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."

Comments

Follow the money

[erick99]

I went to Ameritrade and did some research on SCO. At the end of last year they had $64M in cash which is not very much money. They are a very small company (comparatively) in the IT world with not even 100M a year in revenues. They have three insiders that sold stock or excercised stock options to the tune of almost $300M in Feb/Mar of this year. I don't understand what would keep them afloat for more than a year. They have negative earnings-per-share and they have a estimated share price of $5 at the end of this year (currently at $9.50). SCO would be better served by having someone at the helm that had a real interest in technology. McBride is inarticulate, mean-spirited, and an opportunist. I wonder if SCO can stay in business long enough to see their various law suits to a conclusion.

Happy Trails!

Erick

eWeek clarifies - Linus replies re: "tainting"

[gsfprez]

Linus says clearly

"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.

Re:it's basically true -- no point in denying it

[Paul Jakma]

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).

Re:What gets me...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What gets me...

[back_pages]

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).

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.

The World According to Darl

[Hut_Mul]

"We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code," - Darl McBride, 5/1/2003

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.