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SCOoby Snacks
A day with SCO is like a day without sunshine, I know that's what you're thinking. Novell is asking the court to dismiss SCO's lawsuit against them. Groklaw has taken a look at what is necessary to prove a 'slander of title' claim. And finally, reader loonix_gangsta wrote in and pointed to SCO's humorous 5 reasons to choose UNIX over Linux webpage.
I *love* number 5!!! Ha ha ha!
But they haven't proved it's their butter. Or even if Linux uses butter. Maybe they used margarine. Or Olestra. Or some other substitute. . . This is my sig:
> > >We don't need no steeekin'.....oh wait, my wife says we do.
Most of the code that SCO came up with as evidence of stolen IP consisted of header files, which all of us concluded was part of the POSIX standard. That's Daryl's comeback from the 5 reasons link.
Essentially, what he's saying is that ABI code (including headers) is not part of the standard, but their IP. Atleast we know now what their defense will be if IBM lawyers argue that the headers are part of the POSIX standard, and not their IP.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
From the Groklaw article:
Why didn't SCO sue for breach of contract, then, if their position is correct and copyrights were supposed to transfer and Amendment 2 is the contract that was to make that happen? No one I have talked to can figure that out.
Well, I know why.... SCO must know their copyright claims are questionable at best. They're not claiming breach of contract so not to draw attention to the contract. Because, once the contract is fully analyzed by a court, SCO will know they've lost.
(this, of course, won't stop them from filing at least 8 more stupid lawsuits within a three month period)
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
ah but they're not suing over code similarities anymore. they're suing because they see AIX and dynix as "derivative works" of SysV, which they are, but then SCO concludes (and it seems overreachingly) that therefore every line of code in AIX and dynix are "derivative works" of SysV as well. the suit is now about whether or not IBM violated the contract they signed with SCO by distributing publicly "derivative work" code.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
This has been discussed ad-nauseum before. Someone downstream from them is running Linux, not SCO.
I think that this snippet from SCO's original purchase agreement with Novell is superb.
"(b) Buyer shall not, and shall not have the authority to, amend, modify or waive any right under or assign any SVRX License without the prior written consent of Seller. In addition, at Seller's sole discretion and direction, Buyer shall amend, supplement, modify or waive any rights under, or shall assign any rights to, any SVRX License to the extent so directed in any manner or respect by Seller. In the event that Buyer shall fail to take any such action concerning the SVRX Licenses as required herein, Seller shall be authorized, and hereby is granted, the rights to take any action on Buyer's own behalf."
Basically the original contract says "SCO all your base are belong to us! signed Novell."
Novell can instruct SCO to amend or invalidate any of their license agreements on demand and if SCO refuses then Novell can go ahead and amend them anyway.
"Well that just about wraps it up for SCO." -- Gag Halfrunt.
Worst
nmap -P0 -p 21,80,443 -O thescogroup.comg nu%D=2/12%Time =402BB247%O=80%C=-1)C 2%IPID=Z%TS=100HZ) ....
No exact OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal).
TCP/IP fingerprint:
SInfo(V=2.54BETA31%P=i586-pc-linux-
TSeq(Class=RI%gcd=2%SI=1527
so does that mean its a i586 pc running linux?
Uptime 137.072 days (since Sun Sep 28 10:21:36 2003)
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Well Maybe they are not so happy with SCO in Germany
Help fight continental drift.
According to netcraft it is Linux and NetBSD/OpenBSD:
s cogroup.com
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.the
# nmap -P0 -p 21,80,443 -O thescogroup.com
Starting nmap 3.50 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2004-02-12 09:32 PST
Warning: OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP port
Interesting ports on 216.250.128.21:
PORT STATE SERVICE
21/tcp filtered ftp
80/tcp open http
443/tcp open https
Device type: general purpose|media device|broadband router
Running: Linux 2.4.X, Pace embedded, Panasonic embedded
OS details: Linux 2.4.6 - 2.4.21, Pace digital cable TV receiver, Panasonic IP Technology Broadband Networking Gateway, KX-HGW200
Uptime 137.091 days (since Sun Sep 28 08:21:37 2003)
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 6.709 seconds
#
They meant Linux is Legally Unencumbered.
and SCO Unix is Legally Encumbered.
Ummm, no, it mean that the system that you use is a i586 pc running Linux. That string describes your system, not the nmap target.
After all, if TCP/IP was so generous as to provide that string the -O option to nmap would be really simple.
I'm pretty sure it was a little New Mexico company called "Micro Soft". Bill Gates' one true innovation was the concept of selling software. He was doing it before the Apple and Visicalc had been introduced. Check 'The Pirates of Silicon Valley" and the history of the Home Brew Computer club for the details.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
SCOware != Unix
Linux != Unix
AIX != Unix
The IDEALS of Unix are what make Unix secure. Any idiot can easily produce a VERSION of Unix that, while adhering to the standards, is notoriously insecure. (e.g. bad default install, buffer overflows, ... etc)
Bleah.
Minix is not anywhere in the family tree, I am glad to say. Its limited kernel bears no relation to any of the others, and was created from scratch. Linux sort of came from Minix, although it seems that Linus sensibly threw away all the Minix code very near the beginning. Solaris is influenced by the original BSD, pre the BSD court case. What we now know as BSD of the Free, Open or Net varieties, is unencumbered and therefore has little of Unix as such in its parentage. Don't know about the commercial BSD, I ahven't even seen it advertised for a while....
Now SCO's stupid advert does reveal something that I had not noticed before.
While some application programming interfaces ("API Code") have been made available over the years through POSIX and other open standards, the UNIX(R) ABI Code has only been made available under copyright restrictions. AT&T made these binary interfaces available in order to support application development to UNIX(R) operating systems and to assist UNIX(R) licensees in the development process. The UNIX(R) ABIs were never authorized for unrestricted use or distribution under the GPL in Linux(R). As the copyright holder, SCO has never granted such permission. Nevertheless, many of the ABIs contained in Linux(R), and improperly distributed under the GPL, are direct copies of our UNIX(R) copyrighted software code.
They are alleging that the ABIs (Application Binary Interfaces) are at the centre of their case. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but an ABI definition tells you what to put in which registers and how to make the system call. BSD and Linux use different mechanisms for this, including how the registers and stack are used, and which interrupt. Because of that, and in particular the use of a different interrupt, it is conceptually simple to run BSD code on Linux or vice versa, by adding a handler for the alternative interrupt which shifts the call parameters to where they should be, on the stack or in registers, and invokes the native system call. Now, SCO has a Linux Personality Module, which does the same sort of thing. For this to be possible, without horrendously complex programming causing inefficiency, SCO must be using an ABI set which is entirely different to Linux. Now, the SCO ABIs can not be the same as BSD either, because Linux has a module to enable SCO (and other) Unix code to run, and it is not the same as the BSD module.
So, if we have three orthogonal sets of ABIs, how do they think they have a case? At most, the module, or kernel compile option, to allow SCO code to be run, would be the only place where there was any kind of ABI issue, and of course SCO are using a GPL ABI, and probably some of the associated code, in their Linux Personality Module.
So, on what precisely is SCO's allegation based? Or has Darl confused ABIs with APIs, which are similar in every *nix?
If using similar ABIs or APIs was in any case a copyright issue, would the Convicted Monopolist not have sued DRDOS, Freedos etc out of existence many years ago, and now be taking action against Wine? Or is this a small-scale test by M$ (who after all have funded SCO) to see if they will be able to win a case like that in court? IIRC there have already been court rulings to the contrary, involving M$.
Well Maybe.
:) see.
The Raeleans claim a mission going back to the beginning of time despite the cult starting in the 60's or whenever.
SCO claim 20 years experience in the article (despite that caldera was started in 1995).
So Raeleans are ridiculous by a few million years, and caldera ridiculous by only 13 (thereabouts) years.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
"where is McDonalds using UNIX? in the cash register systems? "
:)
Of course not..
There cash registers run on Windows. They are talking about there US chain _ONLY_ and they are talking about the credit card processing server. All of there stores connect to a SCO Unix box in their HQ, and are then routed to the bank (there is only 1 US connection to the bank from MCd's, not from ever store.. This is true of 90% of _ALL_ retailers in North America and it's spreading to the UK fast.).
I happen to know FOR A FACT, that McDonalds Canada, does NOT use SCO Linux for there server, they are running 4 redundant Compaq server's in two locations (2 per location) each with redundant T1 lines to the bank. These server's are ALL running Windows 2000 Advanced Server. I also know this is a trial run, and if successful, all other McDonalds (World Wide) will be switching, starting with the EU, then the USA. So, they are getting rid of SCO for Microsoft.. Now, this should get some interesting reactions..
Mod +5 Drunk
This made me laugh out loud...
The referenced article is 5 years old. To the best of my knowledge, Nuance does not currently support SCO UNIX in any of its products.
As I recall, Linus owns the Linux trademark...
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
the ABIs include such things as the integers that correspond to each syscall, the actual integers behind error codes that we think of as ENOMEM, EAGAIN, etc., the numbers used for each signal (SIGBUS, SIGTERM, etc.). also you'd include in the ABI e.g. the format of the ioctl() call - what arguments it takes, in what order, and what each argument means and does.
ever seen a run-time linker error when you try to run something compiled against an incompatible glibc? that's a user-space ABI incompatibility at work.
think about the words that make up the acronym 'ABI'. it's an 'interface' (function calls, defined constants) that 'applications' use. the 'binary' portion just means that differing ABIs don't impact how the code is written (i.e., you can have correctly-compiling code that is ABI-incompatible with a particular library or whatever). assuming that all else was the same (binary format, linker format, calling conventions, etc.), you could theoretically compile a binary on BSD or SCO UNIX that would run on linux. unfortunately, it wouldn't actually do anything - it would probably crash almost immediately - because, for example, when linux sends a signal to the app with number 14, linux is sending SIGALRM. but the app, compiled against a different ABI, may believe that 14 means something else, say, SIGIO (contrived example).
when we're talking about user-space, ABI incompatibilities usually manifest themselves as link time errors (compile-time or run-time). when we're talking about the user/kernel interface, ABI incompatibilities manifest themselves as crashes, because the application erroneously believes it is doing one thing, but the kernel believes it's trying to do something else (possibly in violation of what it's allowed to do).
but the point that you made is still correct - much of linux's ABI does differ from SCO UNIX (and BSD), so i don't see where SCO is going with this...
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Ah, it's Godwin's Law and the source is Mike Godwin, a fairly prominent attorney who used to work for the EFF. See http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/g/Godwin_s_La w.html
(Actually, I knew him personally before and during his time at the UT Law School.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.