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Linus Blasts SCO's Header Claims
jonbryce writes "Linus has responded to the latest claims made by SCO in their letter to the Fortune 1000 companies. Basically, he wrote the code himself, and it has been there since Linux 0.0.1. No copying from BSD or any other source." You can also read his comment to the Linux kernel mailing list, which reads in part "I think we can totally _demolish_ the SCO claim that these
65 files were somehow 'copied.' They clearly are not."
Don't we need to inspect all the patches applied to these files and make sure that they were from sources that are as clean as the original code?
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" --Salvor Hardin
I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing I worked with more coders like Linus Torvalds. How many times have we programmers found some code that didn't work like it should, asked the original coder about it, and had our heads bitten off for daring to suggest that there was anything sub-optimum about their baby?
;) ... So there is definitely a lot of proof that my ctype.h is original work.
Mr. Torvalds, on the other hand, shows his value by his honesty:
- I wrote them [ctype.h] (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
It's like a doctor admitting a misdiagnosis to the patient... a wizard willing to work on Dorothy's side of the curtain. I hope that I'm as honest about my code as Linus -- and that my management continues to understand that you don't get good code by pretending you never make mistakes.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
It is obvious that SCO (trying to keep up it's inflated stock price) is issuing ridiculous claims about once a week. Given the amount of time that we have until they have to put up or shut up during a trial we can look forward to more of Darl's comedic stylings in the form of outlandish claims.
In case you're curious about where to get shares to short SCOX, Vanguard has them.
This troll would be a lot funnier if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button for a Google search of the name "Linus" didn't take you DIRECTLY to Linus Torvalds' home page.
Linus probably spent the better part of the day responding to this SCO sillyness. What a waste of time. SCO should somehow be made to pay for there frivolous bullshit!
SCO seems to be run by raving madmen.
I wonder if Darl and Co. will be trying to leave the US before the trial and this is all some contrivance to get the stock price up a bit more for some spending money.
Johnnyv
SCO, n: a concise example of everything that's wrong with IP laws. example: Want to see how the DMCA is broken, go look at the actions of a SCO. Also, a company who's only product is lawsuits. example: That SCO only showed a profit because they forced another company to settle out of court.
SCO, v: to lie about a technical issue in an effort to increase stock prices while the upper management sell their stock. example: That company is SCOing, lookout.
Mind you, the mainstream press still doesn't know who to believe, since for them it's all greek. But anybody with even an inkling of an ability to read code can check these files out and follow Linus' discussion. And bits of information like this will make serious industry players fall squarely opposed to SCO (though the middle-manager types will still believe what they are spoon-fed by SCO, or rather be unable to analyze the argument sufficiently themselves to come to any conclusions). Bad SCO - very, very dumb.
Wow, three SCO articles in one day! I'm always up for more SCO stupidity (being the owner of SCO Report and SCO Countdown), but don't the editors think they can stretch out the SCO news, so there's one article every day? Certainly would make me pay up for a subscription...
/. story came online, and I have to say, the IBM lawyers are going to have a field day kicking SCO's butt. However, I just _know_ tomorrow, I'll wake up and there's going to be a slashdot story about SCO rolling back their comments, saying "Well, those are just examples to justify our DMCA notices; we have more examples for the court" or something along the lines of what happened in the slideshow incident, with SCO saying the example code was just a sample, it wasn't representative of their whole case.
Anyway, yes, I RTFA'ed Linus's response before the
Besides, think about it. SCO has been saying for months that they're not going to release what the infringing code is in public. I find it hard to believe that SCO is, with one fell swoop, slicing off the head of it's own case.
In this case, I think I'll reach into the history books. To quote Winston Churchill:
"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
Remember to visit my sites for more SCO stupidity...
Has anyone taken the time to send an official complaint to the SEC? It seems VERY strange that these "revelations" always seem to co-inside with poor stock performance annoucements. It would seem that SCO is intentionally trying to boost it's stock performance by making clearly false statements. I do believe that would be illegal - fraudulent speech isn't protected by the first amendment. IANAL so - is it?
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
>SCO has stated that the various and sundry header files are for all intents theirs, and Linus has pretty much said "um, no". If this is correct, would this constitute perjury?
Um, no, because they didn't say so in court.
Does anyone else here think that it may not be the best idea to publicly (on Slashdot and Groklaw at least) counter claims made against something that seems bound for court? Doesn't this just give your opponent a head start on how to properly accuse you to get their desired results? I am not looking for security through obscurity, but given the veracity of the claimants, wouldn't some caution be in order?
Mark.
The / in
IANAL, but if SCO's really basing their claim(s) on errno.h and the like, I can't imagine how their attorneys justify $9M in fees over the last year. Google 'merger doctrine' and 'scenes a faire' and have fun with the analysis!
geek. lawyer.
No. They claim copyright violation so they have to prove it. Imagine if what you said was true then SCO simply would have to file lots of (bogus) complaints every year and the kernel-hackers would be tied up for the rest of their lives trying to counter the claims. The burden of proof is on SCOs side.
Try isdigit(++foo)
It's not exactly against the C standard (i.e. the program will still compile and behave predictably), but violates good programming practice.
That's one reasons why macros are frowned upon by modern programming languages.
SCO are now in this catagory or waste because they are screwing up Linus' valuable eating time. He shipped the 2.6.0 - we've all now built it and he needs his rest ready for the new year.
SCO dispute is with IBM on subtle contract issues not Linus on what he wrote (non-thread-safely) 11 years ago !
I wonder WHY they quit. Did they see something in the course of their work that made them scared to be associated with SCO? Director of Financial Reporting AND Internal Auditor, both leaving within a couple of weeks of each other? I wonder if they'll pass whatever they found out on to the SEC?
And again, none of the files mentioned seem to have anything to do with what SCO is suing IBM for! NUMA, RCU, SMP, JFS-- where are you???
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
'The SCO Group cannot expect to win any case based upon application interfaces which it's AT&T, USL and Novell predecessors relased in open standards specifically for the purpose of interoperability.
signal.h, errorno.h,and ioctl are all parts of many released standards including The Open Group and IEEE POSIX Base Specifications and the Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 151-2.
Note that The SCO Group does not own the copyrights on any of those standards and it does not own clear title to the copyrights on most of the AT&T Unix base.
From 1989, the then SCO activity pushed for the adoption of the iBCS Intel Binary Compatibility Specifications across *all* i386 Unix vendors
'Even SCO admits, no requries these definitions to be present in order to be standards compliant.
You mean, like, say, suing them?
The business world doesn't go by what people say on linux-kernel. Or what is said to various computer mags. No, it goes off of legal action. Linus and company need to recognize that they MUST DEFEND THEIR WORK LEGALLY. Given the sheer number of people whose work SCO has laid claim to, if they simply got off their asses and sued, SCO would be loosing the PR war and their lawyers would be tied up in litigation SCO doesn't want to be tied up in.
Everything else is just a whole lot of hot air, regardless of how true it is. You've GOT TO STAND UP FOR YOUR WORK.
Please help metamoderate.
Using the same numbers isn't copying the file.
Firstly, for some strange reason, there seems to be a perception that the GPL needs to be tested in court before it is enforceable. I don't know where this perception comes from (it certainly isn't true) but Redhat vs. SCO is probably the best test case we could possibly hope for. No doubt that the GPL will prevail.
Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, the trouncing that SCO gets will be a serious deterrent to other companies thinking that Linux is an easy target for litigation. No company in their right mind would want IBM's lawyers fighting them while IBM know that they are in the right. It gets even worse for litigants when they are attacked by other companies on other fronts - Redhat's GPL challenge, Novell's copyright entitlement challange. Basically, the message being sent out loud and clear is that despite the fact that Linux is seen as a hobbyists OS, there is serious commercial backing ready to defend it. And this backing is stronger because it comes from diverse organizations that do not even have to be consistent with each other in court. I really think that even cash-rich Microsoft would be concerned to be in SCO's position at the moment.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
> What really need to happen is the courts need to
...they shouldn't be allowed to keep attacking
> put a gag order on everyone involved with the case
Gag orders are rare in US civil lawsuits for obvious reasons. Even if one were to be granted (IBM would have to ask for it) it would only cover statements having a direct bearing on the suit. Most of SCO's bloviations would therefor be exempt.
>
> IBM and the Linux community until they win their
> case in court...
Why do you believe that their bloviations will have any effect on the outcome of the case?
Lying is not illegal and is only a tort if it harms someone. If you believe that their lies are damaging you sue them for libel.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
2. The court case is against IBM and notably on some contractual issues. Again public opinion equates the two but this is wrong. IBM could lose and Linux could be unharmed in theory.
3. Groklaw and to a lesser degree Slashdot is part of an experiment. OpenSource lawsuit. The methodology of OpenSource is being used against SCO.
The debunking of anything SCO claims in hours after they make it public or file it in court is something that is new and will be lethal to SCO in the end.
Help fight continental drift.
Of course there are substantial similarities between UNIX and Linux in the header files, because Linux is a UNIX work-alike. It must have the same or substantially similar interfaces in order to "work-alike". This is nothing other than the old user-interface lawsuits from previous decades.
A bunch of lawyers or PHB's heard that errno.h was similar but don't understand the concept of interface and implementation.
I suspect the OSS side will have to prove to a court what an interface is and that having substantially similar interfaces does not mean copyright violation. I think this actually may be rather difficult. It also places in jeaopardy any work-alike application (Samba, Apache, NFS, Wine etc) because somewhere, somebody has a copyright on some substantially similar interface code. In fact for most of these multiple companies have copyrights on substantially similar interface code.
Makes a good case for all interface code to actually be in the public domain.
Reverse engineering case law (clean-room) is probably also applicable, as reverse engineering is a legal activity.
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
unfortunately jounalists don't read slashdot or Groklaw. It is very obvious for us that SCOs claims are baseless, but obviously not for mainstream press.
Why is the judge letting SCO get away with this coy "they infringed, but we're not going to show you how yet" stuff? Why hasn't he said, "Put the infringing source code in a brief and hand it over tomorrow, or I'm tossing this"? If, as SCO claims, they're being horrifically damaged, shouldn't they in fact be eager to get the offending code removed, which IBM could do, once it knows what the problem is? If I were the judge in this case, I'd be telling them to make their case or withdraw it. But, as Dennis Miller say, that's just me, I could be wrong.
Yes, it's telling. You have a college student who's writing his own OS because he can't afford the money to purchase a commercial *nix. He'd like to make it comply to the standards, but he can't afford the money to buy the standard either. This is exactly why standards should be open in every sense of the word.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
ljavelin sez: "OK folks, now let's be realistic - SCO isn't looking for billions of dollars from "licenses", or even from IBM.
No one would come up with such a poor plan for promoting their product, intellectual property, lawsuit, or anything else.
So what is SCO doing? I think the answer is "Bad Marketing is better than No Marketing". In other words, SCO has nothing to lose."
SCO isn't promoting their product(s), they're promoting their company. They're trying to get bought out.
It'd cost less to buy SCO than it would cost to pay them their "license fees". IBM could buy them for less than the settlement of the suit.
They have no intention of losing the case, because the deal with their lawyers allow for two contingencies: they win, or they get bought. If they don't win, they'll sell out as best as they can.
They're trying to *make* someone buy them out.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
IANAL: Eventhough I don't think SCO has a case, I don't like articles like the one above. Didn't the courts recently uphold an IBM motion that forces SCO to reveal some of the code infrigements it claims? I would think a common legal tactic would be to give an impression of satisfying the court while sending out the least useful information at the worst possible time and in a voluminous quantity that actually says very little. 65 files containing lots of redundancy sent out three days before Christmas could be seen as a delaying tactic. I sure hope this is not what SCO will reiterate to the court in answer to the IBM discovery, because they will have bought themselves time for another round of antics. "But your honor, we gave them thousands of line of code in 65 five files, and yet they are still not satisfied?" For various reasons, I would think SCO would like to reveal the stronger evidence of their argument at the latest stage possible. For one, if someone comes forward to defend open source while chosing undisclosed evidence as an example then SCO could pose the question as to why the defender knew that was a sore point. That is why I still don't understand the seemingly benign actions like the public retraction of some code by SGI or the immediate "feel good" response given to SCO's last offensive. The former can be construed as an admission of some sort while the latter places Linus as the original owner of disputed files. So even if someone else patched in something at a later stage, SCO may have an argument to drag Linus further in: the owner of the file and project should monitor more carefully the progression of the work. In fact this may be similar to something argued in the past. The Linus response makes you feel good with its mockery, but I do not think it a smart response. Let SCO have the burden of establishing everything. As the accuser, let them do all the work. Even if some of the information is public domain, it'll take them longer than if someone spells it out and they may not have time to cover more ground to finesse their weak arguments. Linux does not need to win a PR war, it needs to establish its case in court. Very few people outside of Linux fans will read this article, therefore making such as response of little PR value to start with.
unfortunately jounalists don't read slashdot or Groklaw. It is very obvious for us that SCOs claims are baseless, but obviously not for mainstream press.
So when you see a journalist who is clueless, write a letter (to his editor if you can't figure out how to contact him)
- politely correcting him,
- linking to the most authoritative postings (i.e. Linus' letter) refuting SCO's claim that you can find, and
- pointing out sites (such as groklaw and slashdot) where a truth-squad is digging out and posting refutations as fast as SCO makes up another claim.
And don't sweat it if a lot of other people do it too. The more the merrier. (It creates an unspoken subtext: "If a LOT of people know this, Mr, Reporter, why don't you?")
Reporters don't like to be played for fools. It ruins their reputations and hurts their carreers. Some polite letters turning them on to new sources could get a couple of them posting our side of the story - if only for the appearance of balance. And once one or two do that, any of the rest that don't follow along look like idiots - so the herd stampeeds.
Imagine the whole establishment media looking at SCO's claims, through a microscope, skeptically.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think we've clearly determined that SCO's claims (at least up till now) are completely baseless to the point of laughability. The problem here is that by Linus and various other open source figures discussing this, it almost gives credibility to their claims.
... this is only giving SCO publicity...SCO knows that if they can get their name in the news (even in a negative light), it's still better than fading away...
Not true.
What would give credibility to their claims is letting them stand unopposed.
Especially after the pins we've put in each of their trial balloons up to now. Sudden silence would convince observers that the latest sh*t was actually shinola.
If news sites refuse to carry SCO's press releases, the whole thing would be moot
But the news sites DON'T refuse to carry SCO's press releases. Given that, quickly countering and ridiculing them is the best move.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, as the other posts say the final bid/ask amounts don't tell you much. But something else does. You can no longer short sell SCO. Noone is willing to lend that stock for short sale cause it is expected to fall much faster than the amount of money one could recoup from the interest on lending a stock. The only time this kind of situation happened in recent history was when 3com stock was worth less than the palm stock (at the time palm was a 3com subsidiary).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Just because a standards body has written a published standard on something does not mean that the thing being standardized is free, or even that you can implement the standard freely. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights might all get in the way.
Granted, the existence of those standards makes SCO's case harder, but it isn't clear by how much.
Standards guarantee openness if all the owners of related IP are members and all the members of the standards body agree, in writing, to permit free and unencumbered use of their IP by anyone for any purpose.
(Note that a license only for compliant implementations isn't good enough because Linux could be argued not to comply.)
I can't imagine why the last guy quit! Any takers??!!?
Linus apparently doesn't care that his comments could run him into legal trouble down the road
How so? He is making a factual statement, then expressing his own personal opinion. Neither of which are illegal the last time I checked.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Both AT&T and Santa Cruz Operation participated in the development of the POSIX / FIPS 151-X standards and they did not identify any such royalty/patent dependent section as required for Federal endorsed standards.
In terms of copyright, anyone and any organization who has purchased and ISO standard is free to release implementations based upon those standards.
... And lastly to totally blow away your argument From This is the final listing of Testing Laboratories and Validated Products from the NIST POSIX Testing Program, dated December 31, 1997.
Linux has met the required standard as a POSIX plaform and today Linux *IS* the defacto industry standard for the common Unix platform.Fact is that SCO's statements are professional media statements, they are designed and distributed trogh the channel. And obviously mainstream journalists are too stupid to get that it is all crap. Solution: Write professional media statements, facts don't count.
The Coherent episode suggests one approach to disproving the SCO case: if undocumented SCO/UNIX bugs (or features) are missing from Linux, that strongly suggests that the Linux code was not copied from UNIX. Documenting subtle differences in behavior between the two kernels could put the final nail into SCO's coffin.
If SCO thinks that it somehow has a copyright on the intellectual content of the code (e.g., that only it can publish a macro called "isdigit()"), well, AT&T long ago chose not to assert that claim.
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