Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
-
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.
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.
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'.