were indefinite.

Re:What happened to '4 quarters of profitabiity'?

[SoTuA]

It seems to me like Darl finally ran out of decent "outrageous claims" and he couldn't keep the profits coming in... bye bye bonus, darly baby! And say hello to Ramiro(*), your cellmate in your new bars-in-the-windows stone hotel!

(*) Your regular six feet tall, three hundred pound heavy "host" on a proper federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

Nobody's mentioned yet...

[rograndom]

Most of all this hubbub from Darl was that if managed to get four straight profitable quarters then he would get a fat bonus. A loss this quarter is a major, major setback.

just explain this:

[gotem]

what is the diference between those headers and the ones in the 2.2 series? suposedly 2.2 kernels are "clean"
Every open letter from SCO should come with a default +1 Funny modifier

Re:Vote bush out of office

[CashCarSTAR]

The problem isn't "Democrats" or "Republicans", it's the public at large has absolutly no respect for freedom.

The thing is, freedom is often seen in the US as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself. Freedom is seen as something you are given, not as something you give. Notice that pretty much everybody will completely trample any reasonable concept of freedom, as long as they get what they want.

The answer is not in politics, but in cultural change. American politicians, for the most part, are either too patriotic, or too pandering to say..yes, we are very flawed, and we can be better than this.

And frankly, Libertarians are the worst. For all their talking about freedom, they still would tear down enviromental and private privacy law that probably does the most to protect our freedom.

actual link

[gumbi west]

The parent link is not correct. But This is

Mac OS 9 and earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a damn good thing that the earlier versions of Mac OS were based in Pascal then! ;-)

That's What I Figured All Along

[Inode Jones]

A few months ago I took a guess as to what the misappropriated IP was, and the only thing I could come up with is errno.h, signal.h and syscall.h.

Linux was/is a derivative of Minix. There is no real Minix code left in Linux, but back in the 0.9x days, Linux was still evolving. You can still download Minix from here.

Now, here's the key point: although the NAMES of the various system calls, IOCTLs, error numbers and signals are part of the POSIX standard, their numeric assignments are not. The implementor is left to define them. Not all implementations define these the same way - take a look at the Linux/FreeBSD/SYSV emulation code in NetBSD to see the kinds of translations that need to be done to provide cross-platform compatibility.

Now compare the Minix include files with those of Linux and FreeBSD. You will notice very much the same error code and signal numbers. The Linux code dates from 1991 and is pre-ATT/BSDI settlement. It's likely that Tannenbaum is also in violation of AT&T's IP, and Linux has just inherited it. Of course, there's no money in SCO suing Tannenbaum.

Does this damage SCO? Not really. Is it worth US$699/seat? Definitely not. Can SCO collect damages? Probably, knowing the U.S. legal system.

Re:That's What I Figured All Along

[Anonymous Coward]

It's likely that Tannenbaum is also in violation of AT&T's IP, and Linux has just inherited it.

Except that Minix is only licensed for free educational use, so Linux could/better not have taken any copyrighted material from Minix.

Re:That's What I Figured All Along

[schon]

Can SCO collect damages?

Probably not. In order to assess damages, you determine how much damage was caused (in this case, ~$0). Then you look at how quickly the plaintiff addressed the issue (more than two years, in this case.) Then you look at how quickly the plaintiff notified the infringer, and attempted settlement. In this case - well, we're still waiting on that (Linus, Eben Moglen, and others have contacted SCO attempting to find out the specifics of their claims - all were rebuffed. SCO released this "evidence" to third parties, they never once sent it to the actual alleged infringers.)

SCO can't collect damages because they have declared (through their actions) that they value the alleged stolen code at $0.

Re:That's What I Figured All Along

[terminal.dk]

SCO can't sue Tannenbaum. I am pretty sure that most european countries (like Denmark) has a basic legal principle of, that you can not stand on the sideline passive for n years, waiting for the peoduct become popular before you sue.

The case could never be won here, which is why SCO Germany removed all claims from their website. They did not want a parallel case here.

Re:That's What I Figured All Along

[tiny69]

http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/usr/include/err no.h.html
http://minnie.tuhs.org/VSTa/srctree/newsrc/include /errno.h.html
http://minnie.tuhs.org/FreeBSD-srctree/newsrc/sys/ errno.h.html

The some of the numbers in the above are identical, others are not. SCO claimed in court that there are no trade secrets in UNIX, only in the Unixware that SCO sells. So unless the different errno.h files in Linux are identical to what is found in Unixware, SCO doesn't have anything to stand on. The above files are from the same archive that contained a copy of malloc.c that SCO tried to use as proof that code was copied into Linux. It was later shown that the malloc.c code in question was released under a BSD style license at least twice and was probably in the public domain as well. So that can't make any Copyright claims.

Even if the headers are located in Unixware, SCO already acknowledged that some of the header files in question came from BSD. Much of the code from the AT&T-BSD settlement was placed in the public domain. http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1028217/posts

AT&T claimed this code, among other portions of its Unix OS, as infringed by the University of California in the BSD litigation, and was denied a preliminary injunction on the ground that it could not show a likelihood of success on its copyright claim, because it had published the code without copyright notices and therefore, under pre-1976 US copyright law, had put the code in the public domain.

In SCO's letter that they recently sent, they are claiming Copyright to everything from the settlement.

The settlement agreement between USL and BSDI addressed conditions upon which BSDI could continue to distribute its version of UNIX, BSD Lite 4.4, or any successor versions, including certain "UNIX Derived Files" which include the ABI Code. A complete listing of the UNIX Derived Files is attached. The ABI Code identified above is part of the UNIX Derived Files and, as such, must carry USL / SCO copyright notices and may not be used in any GPL distribution, inasmuch as the affirmative consent of the copyright holder has not been obtained, and will not be obtained, for such a distribution under the GPL.

They seem to have forgotten that Caldera was founded on selling Linux under the GPL. SCO is trying to obscure that fact, in the media and in court, that they changed their name from Caldera.

SCO also seems to forget that they can't place their Copyrights on stuff that has been placed in the public domain. Some of the code that SGI added to Linux turned out to be from SCO who had wrongly placed Copyright notices on the files.

Re:That's What I Figured All Along

[psykocrime]

Except that Minix is only licensed for free educational use, so Linux could/better not have taken any copyrighted material from Minix.

I don't any of this is particularly relevant to the SCO case, but FWIW, the above statement is no longer correct. Minix is now license under a very liberal license similar to a BSD type license.

For more on the Minix license see:
here and here

Re:Vote bush out of office

[Pionar]

You know, it always amazes me when Libertarians spout off on the internet. I'm sure Libertarians would frown on spending federal money for technology research when it should *obviously* be funded (and controlled) by private companies, yet they continue to use such technologies to spread their hypocritical views. If it pisses you off that the government gets involved in things, then boycott those products! That includes the Internet. The web would be a much more peaceful place.

Plus, one of the main points of that party is protection of property. That would include such measures as the DMCA. Maybe that's why they let an Indy pastor run for city council who thought his church didn't have to pay payroll taxes because of the "separation of church and state" (dumbass must not have realized that the separation he was talking about meant that his church was to be treated like other non-profits, not given tax-exempt status on payroll).

I know that the Libertarian dude that was running for senator in IN in 2002 (no, I didn't vote for him, he was an idiot) said he thought that the DMCA had the right ideas, it was just poorly implemented and too vague.

De minimis non curat lex!

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

"Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought one could only copyright original works, but what's original about a bunch of #define-s? "

Nothing ... if it's the only way, or one of a very limited ways to implement the standard, it's not copyrightable. I believe the format and switches are specified by the POSIX standard, which means you have no choice/originality involved. Do it their way or it doesn't work.

Leaving the copyright notice off, even on a one-liner, is wrong, but it's not a fatal error. Tracking down who may have stripped a 20-line notice from a 1-line header for an OS that's been around since the 1970s is not going to be an easy task, and a judge would probably say "screw this, de minimis non curat lex* applies" and tell them to shove off. (*the law does not concern itself with trifles, nothing to do with Lex Luthor)

Re:Vote bush out of office

[Anonymous Coward]

Repubilicans...More to the point Dean has been more open to reforming DMCA than say Bush and his money grabbing crowies. If we aew to have any serious effect with this president for now vote the democrats. By voting Green..your going to end up like the florida 2000 race, splits for the democrats there by vote goes to the republicans...

The next logical step...

[ca1v1n]

The caldera logo isn't enough. We need to be putting these stories on sco.slashdot.org

Some more SCO code...

[syusuf]

$ cat /bin/false
#!/usr/bin/sh
# Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 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.

#ident "@(#)false.sh 1.6 93/01/11 SMI" /* SVr4.0 1.3 */
exit 255

Re:Vote bush out of office

[derF024]

Still, what you CAN do is research the candidates on the major 2 platforms and pick out the ones who side with Libertarian beliefs.

Sounds like what you really need is a system like Instant Runoff voting where you don't have to worry that you're "throwing your vote away" on a third party candidate. Then you (and everyone else) could vote for that Libertarian candidate without worrying about the bad guy winning.

SCO has given up

[Moe Taxes]

These header files have nothing to do with the IBM lawsuit, but in less than a month they have to show code to the judge. Then when the case is dismissed they are going to need these claims to keep themselves out of jail on stock manipulation charges.

Or maybe...

[Kjella]

...they just took it from them same damn error description table. This is about as much proof as it is that Apache and IIS both return "404 Not found". Why not "404 Document does not exist" or something else? They must have stolen it, yes sir.

Either way, this just comes out as pathetic. Even if some Linux developer copy-pasted the interface #define's from BSD (which you can't do by the old BSD licence, because of the advertising clause), it's basicly simple facts of the POSIX standard.

It's like copyrighting "#define PI = 3.14". Now all other programs that define PI, must be infringing on mine. Yeah. Right. It's yet another bullshit tactic just like the last "proof" they showed. They're going to display stuff that is common to SCO, BSD and Linux and state "look, they took our code (through BSD and BSD settlement)". It's enough to get past the idiot test "Umm these look similar. They must have stolen it"

Kjella

Re:not just Linux... use do-while loop

[dmeranda]

This is off topic, but your macro itself has problems. It permits its use without a statement-terminating semicolon. It is always best to define multi-statement macro blocks with a do-while loop as:

#define return(x) do{ ..... }while(0)

Notice no semicolon after the "while(0)". This makes it an error to omit the semicolon after the macro's use, and thus behaves more like an actual function in syntax. Oh, and this is one case where you really DO want the parenthesis around the return "value" x inside the macro, since "x" is not a variable but a macro argument which could contain a semicolon.

ABI vs API code

[nzkoz]

Now forgive me if I'm being stupid here. SCO's letter states that:

Certain copyrighted application binary interfaces ("ABI Code") have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted UNIX code base and contributed to Linux for distribution under the General Public License ("GPL") without proper authorization and without copyright attribution.

Now all these header files that they've named, are just that, header files. Which relate to the POSIX|UNIX API. These are two different things right?

Re:ABI vs API code

[igomaniac]

I believe the ABI part means they are claiming copyright of the specific numbers assigned to each of these standard (API) defines. They can't claim copyright on the defined names since they are ANSI/ISO standardized, but the standards do not mandate which numbers are assigned so this is (or at least can be interpreted as) original work.

There is no copyright issue

[Rayban]

From:

http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&act io n=m&board=1600684464&tid=cald&sid=1600684464&mid=7 4550

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

Re:Vote bush out of office

[mushroom blue]

I'm looking from the outside, but it sure seems to me that Republicans are exactly the same.

see, this is why you should read the full post before replying.

if you'll note the grandparent's post, the next line talked about Republicans being just as bad.

Re:Vote bush out of office

[saden1]

I agree. We are culturally bankrupt. No one asks the tough questions and when politicians dodge the questions there is no penalty to pay. And then you have all these radio talk show host that simply trying to get you to buy their books. It is disgusting. America as it is today is not the World it was envisioned to be. We have inapt public and weaselly politicians....a very deadly combination.

Forgive me, I'm forced to use SCO at work..

[avij]

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.

Re:Forgive me, I'm forced to use SCO at work..

[gabe]

SCO Bought Xenix (a UNIX system) from Microsoft at some point. So I imagine after that point, Microsoft no longer owned the copyright on that material.

Re:Vote bush out of office

[pyros]

Louis Black highlighted the differences between Democrats and Republicnas best when he said "A Democrat sucks, a Republican blows. A democrat won't let me keep my money, but a Republican won't let me spend it on drugs and hookers, so what am I supposed to do with it?"

"Loser pays" only benefits corporations

[gillbates]

Smithers: Did you hear? "Loser Pays" has now become law; if we sue someone and lose, we'll have to pay their legal fees!

CEO: Perfect.

Smithers: WHAT?! Do you know what this means?

CEO: I know EXACTLY what it means. It means we'll hire the most expensive lawyers we can find. It means that no one will risk paying a million dollars in legal fees if they lose their ten grand lawsuit against us. It means when we sue people, they'll settle because the cost of losing just got higher. It means that we can rip off the customer even more! We'll have the best lawyers in the country - we're bound to win, and we'll make our victims pick up the tab! Yessss, this is EXACTLY what we wanted....

Re:"Loser pays" only benefits corporations

[pyros]

nice fear-mongering.

If you sue and lose, you pay for the defense. If you sue and win, you win your court awarded damages. If you are sued, and win, the plaintif pays your fees. If you are sued and lose, you pay the damages ordered by the court.

Besides, I would fell more encouraged to defend myself when I know I'm in the right. A high profile law firm would also be more inclined to take on such a case, as they know the plaintiff will have to pay their fees. The lawyers wouldn't have to worry about the little guy defendent being able to pay the tab.

This is just too good to be true

[Kjella]

Linux header:
#define EPERM 1 /* Operation not permitted */
#define ENOENT 2 /* No such file or directory */
#define ESRCH 3 /* No such process */
#define EINTR 4 /* Interrupted system call */
#define EIO 5 /* I/O error */
#define ENXIO 6 /* No such device or address */
#define E2BIG 7 /* Arg list too long */

And the POSIX standard says:
The [errno.h] header shall provide a declaration for errno and give positive values for the following symbolic constants. Their values shall be unique except as noted below.
[EPERM]
Operation not permitted.
[ENOENT]
No such file or directory.
[ESRCH]
No such process.
[EINTR]
Interrupted function.
[EIO]
I/O error.
[ENXIO]
No such device or address.
[E2BIG]
Argument list too long.

Conclusion:
This is hogwash. Complete and utter hogwash. Even the descriptions are specified in the standard. You see some minor differences (Argument vs Arg, function vs system call) but it is simply trivial. If this is the "infringing" stuff, the replacement with completely non-infringing comments would be ready in about 30 seconds directly from the standard. I can volunteer to do a cleanroom implementation without neither SCO nor BSD code :p.

Kjella

Two questions...

[emil]

1. McBride was supposed to get a bonus for several consecutive quarters of profitable earnings. The bonus is trashed now, correct?
2. The Linux 2.2 kernel is supposed to be free of infringing code. Aren't the errno.h, signal.h, and ioctl.h unchanged or very similar since 2.2?

How dare you...

[terminal.dk]

post copyrigthed code here ?

They will soon come and close slashdot down.

Darl's brother is hard at work

[Platinum Dragon]

Someone at Groklaw pointed out that the MS Word version, hosted at LWN, still has the good ol' properties saved. Kevin McBride apparently created the document, with the last modification being made by "bstowell"--presumably, Blake Stowell.

Nice to see that $9 million in legal fees is going to great use.

Re:SIG Must gooo! its the gay GOATSE.CX guy

[Tackhead]

> Didn't your Momma tell you not to click on strange sigs?!
>
> Long ago I quit clicking on slashdot sig links. *Especially* when it has goat in the link text :P

This is a SCO thread. Pictures of Darl McBride may be repulsive, but they're definitely on topic.

Re:Vote bush out of office

[cyberformer]

I'd vote for anyone who isn't Bush, which of course means a Democrat. But even someone who hates both major parties should still vote, because independent or third-party votes do make a difference.

If the major parties see a substantial portion of votes going to a single-issue candidate, they'll see that people feel strongly about that issue and try to adjust their platform to attract those voters. When people don't vote at all, politicians just assume that nobody cares what they do.

I dislike the libertarians because (like Bush) they often seem to be more interested in the rights of corporations than of human beings, but the principle still stands.

Re:Vote bush out of office

[Bull999999]

So Clinton gets all the credit for the economic boom, but if anything bad came out of Clinton era, it's all Republican Congress' fault, right?

errno.h from Microsoft....

[rongage]

I thought this bit interesting - from Microsoft Visual Studio .Net Enterprise Architect...

/***
*errno.h - system wide error numbers (set by system calls)
*
* Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
*
*Purpose:
* This file defines the system-wide error numbers (set by
* system calls). Conforms to the XENIX standard. Extended
* for compatibility with Uniforum standard.
* [System V]
*
* [Public]
*
****/

Better call the SCO police on their licensee Microsoft - releasing "Unix" proprietary methods without authorization....

Re:Vote bush out of office

[kin_korn_karn]

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.

Re:Vote bush out of office

[Stray7Xi]

Ya that'd be great, a system where voting for someone can CAUSE them to lose.

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! + ... + 100!/98! + 100!/99!

-It's not easy to understand by the common guy (not /. ) imagine the news trying to explain HOW a candidate won.

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.

Losses

[StormReaver]

If SCO hadn't filed the lawsuit to pump up its stock price, neither Microsoft nor SUN would have given SCO money. In that case, SCO would not have had that 10 million dollars in revenue.

Seeing that Linux had been eating SCO's lunch prior to this, it's reasonable to think that SCO would not have had brought in any new business and hence no new revenue.

So without the lawsuit, SCO would probably have posted a quarterly loss of 11 million dollars.

Then we have Baystar's 50 million dollars. Again, without the lawsuit, Baystar most likely would not have given SCO the money. Without this, SCO's quarterly losses would have topped 61 million dollars.

The bottom line is that, as we all knew, without the phoney lawsuit against IBM, SCO would no longer exist as an organization. It would be bankrupt now.

SCO can only exist as long as it can delay court proceedings. Once IBM gets into full gear, SCO will vaporize.

OK, let's rewrite errno.h

[Animats]

Here's a start. This is a complete rewrite; only the textual identifiers and numeric values required for backwards compatibility are the same.

• /*
  POSIX standard error return values.
  Modernized descriptions.
  */
  enum errno_t {
  EOK = 0, /* No error was reported. */
  EPERM = 1, /* Permission denied - not the owner */
  ENOENT = 2, /* The requested file, directory, device, or socket does not exist. */
  ESRCH = 3, /* The requested process does not exist. */
  EINTR = 4, /* A system call was interrupted by a signal. */
  EIO = 5, /* General I/O error */
  ENXIO = 6, /* The requested device or device address does not exist */
  E2BIG = 7, /* An argument or argument list was too long. */
  ENOEXEC = 8, /* Incorrect call to "exec" function */
  EBADF = 9, /* The requested file descriptor is not valid. */
  ECHILD = 10, /* This process has no living children. */
  EGAGAIN = 11, /* Try again later; resources are tight now. */
  ENOMEM = 12, /* Memory is full. */
  EACCESS = 13, /* Permission denied - access not allowed. */
  EFAULT = 14, /* Bad pointer value passed in a call */
  ENOTBLK = 15, /* The requested operation (probably 'seek') is not defined for this non-block device */
  EBUSY = 16, /* Some other process is using this resource. */
  EEXIST = 17, /* Can't create - file already exists. */
  EXDEV = 18, /* Can't link across file systems. Try a symbolic link instead. */
  ENODEV = 19, /* The device number is not valid. */
  ENOTDIR = 20, /* The requested directory operation is not valid for this non-directory file. */
  EISDIR = 21, /* The requested operation (probably 'write') is not allowed on a directory. */
  EINVAL = 22, /* General bad argument error. */
  ENFILE = 23, /* Too many open files system-wide. */
  EMFILE = 24, /* Too many open files for this process. */
  ETXTBSY = 26, /* Attempt to install a new program over one that is running. */
  EFBIG = 27, /* File too large for the file system type. */
  ENOSPC = 28, /* File system full. */
  ESPIPE = 29, /* The requested operation (probably 'seek') is not allowed on a pipe or socket. */
  EROFS = 30, /* Attempt to write on a read-only file system */
  EMLINK = 31, /* Too many links to one file. */
  EPIPE = 32, /* Read failed - pipe closed by the writer. */
  EDOM = 33, /* Numeric input out of range. */
  ERANGE = 34, /* Numeric output out of range. */
  ENOMSG = 35, /* General error - no further information */
  };

This provides modernized descriptions of the errors, and makes errno an enum, which is still compatible with integer declarations of errno, but cleaner. The list is not complete, and should be updated with the additional error numbers defined in Linux.

Offered under the GPL by John Nagle, the author.

Re:OK, let's rewrite errno.h

[Anonymous Coward]

EOK = 0, /* I'm OK */
EPERM = 1, /* Screw you, your not the owner */
ENOENT = 2, /* Nuttin there dude */
ESRCH = 3, /* Indigo Montoyo not found */
EINTR = 4, /* Bugger. */
EIO = 5, /* I/O bugger */
ENXIO = 6, /* Indigo Montoyo's address not found */
E2BIG = 7, /* Argument too long, seek councling. */
ECHILD = 10, /* My name is indigo Montoyo, you can kill-9 my parent process, but you can't kill-9 my children, they don't exist. */
EGAGAIN = 11, /* bugger, no room. */
ENOMEM = 12, /* bugger no memory. */
EACCESS = 13, /* Bugger off - your access is inadquate. */
EFAULT = 14, /* Bad pointer value, very bad pointer value */
ENOTBLK = 15, /* bugger, no blocks */
EBUSY = 16, /* Bugger off, i'm busy. */
EEXIST = 17, /* Bugger, it's there already. */
EXDEV = 18, /* Hey bozo, try symbolic linking. */
ENODEV = 19, /* The device number is buggered. */
EINVAL = 22, /* General bad argument bugger. */
ENFILE = 23, /* Bugger, too much shit open. */
EMFILE = 24, /* Bugger, too much shit open for this process. */
EFBIG = 27, /* Bugger, file too big. */
ENOSPC = 28, /* Bugger, system is full of shit. */
EROFS = 30, /* Bugger, can't write */

Re:Vote bush out of office

[bnenning]

I think the relevant question is "Who held the majority in congress at that time?"

IIRC, Republicans had the House and Democrats had the Senate. The DMCA was yet another instance of lawmakers putting aside their political differences and coming together to reward special interests and screw the general public.

Bill Hicks on political parties in America

[Overly Critical Guy]

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!"

Maybe SCO has more tricks up their sleeves?

[NaveWeiss]

SCO scares me.
They are so sure of themselves. They also said that.. they showed many people the offending source if they signed an NDA. Has anyone ever spoken to these people?
I mean.. if SCO wastes so much time on this seemingly-absurd plan, maybe they have a reason to believe they might win.

Good thing Microsoft bought a license

[zjbs14]

From the VC++ 6.0 errno.h header:

/* Error Codes */

#define EPERM 1
#define ENOENT 2
#define ESRCH 3
#define EINTR 4
#define EIO 5
#define ENXIO 6
#define E2BIG 7

They could have been in BIG trouble.

"Novell is desperate" says Darl

[Belegothmog]

"Finally, McBride responded to a report that Novell Inc. was still pursuing its own copyright claims on Unix. "Novell is desperate," McBride said. "SCO has produced documents that say we own the Unix copyrights. Let me be real clear: SCO acquired all rights for Unix and UnixWare, includes copyrights. We see this as a fraudulent notice." McBride added that SCO sees Novell as being "all hat, no cattle." from eweek

Well, if that's not the pot calling the kettle black... They really are a joke.

Re:Vote bush out of office

[bnenning]

I'm sure Libertarians would frown on spending federal money for technology research when it should *obviously* be funded (and controlled) by private companies

The Internet came out of DoD research. Libertarians support the military as one of the primary purposes of government. And the Internet exploded in popularity only when private companies realized there was mone to be made.

Plus, one of the main points of that party is protection of property.

Yes.

That would include such measures as the DMCA.

No. Even leaving aside the distinction between physical and intellectual property, protection of property means "you can't take my property". It doesn't mean "you can't make any device that could conceivably be used to take my property, regardless of its legitimate uses".

Disclaimer: I don't support the Libertarian Party. I agree with some of their principles, but many of their positions are completely unworkable. I support smaller (but not nonexistant) government and individual freedom, which means I generally hold my nose and vote Republican.

I have a serious problem with this...

[jasonrfink]

SCO is asserting that because a BSD/USL agreement was somehow not honored that SCO is entitled to recompense. Here is the problem, SCO therfore implies that it was making an eanest effort to improve the core operating system, SCO UNIX, during said time.

I know for a fact that SCOs system has bugs in it that other systems and projects fixed years ago, instead, SCO was busy making up, for the most part, utterly useless, products. Their userland is horrible, the kernel clunky, and the system is riddled with bugs that should have been fixed.

SCO claims, "they did their best" but the world owes them something.

Sorry, you can't make money for being incompetent and then blaming someone else's good fortune.

Copyright status of UNIX headers

[epmos]

#include

I am not a lawyer. I am not a paralegal. I do not offer legal advice to anyone, ever.
As someone who uses Linux and BSD every day, I do have an interest in this case, and in the history of UNIX.

Remember, copyright law has changed since UNIX was written. Be careful not to make incorrect assumptions based on what the law says today .

I have one question: are the BSD header files subject to copyright ? I really tought that these files were declared as "no copyrightables" in 1973

Not quite. IIRC they were not "declared 'no copyrightables'" in 1973 but in 1993 the court found that 32V may have entered the public domain due to AT&T's not following copyright rules in effect between 1978 and 1986.

Please read this document, esp. the section titled "1. Copyright Infringement".
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/bsdi/930303. ruling.txt
Please note that this is a ruling denying an injunction that would have prevented distribution of BSD, not a dismissal of the entire case. So it's not as strong as we might like.

There is a lot of information about the BSD case on the web, start here . Of course, the settlement itself is sealed, so it's hard to say exactly what it contains. However, such a settlement would restrict USL, BSDI and the Regents of the University of California, not the Linux developers or IBM.

And the general feeling is that USL asked for the seal because they had their ass handed to them, not because the wanted to spare the Regents a public humiliation.

<grin>

Does this help clear things up?

Mac OSX, *BSD as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC as I already modded here

I just took a look in the Mac OSX errno.h file (/usr/include/sys/errno.h) and the error definitions are all there, with the same attributed numbers as in the Linux and *BSD ones. Someone further down claimed that SCO was claiming ownership of the actual numbers, since the defined names are an ANSI/ISO standard and therefore can't be claimed.

What this means, I think, is that SCO is indeed attempting to roll open the BSD/LSI case again. I would be amazed if they were able to get away with this. I'm pretty sure a competent lawyer will be able to clam this one up in court.

Not only that but SCO is opening themselves up to truly massive claims of extortion and fraud if this is not legal, which although IANAL I really cannot see it being from their pretty wild claim in their letter. They simply claim they own these files, yet make NO mention of showing how that is so.

I am really interested as to who is going to sue SCO next.

Fiduciary duties..

[ProtonMotiveForce]

Don't SCO's financial officers have a legal duty to shareholders to earn as much profit as possible? Sounds like SCO shareholders should be suing _now_, instead of waiting.

It's obvious to me that a lot of people _will_ be suing SCO when this all blows over and it turns out they squandered millions on a case they knew they couldn't win. But I think they should start now, and use this quarters' losses as their case.

1 dead == 15 dead?

[Merk]

So what you're saying is that 1 death and 15 deaths are equally bad, and that an atomic bomb should be seen as simply an overzealous way to cook a pizza?

The argument that golf clubs and automatic weapons are equivalent because both could potentially be used to kill somebody is ridiculous. One is obviously more dangerous than the other one. That's like claiming that an atomic bomb and an oven are equivalent because both can cook a pizza.

There seems to be a general consensus that people shouldn't be allowed to own something that makes it easy for them to kill more than n people in a row. Right now, n is generally agreed to be about 1, although the difficulty in killing that 1 person is pretty low.

I don't want my neighbors owning atomic bombs, land mines, chlorine gas cannisters or guns. The ability to kill people with them is just too high. On the other hand, I don't mind if my neighbor owns a sword, which has never had any functional purpose other than killing and maiming other people. The difference is that if my neighbor goes nuts, I have some small hope of escaping from a crazy neighbor chasing after me with a sword. Bullets are a lot harder to escape.

I agree that the blame primarily rests on the shoulders of the person doing the killing, but I think it's stupid to make it easy for him/her to kill so many people. We have laws to prevent people from doing stupid things: running red lights, walking on a busy highway, etc. Why should we not have laws preventing someone from getting the tool necessary to commit a massacre? Is there some legitimate reason that someone would need a fully-automatic weapon with a 50 round clip?

Re:1 dead == 15 dead?

[psykocrime]

Why should we not have laws preventing someone from getting the tool necessary to commit a massacre?

It's called the 2nd Amendment.

Is there some legitimate reason that someone would need a fully-automatic weapon with a 50 round clip?

Yes. The main reason that comes to mind is an armed revolution against the existing government, should it ever become tyranical / dictatorial / etc.

It may sound unlikely, it may even BE unlikely... but fundamentally the 2nd Amendment is all about making sure that the ultimate power lies in the hands of "the people" where it belongs.

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.

Re:1 dead == 15 dead?

[psykocrime]

Odd that someone with a .co.uk address would talk about the 2nd amendment. In any case, the 2nd amenment doesn't say: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear the tools necessary to commit a massacre, shall not be infringed."

First of all, I'm American, not British. The .co.uk TLD is a lark.

Secondly, the same weapons necessary to wage war, if that need should arise, just happen to be the same ones that would conceivably allow one to commit a massacre. It's a (somewhat) unfortunate truth that living in a country with great freedom also entails a certain amount of danger, and maybe a little bit of self-responsibility. You worried about a gunman walking into the McDonalds where you and your family are eating, and beginning to spray bullets? Ok, get yourself a concealed carry permit and a nice legal, properly licensed handgun, and when that event happens, take the safety of you and your own into you own hands.

The other alternative is to move to a country with a restrictive, totalitarian, authoritative, government that protects you day in and day out, from cradle to grave. But god-damnit, leave those of us who love the freedoms that make America great, the hell alone. Quit being part of the system that's trying to systematically turn US into that totalitarian country referenced above.

Re:1 dead == 15 dead?

[ces]

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.

Re:What happened to '4 quarters of profitabiity'?

[Error27]

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.

Re:Vote bush out of office

[jazuki]

Not quite right. While the shareholders of a corporation are not liable in case of corporate wrongdoing, its officers and board are. And they can be individually prosecuted if they were party to criminal activities, either in terms of making decisions or in terms of intentional execution. And they can go to jail as a result.

In the case of Enron, for example, Andrew Fastow is being criminally prosecuted.

However, many argue he's just a fall guy, since people that high up in a corporation often as far as they can to maintain plausible deniability. Like Ken Lay for example. But, this happens in politics, too. Say, Reagan and Iran-Contra.

Comparing SCO Openserver errno.h to Linux errno.h

[DDumitru]

I just pulled up /usr/include/asm/errno.h from a SCO OpenServer V system I have access to (which has a legal license). I compared this with /usr/src/linux-2.4.22/include/asm-i386/errno.h

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:

SYMBOL - Linux - SCO

EPERM - Operation Not Permitted - Not Owner
E2BIG - Argument list too long - Arg list too long
EDOM - Math argument out of domain - Argument out of domain

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:

SCO - EBADE 50 /* Bad Exchange Descriptor */
Linux - ENOCSI 50 /* No CSI structure available */

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.

Where SCO comes in...

[Kjella]

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.

I think it's part of the BSD settlement, which basicly goes like this AT&T licences to BSD, BSD licences to AT&T. Because they'd both been using eachother's work. Any code that should be attributed to both AT&T and Berkley, is SCOs business since SCO now owns the Unix code of AT&T. So their claims to a copyright notice is not without merit, the silly part is laying claims to the definitions of the POSIX standard.

Kjella

SCO Better Sue Microsoft, Too.

[lophophore]

I found 4 different copies of errno.h on my Windows XP box!

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

/* Error Codes */

#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!

Document SCO lie - from Groklaw

[Anonymous Coward]

From Groklaw:

No, none of the code in the Linux ABI modules contains SCO IP. This code is under the GPL and it re-implements publicly documented interfaces. We do not have an issue with the Linux ABI modules. The IP that we are licensing is all in the shared libraries - these libraries are needed by many OpenServer applications *in addition* to the Linux ABI.-- Blake Stowell, 2003-02-05

Think IBM will find this interesting?

Give SCO some credit

[roystgnr]

SCO have literally come up with the weakest possible argument they could have attempted.

They've attempted weaker arguments before!

"Here is a malloc implementation copied from our proprietary Unix (or possibly from our old public domain Unix, or maybe from an even older Knuth textbook)" might not be this weak, but both attempts are put to shame by SCO's best 'argument': "This packet filtering code looks kind of similar to our code (and even more similar to the public specifications describing that code's interface, and it turns out that 'our' code is owned by Berkeley and we must have illegally stripped their copyright notices not to realize that)"

They've said some stupid and contradictory things to the press and the courts, but nothing that tops the lines they were feeding their NDA suckers.

Re:If SCO gets bought, the terrorists win

[utlemming]

What we need to do is a distributed buy out -- have every Linux user buy one or two or ten shares of stock from SCO -- privalaged with voting rights. But then it would not be a buy out perse, because it will not be a single entity doing the buy out. It will be individuals that do it and therefore not subject to the buy out clause.

With a distributed buy out, then we simply call a stock-holders meeting. To which we propose that we are going to raze the company from within. With Darl at the meeting, then the Linux users vote to opensource all the SCO source code -- every single bit of it. Well Darl is still in shock, we vote to have Darl booted with the whole board. As Darl is picking up the bricks he just dropped out of his pants then we vote to dissolve the company.

The way I figure is that if we get half of the /. community and the Linux users to spend a little money then we could dispatch this company to /dev/null.

The best part is that since it is no company but a group of stock holders that are really pissed off it is not illegal. How? Because it is not a hostile take over, and it is not the actions of one entity, but in this case the actions of several thousand people -- who hold interest in the company -- making the decisions to Enron it.

Linus proves he wrote errno.h and ctype.h

[close_wait]

Groklaw has just posted an email from Linus where he shows how he wrote errno.h and ctype.h for the original 0.01 release of Linux. So it's not from SCO and it's not even from BSD.

Can SCO really be that incompetent?

Comparing Linux-1.0 errno to Linux-2.4-20 errno

[MrHanky]

I compared errno.h in Linux versions 1.0 (from 1994) and 2.4.20, and they're practically the same. Some additions have come in the later version, but a diff shows that only 8 lines were changed between the two versions, for a file originally 132 lines long. At least when it comes to errno.h, SCO is pulling stuff out of its arse.

Linus also had some interesting things to say on the LKML:

For example, SCO lists the files "include/linux/ctype.h" and "lib/ctype.h", and some trivial digging shows that those files are actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux (ie September of 1991). And I can state

- I wrote them (and looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed: the "toupper()" and "tolower()" macros are so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so ;)

- writing them is no more than five minutes of work (you can verify that with any C programmer, so you don't have to take my word for it)
- the details in them aren't even the same as in the BSD/UNIX files (the approach is the same, but if you look at actual implementation details

you will notice that it's not just that my original "tolower/toupper" were embarrassingly ugly, a number of other details differ too).
In short: for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files are trivially written by me personally, with no copying from any UNIX code _ever_.

It's rather long, so read the rest at http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/12/22/137

2.3.50 v 2.6.0 -- Diff anyone?

[utlemming]

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.

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 /*Argument list too long*/
#define E2BIG 7 /*Arg list too long*/

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.

It's unlikely BECAUSE of the armed population.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

It may sound unlikely, it may even BE unlikely... but fundamentally the 2nd Amendment is all about making sure that the ultimate power lies in the hands of "the people" where it belongs.

And it works. So well that some people now believe that a conversion to a tyranny is so unlikely that they argue for the elimination of guns as an unnecessary hazard - completely oblivious to WHY it is unlikely.

But it will only remain unlikely as long as a large part of the population is armed. The US has had a number of near-misses with tyranny even in recent times. Some examples:

In the period just before WWII, when the NAZIs were coming to power in Germany, the KKK actually HELD power (especially in law enforcement) in many of the towns, counties, and states of the US. Their ideology was similar. But in the US people were able to resist with firearms. (My wife is here because, in separate incidents, her grandfather and mother held off the Klan in battle.) So while the NAZIs were able to suppress opposition and rise to power in Germany, the Klan in the US was held at bay, and finally defeated, in thousands of tiny battles.)

Nixon, president during the peak of the '60s anti-war movement (with a terrorist faction that makes Alkaida look tame), actually hired a think-tank to examine what would happen if he suspended the presidential election. Answer: That would precipitate the population to oust him by armed might and restore the election - and this would succeed, mainly because over half the population was armed and partly because some of the military would side with them.

The Battle of Athens is another county-level example.

(Of course not all near-misses were averted by an aroused, armed population, or the threat of one. For instance, there was the "Butler Plot" in 1933, when the heads of several of the US' largest corporations plotted a coup to replace Roosevelt with a fascist regime under general Butler. Butler was appalled, went to a congressional committee (the predecessor of HUAC) about it, and the plot was suppressed. Imagine if they'd found a more sympathetic general...)

And I could go on.