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SCO Changes Tune, Again: Linux Now Just a Riff on Unix
dr3vil writes "eWeek publishes an interview with SCO's Darl McBride and Chris Sontag about the IBM lawsuit. SCO now claim that Linux is a 'nonliteral implementation' of Unix, and compare their claim to those involving Harry Potter rip-offs and Vanilla Ice versus David Bowie and Queen." And ronaldb64 writes "Yahoo Business has a nice summary of the last couple of months of stock movement of SCO, and the reasons why. It contains quotes from business analysts ('Win or lose, the outcome is at least a couple of years away' - 'In the interim, we know the company is going to burn through its cash balance.'), the lack of interest in SCO licenses, the effect the license purchase of EveryOne Ltd. had, and its continuing battle with Novell. The explanation given by pro- and contra-SCO activists is interesting: the pro-SCO group (in the form of SCO CFO Robert Bench) says it is because SCO has been laying low lately, the contra-SCO group (in the form of Eben Moglen) says it is because investors are beginning to understand how weak SCO's case is."
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
"In other words," Torvalds said, "there is no code taint that I'd be afraid of, since no such tainted code exists in the kernel. There is only the issue of SCO's NDA. And, at least back then, Darl was aware of the issue, so this is not a question of misunderstanding. It's a question of Darl knowingly misrepresenting the truth."
like his code, his words are to the point and clear.
Fuck Darl, he's a kockbite.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
OS X is a NeXT derivative with some *BSD
No, OS X is NeXTSTeP with updated BSD. NeXT already was a BSD userspace on top of Mach. OS X just updates it from 4.2BSD (or 4.3, i dont remember exactly which 4.x) to FreeBSD (4?). The major changes were in the addition of the MacOS compat layer (Cocoa?) and much work on refining the UI - but its still essentially, IIUC, display postscript (oops, updated to display PDF, iirc) graphics engine with the OpenSTeP API (oops, called carbon now isnt it?). I dont know if OS X uses Objective C as its primary language of choice for its APIs as OpenSTeP did though (but judging by the docs on apple.com, ObjC bindings are supported).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Do you have health care coverage?
Do you have parents or grandparents that are retired and have social security?
These are socialist ideas, a purely capitalistic society would not provide anything for anyone without pay. If you can't pay for that heart surgery, you die. Speak to the Ayn Rand cultists if you are interested in such a society.
1929 was not just another "down". it was a heart attack. America was saved by grafting socialist ideas such as unemployment benefit and government-sponsored jobs ("boondoggling").
Elcorton notes that SCO's First Amended Complaint against AutoZone, section 19, asserts, "The Copyrighted Materials include protected expression of code, structure, sequence and/or organization in many categories of UNIX System V functionality ..."
Elcorton writes, "The phrase 'structure, sequence and/or organization' comes from the opinion of the Third Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in the 1986 case Whelan Associates v Jaslow Dental Laboratory, in which the court held that some non-literal elements in the design of software could be protected by copyright. This precedent was cited in a number of cases for the next several years. But in 1992, the Second Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, ruling in the case Computer Associates v Altai, rejected Whelan, and imposed its own much more stringent test for determining whether a software copyright is infringed."
A former CA employee went to work for Altai, taking code from the disputed program with him. Unbeknownst to his employers at Altai, he copied CA's code line for line into a utility being developed by Altai.
After CA brought suit against Altai, the programmer confessed that he had copied code wholesale from the CA program into the Altai product.
Altai executives commenced a "clean room" rewrite of their utility, locking away the tainted code and excluding the offending programmer from the rewrite.
The Second Circuit found in favor of CA on the literal copying, but found against CA on its assertion that the rewritten program also violated its copyrights.
If you can't pay for that heart surgery, you die.
Pure capitalism doesn't prohibit others from paying the cost (perhaps the doctor would work without pay, or many other possibilities that can and do happen today without government involvement).
Pure capitalism prohibits the government from forcibly seizing one persons property to transfer to another person.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
a) you do not "assign" copyrights to GPL. The author retains copyrights, but the code is licenced through the GPL.
b) The required notice is the GPL. Everything in the kernel is covered by that statement and licence. SCO distributed the kernel with the GPL.
Don't trust SCO. Read the GPL yourself.
And the other side of that coin is that it doesn't save the sick and the old from being beggars whose survival depends on the mercy of others. That pretty much brings us full circle to the original poster's complaint. Without some flavor of socialized health care, if you can't afford the medicine, you are left for dead -- Oh, unless you beg appropriately or someone takes pity on you.
The rich stay healthy and the sick stay poor. Capitalism will never adjust that situation.
Mr McBride asserts that there is line-by-line code copied into the Linux Kernel
"When you look in the code base and you see line-by-line copy of our Unix System V code... you see that everything is taken straight across. Everything is exactly the same except they have stripped off the copyright notices and pretended it was just Linux code. There could not be a more straightforward case on the Linux side." - Darl McBride, 6/27/2003
Darl is confident that the SCO case is just and good. It couldn't be any more straightforward. The line-by-line copying is so blatant that SCO will win.
"To date, we claim that more than one million lines of UNIX System V protected code have been contributed to Linux through this model. The flaws inherent in the Linux process must be openly addressed and fixed." - Darl McBride, 9/9/2003
Millions, and millions lines of code have been copied right into the Linux kernel!
"A lot of code that you'll be seeing coming on in these copyright cases is not going to be line-by-line code. It will be more along the lines of nonliteral copying, which has more to do with infringement." - Darl McBride, 4/1/2004
Darl.. what happened? For the last year there has been line-by-line copying from UNIX V to Linux. Now "when the rubber hit's the road" that line-by-line thing isn't happening. It is more along the lines of infringement? I'm so disappointed.
Even better, from reading the article -
We don't have to knock out the GPL for us to succeed on the copyright issue. The GPL itself supports, in a lot of ways, our positions. Section 0 of the GPL states that the legit copyright holder has to place a notice assigning the copyright over to the GPL.
All these contributions of our IP did not have an assignment by SCO saying here, 'We assign these copyrights to the GPL.' The fact that we participated with Linux does not mean that we inadvertently contributed our code to the GPL. You can't contribute inadvertently to Linux. We feel we have a very strong position based on the GPL.
Sorry, but you don't assign copyrights to the GPL. The GPL is a licence. A licence is not a potental copyright holder. You don't need to assign the copyright to anyone in order to licence your work under the terms of this licence.
Even better, lets look at section 0 of the GPL to see what it really says.
0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains
a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
under the terms of this General Public License.
Where does it talk about copyright assignment here? Where?
I've given a fair amount of thought to economic systems. The first step is to admit that capitalism is flawed. It is not the end all and be all system that gives us exactly what we want. It does tend to work better than the other systems tried so far, but it is a poor substitute for what we as a society seem to really want. (What sicko is really happy that people are unemployed as opposed to accepting it as an unavoidable problem in capitalism)?
At the same time, the various other isms seem to fall apart rather quickly in most cases. They certainly do not seem to work.
Socialism sort of solves the unemployment problem, but produces a situation where the workers almost wish they WERE unemployed. Productivity tends to become nearly non-existant. Nobody tends to get what they want, only the bare necessities are met (just)
Most of the other isms are little more than a scheme to allow a small class to live in luxury while the masses struggle for subsistance.
Capitalism suffers the perverse problem of like attracting like. It's expensive to be poor, but the more money you have, the easier it is to make more. If you have $10,000 to deposit, you get free checking with interest. If you have no money to deposit, you get to pay 5% of your (tiny) income to a check casher and pay for money orders. Poor people lose deposits and flush rent down the drain. Wealthier people build equity. It's cheaper to own a home than to rent, but you can't own a home if you don't have a down payment.
While socialism holds a gun to your head (perhaps literally), capitalism is no less coercive. Starvation and homelessness is a powerful motivator. That is a coercian so pervasive that it goes unnoticed (until you become unemployed).
Clearly, in capitalism, the path to freedom is business ownership. However, that requires money and a skillset that only some people have. Society needs people with that skillset, but also needs doctors, engineers, carpenters, etc.
I don't have a fully developed alternative to capitalism that works, but I do have a few ideas.
One direction is pervasive automation. Not just automated production lines and welding robots, but robots that make and repair robots. The cost of anything in a healthy capitalist market is driven towards the marginal cost of production. If sufficient automation is in place, it is entirely concievable (though not yet realizable) that the entire chain of production could be automated. That includes gathering raw materials, energy production, transportation, and maintainance of all of the machines. At that point, the real marginal cost is zero. The only obstacle is that someone will own those machines and won't allow them to run for free even though they could. The problem is that starting from a capitalist system, we will never reach the automated ideal. During the transition, most people would end up unemployed, and the cost of things will never quite reach zero.
One possability is a hybrid system. For that, we start with the idea that food, clothing, shelter, medical care, transportation, communication and education are rights. Recieving those from the state is not a form of societal charity, it is simply the recognition of those rights.
That is not as unreasonable as a capitalist might think at first glance. After all, simply being born obligates an individual to obey the law and potentially to serve in the millitary, and all but obligates the person to participate in the economy, so it is only reasonable that society in turn has an obligation to the individual.
So far, it sounds like socialism. The capitalist part is that while those basics are rights other posessions must be paid for just like now in the U.S.
I maintain that such a system will actually encourage capitalism. MOST people actually can't stand to just do nothing and live off of the state if given a choice. Sure, a lot of people might lay around the house for a while given the chance, but eventually, boredom will drive them to hobbies, and ho