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SCO Says They'll Sue A Linux User Tomorrow
Xenographic writes "InfoWorld is reporting that SCO intends to sue a Linux using company. Ordinarily, this would not be newsworthy, as they have not followed through on past threats. However, this time, they have given themselves a concrete deadline--tomorrow. While they claim that it will be one of the "top 1,000" companies, they apparently have yet to decide which company to actually sue. Perhaps they need more practice playing darts?" Reader Fished links to CNET's coverage.
Personally, I woulda sued... Well... Me.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Isn't it going to be a top 1000 company... and not an Internet related business?
IMHO that pretty much rules out Google doesn't it?
this whole SCO mess is really out of hand and absurd. They will be suing a Linux user for what? Using software legally? They haven't won their case with IBM. This is all just absolutely outrageous! They're suing someone based on what someone else did (and they haven't even proved that much in court). I hope the "victim" of SCO's suit couter-sues their asses into tomorrow.
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
Since when has anything SCO said made sense?
What is SCO going to gain by suing a well known company? Nothing! All they are doing is setting themselves up for the worst countersuit. The suit SCO is going to bring against "teh Fortune 1000 company" is going to get stuck in court until the IBM/SCO suit is finished. Then and only then is this NEW suit going to be resolved. I hope for SCO's sake, everyone in that company has somewhere else to go.
- I'm not creative enough to have a sig.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)... oops
Yeah, it's SCO and nothing do makes much sense, but wouldn't it make more sense to wait for the ruling in their primary case against IBM so that they can have a concrete leg to stand on before going off and suing copyright violators without having a definite declaration of copyright ownership?
I have been pwned because my
As other have pointed out, EV1 can't comply with SCO's linux license and still get Redhat patches, so there is actually a case that SCO can win against them now.
actually DOING it instead of saying...
I'll just be holding my breath over there, in the corner.
OK now let me make sure I have all of this straight. Wednesday is the day the SCO quarterly non-earnings report will be released, which most likely won't be good news. So, on Tuesday, the day before the report is released, SCO makes a stock, I mean lawsuit announcement. Do I detect a pattern here?
They are going to sue the corporation, the legal entity that has person like status.
And the corporation's lawyers will respond, "Sorry, we bought our Linux from (insert distributor here). You have take your claim to them, and you will receive any compensation you might be due directly from them for selling SCO IP without a valid license. Piss off."
KFG
"They're just asking for trouble (as the article points out) if they sue someone in a Fortune 1000 company."
I don't know if you can really get much worse than IBM. IBM's been around the block, they've been the bad dog, have more US patents than most nations have in their patent registry, and probably have more elite, fire-breathing IP layers than SCO has employees.
And SCO is suing for three billion.
Of course, more straw on the camel's back won't do them any good, but I fail to see how they could have picked a harder target than what they already have.
Cheers
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
If they win, that'll bring about a huge change.
for example, what about those companies which have purchased and used sun appliances, specifically the cobalt line of products as a network edge appliance for email or webhosting? or what about linksys/cisco for that matter, for home networking? sco could choose any company in the white pages, and chances are, somewhere in the enterprise is a linux based appliance (if not at the enterprise location, perhaps at a home office...).
face it sco, linux is everywhere, and there are foundation companies which are using/deploying it(sun, ibm, novell, cisco, nokia) and threatening one of their end users with your pathetic attempts will only cause more companies to join the team against you.
give it up! you lost!
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
"Tomorrow never comes" Vitalstatistix
"After all... tomorrow is another day" Scarlett O'Hara
heh, good luck passing that off on the /. crowd. You and I might know that distribution, not use, of unlicensed IP is a crime, but its like banging your head against the wall to try to explain that to anyone.
>Since when has anything SCO said made sense?
hey, it's a valid question! the concept of end user isn't objective, it depends on who you are:
of course if you just piss away your valuable dev time posting on slashdot, the end user is whoever has mod points...
2 1337 4 u!
What the HELL is going on? Why hasn't any govt. authorities put a stop to SCO yet? What exactly does SCO think they're doing?
They have NO case. We all know it. This would be like me tying up the legal system with a lawsuit against my neighbor because I chewed gum on a Thursday (aka Completely Utterly Frivolous).
It's a waste of our judicial system along with taxpayers' money. The federal govt along with any of these companies being sued by SCO should countersue the shit out of them. This is just stupid.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
it hardly matters who they sue, there will be a nearly instantaneous filing of an injunction until the case against IBM is done. Everything SCO would be suing on is currently part of another lawsuit. I have a hard time seeing any judge letter a second suit go forward while the facts of ownership are in question.
The company, Houston-based EV1Servers.Net has purchased site licenses from SCO for its two data centers for an undisclosed seven figure sum, according to SCO.
This has to be bullshit. There's no way that EV1 is going to pay 7 figures for a license from these pricks. They operate on a razor thin margin at $99 bucks per month per server. This is a bargin basement hosting facility. I call bullshit on this this statement. The price was probably:
$1,000,000 - License Fee
- $999,900 - Early Bird license discount.
___________
I want to see the additional 7 figures in the quarterly report. 7 figures my ass.
I imagine the only ones who can do that are actual Linux providers. The average person can't do anything. The law is not designed for the interests of free software.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Oh, I think it makes perfect sense in a kind of stupid way. Since SCO's just riding on fumes, they need to throw something like this out every few weeks. It's the only way for them to keep up the pretense that they're anything more than a paper tapeworm.. er.. tiger. Reliably, and gullibly, the tech press eats it up giving them a few more days of pseudo-credibility.
Really, the old on-line adage "don't feed the trolls" seems somehow appropriate.
I hate SCO, but damn. That would be some justice right there. As McBride yells, "This one's for Vlasic pickles!"
(You might not get that.. google for Wal-Mart and Vlasic"
SCO is either:
a) Going to pass this by, probably with a lot of angry geeks and scared company CEOs. Watch as their target "bought a license at the last minute" and they don't even disclose who it is.
b) Sue someone, get laughed out of court while trying to hold it as long as they can, and die anyway. Stealing people's money in the process for their license fees. Hopefully, the SEC will get off their ass and stop them.
That, or they could be trying the Kazaa trick.
The idea is, they can't possibly win, but they can attract lots and lots of attention to themselves because they can drag out the trial ad infinitum. By suing someone really big who people expect would have a strong case instead of someone small, people will apply the false analogy that SCO has a strong case and can win lots of cash.
I've heard many older folks repeatedly say that "trading music is okay now", because they've conflated the idea that Kazaa sued the RIAA with the idea that there happen to be legal places to buy music online. SCO is hoping that they can scum up the same type of conflation: "SCO is suing IBM for using that bad, bad linux thing (the one we saw on those IBM commercials), and Microsoft says Linux is bad..., and we use Windows at home... and..."
Seriously. Their stock is dropping.
http://financyahoo.e.com/q?s=SCOX
SCO is not a software company. It's a publicly traded lawsuit. They've delayed and delayed and delayed too long with IBM and the truth is getting out. If they don't start another lawsuit their entire business model is threatened.
The 7-figure sum was bothering me for a while. What idiot would give SCO more than a million dollars for a worthless license? It could just be a lie, of course, but one way for it to be "true" is if EV1 signed a long-term contract that's worth a total of $1 million over the life of the contract. After all, that's how football players' contracts are publicized -- it makes them sound bigger and more exciting.
EV1 might have agreed to pay SCO $1/year for the next million years, for all we know.
I would think that no disclaimer can get you out of trouble if it is found out that you sold someone something that was not yours to sell. If and when SCO loses their case against ibm and quite possibly loses to Novell as well then their claims on Linux will be false. (as if they were not already) If I go out and sell licenses on Microsoft software in addition to the ones companies already have and later it is proven that I have no right to sell such licenses then those companies have the right to get their money back or I am very likely in criminal law territory for fraud. No contract between two private parties can render a person or company immune from criminal liability and in the case of fraud such as selling something that is not yours to sell, the contract would be void anyways. IANAL but those half dozen big companies are big enough to convince the justice dept to send SCO's officers to prison for fraud when the time comes. Darl may very well end up where he belongs, well at least in club fed.
"McBride said the arrangement with EV1Servers.net is perpetual and that SCO doesn't offer companies their money back if courts later find SCO's claims baseless. It will bring in revenue that will be material to SCO's financial results, he added."
>>Come on, if SCO really did have them behind them they would be showing at least some sign of competency
Competecy? Are you kidding? This is stock scam, it's been going on for a year, and still going very strong. The market cap has been pumped from under $20 to over $150 million in a year. And scox was never worth even $20 million. This scam is way beyond competent.
Ever hear of the Mormon Mafia?
So basically what you're saying is, Microsoft has more money to spend on advertising and white papers than the Open Source people? Damn, who would have thought?
Well, not that SCO normally takes pains to tell the truth or anything, but the article did say that the company they'd be suing was not a technology company. So that rules out RedHat, Oracle, and Google. I think they'll probably sue someone whose lawyers aren't as well equipped to deal with the technical nature of a code-related IP lawsuit. It would only help to spread FUD to large companies who use Linux but aren't directly technology companies.
Besides, if Google did get sued, it wouldn't harm them that much, because of the IPO that they are releasing soon (hopefully).
:)
Really? You don't think so? Why was it that Google delayed that IPO again? Something about bad timing wasn't it?
Tomorrow, when SCO sues Google, I'm going to link back to this post*. How much longer can they keep this up? The whole story is starting to fall apart so why not have one last huge grandstand move and sue Google. Even your GrandMa has heard of Google, and what's that? MSNBC says some company is sueing them? Noone will ignore the press release, air will be gasped, monocles will pop out of eyes and ladies will swoon. But SCO stock will rise, and rich people will get richer and Darl will have to think of another more astonishing way to get peoples attention or we'll start to ignore him like we should. And SCO still won't have actually done anything.
*And of course, if they don't, I'm going to ignore it and hope no one notices
you're all figments of my deranged imagination
..is if SCO actually goes through with this and sues someone: Where are they going to find impartial jurors?
*Everyone* with enough technical background to fully understand the issue has been following this case in the news and lets face it: Most programmers have a pet OS. We're not the most impartial bunch.
Anyone without the IT backround could potentially be fooled by the silver-tongued army of SCO lawyers.
Stack overflow: pid 352258, proc httpd, addr 0x11f7ffff0, pc 0x12000195c Segmentation fault (core dumped)
The Fortune 500 company is almost certain to be a valid target of SCO's claim. Mind you, being a valid target does not validate the claim itself!
Which means that SCO must first validate their claim. Unlike the case of the movie where the ownership of the IP is a trivial matter, and only the just compensation for its use is in question, there is, as yet, no evidence that any of SCO's alleged IP is in Linux, which raises the issue of how it got there, which is through an entirely different manner than renting a DVD from Blockbuster, someone must have illegally put it there, and thus only the party that put it there can speak to that matter.
In other words, to use your analogy, the case inherently involves bootlegging by the distributor who then sold it to the user.
SCO would also have to demonstrate that use is a valid license issue. For a DVD, play or song such performance royalties, not use, are an issue of law. They are in the legal code. They are not in the code for software. In fact, under the Berne Convention, use of software is explicitly not a copyright violation. You cannot extrapolate copyright law from one medium to another.
Your analogy needs a bigger ass because the cases are not similar under law. I'm perfectly willing to view such a fuller assed analogy though and give it some thought.
KFG
Maybe. All depends on the judge. If it's a moron behind the bench, who somehow equates downloading Linux with downloading mp3s, then it's bad. If the judge has a lick of common sense, then it's good.
Actually, the better response would be "Your honour, the actual ownership of the IP in question has not been resolved yet, therefore we believe that this suit is premature, and ask for it to be held in abeyance until such time as SCO actually proves it owns what it is suing us for."
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
In your analogy the copyright owner would be suing the people who saw the movie. That's what SCO is doing. Suing the people in the movie theather for watching a stolen movie.
The best way to support the US war effort is to continue buying American products.
IANAL,
but I think the case is different.
Even if not indemnified, the Fortune 500 company has a license from it's distributor that sais that it is ok for them to use Linux.
So the company can argue that they have two contradictory statements (one from it's distributor, one from SCO), both without proof, and that it shouldnt be their job to resolve this contradiction, but that SCO should first clear the license issue with their distributor.
In your movie scenario, the theater has no license from Blockbuster that allows public presentation of the movie, thereof they cant claim that there were contradictory claims.
BTW, as SCO has (somewhat) admitted that there is no SysV code in Linux, all their claims hang on some AT&T/IBM contracts and some AIX code, that this Fortune 500 company has never seen. One more reason to argue that they arent qualified to judge SCO's claims and that SCO should settle the dispute with IBM first, or make public all relevant evidence so that everyone can evaluate the merrit of their claims.
Of course this doesnt prevent SCO from sueing whoever they want, but it gives a good reason to put the new case on hold till the IBM case is resolved.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
I don't think the SCO vs IBM case have much to do with this. The only copyright stuff in that case is about IBM continued to distribute AIX after SCO revoked their licence. The rest is breach of contract stuff, and unless the end user isn't a SCO customer there would be no such things for SCO to sue over. So once again the lesson to learn, don't do business with SCO.
The Novell case is much more interesting here as it deals with wether SCO really have any copyrights to Linux.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
this sounds more like a ransom demand than a legal strategy.
I'd say SGI. SCO said it was someone with a UNIX license and will include copyright claims. SGI did have that little triffle with the memory code that was written for an arch that was never actually sold and thus never compiled into binary form and run on a real piece of hardware.
SGI is also a Linux contributor, and McBride once said that they'll have their day in court with SGI (or words to that effect).
But.
But? But what if the whole thing's for show, and TSG intend to go down in flames? Perhaps in exchange for golden parachutes all around from someone. Pull a name out of my ass at random, say it's Microsoft?
Looked at that way, their actions make more sense. Sick sense, yes, but lots more of it.
Well they were stupid enough to sign a contract for a BINARY ONLY LICENSE while at least some of their customers are busy customizing the kernels on EV1's machines they lease. EV1 can't stop their customers doing this under the GPL, so they've pretty much asked to be sued by somebody.
How are they going to choose this end user to sue? Are they going to randomly pick an entry from there web server log that contains a referer with linux, and then use RIAA tactics to obtain a supeana to gather your information from you ISP?
No, the sad commentary was on the way that individuals sabbotage themselves. Let's say I had a fervent belief that copyright was an evil and felt that I had to sacrafice myself as a praxis in the social revolution to repeal the copyright laws themselves...I am likely to sabbotage my case by venting my anger at the law itself.
If, on the otherhand, I was just Joe businessman running a shop and getting an annoyance lawsuit from SCO; I would be more apt to focus on the case and to listen to good legal advice on how to win my case.
A person's beliefs affect the way they act. It affects the way they present their arguments, who they choose to represent them, etc.. This is not prejudice on the part of the court, but the beliefs of an organization can affect the outcome of lawsuits.
Oh what a tawdry, petty thing this democracy has become... I don't know whether you intended it or not, but your post is brilliantly ironic about the dismal state of our democracy.
Where people more interested in the tone of voice than the ideas.
Where people more interested in hair styles than Social Security.
Where people who would rather feel as if they were just consuming another product they may judge by the pretty packaging and ad campaign.
Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
What I find interesting is that they are (apparently) planning to sue one of their own customers! How stupid would anyone have to be to sign a contract with them?
This is a classic strategy of fraudsters, like salespersons who cheat the elderly out of their money. Find someone who is weak and milk them until they have nothing left.
I'm pretty sure they'll follow through on the threat this time. The reason? SCO has an earnings call on March 3. While their legal case is pretty clearly going nowhere, they do seem media-savvy enough to know that a loudly-trumpeted lawsuit against a high-profile company will distract the analyst/media community enough to help them avoid questions they'd rather not answer.
Something that disturbs me, and I don't see it mentioned here, is that SCO has not proven their case in court. Don't they have to prove their claims before they can sue anybody?