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New Survey Finds No Linux 'Chill' From SCO Suit
daddywonka writes "According to this article at internetnews.com, an upcoming survey from the Robert Frances Group shows that 'cost-savings and the General Public License, or GPL, are trumping any concerns about SCO Group's claim of copyright infringement within parts of Linux.' The survey only covers 15 companies. That doesn't seem very reassuring to me. Do any slashdotters have experience with their companies pulling the plug on Linux projects due to the SCO trial or is it business as usual?"
The reason the SCO heat is not affecting Linux deployments all that much is simple - most Linux admins are knowledgeable enough to gather that it's only a matter of time before the entire SCO thing blows over. Armed with this knowledge, they are able to make a convincing argument to management that there is nothing to worry about, and any Linux projects on the table are able to move forward as planned.
I am sure there are exceptions, but my guess is that this is the overall trend.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
People who would use linux already know better than to listen to SCO attacks anyway.
Which means you dont have a clue about how he feels about the whole thing.
If he would know about the lawsuit, he might think/act differently...
What kind of software is it that is so dependent on kernel details? Most Linux software I've seen doesn't even notice the kernel version and work unchanged from 2.0 to 2.6 (unless it uses threads, and then only when the threading library changes from LinuxThreads to NPTL)
Even if (BIG IF) SCO would win, there is no way in the world they could let the user pay.
You got the software under the GPL. That license says specifically you are in the clear.
The only thing SCO could do is sue the people infringing the so-called IP. And if their IP are the files they presented, they will be rewritten to unmatch SCO's.
But there is absolutely no way in this current Time-Space continuum that SCO will win.
What they are saying at the moment with the files they showed is something like:
You wrote a book. That's OK. But you wrote it in English. You can't do that ! English is ours ! We own that copyright !
And then they go on:
You are currently reading a book, written in English, which we own the copyright of. You will have to pay us $699 to read the book in English. Your alternative is to stop reading, or read it in Hungarian, Swahili or Klingon (although we might have the copyright on Klingon).
If you really halted the Linux adoption, you did your company a big disfavor. Maybe you should review the decision (if possible).
I had the owner of the company i work for ask me about it, but he did so with a chuckle. i think most halfway-intelligent people will understand that without proof and without trial, SCO is just trying to make a buck before they go out of business. I think in (american) football, they call that a hail mary. They have nothing to lose by talking the talk, and walking the walk, and they have everything to gain. Their product is still stuck in the 80's and they have no money to bring it up to date.
money (or lack of) does strange things to people.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Since they have plans to decommission a few hundred servers in the upcoming year it looks like their decision will grow the Linux footprint there.
Now this is an important matter: although the rate of Linux adoption is not slowing down (in fact, it is speeding up), the fact that your company (and presumably others) have gone with business other than Linux means that Linux adoption would have been speeding up even faster.
In terms of the Red Hat law suit, this is demonstrable damage to the Linux Business.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
So how could this lawsuit possibly help you? I'm not trying to be funny here, but your products are crap. Linux or no Linux, you would not be succeeding.
You deduce all that from a list of filenames with identical content? Try asking yourself these questions:
1. If SCO file A is the same as Linux file B, how do you know that B was copied from A, and not the other way round? SCO have not presented any solid evidence that shows WHICH WAY the copying took place. Identical files by themselves do not prove anything -- you need a history. SCO doesn't seem to do much research into the history of the so-called infringing files. Which leads me to...
2. How do you know that both A and B are not based on an older file C from separate source? Did A and B both have permission to copy from that source? (e.g. BSD code, or international standards, such as many of the header files SCO list?)
3. Can copyright even be granted on some of those header files, many of which may be construed to contain simple facts (e.g. "#define"s) required to comply with standards or be compatible with existing systems? Copyright does not extend to facts, nor the straightforward expression of them.
4. How do you know that those files even belong to SCO, given the complex history of UNIX copyrights, and the fact that Novell ALSO claim to own UNIX and that SCO's licence does not permit them to make such a claim? Oh, and the fact that SCO repeatedly asked Novell to assign UNIX copyrights to them, but were DENIED?
As an "attorney", you might also want to actually speak to a "tech guy" before making IT infrastructure decisions, or in my book you're being NEGLIGENT.
But then again, I don't believe for one minute that you are an attorney (or at least not a GOOD attorney) or you would have investigated some of these things. I think you're a TROLL.
On the offchance you're not just trolling, ask a lawyer not slashdot. Minor miswording can mess shit like that up, so talk to a professional and get it right.
I think all of a sudden, *BSD won't be dying :)
I kind of guessed it may be something like that. Hey you're employed, you're doing better than many and I figure there are employers who've done far worse things in the world than take what look like big risks, to save the company.
While there are companies that have hired slave labor (BWM, Bayer), and those that continue to employ near-slave labor (Nike), and even those that have killed en masse (Union Carbide, Monsanto), trying to steal the hard work of tens of thousands of people and claim it as your own, then force the creators to buy their own work back at extortionate prices (or any price, for that matter) is still pretty damn low. About as low as one can get without doing actual, direct physical harm to others.
Frankly, anyone willingly working at SCO, recession or no, deserves the low self esteem they undoubtably enjoy and the difficult job prospects their current employment on their Resume post-law-suit will almost certainly bring. This notion that earning a living justifies doing what is unequivocably wrong is complete and utter bullshit. Evil isn't defined by the difficulty of doing good, it is defined by the harm it causes others. The fact that doing the right thing would be difficult for those foolish enough to be working at Caldera/SCO has absolutely no bearing on the fact that what they are doing all those long hours they put in each day is wrong both morally and ethically, nor does it absolve them of one iota of their part in it all.
I'm sick to death of "my employer made me do it" or "I fear unemployment so I have no ethics" crap this formerly great nation seems to have instilled in so many of its drones. It rings a hollow as the famed defenses of the Nuremburg trials, or the death-bed repentences of dying Christians. (cue Godwin-Law pundits)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"somebody should hack up a compatible layer for other Unixes"
Hardly possible, since "the other Unix's" might (in SCO case are) be closed source.
Reverse engineering is not trivial, just ask the Wine folks.
The other way around is quite common, SCO and AIX both offer LKP's (Linux Kernel Personalities) , and thus are binary compatible.
Thanks to the Open Source nature of Linux, SCO and IBM can do it easy.
So the crap is on us, they can run Linux bins, we cannot run SCO's. Not that this is tremendously important, even Progress forecasts all their apps will be on Linux some time.
"/Dread"
I don't think the courts would be particularly impressed with this suggestion. It is somewhat analagous to the idea that if I distribute a dictionary with a remarkable similarity to the Oxford English Dictionary but with a little disclaimer stating that it is up to the copyright owners to notify me within a set timeframe, then I get an implicit right to distribute their work. Ain't gonna happen. Copyright holders get until the copyright expires to protect their work, which is as it should be. (The question of how long the protection should last is a different matter.)
The simple solution if any packages are found to contain unauthorized copied code is just to remove those packages from distributions until they are fixed. One of the great benefits of the "duplication of effort" that goes into GNU/Linux, and which is often criticized on in this forum, is that there is no shortage of packages if alternatives need to be found quickly.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
If anything is found in Linux that doesn't belong there, swarms of Penguin lovers will remove it and replace it with working original code. Darl has already said that's what he's afraid of. Probably weeks, at most a few months.
That's how it's always been.
That's how it always will be.
If even the tiniest shred of improper software is found, Linux will be fixed faster than Microsoft can fight an anti-trust suit.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
All the developers wanted to use Linux, but the project manager chose FreeBSD because he thought we might have to pay SCO money at some point.
Stupid SCO...
Stupid manager. SCO has already publicly announced that it plans to go after FreeBSD next. Either the case has no merit (probability approaching unity), in which case deploying Linux would have been fine, or it does (probability almost but not quite equal to zero), in which case FreeBSD will be next. Followed by every other brand of UNIX out there (except Sun's offerings, as they are helping to bankroll this fiasco).
Not a very bright manager. Either s/he can't think logically past his or her own nose, or s/he doesn't plan very far ahead. About the only way to have 100% certainty that one will not be sued by SCO would be to deploy Windows or Solaris.
NOTE that I did not include SCO Open Server. If you will recall, Darl McBride cited a professional relationship with ones customers as having the primary purpose of providing an avenue for future litigation. Companies having any relationship with SCO are at much greater risk of litigation than those with no relationship.
Of course, having 99.99999999% certainty is good enough for most of us, in which case, running Linux (or FreeBSD, or HPUX, or Irix, or AIX) would be more than adequate.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Sure there is a solution: major reform of the US legal system, preferably on similar lines to the German system. As long as the legal system is designed for lawyers to make money rather than to dispense quick justice, a rapid solution is in clear conflict with the objectives of the system.
but I have worked with a company that pulled the plug on SCO. One of their major applications was running on a SCO platform and to reduce risk, another platform was selected.
Seems to me that people should be just as worried about what happens if (when?) SCO loses as they are about loses related to being charged for running Linux. With the amount of money they are losing, they could be in massive amounts of trouble if the do lose (I mean, any business who's major strategy fails is not going to do well, right?).
The management are just doing the best for their shareholders. That is what they are paid for: to play the system as best they can to boost the stock price. It is not their fault that the system sucks.
The politicians who could fix the system are just doing what it takes to get elected. Taking actions that would upset the businesses that pay for the election campaigns would just be stupid. America likes winners, not wimps who accept defeat just because winning requires a few distasteful decisions.
The electorate that elects these politicians is doing nothing wrong. Hell, if they can keep taxes low and not cut programs that directly affect me, why shouldn't I elect them?
Let everyone fend for themselves.
Do any slashdotters have experience with their companies pulling the plug on Linux projects due to the SCO trial or is it business as usual?"
:oP
In the datacentre i work in, RH discontinuing its "free RedHat" is a bigger deal than all this. We aren't the least bit concerned about SCO. Just Fedora Core vs. Debian for our new servers.
do() || do_not();
Is using Linux. We don't talk about it though. We don't tell our competitors because it's a HUGE advantage that we don't have the multi-million dollar license problem that most do. Our customers couldn't care less as our last "official" downtime was over a year ago on our web server.
Anyone NOT using Linux is just plain stupid. Microsoft is crafting this whole piece of BS with SCO designed to be the biggest piece of FUD you people ever saw. Don't be blinded by stupidity. Just get some balls and tell your windows group PEACE-OUT.
"The survey only covers 15 companies. That doesn't seem very reassuring to me." I work for an opinion research company, and although most of our work is done over the telephone, I think this applies here: alot of people have similar questions when we survey 300 people and say that their opinions are representative of those of hundreds of thousands. My boss, the founder of the company, has a famous reply. He says that if you are making chicken soup, and you want to know if you've added enough salt, you don't eat the entire pot of soup, you stir it up (this is important), and take a spoonful off the top, then if you need to add more salt, you can. The same principle applies to sampling people to determine public opinion, and you'd be suprised how accurate it can be.
"where words meet intent, lies rhetoric's lament"
...and those of us who have chosen ethically in the past, even to our own financial disadvantage, quite rightly look down on those who do not.
Nice view, from way up there on your high horse, but put yourself in the same situation. The economy is in the shitter. You quitting wouldn't change a damn thing.
"Yeah, I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway. If I hadn't, someone else would have." I cannot believe that an adult would even field such an answer in public, much less accept its veracity.
It's not like they're committing genocide - it's a fucking law suit.
No one ever suggested it was genocide. However, what so is doing is much more than a lawsuit. Indeed, it is a lawsuit in name only.
Were it merely a lawsuit, it would not entail the vast amount of public FUD, misdirection, deception, and outright lies (including lies that contradict one another) that has come from SCO's management. Indeed, attorney's strongly discourage such statements, as they are destructive to their client's case. The fact that SCO shows no such restraint (and that SCO's lawyers apparently feel no need to reign them in or insist upon such restraint) demonstrates prima facia that this isn't so much a lawsuit as something very, very different.
At its heart it is an attempt to defraud thousands of free software out of their hard work, to defraud third parties by charging licensing fees for things that do not belong to them, and to defraud their investors by pumping up their stock value through deceit and market manipulation.
They may be within the limits of the law in the United States (or they may not). They certainly are not within the limits of the law in Australia, Germany, and numerous other countries.
Either way, they, and those who support them, are unethical, and I for one would never hire an HR person who would knowingly hire unethical people and open my company up to the potential of such behavior within my own ranks. Nor would I hire an HR who would staff my company with weak-minded people who put a paycheck ahead of any ethical considerations, or who cannot recognize a lost cause when they see one.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It's a shame that you need to equate SCO employees trying to feed their families to Nazis, seeing as I don't remember anyone at SCO killing 12 million people in concentration camps, or did I miss a history lesson?
Nope. You missed a logic lesson.
I did not compare SCO employees trying to feed their families with Nazis trying to feed their fmailies. I did compare the justification "I am only doing my job" used by an alleged SCO employee with the justification "I was only following orders" used by famed war criminals in years past.
The crimes being justified couldn't be more radically different from each other, indeed they utterly unrelated. However, the justifications used by both parties are virtually identical. The latter ("I was only folling order", ie. "I was only doing my job") has been formally and resoundingly debunked; the former ("I am only doing my job"), being semantically identical to the latter, is likewise nonesense.
The only similiarity between this troll posing as a SCO employee and war criminals of centuries past is that they use exactly the same justification to defend their immoral and unethical behavior, and that justification holds absolutely no water.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Linux is still cheaper tho. :-D
He said his team leader was "very techy". Techies don't care much for meetings in general, and it's all very speculative at this point. Why would he want to throw money at the lawyers to talk it over at this point? To give the other manager face time, to lend validity to the claims, or to lower his perceived value to the company by showing a lack of understanding/planning/sureness about his department?
Going to legal is going to be costly, put projects on hold, and ultimately result in having to wait and see. No point. Taking a strong stand from the offset is exactly what a good leader should be doing.
Perhaps a better response would have been "go read groklaw, we have better things to do then chase rabbit trails", but tieing things up in legal is a waste of time and money at this point.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
I think that since RedHat is claiming damages for "unfair competition" (ie, filing lawsuit claims to damage a company's reputation, trade libel and tortious interferance) that a handful of instances of the matter harming RH would be sufficient. I suspect in terms of money--which isn't what RH is seeking as much as judgment--they would be after much larger punitive than compensatory damages. Mostly, however, I see this as an attempt to quash SCO's lawsuit claims, until they pony up in court, via an injunction.
Slashdot is simply a bad medium to go to for whether or not it is effecting anything, though. You're right in that a lot of people have said it has no effect but even a large portion of those said "my boss asked me [or corporate legal] about it, I said it was a joke, it's okay." That still effects decisions; the boss was simply convinced that the matter was safe to proceed.
Just a few thoughts.
I work at a university a couple of miles from SCO's offices in Lindon, Utah. There hasn't been a peep about dropping Linux from any of our projects. In fact we're ordering new servers and installing Linux.
Think about it. Why would Linus steal loads of code and then post it for everyone to see?