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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."
Sorry no more responses allowed after this, or else I'll sue you for non-literal illiterate literation.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
I noticed Sim-SCO was one of the first to die off.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
McBride: When I look at our case, I think anyone who has a rational mind would come down to the same conclusions I do.
Notice how he carefully avoids stating what conclusions he came to...
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?).
Perhaps IBM should say that SCO's Unix is a "reverse parody" of Linux, and sue on the grounds of defamation of a good product by releasing one that's more of a joke?
:-p
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
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.
You just summed up the state of IP law in the US most beautifully.
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.
It kills me that types like this go home at the end of the day to their families convinced that they're adding to the GDP.
GDP? What ever happened to coming home to your kids and convicing yourself that you are decent human being?
Fuck the GDP.
Nick
--
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
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???
>even in Communist Russia, there was always money
that's because Russia wasn't communist.
this is one of those situations where the answer is in the question: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
>Capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best system we've been able to come up with.
no it's not, the best system that we've been able to come up with is a mixed economy in which there exists elements from capitalism (private ownership of means of production) and elements of socialism (social security, free education/health care)
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.
What ever happened to coming home to your kids and convicing yourself that you are decent human being?
It moved to Europe.
...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
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".
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.