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ZDNet Examines SCO Indemnity Options
Ursus Maximus writes "David Berlind of ZD NET has posted a major opinion/research piece. What do you all think? I don't like the story at all, but he does seem to have made more of an effort to try to find reasons to back up SCO's claims than any of their other supporters have."
Argh, has the legality of SCO asking for that money even been established? Yeah sure I'll skip the corp-lawyers and take the advice of a fucking net-journalist and fork over the dough. Is it even to get SCO to accept the money?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
It is very telling that Sun was pushing the indemnification angle in this timeframe. This really sheds some light on their funding of SCO as a means to further their own hidden adgenda. Like Microsoft they appear to have used SCO to attack Linux by proxy and advance their own business. In SUN's case it is particularly mendacious as they pose as a Linux ally while working against our interests.
Yup. More to the point, he's saying "Just because the opposition to SCO is bigger, louder, and carries the most-respected voices, doesn't mean they're right." He's technically right in that regard; just because Torvalds says they're on crack doesn't mean they can't win.
On the other hand:
1. The fact that the very rights they claim to have are in dispute,
2. The fact that it took them MONTHS to produce, even for the court, any evidence supporting their claims -- and even admitted that they didn't have all of the evidence they'd claimed to have,
3. The fact that their high-priced lawyer hasn't shown up to court in a while,
4. Other facts related to the case,
those DO suggest that this is bullshit, and that there's nothing to fear.
So yeah. Don't believe us because we're loud. Believe us because the evidence supports us.
Given the current state of our collective PHBs, the kind that aren't technical, and both fear and resent their more technical employees, this article attempts to soothe their fears. Just pay up, and you won't have to worry. Don't bother asking your developers and/or legal staff for pesky details and long-winded explanations. Just sweep the cost under the rug, as it were. Don't worry, Mr. Manager, you can sleep soundly at night, knowing that through your failed initiative, Darl McBride is a richer man. Heck, your own stock portfolio might event perform better now.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I found an interesting contradiction in this article... In one line he speaks of the defense fund for developers, and mentions they aren't likely to get sued. And in another he mentions Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton by name as likely to get sued... Just who did he think they are? Another case of someone WAYYYYYYYYY out of their depth...
What he probably meant to say was "my intended audience of (frightful?) enterprise users of Linux are NOT developers, so they don't want to know who is gonna get sued, they only care if they are gonna get sued..."
I also found it odd(in the sense that it indicates his research was skewed as not to sound alarmist) that he spent so little time speaking about how vital a part of a proper support contract indemnity used to be (in Mainframe and Minicomputer environments, which aren't as plentiful now) and are now being forgotten because people think anyone MCSE can run what they call "a departmental server" on 2000$ hardware with no backup or redudancy... As for indemnification I always thought a good rule of thumb was if your computers systems total 50000$ of book value, or handle more than a million a year in money value, you should either get indemnification, or negotiate an equivalent value out of your support contract(equivalent to the indemnification, not the 50000)
If anything, we live in interesting times...
For many, the answer to these questions has to do with the likelihood that SCO might succeed in its legal endeavors. It's like basing the decision to get collision insurance for your car on the likelihood that you're going to get into a fender bender while traveling down a desolate stretch of highway.
That is to say, he doesn't sound like he thinks SCO might succeed (it's a "desolate stretch of highway"), but that perhaps you should get indemnification *before* more "traffic" (somebody with a legit claim... say, somebody with a "defensive" patent...) comes along.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
As someone with more familiarity with Ziff-Davis than the average person (hint: in my time I've done more than just read what they've got to say), I can honestly tell you that the overwhelming majority of ZD staffers are less than enamoured by Microsoft and its business practices.
However, living in the real world, it's a bit difficult to run a series of IT publications without writing about Microsoft and its products given their dominance in both the enterprise and the consumer markets. ZD (or CNet, IDG, VNU, etc) ignoring Microsoft would be about as sensible as a mainstream movie magazine ignoring any Hollywood productions.
Frankly, I'm fed up with this "Ziff-Davis is a Microsoft shill" line. ZD has spent the last two decades writing about Microsoft (and other) products that run on Microsoft operating systems because that's what sells magazines. If Joe Average had wanted magazines about Unix instead then they would have written about Unix instead, but they didn't, so get over it.
And, finally, why you would be surprised that the editor of a publication called Windows Sources would "push for exclusive coverage of Windows NT for business users" is a mystery to me - would it make more sense to you to devote large chunks of coverage to other OSes in a magazine that's devoted purely to Windows? I guess you'll be demanding that Apple magazines now cover Linux too.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Frankly, I'm fed up with this "Ziff-Davis is a Microsoft shill" line.
... but they didn't. That's
Okay. You're fed up with it. Regardless,
it's true. I got fed up with Ziff-Davis
and stopped subscribing to PC Magazine.
ZD has spent the last two decades writing about Microsoft (and other) products that run on Microsoft operating systems because that's what sells magazines.
Used to sell magazines. ZD is in a big hurt
these days. You're also ignoring the other
side of equation : ad sales. ZD was notorious
for kow-towing the Redmond. IMHO ZD went out
of their way to attack Linux in the early days.
They tried to bury the baby in the cradle.
They're sill trying to kill it. ZD could have
had some balance and pemitted some criticism
of the advertizers
the big reason ZD is irrelevant now.
If Joe Average had wanted magazines about Unix instead then they would have written about Unix instead, but they didn't, so get over it.
Oh beleive me, I am over it. Who subscribes
to PC mag. anymore? Or Computer Shopper ?
Or Network Week? or whatever fad bandwagon
ZD tried to domesticate?
ZD would have been better of hedging their bets.
The ruined their credibility.
I have run into this joker's silly opinions before, and this one is par for the course. Just read a few of his other opinions, if you can get through them, and his total irrelevance, on ANY subject, will be apparent. Shortly after his appearance at ZDnet a couple of years ago, I deleted them from my bookmarks.
SCO has not yet made the case in cort. Not to defend Microsoft more than I have to but Microsoft is in cort a lot and many times for bogus IP rights issues. Actualy at any given time at least one of the big players is fighting some sort of IP rights clame made by a much smaller company.
If your thinking of a one time indemnification then yeah SCOs deal looks pritty sweet but let's get real here that isn't how things will go down if SCO makes a good chunk of change from SCOs liccensing. In fact it's more of a lose lose situation for anyone who forks it over.
If SCO wins the case there are many other issues to deal with and you've already set yourself up for a bunch of collage students and IT profesionals to stick hands out expecting a cut.
If SCO loses you've set yourself up for every Tom, Dick and Herry who thinks they can take on Microsoft, Intel or Apple to seek an liccens from YOU reguardless of how stupid or anil the clame may be.
Pony up... It's not the drop of blood you think it is.
On the other hand the corts could deside this practace is illegal.
Then your just out the cost of the one liccens.
I don't actually exist.
Any infringement (if it even exists) is still SCO's fault. SCO has still not given us exact line numbers or snippets of code. They have made statements without backing them up and claim that Linux is still hurting their IP.
The only thing we've seen are claims that are nothing short of saying anything IBM has touched is stolen from SCO...It's obvious that SCO has no plans to actually cooperate with the kernel dvelopers, as there has really been no attempt at contacting the developers directly...
There's really no reason for this type of speculation until the courts actually make their decision...this article seems to assume that SCO's claims are as good as gold...To be honest, SCO doesn't look to be moving on their end...
Another clueless hack with a word processor.
I guess most people realize this guy knows little about computers, and nothing about law, so his main claim to fame is...that he is a journalism major writing for Ziff-Davis? That means his rant is just a nicely worded Slashdot troll.
He writes like he knows something when in fact he's being completely uncritical of not only *fact* but recent events. Particularly how SCO's lawsuit has completely changec character and is now down to 60 lines of code that they claim were copied.
SCO's case is on its last legs, but he talks as if SCO is an aggrieved party looking for a little love.
Lets do some digging on this chump and see what other jems he is pushing on an unsuspecting public.
I'll post any response I get
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
This could open an avalanche for copyleft. It would mean any code which has ever been *near* any copylefted code would be owned by copyleft. Removing the copylefted code would be no remedy. The FSF would have field day chasing down all past GPL violators and any company which has even looked at GPL code (the majority, even if they won't admit it or actually used it?). The opportunity for retribution against the Darl McBrides of this world would be fantastic, and make others wish the SCO case had never happened.
It's an easy game to play until you notice that you have to include the quality of the evidence somewhere in the equation. At which point TSG's case goes all wahoonie-shaped.
I can just about imagine the IBM legal office examining TSG's amendmended complaint (I'm pretty sure they want to nail TSG's hide to the shed, if possible, no quarter asked or given): "Amendment fourteen!" <pause> <raucous laughter> "No! Wait! Wait! Amendment eighteen! Amendment eighteen! Unnnnn-believable! <bwaaaaah-hah-har!> Get a load a'tha' second sentence! Whoooe!" <more raucous laughter> ...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This piece completely forgets that SCO just removed all of the Unix is in Linux parts of their case, and now it is only that AIX and Dynix are in Linux, which SCO has no reason to believe they actually own, and if a judge finds that code developed by IBM and Sequent is actually owned by SCO well, I'll have to move to a different country, based on that ruling code developed using Microsofts MFC is owned by microsoft, code developed using Qt is owned by trolltech, and so on and so on...
...whereas Enderle's about a minus 7 and Didio's about a -3i. And yes, I do mean "i" in the mathematical sense, since Planet Laura seems to have left the solar system. Not sure how to rate Daniel Lyons, his bias is obvious and unforgiving but mild and he hasn't said much lately. Maybe a -4.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Tell us about the connection between size of ad budget and e.g. results on reviews...
I lost my innocence when Word 6 was released on the Mac and got good reviews in the trade rags -- while all Mac users hated it because it was both buggy and really slow. Word 6 was faster if you ran the Windows-version in VirtualPC (or what the emulator of the day was called; I talked to people that had tried but never tried).
The interesting thing was that the columnists in the Mac magazines hated it -- they had some deal wich didn't sign away their souls. If you're in the business, please inform me:
Can you still more or less trust the columnists in trade magazines or are they just supporting the ad sales team, too?
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
The whole notion that an end-user would owe SCO anything (even if it was there code) is ridiculous. By way of example - if you buy a car and it turns out that it was stolen ( assuming you reasonably had no idea) you have NO LIABILITY - you do have to give the car to its rightful owner (ie stop using it) but you dont owe the real owner the depreciation that occurred while you were using it. Because it would be UNFAIR, since you bought it in good faith. So if Sco establishes owenrship (which it apparently cant), then users would have to cease to use it. THATs IT - the only possibility (and it isnt really one) is that by notifying users today, some crazy judge could say that from the time you were otified till the time you stopped using it you are liable. Thats not likely because the notice from SCO has provided no details that really provide notice that SCO is the owner. In addition even if that worse case senario occurred the UPPER limit on damages has been established $149 a year per useage. And even that wouldnt be likely since SCO's pricing is arbitrary and no Judge would rule 60 lines is worth $149 - unless it was some trade secret - which has been dropped. The whole end-user thing is a red-herring since no owner of IP is going to sue end-users, for the above reasons and the reason why majority of Software Companies dont offer indemnification, is b/c they dont want the nuisance of every ambulance chaser making a run at their very deep pockets
Sure. He says the claims could "absolutely" be dismissed. That is hardly a careful review of the claims at issue. Yet he goes on to ask "How much is your job worth to you?"
Now - to be fair he does note "...as a user of Linux, protecting yourself from an SCO-law suit could easily be a waste of money." But by the time he's done with the article he's advising " Basically, you have one question to ask yourself: How much peace of mind do you have now and how much more are you willing to spend for a little extra?"
The overall message is that a prudent IT manager would be finding a way to spend money on some form of legal protection. And when trying to figure out where to put that money - SCO's licensing offer seems to be fairly iron-clad and cheap, all things considered.
Which, some would point out, seems to be the whole point of SCO's actions. That - and put out the message that Linux is too dangerous for the Enterprise. Which seems to be an undertone to this whole article.
Let's say I'm stupid or work for a company which absolutely, completely as the author said "wants to avoid the legal limelight", and I buy a SCO license. A month later, a summary judgement is released--SCO is smoking something really strong. Case dismissed. Is there any legal recourse to get my $699 back?
This seems to imply that idemnification is something out of the ordinary. After all, acording to Berlind, one should be leveraging one's buying power to get it.
So the question that I get from this is - who offers idemnification as a standard part of their license? Which OSes are "safe"? How "safe"? And were they always like that or is this something they jumped on when SCO began its campaign?
While I won't call this article the most well-informed or well-written ones, let's see, isn't this a good executive summary?
The suits upstairs say
" You tell me SCO won't win? But what do we do if it does?"
With Tux wearing a suit, these are the kind of questions that have to be answered. Risk assessments and "what-if" scenarios need to be thought out. SCO will lose, but companies may need to make plans to present to boards (though they may never get around to doing anything about it).
btw, I am not a conspiracy theorist, but this is an impressive F.U.D. program. I could almost swear Redmond was behind this.
How much do ad budgets influence reviews (and other content)? No, I don't believe zero -- or 10 percent, for that matter.
I explicitly used software as an example and the previous discussion was about Mirosoft/SCO. There was no need to waste your time discussing hardware. (And, yes, obviously there are influencing factors from reviews of beta versions. Etc, etc. Not an answer.)
This when I gave an example (from middle of the '90s!!) when reviews and articles where totally different from both user experiences and columnists that could write freely... (I even started it with "I lost my innocence when"!) Search Oct-94 to Mar-95 on groups.google.com for "word 6" and "macintosh".
You are joking and/or condescending. Or just not answering a simple question with the tried and true method of starting a large discussion of other matters.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
he does seem to have made more of an effort to try to find reasons to back up SCO's claims than any of their other supporters have.
... and that license allows them to redistribute it without fee, to anybody.
He ignores the fact (admitted by SCO) that SCO distributed Linux under the GPL. That's one very good reason why his article is hogwash. Many people already have an SCO license
So despite the author's attempt to sound serious, balanced, objective, responsible, etc: he's just another FUD merchant.
1. Most freelancers get paid by the word, so why use two words when fifty will do?
Seriously though, the reason why I didn't give a straightforward answer to your question is because there isn't one. All publications aren't equal, and some hold themselves to higher standards than others. The same is true of individual journalists: most and very professional and value their integrity above all else but, as the recent debacle at the New York Times showed, not all journalists respect the power they wield.
2. I see as much banner/box advertising on Slashdot by Microsoft as I do by any other vendor. Does Microsoft's ad spend make a difference to the editorial coverage it receives here? No, not at all. The same is true in print.
What can potentially make a difference is the relationship a journalist has with a vendor's press officers. It's a press officer's job to get a journalist what he needs and to keep a journalist happy. This doesn't mean envelopes full of cash or anything so seedy but it does mean occasional socialising (for example, at product launches). The vendor's hope that this buys them some influence. To a certain extent, it can (note, I said "can", not "does") but a bad product is still a bad product.
Again, a good journalist keeps things professional. Just because someone buys you a drink it doesn't mean that they've bought anything more than that.
3. The reason why Apple journalists didn't hesitate to pull punches when Microsoft produced a less than stellar version of Word was because it was from Microsoft: in a way, it was anti-Microsoft bias in action.
Most Apple journalists aren't shy about hiding their feelings about Microsoft. From the "look-and-feel" trials to the Apple vs Windows battle for the desktop, they've got few reasons to sing Microsoft's praises. Their readers usually feel the same way too. So when Microsoft released a bad product, most Apple journalists weren't too slow to bring it to their readers' attention.
That's perhaps an over-simplification, but it's a pretty accurate one.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"Basically, you have one question to ask yourself: How much peace of mind do you have now and how much more are you willing to spend for a little extra?"
The answers would be plenty and absolutely NOT $699/machine.
There now, wasn't that easy?
I note something that didn't seem to get mentioned it in the article about indemnification. That is, Novell has dredged up an official AT&T interpretation of a particular paragraph-in-the-contract.
I think that this disputed paragraph is the foundation upon which SCO is basing 99% of its claims. What I most seriously wonder is, "OK, suppose the judge gives SCO full rights to Unix. But most of the Unix contracts out there are based on an AT&T contract, and AT&T has provided a specific interpretation of a critical paragraph. Can SCO change the interpretation of this particular paragraph, JUST because they now own Unix?"
What I think is that those who obtained those AT&T-type contracts will argue that they are operating under the AT&T interpretation, which they were contractually allowed to do when they signed those contracts!
I do not think that the judge will grant SCO the right to arbitrarily alter the interpretation of the disputed paragraph in those contracts without some sort of advance notice -- and no such notice was given (just lawsuits). The net result is that, for example, IBM may have to STOP moving AIX and Dynamix code into Linux, but that all previously-moved code will be "grandfathered".
For Linux, that net result means that SCO can be ignored, and no indemnification nor insurance need be paid to anyone.
And then your response:
As much as I love your don't-take-shit-from-nobody stance towards lawsuits and the like, in many cases the choice you make affects more people than just you. In my case, I'm Chief Technical Officer of a small web design firm. I have the option to use a Linux or a Windows server. Which server do I install? If I install Linux, what are the odds that SCO will go after me? If SCO *does* go after me, for how much?
In my scenario, the chance that SCO will go after my company is extremely small, say 1/10000. If we decide to pay the $700 to make them go away, with probability this factors to an additional $0.07 to factor into Total Cost of Ownership. Big deal. I personally like my odds.
If your legal fees end up going over what the other side is asking for, it's not worth it.
If you're a 15 year old kid downloading mp3's and get busted by the RIAA, do you fight it through? Or do you negociate to minimize the dent in your college fund?
In the case of a company like Google, a suit from SCO will most likely claim 5-7 million in damages. A large company with a lot more to lose will be sure to fight the fight to the bitter end.
It's basic bean counting. It's how business works nowadays.
And finally:
Some cases are just to keep you distracted while one of their partners moves in on your deal.
Your stance is fight the good fight. If the company suing you is trying to distract you, they'll do a pretty good job of it if you fight tooth and nail at it.
Calculate your risks. It might save you a pretty penny or two ;-)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
It seems like what people are most worried about is the unlikely situation in which SCO's claims hold up in courts, and theyfore somebody's going to have to pay. For those who have billion dollar businesses on the line, even a slight risk of something this huge still has to be accounted for.
The odds of SCO's success at this point are hard to compute. It's not quite zero yet, as much as we'd like it to be. When you multiply those odds by what's at stake for a business with deep pockets, you end up with a pretty sizable sum that the business most likely will be willing to part with as an insurance premium for somebody else to assume the risk.
Gotta wonder if there's any betting window in Vegas that's trading the odds on SCO doing anything...
OS/2 was considerably more user-friendly than MS-Windows 3.1, not to mention incomparably more consistent. And set against any 3.X/9X/ME version of MS-Windows, it never crashed. It only lost points because it was different to the DOS-based abominations which had gone before.
Then we get to MS-Windows 95-ish and the advent of the "short cut" AKA symbolic link - which breaks if you move the target object - not so with OS/2's equivalent.
After that we can go on to discuss relative esoterica like efficiency and programmability (contrast REXX against COMMAND.COM, for example). MS-Windows was just so totally outclassed in technical terms that it was beyond funny - in some ways it's still outclassed even though development on OS/2 has essentially been frozen for five years.
OS/2, however, was hobbled by Microsoft and jilted by IBM for marketing reasons. Politics betrays another fine soldier. As usual.
Disclaimer: I went straight from MS-Windows For Workgroups 3.11 to Linux. I have no vested interest in supporting or promoting OS/2.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I agree.
the article is basicly superfluios verbage that is well written but says almost nothing of any substance.
One of the points that had me laughing out loud was this:
"A review of the company's quarterly 10-Q filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveals an increasing concern over SCO's legal actions, the risks they pose, and Red Hat's options and the potential consequences should the outcome favor SCO."
anyone who has a remote understing of what the risk portions of the 10-Q and other SEC documents means knows this is is total and absolute bullshit. publicly traided companies HAVE to account for any possible - percivable - source of threat to the future well being of the company, useally overstating those posible threats to the point of absurdity. I have yet to see a "alien abduction of key executive officers might harm our future revenus" clause in a 10-Q but I would'nt be surprised in te least to see it..
Big advertisers are going to advertise with you regardless of what you say. Dell advertises inside the front cover of every non-Apple magazine that I know of, Microsoft does the same, etc.
Don't forget, these are big companies who outsource both their public/press relations and their ad buying. The people responsible for public/press relations will be a press agency, and the people responsible for ad buying will be a media agency. Although they might sound the same, two aren't related, and ad buying has nothing to do with editorial coverage and vice versa.
As I mentioned before, a negative review will occasionally have a vendor throwing a tantrum, but they'll cut off an editorial team before they think about ditching their ads. After all, ads are how they send their controlled message ("buy this because blah, blah, blah") and stopping advertising is pretty much a case of cutting of your nose to spite your face, as its counter-productive to them.
So, the black-and-white short answer is "no", but given what I've said previously about not all publications holding themselves to the same high standards, the shades-of-grey short answer is "maybe".
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Huh? He's saying that all forms of protection listed are both a)reasonably priced and b)could easily be a waste of money.
Um, thwap me with a wet noodle, but that seems contradictory.
Reading the article made my blood heat up because I am so pissed at SCO for what they are doing. But I think the reporter really did do a pretty even-handed job of addressing the indemnification issue alone (in spite of the above paragraph).
It didn't seem to me that he was really addressing whether or not SCO has a case, but the practical business decisions arising from their lawsuit.
In the end of course, SCO does not have a case and will not win any of their pending lawsuits.
Furthermore, if SCO succeeds, they have established that their past actions in distributing the Linux kernel violated the GPL on the kernel. They cannot simply choose to go back to being in compliance. They must get permission from every kernel developer to go back to using the Linux kernel under the GPL. Effectively, if SCO wins, here's what happens:
1) All of the SCO code is replaced.
2) The new, non-infringing Linux kernel is distributed.
3) SCO is notified by IBM, RH, Mandrake, OSDL, and a few hundred individual contributors that they have violated the GPL. There will be conditions if they ever want to distribute the Linux kernel again.
Personally, I would only require a few minor conditions:
1) SCO pays a $699 license fee to each kernel developer for each copy sold or downloaded.
2) There will be a $699 upgrade fee as well for every new version of the kernel they distribute.
3) SCO will release all of the code for their various Unices under the GPL.
4) Darl McBride will resign and donate his entire net worth to OSDL, FSF, EFF, and Groklaw.
5) Letters of apology, including an admission that they knew at the time they were wrong, will be sent to everyone they sued or threatened to sue.