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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...
I'd agree more strongly with your point if they'd mentioned what he actually said instead of describing how silly they think he is.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I don't understand why they paraphrased McBride's comments? Why give a full quote of the question and then joke about the answer? Seems to make a serious discusion in an intimate setting look a bit high school.
Sorry.
The / in
Suggested Linux kernel addition:
if (UserName=="DarylMcB")
{
DeleteAllPartitions();
int x=x/0;
}
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
SCO got compensation for the work they submitted to the Linux kernel.
Their compensation was a licence to use and distribute all the other code.
Civil disobedience is knowingly breaking a law because it is unjust.
It is not performing a legal act despite very vague accusations that it may violate some law or contract.
Another example of how going to colledge ends in brainwashing. Any respectable school, much less an Ivy League Law school should be able to see through this desperate attemp of sco's to make an easy dollar. They expected the underfunded linux orginazations to roll over at their demands and payup. Guess it didnt work did it Darl? Now to cover your own ass you have to go through with the lawsuits and get beaten.
Everyday You see me is the worst day of my life -Office Space
It's like the guy genuinely doesn't care about th eendgame as many here have observed.
;-)
No, its just that his endgame is when he sells his final share of inflated stock and runs off.
I really hope that when someone picks up the scraps of SCO when all this is said and done, that they can find something in the corporate documents that will incriminate Darl in this pump and dump scheme. It will of course have to be a document they forgot to shred
No need to say IANAL, it shows. The "upcoming trial" you're probably thinking of is only an evidentiary hearing, the actual trial isn't scheduled until next year. And showing prior art won't do a thing for a trade secret/breach of contract/copyright claim. Prior art relates to patents, of which SCOG has none. And even if Linux code did the same thing as SVR4 code at some time in the past and then it was improved or replaced by SVR4 code, it's still a misappropriation of trade secret/breach of contract/copyright infringement.
IANAL, either, but I at least know what I'm talking about.
But Part 6 says if they dont, they can just blow some smoke up the judges robe instead.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
How was it 'good and worthwhile to humanity'?
Likely not a single person who was given a Linux CD at the event will ever use it. They either already have a Linux system running or they're not likely to. It was a political gesture and nothing more.
There's nothing at all wrong with that sort of political gesture, but it's essentially the equivalent of the pig blood you speak of.
---
I don't know, I think that this is mixed in with the on-going backlash against corporate litigation, ridiculous patents, and CEO compensation. People feel that SCO has no case, and that while the courts may be the place to sort it out, if SCO loses and the lawsuit is shown to be ridiculous absolutely nothing will happen to the architects of the lawsuit. Darl will make a lot of money, all for playing with the law. This is a nation steeped in the mantra of accountability, regardless of recent flirtations with "political correctness", but in cases like these it is hard to see. There is a real fear that even if/when Darl and SCO lose, they will have won, and that any company can take a similar nothing-to-lose roll of the dice with other peoples money.
and thats a valid reason to mock and paraphrase his argument? If he's actually wrong what harm could it do to report his full rebuttal? Those are not the markings of mature debate.
from reading this page:
http://web.mit.edu/jonas/www/faim/
here's a choice quote that is very important to me:
"This isn't a group of crazy commie hippies who want to destroy their business model(SCO's), but rather, we're engineers and scientists (and law students) who recognize that they may have a valid claim, but tune them out when they(SCO) make irrational statements."
and SCO sure does make a LOT of those irrational comments eh?
SCO _is_ irrational. And if we can keep discrediting them with calm cool logic, and not froth at the mouth, we'll make headway.
Awesome job guys! You guys are role models on how to handle FUD.
Above all, we wanted to go and present the non-RMS, non-crazy-anti-IP side of linux.
[..]We're having the law forced on us, and if we're not careful, one day we're going to wake up in a world where IP restrictions will take all the fun out of engineering.
Maybe you should go back and listen to "crazy" RMS when he talks about these legal issues. Which he's talked about since day one. And people laughed at him.
When the FSF insists on paperwork for all major contributions, there's a good reason. When they insist that all copyrights be centralized with the FSF, there's a good reason.
Linus may be popular to us geeks because of his easygoing nature, but easygoing gets you eaten alive out in the real world.
"Darl is claiming someone took SCO IP, stuck it in Linux code, and distributed it as GPL"
Yes, and according to Groklaw, that person or persons are Caldera, which is what SCO used to be called.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
they claim ownership of a certain body of IP and that IBM distributed that IP illegally.
OK, so why don't they tell IBM what that 'body of IP' is?
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.
Actually, SCO doesn't believe they have a case either, which is why they fought tooth-and-nail to delay discovery, and in the end still didn't provide what they were required.
I certiainly wouldn't call this 'reasonable'.
Above all, we wanted to go and present the non-RMS, non-crazy-anti-IP side of linux.
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
Hardly. If you look at the year graph, it's still outstanding. It took a similar dip in August before climbing to dizzying new heights. I don't think SCO has much of a leg to stand on from a legal perspective, but the fact that remains anyone who bought at the last dip and was smart enough to sell a month doubled their money. Not a bad ROI for 30 days.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
SCO doesn't want to make public what part of Linux infringes on their IP because they WANT their code to remain in Linux and make money off it. Yes? No?
I mean, having SCO speak on how to defend intellectual property rights is like Bill Gates giving a speech on business ethics.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
All,
It's difficult to believe that these attacks (DDoS) and threats on SCO might be from GNU/Linux users.
Despite the timing of the attacks, all of the evidence is highly circumstantial.
We, as a community, however, must distance ourselves from extremists or extremist activities such as this by whatever means possible.
We cannot compromise our core values which are embodied by the work done on Open Source and Free Software, but we also cannot allow corporations to usurp our hard work.
We must, *above all else*, allow this to play out in court as this is the *only* way to make certain something like this doesn't happen again.
This is my message and, while I can't speak for the community, I believe these statments to be undeniable. I, personally, don't think a Linux user is behind the attacks, but if it is, then it's one person or a small group of people who are acting foolishly and should not reflect on the community as a whole.
Thanks, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
To be extra fair, we don't really know what they are claiming was stolen. (And they aren't always just claiming illicitly copied, though I'm sure that's what they mean.)
But, since we don't know what they are claiming ownership of, we don't know that it's the part that Caldera contributed.
OTOH, whenever we've been able to pin them down to something specific, it's been quickly shown to be an invalid claim. Still, proving that parts of their claim is invalid doesn't really prove that their claim is totally without merit.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
From the MIT summary it was noted that at least some elements of SCO read /., it should be no suprise then that some of them astroturf as ACs here.
I'm not suprised one bit that within every SCO thread here there is someone saying such silly things. If anything, I would be much more suprised if there were none.
And luckily, even the densest of mods seem to know this and I've not seen anything that bad above +2 yet.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Darl knows that he will never win against IBM et al in court, even if his claims had some merit, which they don't, IBM has enough cash, credit, and lawyers to squash a relatively small company like SCO. The indemnifications that IBM and others are offering to their clients are the legal equivalent of "an attack against one is an attack against all" treaties such as the one governing NATO. IBM, RedHat, and others will close ranks and take a "we don't negotiate with terrorists" scorched earth approach to this whole thing and when they are finished there will be nothing left of SCO but a smoking crater in the ground.