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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
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.
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."
Finally, a true successor to Ernest Goes To Camp.
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,
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
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.
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