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IBM, Intel Set Up $10m SCO Defense Fund
An anonymous reader writes that the "NY Times reports that a group of companies, led by I.B.M. and Intel, plans to announce today that it is setting up a $10 million legal defense fund to help pay for the litigation costs of corporate users of the popular GNU/Linux operating system if they are sued. ZDnet also has a story on this." otisaardvark points out that "The fund is to be administered by OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) and so, amongst other things, could bankroll legal costs for Linus."
Big, Rich friends :-))
:-)
Of course, IBM and Intel aren't doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, but it's still a nice gesture, 'cos it works for us (well, them, I'm not a kernel contributor
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Kudos to IBM/Intel for "doing the Right Thing (TM)". Also found it interesting how the ZDnet article words it "Anti-SCO". Harsh. I like it.
the timeing of this is interesting with today being the day that SCO has to show evidence in court of IBM's infringment on their copyright.
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This announcement should add a new dimension to SCO's nonsense about indemnification.
Since Lou Gerstner took control of IBM (although he is no longer at the helm), this has been a different company. Today they are doing everything possible to help Linux, but of course to that end they are also helping themselves. Still, it must be said that the IBM of today is one great company.
(I don't work for IBM or have any connections to them other than my Thinkpad T40 (NewEgg has them now for $1600 bucks!)
; )
Can I bum a sig?
The SCO vs Linux legal battle took another turn today, as the SCO group plans action against Caldera, it's former self, for releasing their alleged IP. In a move that stunned the rest of the industry, SCO is effectively suing itself for initiating distribution of SCO IP as GPL code. SCO says they are assured of winning the case as they have all of the evidence and can present it in court.
SCO claimed that, to defend itself against such charges, it will be making gratuitous use of the OSDL defense fund.
nude mac desktops
IBM & Intel won't just throw all this money away would they. I think what this means is:
We're pretty damn sure that Linux is clean. You can be sure too, because if you get sued we'll pay the legal costs for the time being, but since we know that you (we, Linux) will win in the end, SCO will have to pay and so it won't cost us a dime.
And so our Linux bussiness can roll on. It's more than PR. It's saying we'll win.
They are making preparations to buffer their new role as being total service providers, providing OS helpdesk and contracting support to corporaions.
OS was supposed to be use at your own risk... but it seems they are now going to make promises above and beyond a general GNU contract.
The Custom Mary
OSDL hopes to raise $10 million, Cohen said. So far it's raised $3 million from a group of companies that includes IBM, MontaVista Software and Intel.
What this may do is set the stage for killing SCO by bleeding them by laywers...
The idea is simple: Ring fence SCO from accessing customer license fees. Meanwhile, bleed them to death by keeping them entangled in the SCO/IBM, RedHat/SCO suits.
If SCO cannot extract a single license fee because it ends up in another court case, their business model is effectively dead, thus (hopefully!) devaluing their stock!
I know I cannot give as much as Intel or IBM, but I was wondering if there is anyway I can contribute $$ to the fund?? Admitedly my 10$ may not pay for 1/10th of an hour to pay a lawyer, but I would like to feel that I helped destroy SCO in some way. And this isn't a troll, I'd give anything to be part of the reason SCO had to shut it's lying trap!
Ofcourse, it is yet another news article with SCO's name in it, but it also seems like IBM and Intel think they need a crapload of money to defend people, which in turn suggests that there is something to SCO's claims.
SCO really wants to go to court, but ofcourse they know they don't stand a chance. This amount of money on both sides could make for a spectacular trial.
At the same time, some people, who hadn't figured it out yet, might realise that there is no way on earth SCO is actually going to win.
Besided that, i wonder if IBM and Intel did return-on-investment calculations on this. Maybe they figure the kudos will be worth more than 10M.
The question of users being sued for running Linux has got me thinking. Now that RedHat no longer offers a free desktop version of their product, would it be possible that a Linux-running site could be sued by RedHat for illegally running a 'pirated' copy of Red Hat Advanced Server? Would this be any different to Microsoft calling in the BSA to investigate a site running unlicensed copies of Windows? What if the RedHat site was running a hybrid type of installation, with portions of the distro taken from the unlicensed 'illegally obtained' version of RHAS, but others, such as package management (apt-get, for example), taken from the free GNU/Debian distro? Are there any lawyers out there that would care to comment. Thanks.
Megacorps are neither all good nor all evil. They are just human institutions that plug along and do their thing. What they do often depends on circumstances and who is running them. Often when they do seemingly "evil" things it's out of stupidity and shortsightedness rather than malice.
As for why IBM is doing this, that's obvious. Intel and the others? I'd say that being on the list of contributors for that is probably the best PR money can buy with the hacker community. If you are a tech company, the hacker community are your customers. They probably just redirected a few mil from advertising. Intel needs good PR right now with the hacker community to help them compete with the AMD Opteron.
This may be one of the last nails in the SCO coffin, since $10 mil can buy a lot of legal representation and SCO likely can't match that. SCO does not have the cash to bankroll fifty lawsuits. If the legal battle really got ugly, I'm sure the fund could solicit at least another few mil from Linux users.
It's encouraging to see that some of those who benefit from Linux are prepared to defend it against predators. But it may mean that they think there is a significant probability that SCOX will not implode before they can file any new lawsuits (as opposed just to threatening to file new lawsuits).
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
And they will bring DOOOM TO US ALL!!!
Interesting enough then, that Activision, the one megacorp that would actually be thanked for bringing us Doom (well... Doom 3 anyways), seems unable to do so.
It ends today and SCO has stated they are handing it over today, but no one knows what it will be yet.
It may just be evidence they give to IBM so that they can then look at the code themselves, in which case we don't get to find out anything yet, but they may also submit evidence to the court, in which case we do get to find out today or soon after
IBM & Intel won't just throw all this money away would they.
For these companies, this is not a lot of money. What they really are putting on the line (and have been for a while) is their prestige and reputation.
help pay for the litigation costs of corporate users of the popular GNU/Linux operating system if they are sued.
That leaves grandmas, 12 year old girls, and nerds in parent's basements out in the cold.
I guess we now know who SCO is going to target next.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
It will be interesting to see how much of the code for X86 that sco is claiming as stolen actually came from intel. Either intel reference code for talking to the bios or for talking directly to the chipset peripheral controllers tends to show up everywhere. Plus there is intels own work on SMP operating systems. Hypercubes were an intel specialty.
Now if adaptec joins in sco could be in for a ripping the like of which has never been seen
Donate to groklaw - www.groklaw.net
PJ is doing some AWESOME unpaid work uncovering and collating all the information about the case and the history of unix, sco, novell, the copyrights etc. Many journalists are looking and linking to groklaw already. If there's one person working against SCO who needs support from the community, it's PJ.
--rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
Partner link for the NYT article.
Well, so much for that.
This begs a couple thoughts/questions though.
First, $10M US is not that big a pinch really. IBM could throw that kind of cash around without even a blink (kinda like MS throwing $6M to SCO for a "License",) so $10M really shouldn't be too hard to come up with.
In fact, I would like to see a list of people who are contributing to this, and would like to see some big names on that list (hello Red Hat!)
Also, this would be an EXCELLENT time for Novell to step up and put their money where their acquisition is, and back their SuSE purchase by getting in on this as well.
And someone earlier made an excellent comment: where can someone in the general OSS community donate to such a fund? I mean, its one thing for "We the People" to piss and moan about SCO, and then rely on major corps to handle the legal stuff for us (Which is fine for now, but with the way SCO has acted over the last few months, who knows WHO they are gonna sue next), but it would be a much better show of solidarity if we also contributed to this fund, or sone like it, above and beyond the usual contributions to groups like EFF and such.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
Say, remember when the Romano-British employed one lot of maurading Saxons to protect them from another lot of maurading Saxons?
I would say you're showing your age there. :P
Ah, those were the days. The sight of a circle of Norsemen huddled around a fire, reciting their ancient sagas... imagine a Beowulf clu... oh, wait.
What do you mean, Off Topic? C'mon, it's more fun than bitching about SCO!
These sigs are more interesting tha
It's a shame this money has to be spent in this way and that it couldn't be used to pay for programmers and bandwidth. Hopefully it won't have to be used.
There is bound to be some old code laying around that may of been leaked in by an ex caldera/sco employee.
Caldera released all of that code under the GPL, though.* If not initially, through the contributing developer, then when they published the resulting body of work as OpenLinux.
They still retain copyright, but that doesn't mean they can revoke the use, distribution and modification rights that they've already granted to Linux users.
* (and SCO were still doing so until midway through last year, after this whole kerfuffle started.)
deus does not exist but if he does
A typical legal strategy for a battle like this is for the side in SCO's position to tackle a bunch of little guys first to build up precedents without actually having to prove their case against an oponent equipped with a like legal force. IBM and Intel are simply serving notice to SCO that that isn't going to fly here. They will put on their defense wherever SCO goes instead of waiting for SCO to come to them.
IBM comes off looking like a hero, combined with the Linux commercials all over TV this weekend and it's a huge PR win. I'm not easily impressed but this was brilliantly conceived, timing and execution nearly flawless.
With everything else they've done so well one would have to believe that somewhere inside the folds of the cape there is a sword ready to strike the killing blow.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
" Why do people ignore IBM's past? They're so easy to forgive IBM , and yet so quick to jump down Microsoft's throat for any little thing.
Imagine if Microsoft was doing team-ups like this. Slashdotters would be all over them for the "unfairness" of it all."
Microsoft already HAS "teamed up" and is intimately involved in this thing, or at the very least encouraging it.
$8 million dollars to SCaldera for licenses they didn't need, for one thing...
You can bet Microsoft will _NEVER_ "team up" with anyone fighting a cause for FOSS... The whole reason they are funding SCO's FUD driven pump n dump is because of the fact that the GPL is "Kryptonite" to their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish business model that they have used thus far to maintain their monopoly.
I forgive IBM for past transgressions because it seems they LEARNED from the mistakes they made in the 1980's. If they hadn't, it's likely IBM would have gone the way of Digital and other former dominant players...
Microsoft could crush Linux forever tomorrow... If they released Windows complete with source under the GPL. Won't ever happen.
Corporatism != Free Market