Slashdot Mirror
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."
"In the interim, we know the company is going to burn through its cash balance.",
The saddest part is that this money goes to lawyers and only lawyers, who'll just opt for the luxury version of their next car or shop for the more expensive waterfont summer property. Think if that money went anywhere else--charities, disaster funds, education, investment, open source funding--you name it. Dozens of
G-Force music visualization
Q: Why do you think SCO can win?
McBride: When I look at our case, I think anyone who has a rational mind would come down to the same conclusions I do.
You mean, just like IBM, and the FOSS movement in general?
Sorry no more responses allowed after this, or else I'll sue you for non-literal illiterate literation.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
King Feature Syndicates claims Star Wars is "nonliteral implementation" of Flash Gordon, sues Lucasfilm for $10 billion.
Investors are simply beginning to understand how weak SCO's case is.
Then why is Microsoft still invested... Oh, wait a minute...
I noticed Sim-SCO was one of the first to die off.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, a guy name Harry Potter invented a new type of ice cream and used a David Bowie song and the image of the Queen of England to sell it. He got sued but the case was thrown out.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1404303,00.as p
Yet the Arse of Lindon continues to distribute (unsupported) Apache as well as other F/OSS products which adhere to the GPL.
Need we any other evidence of the duplicity of these scumbags?
Someone, please shut his piehole. I am sick and tired of listening to the lies and FUD and blastant misrepresentations made by this company and its executives and lawyers (same thing?).
SCO marketeers must have just relized that their lawsuit is in effect telling the public, and in particular the business public, that Linux is Unix for free. Otherwise, why sue?
SCOX definately should be sorted.
That company no longer has the ability to sustain itself from day to day operations.
Or Maybe it's better to buy 1 share of SCOX, wipe my ass with it, and mail it back to Darl McBride. It's just too hard to say what gives me more pleasure.
As I type I am (should be) working on a simple login function. It works pretty much the same as every other one ever written... including a unix login... wonder if I'm next to be sued.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
There are different standards for software than there is for a work of fiction - in a work of fiction, if you have the same characters or the same plot, it looks like plagiarism; but software is about applications (in the generic sense of "things you do"), and one can pretty easily see that a certain amount of workalike implementation would be necessary for competition to be possible. IANAL, but if I were at the business end of this lawsuit, I'd ask my lawyer if the whole MS vs. Apple "look and feel" decision didn't set a damning (to SCO's position) precedent in this area.
Now that lawyers are jumpin'
Billy Gates' cash in, and my analysts pumpin'
Insider trades, all the sales I'm makin'
Cooking short sellers like a pound of bacon
Burning them - if they're not quick and nimble
I go crazy when I see the symbol
of my high stock - S-C-O-X tempo,
I'm on a roll, it's time to go solo
(Rollin!) In shareholder dough,
Press releasin' now, up my stock will go,
Pamela's on standby, tryin' just to ask "why"?
(Did you stop?) No! I just drove by,
Kept on - I'm filin' to the next suit,
Judge busts me down, so I gotta try a new truth, -
That truth was dead, yo, so I continued to,
(IBM) - Lawsuit avenue!
Darl and Chris, wearing less than bikinis,
*** VIEWER PROTECTION FAULT - CORE DUMPED ***
So now Linux is Bad because it's Similar to UNIX.
Did Darl ever bother to explain under which portions of copyright law, exactly, it is legal or a civil infringement for Linux to be Similar to UNIX?
Just checking.
Actually, you should do your homework. The Linux Kernel may provide basically the same Unix interfaces and API's, but in many areas the Linux Kernel does things completely different than the Unixes before it...
The eWeek article has some interesting quotes by Sontag, indicating that he has no clue what the GPL is, what copyright is, and what a license in general is. Sad really.
Sontag: 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.
The GPL is a license under which copyrighted material can be used by others, it is not an entity to which copyright can be assigned (transferred). Sontag seems to think that the GPL == the FSF, or something along those lines.
It is perfectly possible to "inadvertently" license your copyrighted material to someone else under conditions you don't approve of. The solution is to create a new license to distribute your works under to new people, not to pretend you never did it in the first place.
I also love this part:
Sontag: We feel very covered under the GPL itself, and second, U.S. and international copyright law does not allow for inadvertent assignments of copyrighted material; the copyright holder must make an explicit assignment, typically in writing, in a contract. If that's the strongest argument that's out there that SCO has a big problem here, that's a molehill as far as we're concerned.
This crap is right out of Novell's Motion to Dismiss and Notice of Removal. Novell argues that US Copyright law requires very strict wording to assign copyright, and it does. Unfortunately for this gang of thieves, the GPL is not an entity copyright can be assigned to.
Pierre
Well, this is an interesting point. 10 or 15 years ago, CS was the hot thing to study in school. The Internet was new, the money was fantastic , now it's changed to law. All the kids will be going to law school, because it is now the hot thing, and the money was fantastic .
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
This is what SCO license demand letters were meant for.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Linux is a kernel. It copies POSIX specs, if anything. If anything, GNU are the ones who "copied" UNIX, and did so over a decades ago, but even that is a false argument.
At the heart, we have to ask 'what is UNIX?' Is it the core userspace tools? Then "copying" UNIX has already been shown to be OK, as BSD "copied" (read that "replaced") UNIX bit-by-bit while AT&T had it available to the schools.
Is it a kernel? If so, then SCO's claim of Linux 'copying' UNIX is meritless, as all it does is impliment POSIX calls so UNIX programs can compile and run on it. Behind the scenes they differ immensly, hammered home by the fact that SCO talked of adding a Linux compatibility layer to their UNIX product a few years back, but dropped it because it just would have been too difficult to impliment IIRC.
If UNIX is everything that runs on the 'UNIX' kernel, then there's never been a UNIX. Ever. Because each 'UNIX'(AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Sun OS) has been so drastically different that it has been the major reason UNIX never hit it big until someone came who didn't trying to block other vendors out and prevented others from using it to in turn block other vendors. (Namely, GNU/Linux) Had HURD pushed forward and been the default GNU kernel, perhaps they would have some theoretical merit, but HURD is also drastically different, being a mircokernel design and all the spiffy stuff that comes with that.
To say "Linux copies UNIX" is to say "Timex copies sundials." They have a common ancestory, serve similar roles, but vary greatly in implimentation.
This has more to do with sequence, organization, which is copyright-protectable.
And most cars have doors, windows and 4 tires. Perhaps all of the auto companies should sue each other for making similiar items.
If this is the best they can do they have a hard road ahead.
Got Code?
...It's the terror of knowing
What these lawsuits are about.
SCO investors screaming
Let me out.
Press-release tommorow - get the stock high, High, Hiiiiiiiiiiiiggh
Pressure on SCO - SCO on the brink.
Under pressure.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
There is no such thing in Copyright law which says this. Unless you have a line-by-line copy of a significant amount of code, you're chances at proving infringement are remote, at best. If you'll notice SCO has progressively backed down it's case again and again.
:)
:)
We've gone from "full blown copying of 1M+ lines" to "no copying, but those are our derived works" to "we claim these header files" to "Linux is a riff on UNIX". Oh, please.
Come on, Darl, you mean to tell me you think that someone can't write something *similar* to something else without infringing?
What about Free DOS and the myriad of other OSes out there. Hell, according to this logic, Windows would infringe. Why don't you go sue MS? Oh wait, that would be biting the hand that feeds you.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
This is standard operating procedure in intellectual property litigation -- even if you have a good claim. First harvest the low hanging fruit. Build your war chest by first feasting on adversaries who won't put up a fight. Avoid the risk that you may not collect from weak players becaue you attacked a strong adversary too early, and received an adverse precedent (i.e., published) decision that the weaker players can benefit from and couldn't otherwise have obtained.
On the other hand, it is also the perfect strategy if you have a weak claim. Attack only weak adversaries who can't afford to defend themselves, or for whom the cost of defense would be greater the the cost of capitulation. There are companies who survive and prosper by asserting weak (cough) intellectual property claims and offer to settle for amounts less than their adversaries' cost of litigation. The key is to make sure that the claim is not so baseless that you expose yourself sanctions or a subsequent claim for malicious institution of a civil action.
Then again, SCO has already violated these rules by attacking IBM far too early in the game. Go figure.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
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.
Forgive me if this is a redundant question, but I'm not wading through 3 pages of comments to see if this has already been asked.
By constantly changing what they're saying, does this change the strength (or weakness, as it is) of their case at all? I'm just waiting for some judge to look at this and say, "You guys are full of shit and you can't make up your minds. Case closed, you're ordered to be neutered so that you have no chance of ever reproducing ever again".
So McBride says that we are all irrational because we do not agree with his side. Traditionally, legal disputes are fought with the admittance that each side is rational - a sort of gentlemen's approach to the fight. Of course, often legal proceedings come down to screaming that the other side is wrong because he's just crazy.
The article mentions SCO's opinions on the GPL, so it may come off redundant that I mention this here, especially since Slashdot rejected it when I submitted it days ago:
SCO's website lists five reasons for choosing SCO over its competitors. The fifth reason; that SCO UNIX is legally unencumbered, contains some inflamatory statements that hint at litigious behavior to come. In an open letter from Darl McBride, SCO has stated that the GPL license violates the US Constitution and current US Copyright and patent laws. From a legal perspective, it seems that SCO is gearing up for a floodgates argument (the weakest kind) that even if Linux doesn't contain SCO code, the GPL license itself is void such that no software can be distributed under the terms of the GPL. This would leave an opening for SCO to attempt to claim ownership of Linux technologies that have not been implicated in SCO's original lawsuit.
Now, McBride is essentially arguing that the Court will find that it is morally wrong for people to develop free software, or software for free since profit is the engine that blah blah blah:
We do so knowing that the voices of thousands of open source developers who believe 'software should be free' cannot prevail against the U.S. Congress and voices of seven U.S. Supreme Court justices who believe that 'the motive of profit is the engine that ensures the progress of science,'" McBride said.
Okay, admit it guys, if there was ever one company you wish Microsoft would just up and swallow, it's this one!
The first is the Novell copyright situation. To me, it's not clear who's in the right here.
McBride: Would you buy an operating system without the source-code copyright? If you don't have copyright, they can turn around the next day and screw you.
Sontag: Instead, they waited nine years.
McBride: We have no doubts that our Unix copyright claims are valid.
One must, of course, ask why SCO felt that they had to wait years before notifying Linux folks of their alleged horrific infringements, and then felt that it was necessary to avoid actually *telling* Linux folks what the alleged infringements year until months and multiple court orders forced them to do so.
Sontag: 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.
First, this tidbit:
'We assign these copyrights to the GPL.'
Okay, enough fun has been made of Sontag and McBride's lack of competence when it comes to IP, so I'll avoid the jokes. You don't "assign a copyright to a license" (though GNU contributors are required to assign their copyright to the FSF for a number of reasons, in addition to licensing it under the GPL -- Linux is not a GNU project.)
Uh, huh. The fact that you added them to a file containing a GPL header doesn't count, eh? It's been well understood for many years that one header works for multiple contributions. When it comes to licensing, intent matters, and there was very clearly intent to GPL this code. I can't understand how you could make any kind of a counterargument.
The fact that we participated with Linux does not mean that we inadvertently contributed our code to the GPL.
Well, the alternative you have is that you committed massive infringement of thousands of IP holders that licensed their Linux code under the GPL. It's one or the other, SCO. If you want to go after Linux (and it's a damned weak argument -- I can't see how you'd manage to win it), you're also admitting that you deliberately committed a far worse crime. The potential costs of years of theft of perhaps millions of copies of Linux would easily bankrupt your company. I would expect that a shrewd mediator would find that donation of your code's copyright to the IP holders as a group would be the most acceptable form of restitution (trying to work out monentary damages from a class action lawsuit by a mass of coders with no interest in your money would be hard to resolve), which would put you back at square one, except without your money.
McBride: We will admit the things we've contributed and that we can't claw them back.
Darl, your second-in-command just said otherwise five seconds ago. C'mon, guys. At least maintain a cohesive position.
We think we have protection under both the GPL and copyright law.
This makes no sense. Name one right granted you by the GPL to either your IP or anyone else's IP that would entitle you to "protection" from other people using this code. If your code or other people's code is GPLed, everyone is clearly in the right to use it.
the copyright holder must make an explicit assignment, typically in writing, in a contract.
No. Team-written software is a form of joint authorship, which does not require explicit copyright assignment. While SCO might be able to argue that perhaps they have sole copyright ownership of the patch itself, the patched work is also owned by all the other authors of Linux, who
May we never see th
The term "communist" isn't actually as cut and dried as you make it out to be.
Marxists defined communism as the dissolution of the state, elimination of private property, and the leveling of all class barriers. That idealized goal was not achieved during the Soviet era, obviously, but the term was hijacked by the Communist Party, which for obvious political reasons presented its society as the realization of the communist dream.
The West saw little reason to quibble over terminology, and so bought into this misrepresentation by using the term communism rather than another, more accurate term (such as totalitarian socialism).
So yes, our history books call it communism, but history books simplify presentation of complicated historical material for reasons of clarity, ideology, and so on. Check out Lies My Teacher Told Me to get a glimpse at these simplifications in effect.
For more info about communism, check out this detailed explanation.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
Please note I have not gone in to quite how self-flageletory the German texbooks are about WW2...
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."