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Darl Goes to Harvard
colinmc151 writes "Both Groklaw and Internet News are reporting on the visit made to Harvard University by Darl McBride, SCO president and CEO, and Chris Sontag SCO senior vice president. Darl and Chris made a presentation titled 'Defending Intellectual Property Rights in a Digital Age'. One protester gave out copies of Linux to all that attended. Bottom line SCO plans to carry on with the lawsuits. Best line was one student who when Darl asked if he was impacted by MyDoom.A e-mail virus answered 'No, I use Linux'." One MIT student has a write-up of the event as well...
It's a badly phrased sentence, it should have been written something like: "When Darl asked a student if he was impacted by the MyDoom.A email virus, the student replied, "no, I use Linux."
Dude,
Re-read the quote. It is the student who said he is using Linux not Darl.
Darl Goes to Harvard - My First Quick Impressions
Monday, February 02 2004 @ 08:48 PM EST
I watched the webcast and while I lost the stream once or twice, I heard the bulk of it. No doubt others will fill in the blanks, and I took some pictures off the screen which will at least give you a flavor when I get them up. Soon.
The big news is that they say they will start to sue copyright end users by February 18. The other news is that he asked the audience if they had gotten infected by MyDoom, and he pointed to one guy who beautifully answered, "No, I use Linux, so I wasn't affected," and the room laughed. Darl wasn't happy about that and it was clear he didn't like the questions about the ABI files. He said that Linus claimed only two, and there were the rest they can sue over, though they still plan to contest Linus' claims in court.
Someone mentioned an article that had lessened his credibility on the other ABI files, that it had said it looked like they had distributed them under the GPL. And it was like he turned dark and stormy and paced and tried not to show his anger. But it showed. Then he said that the BSDi settlement was about those same header files, and they know what is in that sealed settlement and we don't, but there were three kinds of files addressed in that settlement: files that had to be removed, files that had to have copyright notices put on them, and files that were ok. They claim that the files they will be suing over lack the copyright notices, plus some files that were supposed to be removed, IIRC. And the DMCA says it's a violation to strip off copyright information, so I gather they intend to go after end users for "stripping off" copyright information on those header files. Ridiculous and cynical as that may sound, that is their strained plan. No doubt they figure the DMCA gives them muscles that AT&T didn't have back when the original case was before the courts. But those are the files. Sontag hinted that they might add copyright claims to the IBM case over those same header files at some point.
My overall impression was that they were very uncomfortable. It began with calls for civility, which turned out not to be necessary. Everyone was polite. But clearly Harvard had gotten a lot of complaints, judging from their remarks. They have invited Chris Stone of Novell to speak there in three weeks on February 23. Details will be on their website.
They continued to repeat the same untrue "facts" about the GPL, that it forces you to give your software away free, blah blah. I hardly think explaining it one more time will help them, since it's clearly volitional. They've got their story and they're sticking to it. Darl said when you go to court, the rubber hits the road. I assume he means by that you have to get it actually sorted out with facts. He was asked how he can sue without having established copyrights, but he danced around without answering that directly. No doubt that rubber will hit the road when he sues the first end user.
Clearly they have something in that settlement agreement, which Noorda was a party to, and the rest of us were not, and they plan on springing it on a startled and totally innocent end user soon, who will be befuddled as to how he is responsible for complying with a sealed agreement he isn't a party to and doesn't have a clue what it says. Of course, they don't tell you what it says. They would rather surprise you. Well, good luck, cowboys. We'll see how it plays in a court of law.
He tried to answer Eben Moglen's illustration about going to Barnes and Noble and buying a book and having SCO leap into your living room and say, I'm suing you for reading that book. He said it's more like you get the book without paying for it and then you make copies and give them to 500 friends. He said that is how it is with Linux. Companies get one copy and make tons more. The part he misses is that the writers of the code have no problem with that,
Yeah, but IIRC, Darl is claiming someone took SCO IP, stuck it in Linux code, and distributed it as GPL, when in fact the code wasn't supposed to have been released. SCO then sued a bunch of Linux users.
IBM called shenanigans, and one objective of the upcoming trial is to have SCO show just what code they claim is theirs, and so other kernel coders have a chance to defeat the claim on prior art or somesuch.
GTRacer
- IANAL
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
I thought that the whole point of open source is so nobody can take the software, change it, and then sell it as their own.
This applies fully only to GPL and closely related licenses. BSD-like licenses enable people to do exactly this while IMO still being open source licenses. Open source != Open Source.
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Magistrate Notice of Hearing
...
To be held before Judge Wells.
SCO has already been ordered by the judge to comply. That happened back in December. The order is below. Notice item 4. Tomorrow, the judge rules on whether they did comply.Motion hearing set for 10:00 2/6/04 for all pending motions:
The SCO Group is hereby ORDERED:
In that one line of boldface above, the judge captured the key issue. No amount of PR spin control will help SCO in court tomorrow.
As for being laughed off the stage, I don't think anyone in the audience really bought SCO's claims. The audience was realistically fairly polite, but unsympathetic--no one was outright laughing at him, but no one agreed with him either.
As for the presentation itself, at its core, Darl seemed to say a few reasonable things--they claim ownership of a certain body of IP and that IBM distributed that IP illegally. Both of those claims are under contention, but he stated that that's for the courts to decide. This, to me, seems perfectly reasonable--I may not agree that SCO has a case, but they obviously think they do, and the courts are the proper forum to determine this.
If it were just the contract dispute, I don't think there would be this violent reaction against SCO. It's all the FUD that comes with it--from "The GPL is unconstitutional" to "Linux gives computing infrastructure to terrorists, cyber- and otherwise"--that is causing the problem. We told Darl as much after the talk (no matter what you think of the man, it was cool to have the opportunity to talk with him face-to-face), and he seemed somewhat receptive to the fact that we're not all IP-hating copyright-hating hippies, we just don't like the FUD. Frankly, I don't think anything will come of that--it's too late to retract the many things that have been said, and PR will probably keep him on the same path--but there was a glimmer of hope, at least.
Free as in Maaah!
Or, My Chat with Darl McBride
see, "Free as in Speech" vs "Free as in beer" are different types of freedom. The Cheat goes "Maaah!"
2 February 2004
Those of you who know me know I don't miss lab on a whim. But when Erica zephyred me saying that Darl McBride (head of SCO) was speaking at Harvard, I knew we had to do something. Our first thought was, in proud MIT tradition, a hack. May be water balloons, maybe paper airplanes. But hacks are hard to do without causing some sort of damage, and these people have proven that they are willing to sue everyone in sight.
Our obvious choice, then, was to provide anti-FUD. Based on help from people on my zephyr class, we assembled a nice set of flyers full of pro-Linux and pro-GPL information. We figured that, as this was a talk put on by the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, the audience would mostly be lawyers. Maybe they've never heard of the GPL? Maybe they think Linux is some sort of furry pet?
So we made up these flyers. They were all done in Adobe Illustrator under Windows (Oh, the irony!) but looked really professional. Above all, we wanted to go and present the non-RMS, non-crazy-anti-IP side of linux. We even dressed up.
* What Is Linux
* SCO vs Open Source : A timeline
* Quotations between SCO, Linus, and the FSF
Oh, and in each packet of information (in a nice little folder, might I add) we included a burned copy of Knoppix 3.3 (which Erica and I stayed up late last night mass-producing in an Athena cluster). Knoppix is great because 1. it's only a single CD and 2. it'll let non-linux-users try linux without any potential risk.
The Handout
We decided to leave Fourth East at around 5:00 or so. Some people would be late, but in the end we had myself, Erica, Dave W, Vimal, Javier, Clare, and Ike there. We took up a whole row in the room (which, by the way, was beautiful -- Harvard has some nice buildings!)
At around 6:05 (the talk was scheduled to begin at 6:30) we decided to get started. Our 60 handouts, complete with Knoppix CDs, were ready. Erica and I went out in front of the auditorium, and Clare et. al. stayed behind, to hand them out to people already inside. Upon meeting some people from the Journal, they admitted that they knew Darl would be a contentious speaker, and simply asked that we tell people that we were in no way affiliated with the journal or Harvard.
Our speech went something like "Hi, we're not affiliated with this talk in any way, we're just a group of concerned MIT students who have some information about Linux, the GPL, and SCO that we'd like to provide to perhaps counter some of the claims that will be made by the speaker tonight." Only one person said no to a handout. Several said that we were "preaching to the choir", others admitted to having run linux for many years.
The Talk
Once the talk begin, Darl introduced himself and rambled a bit about the superbowl. At this point he announced that he had several coworkers with him, two of whom looked, I kid you not, like Agents (were Agent Smith et. al. collecting social security). These guys never smiled, all night.
McBride starts off by talking about the role of intellectual property in the digital age. He talks briefly about copyright law in the digital age, and asks about Napster, and then talks about linux being free, and seems to be suggesting that "free things on the internet require violation of copyright". He traces through the ownership of UNIX IP, and then argues that the change between 2.2 and 2.6 was largely due to corporate help.
He also repeatedly argues that, per recent supreme court decisions, copyright exists to benefit the public by creating profit incentive. He keeps painting the IP debate as a pendulum swinging between public and private ownership, but continually stresses "Do we want a world where all IP is free?" which of course, no one is arguing for. He mentions that the GPL hasn't been tested in court (an allegation nic
Maybe Darl wasn't just blowing smoke when he said he had hired some security guards...
His answer to that particular answer was quite evasive and not particularly memorable--something along the lines of "We support the rights of authors to distribute their works, for free if they so choose." He did not at all address how this squares with the statement he made in December that the GPL is unconstitutional, which is, of course, what the student actually asked.
Here's a link to ESR's original post where he forgot his meds and acts like he's on an episode of The Lone Gunmem. So this is what Daryl is talking about in his Harvard presentation.
Darl doesn't care what happens to SCO so long as he can jump off a foot before it hits the ground.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Careful with he word "property".
Others get the right to distribute, but if you wrote half the code, published it under GPL, then I took your code, added an equal amount of my own, and released the result under GPL... You do not own my work, and I do not own yours. I can work within the terms of only the GPL as long as I include your code.
You can take your code and license it however you want. You cannot take mine.
The "project" itself, presumably meaning the code, cannot "own" property, it is not a legal entity, it is a body of code under a license.
People are free to take your work under GPL, modify it, and sell it... they can do whatever they want with it.. as long as it is within the terms of the license.
As for claiming it's theirs... that might get tricky. The GPL doesn't forbid it, but it is fraudulent.
6) If SCO does not have sufficient information in its possession, custody, or control to specifically answer any of IBM's requests that are the subject of this order, SCO shall provide an affidavit setting forth the full nature of its efforts, by whom they were taken, what further efforts it intends to utilize in order to comply, and the expected date of compliance. SCO is required to provide such answers and documents within thirty days from the date of this order. All other discovery, including SCO's Motion to Compel is hereby STAYED until this Court determines that SCO has fully complied with this Order.
... if they don't comply, they have to state why, and how they tried, and only have thirty days from back in December to do it, and they still can't get to their own discovery until IBM's discovery is complete. All SCO would do is make their own case weaker and weaker.
Notice
Infuriate left and right
Um, maybe because they can't remember them verbatim and didn't think to bring a tape recorder?
This guy is way out there
Well, ANTHONY, first, I suggest scrapping Windows XP... Second I suggest you not post your name on public boards... Third, I suggest you start a strict regiment of drugs.
No, this is valid code. It will even work since most compilers will find all instances of identical strings and equate their locations:
//do something everytime!
char *UserName = "DarylMcB";
if (UserName=="DarylMcB")
It works because UserName is set to the address of the static char array "DarylMcB".
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
You're paying to read Slashdot.
inflated stock
It's looking a little less inflated right now.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Close, but it's more specific than that. The compensation they received for distributing their code under the GPL was the same compensation anybody gets for distributing code under the GPL - the guarantee that the licensee will have to release any of their modifications and improvements to SCO's code under the GPL. So SCO got to benefit from others' contributions and improvements to their contributed code, such as the linux-abi code that they developed and released to improve compatibility between Linux and SCO UNIX.
No! it is not the FUD that really tans my hide. It is the blatant heavy handed attempt to hijacking a large body of work, developed by others, as their own.
He is quite aware that no SCO IP resides in Linux. This man is a thief or at best a con man.
While it is true that MS have stopped piping on their anti-Linux horn quite so much since SCO have been up to their mischief, it could of course be because they recognised that SCO were doing a better job than they were, and of course that the backlash would not be aimed at Redmond.
That is, MS didn't necessarily pay for SCO's fud, they just recognised a good wave to ride when it came by.
Naturally I don't believe that though, after all they did pay SCO millions of dollars for a "license". I think they saw an opportunity and took it.
Particularly funny is what happens when you Email SCO asking why you need a license if you aren't using any of the modules involved in the IBM case. Maybe they've come up with an answer by now, but the response I got was 'direct any further questions to the sales department'.
Just FYI - SCO's new web site runs Linux.
I disagree with a line in the writeup [1] related to what you're saying [2]:
... He looked taken aback -- the people, who came with such a strong set of opinions against SCO, were saying that they agreed with the root of their case... But the message was getting lost amongst all their constant BS."
1. "Darl repeatedly returned to the issue of their IP being in linux, which I think is a very very valid point.
2. "he seemed somewhat receptive to the fact that we're not all IP-hating copyright-hating hippies, we just don't like the FUD"
Meeting someone in person, especially one who is good at politics, helps you see their frame of reference -- or the one they project anyway. This will often lead to the perception that someone is less crazy than they seem. The two quotes above, to me, imply that SCO might have a point and Darl is honestly trying to win this case, that this is a serious matter to him.
Sorry if my implications are putting words in the mouths of the writers, but I'd like to point out a few things.
1) SCO hasn't shown any valid proof, even in court, as of yet.
2) Most of the that has been shown publicly has been shown to be public domain.
3) SCO is asking IBM to open their code for comparison... but SCO has their own code as well as Linux's. This is about code in Linux, not AIX mind you. They're asking IBM to prove their case for them while refusing to show any of the proof they've been ranting about for the better part of a year.
4) It's quite arguable that suing IBM for $3 billion is a joke.
5) SCO released Linux under the GPL, even after the case had been filed. This is contradictory to their "GPL is unconstitutional, etc." claim. Either the GPL is valid and their IP is OSS or it is invalid and they're violating copyright.
6) Verbal, contradicting comments saying A) This is about contract, end users are fine/We're going to sue people using Linux, B) Linux is "counter-cultural"/We use and sell Linux, it's great. They haven't even stuck with a transition here, they keep going back and forth.
7) SCO is selling licenses for IP but they refuse to tell you what IP you're licensing. Note that this also violates the GPL.
These things aren't just 'bad PR', these are actual stances SCO (and namely, Darl, who said many of the things I'm talking about) have. This stuff is common sense and public news. If Darl is truely running this $3 billion dollar lawsuit seriously, my only explaination is that he's absolutely stupid and out of touch with both reality, and his company.
A good summmary: http://www.linux.org/news/sco/timeline.html
Cheers
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
JOLT's presentation of the event was very odd. They made a few comments at the start that made it sound like they were only grudgingly admitting non-Harvard Law students, which is a shame, because the MIT people really came to play. Their questions were good, and the kept it all professional and on-message. (JOLT does and always has, as far as I know, made their events open off-campus; the editor's comments just made it sound like he wasn't all that happy to have a room packed with non-HLS kids.)
Darl was also impressive, to be honest. He was more than a little bit evasive in his answers, but he was very good about going back to the MIT students for questions, even though there were some obviously more sympathetic law students with their hands up. He also stayed around for a bit after the presentation to talk to a small knot of students, presumably including the author of the linked piece.
While he didn't convince me that SCO has a case, he did a fairly good job of convincing me that he *believes* they have a case, and that it's not a scam. He did, after the speech in the small discussion, address the "pump and dump" allegations; he denies selling any significant stock, and claimed any internal sell-offs have been minor and insignificant. I was just on the periphery of that conversation though, so take my report with a grain of salt.
A couple of people have commented on McBride's bodyguard. He did, in fact, have a bodyguard there; I was told it was because he's received death threats. The other guy (the one who actually looks like a bodyguard) was a Harvard police officer; university policy forbids guest speakers from bringing bodyguards on campus without a peace officer in attendance, apparently.
Right you are.
But anyone holding SCO stock and expecting it to still be worth much after Friday is delusional.
For rational, informed speculation about what might happen at the hearing on the 6th, go read Groklaw.
Anything further I might add would just be noise.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
I don't know why Java works that way.
Because in Java a String is immutable, so the compiler only creates one instance of the "hello", then s1 and s2 are references to that one instance.
But the s2 += "llo"; creates a new instance.
When you do s1 == s2 you are comparing references.
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.