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MS Word File Reveals Changes to SCO's Plans
jfruhlinger writes "Ah, the joys of 'track changes' in MS Word: metadata in a document obtained by Cnet reveals some earlier plans by SCO's legal team. Among them: to sue in February (their original target date), to sue Bank of America, to 'impound ... all Linux software products in the custody or control of Defendant through the pendency of these proceedings', and to accuse in court 'Linus Torvalds and/or others' of 'inclusion into one or more distributions of Linux with the copyright management information intentionally removed.' Good stuff." Also, SCO has announced a few new licensees including Computer Associates.
Ironically, UC Berkeley is also going to be a licensee!!
With SCO being all about their Unix IP, you would think they would prefer to use their own product when writing legal proceedings, instead they use Microsofts....
Memories become legend, Legend fades to myth, and even myth is forgotten by the time that age comes again.-Robert Jordan
I'd be interested to know how many companies got the warning letter from SCO and tossed it in the circular file instead of replying to it.
If I'm not mistaken, SCO filed suit against DC because they never received a response to their letter. I wonder how many more they'll file based on lack of replies.
Anyone able to find a link to the word file? I'd like to see this for myself in its entirety. I did a quick search on Google and didn't turn it up.
IANAL. But suppose a case is brought to court that includes, as part of its collection of evidence, a Word document that tracks changes in much the same way that the Word document in the article apparently did. Could a prosecutor who, for example, sees among the "invisible ink" Neo-Nazi writings by the accused, be able to use that as evidence against him? Could he furthermore deduce "motive" and "intent" from that evidence? On one hand, he is able to glean the evidence simply because something *WAS* there. But that's just the problem: It was in the past, but it has been editted out and substituted by the weekly grocery list of the accused. Would he then be able to point to the "change log", so to speak, and build his case on that?
I would have loved to have seen them try to impound all that equipment. BOA would have destroyed them outright.
Anyone know who SCO banks with?
I can't find where it says who got this document or why it was even in the form of a Word doc. Why don't they spend some dollars for some software to barf out .pdf's instead..?
p
somehow this happened.
* SCO Group Inc (The) SCOX 11.66 +0.07 (0.60%)
How? What idiot would buy stock now? Microsoft, in a last ditch attempt to give them a shread of crediability? People willing to take a million to one odds that they win any of these lawsuits?
SAILING MISHAP
Or perhaps just find notes left by Darl in their MS Word(tm) contract that was sent to them. "Template for Linux contract for use in money embezelment" or "/*This provision will allow us to sue later*/
Seriously, with huge fast hard drives, why does MS Office try to write quickly rather than correctly and space-efficiently? For example, I work on powerpoints that get modified all the time. Every time they are saved, unless substantial information was *deleted*, the file gets larger. If you delete something and recreate it, the file will grow. If you copy and paste something anything in, the file grows substantially even if you delete it. If complex slide(s) are pasted in, this growth can be monsterous. I've seen simple presentations that have grown to 100MB (that is not a typo) from editing.
In seeking relief from the courts, the original version of the document also said that it sought: "impounding all Linux software products in the custody or control of Defendant through the pendency of these proceedings;"
What kind of drug were they on when they thought that a court would allow them to impound all "linux software products" (impounding the hardware would be easier) before the trial had been decided? Proving irreperable harm to SCO would be very hard, and taking all of these computers from BofA would cause incredible harm. No judge would allow such a thing.
Which makes me wonder... who even suggested this - SCO management or their lawyers? Is the management that clueless/reckless?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I've never understood why people send out an edittable format (yes, OOo and SGML are edittable; I prefer to send a PDF) when they're disseminating what is conceptually read-only information. Does anyone who receives these lawsuit documents have any reason to edit them?
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
another often overlooked "feature" is good old ^Z (undo). back many years ago (i think before track changes even existed) i was a t.a. for a professor who wanted all assignments turned in with word. if you got two similar assignments all you needed to do was bang on ^Z for a while and you'd see where they changed the name from the origial author to the current one. kinda fun.
The KKK and some other interesting organisations host in EV1's datacenter. I'm sure that's not the kind of relationship you meant but it's funny because there is in fact a relationship between them :)
I know the change tracking feature has some uses, but the security problems it can result in just scare me. This incident is the perfect example. Why doesn't microsoft have a simple button or menu item labelled "Publish" that creates a file containing only what you see. No change tracking. No meta data. Just the document.
I think a better option is to keep the document in source control though. Has anybody out there intentionally picked a source control system for their Word documents over the built-in change tracking? How has that worked out?
...so we can TURN IT OFF.
"And in other news, gravity continues to pull things together!"
You obviously never heard of the penny stock scams that originated in Utah in the 70s... or seen Ruben & Ed... or noticed that everyone and their grandma is a member of a multi-level marketing group...
Welcome to Utah. Home of the lily-white, MBA, fly-by-night, "capitalism"-with-no-laws dorks.
Actually, this data, eventhough hidden from view normally, can be entered in a case directly against SCO. There was a similar case where Laywer A was attempting to setting with Laywer B, and there client was going to settle on a much higher amount, but Laywer B had them decrease it ... and you guessed it, they were using MS Word, so the orginial text of the higher amount was saved, and got sent to Laywer A, who noticed it, and then was able to force Laywer B and his client to settle on the higher amount. I could see this being entered as SCO was attempting to sue anyone, once there was ANY shred of proof the company was connected to Linux. This might just be another nail in the box for SCO, and for once, I have to say thanks to Micro$oft because there "feature" (and I use that term lightly) might just help SCO loose.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
Harvard calls its teaching assistants TFs (teaching fellows)...
The thing is though, you can't escape this kind of security breach by switching formats. The security breach is caused by people not understanding the tools they work with. That's only fixable through education.
Thugs doing extortion on a "little guy" does not make the news. The EV1 deal is only the tip of the iceburg, and we know little about it. Did Microsoft back EV1? Dunno. Did SCO make the whole thing up for more pump and dump? Dunno.
I believe that people are starting to catch on. Look at this 3month trend. And look at what the people in the know are doing with their stock.
I don't understand. Can someone detail the problem? I mean, if I create a doc, with track changes on, and then I "accept" (make permanent) the changes, doesn't that clear out the historical information?
That's exactly the point.
I *am* one and I *am* from Utah.
The business climate here is corrupt and out of control. Probably because of the overwhelming one-type of demographic here.
Good grief, just read the local newspapers and you won't wonder why the people at Caldera think they can get away with it.
It's really insane actually. Alot of Mormons are just "Mormons" for the business relations.
A little-bity place inhabited by nuts. Sad really.
If Microsoft has its way, once the business world implements encryption and secure distribution policies for word documents, we can say goodbye to whistleblowing.
This, to me, is a chilling prospect.
SCO has a standard M&F clause in their license. Is there a state that does not allow such clauses where SCO could be sued because Unixware is a POS and isn't fit for anything? Just wondering if one of the folks sued by SCO might do business in such a state and be inclined to sue SCO and make it stick?
Ooops...
I've been a linux user for years, and I had no idea that Autozone, Daimler-Chrysler, and BofA all used linux on a widespread basis.
I'll just bet PHB's are thinking more about Linux, thanks to all the SCO press.
I love irony.
1. sue former customers that have gone to IBM
2. avoid mentioning SCO code ending up in the linux kernel, rather bring up unrelated issues
3. try to tie it to linux in press releases
they might have some success getting media attention, but i strongly doubt that this will get them anywhere in court
Leaving aside the authenticity of this story or the stupidity of SCO, doesn't this case illustrate why it is stupid to build a track changes feature into your word processor? Especially one that where a document file carries all of its revisions with it.
There ain't no joy in MS Word.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
They own UNIX, not Windows; they should have used groff, troff or tex with vi as the favorite editor (emacs stinks like communism, would not be a suitable choice for them)
One of my best friends works for their IT ops in Dallas. The vast majority of their regular enterprise apps are all Windows-based. Exchange for corporate email, SQL Server for small and medium databses, etc, but they do run a lot of Oracle backend databases on really big IBM RS/6000 AIX boxes. Their website is via Netscape Enterprise frontend running on a huge-ass Sun cluster that hands everything off to Cold Fusion on Solaris which in turn hands a lot of stuff off to IIS on internal Windows boxes to do the dirty work behind the scenes. Linux is only used by some developer geeks, not in IT production use. All the stuff you see at your local BofA branch banks around the country is all Windows desktops. Hell even the ATMs are all Windows 2000 too. They got rid of the last of the OS/2-based ATMs some time ago.
I think they are hoping to tie up the courts to the point where they are too busy to throw the book at the SCO executives while at the same time counting on their legal carpet-bombing strategy nets them some settlement profits.
They have a few more tricks up their sleeve...from another news(.com)^2 article:
Linux, which runs well on inexpensive Intel processor-based servers, has become increasingly popular despite SCO's actions. Linux has even spread to the Web site of the U.S. District Court in Nevada, where SCO filed its suit against AutoZone, according to site monitoring firm NetCraft.
Soooo...if the courts threaten to dismiss SCOs case and/or charge them with fraud, they can just sue the court system itself!
Google this: "canopy ca settlement"
Canopy Group (parent of SCO) and Center 7, another Canopy subsidiary, had a joint marketing arrangement with CA. Canopy claims that CA welshed. Canopy and Level 7 sued CA. The suit was settled with a $40 million payment.
I seem to recall, but I can't find a link, that other terms of the suit were that CA buy some Linux licenses. That would fit in with Canopy's plans.
Link to the settlement
Umm, sure. This has been gone over a dozen times in as many places. Probably won't happen. There is a pretty explicit clause in the license that says if their claim is proven bunk, that you ain't getting your money back. EV1 took that chance, in a way, putting in that vote of confidence that SCO is right.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I tried to buy a license. They refused to sell me one because I wasn't incorporated yet. I told them I was starting a small enterprise with a Linux web server that did not as yet exist, but was in the works. They even refused to give me information on what their product was and if it would protect me from a lawsuit. The only thing I got was this form letter.
Dear Mr. [name witheld to protect me from getting sued],
Thank you for your inquiry to obtain an SCO IP license. At this time, we have announced the license availability for commercial users only. If you wish to pursue a commercial IP license, please enclose the following information.
Corporate Name, Corporate Phone and Address, Corporate officers names and titles, distribution of Linux and release/rev information. Once we have received your updated information, we will contact you with the purchase requirements.
Thank you for your interest in SCO.
SCO
That was what they sent me in answer to a request about what their product was. I followed up but they did not respond to any correspondance I sent.
I am not an expert in this kind of thing, but if I were a large company thinking about buying a license, I would think twice. Buying a license is more likely to get you involved in a lawsuit and it might violate the GPL, opening you up to a lawsuit from any developer who ever contributed to Linux and void your ability to use Linux and barring you from using Linux. You are better off paying a one time penalty than being bound by a SCO license. Buying a SCO license will not make your problems go away, it will only make them worse. Basically what they are doing is going around saying that WE WILL SUE YOU over copyright violations. But the license (which I later read because they finally released copy of it) only sells a useless/unnamed product called 'IP' and does not give any assurances and only restricts rights of Linux users. Read the fine print, you get NOTHING. It does not indemnify you. They are entirely geared towards going after and exploiting existing Linux users based on fear of a lawsuit, they are not geared at providing a service to potential users or a useful product that does something. Their license does not make a single hard claim to any specific Linux product and does nothing but restrict your rights.
Only an idiot would buy this license. It is completely asinine. DO NOT BUY A LICENSE. It is an open ended legal liability.
They will bring ruin on your company.
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
SCO owns the copyrights to UNIX, right ?
I know the actual details are in dispute, but the fact is that SCO/Caldera purchased _something_ from Novell, for around $100m. Whether it is the full UNIX copyright or not, lets just call it 'the intellectual property in question'.
Now that SCO is in it's final days, and will end up bankrupt and disgraced real soon now, what is the likely fate of this intellectual property in question ?
Who, or what is standing by the sidelines ready to collect this intellectual property in question when SCO falls down ?
Either IBM will buy it up and formally release it into the public domain once and for all, or Dr Evil will pick it up, and take off from where SCO left off.
Maybe we could do a blender, and put in a community effort to purchase this intellectual property in question, and then do the right thing by it.
The hype surrounding the SCO vs Linux issue is pointless. Some Open Source code writer will post a patch that replaces the SCO mentioned code with new code. Call it reverse-engineering. Call it reinventing-the-wheel. Whaterver. I bet that this patch would be implementd quickly, thus negating SCO's case and putting another failed company out of it's missery. This could have been ended months ago!
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
I doubt what you say is true for two primary reasons:
1) The interfaces to any modern OS are virtually the same. And particularly amongst Unix-like variants, there are certainly fundamental differences in system code, but experienced programmers will use standard c/c++ libraries that are implemented on pretty much every unix-like OS. So if you're trying to do a port of a simple text-based application, the user interface code is a piece of cake because you're writing VT100 level stuff. And the back-end is generic "C" code that will probably compile on any machine with little tweaking.
2) More importantly, without the source code to SCO, how could customers do all this code stealing? Unless SCO distributes source with their OS, but I never heard that before. So how can you steal what you don't have access to?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Yes, ESR gets the math wrong.
Stowell of course is just trying to spin it favourable for SCO. Stowell and McBride are well known liars in my opinion, so why would we trust them?
But forget that, here's another and possibly better SCO story:
Note the word 'insurance'. McBride basically is admitting to racketeering!
I'll bet this will come back to haunt him in court filings in the future.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
All this makes it easy to do "remote network discovery" on some poor sap's company. Oh, and for those IE exploits that rely on a known filename/location, this makes it a snap to "discover" a file location, and then do a little social engineering to get your victem to go to mal.com and click on a link...
Thank you, Microsoft! What do you want to expose today?
Yeah, right.
You would be amazed how poorly the GPL and other Free licenses are understood by the staff - managerial and especially technical - at most companies that do software development. I believe there are a couple of factors that explain the ignorance - on the managerial side, it takes a major change in mindset to "get" the idea of the GPL, most managers just have not gone through the process yet.
On the technical side, far too many developers are stereotypical "heads-down," "why do I have to take history/literature/philosophy/etc courses at college when I am here for a computer science degree?" types who don't know and don't want to know the way the licenses work - instead it's, "if the code is there, it must be free."
Neither are valid excuses, but the point is basically, "never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by stupidity."
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Posted by Terry, on Groklaw on why SCO is not currently going after Bank of America:
If you look at the time frame involved it makes sense. In TSG's second motion to amend against IBM they use the DMCA as part of the complaint based on the removal / alteration of copyright material.
In the analysis of some of the files presented on Groklaw it appears that there exist quite a variety of copyright information on the same file depending on its ancestry. If TSG could make a basis of a copyright claim this could trigger certain DMCA violation.
So on 2/6/2004 we have the 2nd amended complaint with DMCA charges in it. We also have TSG with registered copyrights conflicting with Novell. But that's OK, as TSG is working on clarifying this in court. Plus, it is possible for two parties to have valid compilation copyrights that reflect "version" or "derivation" content.
Then, on 2/9/2004 Novell throws a big wrench in the works with the Motion to Dismiss. Up till that time the copyrights were contested, however with the motion to dismiss Novell stated in a legal document that they were not transferred. That line drawn, no party can pursue DMCA charges until ownership is cleared up by the courts.
The BA thing was using the "takedown" provisions of the DMCA. Post official notice of contest on 2/9 in Utah court, no judge in the USA was going to use a takedown based on unclear title against some company like BA.
Then some legal eagle's secretary just recycled the BA complaint to fit the new victim. Wonder who's going to lose their job? The nice thing is that this may help wake up corporate America as to how dangerous the DMCA can be in the wrong hands. Maybe some of the "mainline" press will pick up on this also.
The current Bank of America is the result of legacy BofA's 1999 acquistion by NationsBank. The new organization is headquartered in Charlotte, NC - the second largest banking center in the US, behind NYC.
Bank of America has a several major points of presence across the US, including TX, CA, points in the great plains, and now in NY and New England, as a result of the recently announced merger with Fleet.
BofA, or any other North Carolina bank can hardly be considered "some southern outfit" - many of the top banks, brokerage firms, and other financial services companies in the US are headquartered there, or have major offices in there. Bank of America, Wachovia (formerly First Union National Bank), BB&T, First Charter, TIAA CREF, and Compass Group all have major presences or headquarters here. Deutsche Bank, ABN AMRO, and Citigroup are all adding sizable operations to the Charlotte area.
Any way you look at it, by fake-slapping Bank of America, SCO sends a message to that entire sector - an industry that is very risk adverse. Essentially saying "BOO!" to that bunch of scared children in our legal department.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."