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SCO Responds to OSDL Legal Aid Announcement
Greyfox writes "SCO has issued a response to the earlier OSDL legal aid announcement. Basically the same old story, noting: 'If vendors feel so confident with the intellectual property foundation under their massive contributions into Linux, then they should put their money where their mouth is and protect end users with true vendor-based indemnification.' The release also refers us to their SCOSource web site, which they claim in their announcement shows 'proof' of infringement. I was unable to find any such 'proof' other than their claim that they own errno.h. Since I'm obviously too much of an idiot to find the 'proof' they claim they're showing, maybe someone else could go look and tell me where it is."
No, you have to do this: litigious bastards.
Tomorrow, according to Groklaw.
And even then it'll probably be a few days before IBM can look over whatever SCO gives them tomorrow, and possibly some unspecified period after that before information about what 'it' is starts leaking out.
Breath-holding is likely to be ill-advised.
"Since I'm obviously too much of an idiot to find the 'proof' they claim they're showing, maybe someone else could go look and tell me where it is."
n el&m=107 212616605523&w=2
This is not SCO proof, I couldn't find any either, but proof that SCO is laying claim to code they did not write:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ker
Why not filter on 'Caldera' ?... that'll do exactly what you're asking for.
SCO has interesting FAQ over here. It seems to me it contains several points I haven't read before.
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
Novell Inc. has decided to follow Hewlett-Packard Co.'s lead and indemnify its enterprise Linux customers against possible legal action by The SCO Group and/or others
More at:
eWeek
Your mom always said, a PB&J is better than nothing, and God is nothing, is a PB&J better than God?
They are violating the GPL, because they're distributing GPL'd code, and do not accept the terms of its license. Namely, they distribute the Linux kernel to people (still), and they are distributing Samba.
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
So, perhaps, they aren't violating the GPL itself because they don't accept it anymore, but they are violating the authors' copyrights, because the GPL is the only license the authors allow the code to be distributed under. You can hash words all day.
So, basically you can't rebutt the claim since you can't see the source...and you can't see the source until you can't rebutt the claim (via NDA).
Has anyone contacted the ghost of Joseph Heller about this?
Well lets see now...
Section 0. They're charging a fee (other that for the physical act of transferring a copy, or for a warranty)
Section 6. SCO are attemtping to impose further restictions (binary only licenses)
And the catch all... Section 4. Attempting to distrubute the software outside of the terms of the licence, terminates the license, therefore SCO is in breech for distributing any copy at all now.
Any others, anyone?
Its even worse. The Mc prefix means "son of". Now what does the name Bride, from gaelic, mean? "From Brighid, a hostage, pledge, or security." Fits Darl's reign at SCO pretty well.
Wrong. Finland adopted the Berne Convention, which includes pretty much the same rules about derivative works that US copyright law does.
They did that last time. IBM complained. The Judge agreed with IBM and gave SCA a verbal reaming, and told them EXACTLY what they have to give, with no room for doubt. He said they need a list of file names, version numbers, and line numbers for each case of infrigment.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
System V from the BSD OSes is public domain. That has been decided by a court of law.
Noo....As far as I know headers might public domain (only one way to implement it, yada yada), but the rest is still copyrighted. The difference is the license the BSDs are distributed under is extremely unrestricting. Free of most all restrictions and public domain are different things.
You have to be careful to interpret the law using the legal definition of derived work, not a vernacular definition.
A derived work contains material that is covered by copyright taken from another work.
Imagine I take some numbers from a table in your book to make a graph to put in my book. In a colloquial sense you might say my work is derived from yours, but it is not a derived work in the legal sense, because all I took was information, which is not protected under copyright law.
To justify a claim that Linux is a derived work, SCO would need to identify specific elements copied and show that these elements are protected by copyright law. In theory, non-literal elements in the design could be protected, but given the great variety of Unix-y operating systems that exist and the complicated history of their dissemination, it would be difficult to protect non-literal elements unless they exist uniquely in SysV.
I managed to find an English translation of the law. It's here. (Original Finnish text of the act is here).
;)
See chapter 1, article 4, paragraph 2:
"If a person has drawn freely on a work to create a new and independent work, his copyright shall not be subject to the right in the original work."
I think a work could count as "new and independent work", even if you're using a lookalike of an already-known character, like DD as part of it. Using the already-known name, however, would be a violation of chapter 6, article 51:
"A literary or artistic work shall not be made available to the public under a title, pseudonym or signature that makes the work or its author liable to confusion with a previously disseminated work or its author."
Methinks we'll very soon need a real lawyer to work this out for us.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus