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One Company's Response to SCO
Great_Jehovah writes "The CIO of Just Sports USA received an extortion letter from SCO, started a thread about it on the pgsql-general and then posted his response letter after weighing the various pieces of advice and info he received. Here's hoping that most of SCO's intended victims do the same." An anonymous reader submits a story in a Utah paper about SCO: "The Salt Lake City Weekly paper is running a front page article on the SCO shenanigans. The reporter interviewed Darl, Linus, Bruce Perens and others for the article with new choice quotes from them all." Also, IBM at Linuxworld claims it will win against SCO (miscellaneous plug: CmdrTaco will be speaking at Linuxworld later today).
January 21, 2004
Mr. Philip Langer
Regional Director, Intellectual Property Licensing
SCO Group
355 South 520 West Suite 100
Lindon, Utah 84042
Dear Mr. Langer:
I am writing you in response to your letter dated January 19th, 2004 in which you advised that you would
consider legal action if we failed to respond to your efforts to pursue a licensing arrangement. To date, I
have yet to receive any information concerning our systems and what you allege violates your intellectual
property rights. You have sent me letters that conflict with other statements made by representatives of the
SCO Group concerning SCO's ownership of UNIX ABI's and their supposed (re)distribution under the
GPL in the Linux kernel.
If you would like to detail directly which of our systems allegedly violate your copyrights, and specifically
which code on said systems allegedly violates said copyrights, we will be happy to do an internal audit to
verify your claims. Once the results of said audit are complete, we will be more than willing discuss any
pending licensing issues with you.
Our current understanding of your legal situation is that your organization has yet to prove your claims of
SCO intellectual property being included in the GPL based Linux kernel software that SCO itself has
distributed under the GPL. While I understand your concerns regarding intellectual property and your
desire to protect SCO's property, at this time, the legality and claims concerning SCO's ownership of code
that exists in the 2.4 Linux kernel has yet to be determined by a court of law. I, speaking for myself, follow
with interest SCO Group's contortions in its lawsuits against Novell and IBM, and its defense against the
lawsuit brought by Red Hat. In my study of the events that have transpired, it's my understanding that
SCO Group has yet to produce any substantive evidence as to the claims regarding code misappropriation
by IBM. I am requesting the SCO Group to provide to my organization substantive evidence of alleged
copyright violations so that we may compare the alleged violations for the purpose of internal audit to
determine if any licensing needs to indeed exist. I do, however, intend to publicly document the results of
said audit and any communication with the SCO Group regarding this matter.
Before you waste any more of my time or yours, please detail exact information such as the offending lines
of code and the kernel versions you contend this code is in. Alternatively if your organization agrees, we
can re-address these issues after your current lawsuits regarding these issues are finalized.
Sincerely,
Gavin M. Roy
Chief Information Officer
Just Sports USA
It provides a detailed description of what the supposed 'problem' is, and clearly shows each sides claims.
An excellent article to show to the hestitant boss..
It was run by our lawyer and CEO :)
They can't say a damn thing about any of this in Germany- or face nasty fines and jail time for the regional execs if they DO say anything of the sort.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
That was already done in Germany, they can't talk about their claims there until they are willing to show their "proof" in court.
I wrote this earlier today -- well, ok, very late last night -- in response to SCO's apparent Capitol Hill diatribe.
Anyone interested in reading it can find it here, complete with the minor grammatical/typing errors that I failed to catch when reading it the first 20 times.
I encourage all of you to do the same thing. No one is quite sure how wide a distribution Darl's letter has gotten, but we can certainly counter them.
This was moddes as insightful, funny, and interesting (suprising that it was not informative too because it had a link).
An anecdotal slice of the time series data is not going to tell you anything. Considering that when you look at 3 month data you will see that the price for the past 3 months has been basically a sine wave oscilating between 14 and 18 a share. Considering that the stock was in the 1 to 2 dollar range from jan 02 to jan 03 when the current SCO execs bought their stock, I'd say that their plan (pump and dump) is working quite well. They just have to keep the fud going long enough to sell all their stock in smallish amounts over time (to keep off of the legal raday). Trust me at the current price, I doubt anyone at SCO is complaining about the free money.
Any company worth it's salt knows that you at least keep your local press on your side:
City Weekly is a paper catering to the non-Mormon majority in Salt Lake, who see Lindon/Orem/Provo as a sureal Mormon enclave a million miles away. People joke that you need to get a visa to go there.
To Darl, the 'local press' is the Deseret News. Their slant can be seen here:
SCO Group now offering license outside the U.S.
Google and SCO hold talks
SCO sues Novell, claiming slander
Bear in mind, Novell is in Orem.
Those mormons also happen to be the most accepting of other peoples religions too. Don't believe me? Look at history. Even recent history. Or why not just move to some bible belt town that will run out anyone who doesn't goto their church. Where I just visited a Hare Krishna temple and find out the LDS church donated money so they could build their temple.
BTW, I just moved to Utah here for a job. And I have yet to meet one person that likes SCO.
Some info that I dug up real fast thanks to google.
mormons helping Hare Krishna Temple
If you want to bash a religion, try the catholic church and the church of england for their known repeated atrocities against man kind. Anyone who thought differently was tortured, killed, as well as the families.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive