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Darl & SCO Overview
HAL9OOO writes "I found an article that as well as giving a good overview of "SCO - The Story So Far" also provides an interesting insight into the character of a certain Mr Darl McBride Esq."
It's a fairly lengthy article providing a lot of insight. Necessary reading to anyone new the SCO/Linux thing, and recommended to anyone who just wants some interesting details on SCOs position on the whole thing.
They'd be losing money based on the current overvaluation of the stock. Even if they fire the directors, they all walk out with pockets bulging from their stock options, etc., don't they? This path also encourages other frivolous or deceitful lawsuits against them.
No, for substantially less, they should take them to court, stomp on them, drive their stock value into the ground, and make those guys feel pain in their wallets. This costs them less up front, keeps them from having to clean mouse guts off their feet, and certainly shows all the other little vermin that they need to make sure they have a real claim before going against the elephant.
Get off my launchpad!
That's why UC won the AT&T / USL vs UC suit of the early 1990s - so much of BSD had been put into AT&T illegally that UC would have had a heckuva lawsuit against AT&T should they have chosen. Instead, AT&T let them rewrite three files and continue on their merry way.
That's not breach of contract since the board was clearly acting in the interest of shareholders at the time of the suit. A hostile takeover is not a cheap thing, and getting 10x your face value for the shares makes it hard to argue otherwise.
Now the majority shareholder could order them to cease and desist, and if they didn't do so could have them fired and file breach of contract, but that's not going to happen.
In fact, despite all the talk about buying SCO out, that's not likely to happen either. According to Yahoo! insiders and 5%+ owners own 68% of the company. If insiders own over 50% then a hostile takeover is impossible without someone defecting -- and those trades are usually limited by SEC rules in the first place. This is why hostile takeovers have become a thing of the past - companies have learned that having the majority of shares being held by employees, along with SEC trading restrictions, make hostile takeovers very, very difficult.
I don't agree - I think this is a similar situation to negotiating with Terroists/Hostage Takers/Bank Robbers etc - you don't, otherwise it will keep happening. If IBM buy out SCO, then practically every dying tech firm will sue IBM in the hopes of getting bought out. Better to crush them in court - especially if IBM can find a way to countersue and drive SCO into the ground. It will take longer to fight it in court than to buy them out but it will be better for everyone in the long run (except for SCO :-)
Tk
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
I don't like to answer my own posts, but think I picked the wrong example before. Consider Mr. Thomas Raimondi, Jr (director). He got 32,885 shares at .01 / share!!! If you doubt SCO's intentions, go ahead and do the math yourself.
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I almost posted that IBM should just give in and buy SCO in an earlier one of these threads, but then I thought about it a little more...
SCO is sending all these letters to corporate Linux users saying, "Stay away from Linux, because it violates our IP." If IBM buys SCO and open sources Unix it might prevent any further legal action, but it also might appear to lend some credibility to SCO's claims. Thus IBM is a hero to the average Linux geek, but the corporate world still sees the community as a bunch of thieves who got bailed out by the deep pockets of IBM.
Therefore, let this go to court and let IBM's lawyers prove that SCO is full of it to begin with. That way the Linux community is vindicated and the only people who look like they've done anything wrong are SCO.
If it's any AT&T day code it probably stems from BSD, in which case it's already been to court and freed.
If it's in newer code I'd suggest someone sue SCO for copyright violation as it's probably someone at SCO who's stolen it from Linux. Motive and opportunity... both point quite clearly at them, as they've been constantly left behind technically by Linux since the mid nineties, not to mention it's a lot easier for someone at SCO to obtain linux code than it is the other way around.
Actually, with the claims that there is code that is the same in Linux and SCO's products, that should be enough to file a lawsuit against SCO for copyright violation. Then demand that SCO disclose the source (without any NDA) so a review of SCO's code can be done and so it can be determined if they indeed have violated the GPL and by extension engaged in copyright violations.
To quote many over the top political leaders..."we cannot support this type of terrorism, we cannot agree to their demands"....
By purchasing SCO, no matter how easy it might make the end of this problem, it encourages others to try the same stunt.
SCO MUST be bankrupted as a result of this, no matter how much money it takes to do that in court!....Anything less encourages others to try the same style attack.
Destroy SCO, burn everything, leave nothing standing.....
You *can* steal something that is free. First you copy it into your codebase, then you claim that it is your, and then you sue the person you copied it from. If you are successful in getting them to remove it, you stole it.
... though I suspect these days if they were to adopt such a strategy, they would do so by proxy *cough* SCO *cough*.
Why on earth this was modded as "funny" is beyond me. Donning my tinfoil hat for a moment, I should point out that this is actually quite a serious possibility for a number of reasons:
1) SCO may well have violated the copyright on Linux code and placed it in their OS, violating the GPL, and now leveraging code they have copied in violation to accuse the free software community of their own crime.
2) An entity which dislikes free software, like an obscure Redmond company none of us have heard of, might seek to poison the well by having one of their agents deliberately release copyrighted code into a free codebase, then return a couple of years later with accusations of copyright violation.
3) It is quite possible that either of the above scenerios could be combined with an outcome by a relatively uninformed court that finds in favor of the litigant, leaving the original creator of the code in a situation where they are now forbidden from using their own code, while those who violated their copyright are granted ownership of it.
The fact that the very ill-considered Berne convention requires copyrights to be granted "automatically" with no registration means these sort of 'he said, she said' allegations can be manufactured at will, by anyone willing to violate copyright to achieve their ends.
And lest one think no large company would ever violate copyrights in order to achieve such neferious ends, I would remind everyone that one large company, Microsoft, was sued and found to have violated the copyright on, among other things, Stacker. It is not at all a stretch to think they could extend such a strategy further
But, as SCO has shown, it doesn't require anything remotely so neferious as planting bad code, violating copyright and then accusing the victim of one's crime of the same, or any of that. All it requires is that one lay claim to having written code "in secret" first (where "in secret" can include simply proprietary, unpublished code as in this case). Since copyrights aren't required to be registered, there is little defense against such accusations and the FUD and financial uncertainty and harm they can create (and their unwillingness to discose the alleged violations to allow any such issues to be resolved and fixed, ie. any such violating code to be removed and rewritten, belies their clear intent to cause harm to businesses and the community. Clearly they have no desire to reach a resolution, and equally clearly it is profoundly unlikely that they have anything even remotely resembling a legitimate claim).
Which means no software publisher is safe, now that pandora's box has been opened, from similiar disingenuous attacks.
It would behoove everyone if every copyright were required to be registerd no later than 1 year after the code/prose was written or the movie/music recorded (i.e. 1 year 'grace'). Unfortunately, the media and copyright cartels have tied all of our copyright law up in international agreements such as the Berne convention and treaties which have empowered the WTO and WIPO to such a degree that any kind of sensible reform is impossible without a nation withdrawing from a number of uncumbering and binding international accords.
So look for more of this sort of nonsense, directed not only against free software, but against all kinds of published works. Once pandora's box has been opened and the weapon used, one can only expect it to be used again. And again, empowering lawyers and decimating the productive capability of the software industry, be it free software or proprietary.
This may actually be the beginning of the final collapse of our
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
From the text:
"Should SCO prevail, besides reaping its own billions, software megalith Microsoft stands to win the war of enterprise operating systems."
Exactly HOW did the author come to this idea?
Because if SCO were to somehow obtain a victory, the masses who use GNU/Linux would just move over to BSD. But such an obviouus conclusion would have made for a short article.
Microsoft is more likely to win via software patents than SCO's claims.
Funny thing is, I was trying to explain the situation to someone over dinner last night. This article does an awesome job of nailing the key points.
McBride should note: (emphasis added)
"SCO wound up with the rights to certain dated distributions of UNIX, the proprietary software platform that Linux was patterned after..."
That's pretty much as accurate a statement as any about the whole situation.
It's also calling McBride an unsuccessdul salesman. And there's a juicy comment about "Bruce Perens", as "a Linux cheerleader". I'm sure Perens is happy with that sttement.
Overall, it really reasserts the lack of sense behind the whole thing. The only possible justification for SCO group's actions is the persuit of money for the sake of money....
Any chance of them changin their front page? I mean, they should get rid of all that betterment drival and just come clean. The fact that their making money hand over keyboard from selling *linux* licenses right now is absolutly, well... I'm not going to meniton it...
Pengiuns may be flightless, but they have thick skin and kick some serious ass on ski slopes.
-=fshalor
There is zero insight in that article. Quotes from both sides. Darl says that something is in a contract in plain sight. Everyone else says it's not in that contract. Does the reporter bother to check? No. He just reports both quotes. Same think throughout the whole article. Both sides give easily verifiable contradictory information, and the reporter never bothers to look at primary sources, even if they are openly available on the web. It is lousy reporting.
Yeah, it's a dupe, but I still find this one funny.
"I've been pounding the table here for a year or so saying there's no free lunch, and there is going to be a day of reckoning for every company that thinks they are going to try and sell a free model." That's Darl McBride, president and CEO of the SCO Group, a perennial loser at selling UNIX and, until recently, Linux operating systems."
Couldn't say it better myself.
Reading this article made me sick to my stomach. I get it (finally). Darl won't be stopped until he's either rich or passed on to the great closed source world in the sky.
Having dealt with these pump & dump attorneys in several ventures, the unfortunate realization one makes is that there is nothing - not a single thing - a good, legitimate enterprise or individual can do to stop these thieves. Try suing them to stop them from stealing assets? They'll stall your legal action out - make it take a couple years (by then, there's never anything left). Only tort reform can make an impact.
Darl and his kin are the modern equivelent to a roundworm. Their parasitism preys on the output of others. Parasitism's a natural occurance in the competitive dynamic of life, but at least in other systems, the host is allowed to attempt to rid itself of them. In the US, nearly all legal means of dealing with parasites are rendered ineffective by the diseased court system.
Legal parasites make bogus claims to the results of others work - Linux, patent claims of obvious items or with prior art and increasingly abuse two disasters in the US legal system (continually propped up by one of the political parties):
1. A distorted, manipulated intellectual property award system that allows parties that contibute payola and/or recognize and reinforce the system to be the beneficiaries of an award of others property. Hire attorney. Grease wheel. Pay off the party. Get patent award snuck through. Hire more attorneys. Sue the rightful owners of your "property" for infringement. Get rich. Pay party and attorneys again.
2. A judicial system filled with crooks and fools. More than two thirds of the justices are of the same system. On the rare occasion you get an idealist, they're quickly focused on inventing absurd laws (like throwing out constitutional guaranteed rights, or inventing absurd new rights) and kept out of the back room where the money flows. It's like Zaphod Beeblebrox of the Hitchhiker's Guide books, the fools are there to distract the attention from you while your wallet is being lifted.
U.S. citizens that look to crooked third world nations (e.g Cuba, Venezuela) should realize their legal system no better. The only difference is that the crooks that run the system in the US are richer than most elsewhere.
So open sourcers, until you're permitted to rid yourself of parasites (which unfortunately means both of your parties - and if you don't think your (D) or (R) friends are bought and paid for, then you know which category above you belong in!), understand that your great open source universe represents a dream host to these people. Darl's only uniqueness is that he's one of the first.
McBride and company are quick to tout the warranty advantages of proprietary software over public systems like Linux. Ever since taking on IBM, SCO has persistently goaded Linux distributors to protect their end users by offering indemnification--that is, agreeing to foot the bill if some company, say SCO, sues for intellectual property violations. As recently as October, SCO spokesman Blake Stowell reiterated the talking point. "If IBM is so confident that Linux is free and clear, why don't they indemnify their users against any lawsuit SCO could bring against them?" he asked.
That was then. Novell and Hewlett Packard (HP) have since announced that they will indemnify their Linux customers. However, McBride managed to spin the implications of those announcements 180 degrees to SCO's favor. "By announcing the programme they are acknowledging the problems with Linux. Through the restrictions and the limitations on the programme, they are showing their unwillingness to bet very much on their position," McBride told the online British technology magazine VNUnet.
Why does everyone keep talking about D. McBride on crack?
Partly because Linux Torvalds claimed he must be smoking crack, but mostly because of his resemblance to a a crackhead -- someone prepared to lie, steal or even mug his own grandmother to buy another rock.
He is obviously more of an LSD/THC type of person!
You seem to move with a very different set of acid/potheads to any that I've ever met before -- although I'll admit that Darl's flurescent white teeth and orange skin tone are definitely confusing in that regard. However, rather than making me think he's an acid head, he makes me feel as though *I've* taken acid every time I see a photograph of him.
Actually, I get the feeling the author was dancing as close to anti-SCOism as he possibly could considering it was a local company in a fully unresolved case. There are telling uses of words in the text.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
Linux is a kernel. GNU is an overall Unix replacement. GNU/HURD is a potential kernel replacement. BSD should be untainted by this and you've got three major and two minor varieties from which to choose, with FreeBSD being the easiest transition for Linux users.
The ecological niche here is *open* - even if Linux goes extinct over this, GNU+HURD or FreeBSD is going to slide right into that position, and if there is further trouble from the SCO camp I don't think *anyone* can impinge the likes of Plan9 or BeOS. Sure, it'll be a huge change, it might set us back another ten years, but Stallman opened Pandora's box a long time ago and no one is going to be able to close it now.
Not SCO with their frivolous lawsuit, not Microsoft with their billions in cash reserves, not silly US Patent law, not Digital Restrictions Management in BIOS; no one can stop it now - profit motive and customer demand are going to grind those things into the dust as surely as the automobile did to tack and harness shops.
The internet is global and the desktop is strategic. I mean military/industrial strategic - look at the Pacific rim and their government's backing of their own Linux distribution. Europe is more low key about it but they're equally pleased to have local boys making a more stable product and freeing them from possible NSA/CIA/FBI sanctioned intrusion.
GNU came into being when I was a highschool senior. I'm old enough now to have a child that is a highschool senior but I started reproducing later in life. I'm sure that by the time my son is a college freshman Microsoft's OS offerings will look as quaint as QEMM/386 or OS/2 looks today.
Drawing a blank on QEMM/386? Don't know who Quarterdeck is? Never actually seen OS/2? Both stories are instructive but OS/2 is probably the most relevant - what *IS* the fate of an overweight, closed OS when a more nimble competitor comes into the arena?
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo