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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...
Seems like the MIT students did a nice job putting him on the spot, but it's obvious that ol' Darl is pretty adept at deflecting any criticism or challenging questions and changing the subject when he finds the current one uncomfortable.
What will it take to get him to address all the contradictory statements and lies that he and his cohorts seem to spout at every opportunity?
Perhaps it's time to try to get that court date pushed up
...who will see his tuition go up by $699 next year. ;)
libertarianswag.com
Go to Harvard, spread FUD, gain support from future investors/business people and hope they support SCO in the future, if SCO is still around.
Law or CS students? Either way, he should've been laughed off stage.
Maybe he was speaking to fashion merchandising students (it is a nice suit, after all).
Daryl doesn't seem to be aware that his public comments may impact the trial. It's like the guy genuinely doesn't care about th eendgame as many here have observed.
It must be pretty frustrating for Linux contributors to be attacked by a guy who is using the fruits of their labors on his own Linux system.
Darl Goes to Harvard
:)
Did anybody else shudder at the thought!
Free XBox, PS2
Hey, the poster forgot the subtitle for the presentation: "Defending Intellectual Property Rights in a Digital Age, or How to Make Money Without Really Trying"
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
We should organize more protests involving the giving away of free software.
Now if they threw pig blood at them it would've made mainstream news. But something good and worthwhile to humanity? that's not news
*DrugCheese rants*
Lowest stock price for SCOX since August 2003.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCOX
At $13.54 at time of this posting, and has even gone down so low as $13.18 for the day range.
-Joshua
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. I thought any changes made became the property of the project, for everyone to use.
For example, in the GPL it states:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I'm sure most people were expecting "Darl Goes to Clown College".
Six of one, half dozen of the other.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Linux Stole SCO Cod
Methinks you're missing the meaning.
Darl: Were you impacted by MyDoom?
Student: No, I use Linux.
Predictive text is shiv!
When it was called Ernest goes to Jail.
This is akin to reading the details of a year long train wreck. I somehow feel dirty every time I read the next SCO news.
What I want to know is what do Erica and Clare look like? Pics, dammit!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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."
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.
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,
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
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.
Darl goes to Harvard. Gates went to Harvard. When you are at MIT, you come to realize that evil lives up the river. Like they built over a fucking Indian graveyard or something. Kissinger? Hearst? Updike? Kaczynski? Love Story? Hello?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Darl is going to Yale after the trial is over. Yust wait und see.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
-
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.
Funny, I use Linux too, and nevertheless mydoom affects me substantially. for example, my ISP's mail servers are slow as hell because of this crap. So slow, that I couldn't even get to my mail for much of today.
"..claims that a member of the linux community claimed that a high-level linux hacker was responsible for at least one of the attacks (I'd love to see that citation). "
- 08 -25-010-26-NW-CY-LL&tbovrmode=3
This was Eric Raymond acting as self appointed champion and bull in a china shop during an earlier attack.
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2003
Personally I think Eric Raymond is a darned fool for saying 'we' etc as if this was a community effort. Eric saying he's ashamed for us all plays right into SCO's hands. This was not the community, it was one lone criminal acting for themselves. Presenting it as something else is both inaccurate and damaging.
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
I'm not sure what I'm more impressed by - the fact that an email virus can talk, or that it's speaking at Harvard on behalf of Darl.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
He discusses MyDoom, and also evidently someone on slashdot who posted his home address and phone number, resulting in a DDOS of his house during the superbowl
:-)
Darl reads slashdot??!!
and can you imagine your house in denial of service? and distributed? all rooms are denying you sevice... even toilet... oh horror
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.
Daryl doesn't seem to be aware that his public comments may impact the trial
;)
He does so! Daryl is perfectly aware of the situation and is acting like any litigiously-aware, sane, comprehending human with a clue should.
Darl, on the other hand...
$0.02 (CDN)
I got this off of the SCOX yahoo board:
'Electronic terror' in Linux's shadow
You'll find this about 2/3 of the way through the article:
And they call the Linux community fanatical! :)
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Can we just settle for GNU/SCO/Linux :)
SCO can distort anything...
"Interest in SCO has never been higher, hits to our website are off the charts!"
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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".
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Darl Goes to Clown College
Don't you mean Darl Goes to Con-College?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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
Best line was one student who when Darl asked if he was impacted by MyDoom.A e-mail virus answered 'No, I use Linux'."
At this point Darl wrung his hands gleefully and said "Sic 'im boys!". Two heavyset men set upon the freeloading nerd and, after a brief struggle, relieved him of his wallet. "Anyone else use Linux?", Darl jeered, as he pocketed 2 dollars, fifty five cents, and an expired bus pass.
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
Let's all invest our money in SCO stock! With the luck we're all having with corporate abuse and the IT industry in general, the stock is bound to plummet after we invest in it.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I really wish that when Darl stated that the GPL hadn't been tested in court, someone had pointed out that neither had SCO's assertions.
At least one argument they're using against the GPL can be used against the claim that anyone should pay them $699 per CPU.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
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'.
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.
I was blown away when someone asked him (paraphrased): If you believe the GPL license is unconstitutional, what right then do you have to distribute SAMBA in your products.
At this they said (again paraphrasing): Samba is good, we dont believe that Samba is tainted in any way.
They did not answer in any way what right they have to distribute Samba if they believe that the GPL is invalid. If the GPL is proven invalid (unlikely), it does not mean that the work suddenly becomes public domain. They cant seem to admit to the fact that they are basically screwed either way.
I would highly doubt that SCO could come up with a clean room implementation of the SMB protocol in any reasonable span of time that they could incorporate into their products. And imagine the reduced value of an SCO OS platform if it did not have open source tools like samba embedded.
I would cherish the day that Darl & Co goes up to the Samba developers to negotiate a seperate license and those developers tell them to go to hell. They will never do this even if it is shown that they have no right to distribute Samba because their core business is no longer software development, but litigation.
The Ro Factor - Jeep/Linux Weblog