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NRF Calls SCO's Claims 'Meritless'
Xenographic writes "The National Retail Federation has just put out a press release in which their CIO concludes that SCO's IP claims are "meritless," and that Novell is the last company which can show a clear title to the code in question. That SCO's claims are meritless is hardly news to anyone who has been following this, but what is interesting is that the NRF was prompted to release this because of legal threats to their membership, specifically SCO's threats to sue "major retailers." So the businesses being menaced by SCO are banding together, making it that much less likely that SCO will be able to generate easy money from mere threats of litigation. SCO's stock, meanwhile, appears to have taken a small dive from this news. Also, you can find further details and analysis on Groklaw."
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
What code would this be, exactly?
They would still have to show some copied code.
I don't get these guys. How soulless do you have to be to outright lie about what you own, when you bought it, and the terms of an otherwise perfectly clear license?
Ooops, now SCO will sue me, too.
P.S. If you thought GPL was "viral," listen to SCO sometime: anyone who has ever seen the SysV source code can never work on an OS again, because that makes it a "non-literal derivative." Jeez.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
Ok how many people have to tell SCO to shove it before a judge does? Lemme see:
National Retail Federation
IBM
Linus
Autozone
There are more I am sure, but I mean come on. Noone agrees with SCO (at least I have not heard of anyone). When is a judge just going to toss this crap out of court?
Gorkman
Oh, you mean GrokLaw?
With a market cap of around 90 million now, this one has been a real dog for the investors. And this is a company with $65 million in cash in the bank, supposedly - that means the price-to-book ratio is getting mighty low. And their P/E is pushing down towards 20.
For those not familiar with this stuff, that means the premium people were putting on this stock reflecting the possibility of a big (i.e. 5 billion dollar) win against IBM has basically dropped to near-zero. I wouldn't be surprised to see the whole executive team get rotated out soon or something else drastic happen to SCO. The legal battle may drag out for ages, but the market has spoken.
Because there are still people believing that a company that makes such outrageous claims must have an ace up its sleeve.
Who ever is instrumental for this already got away with the money. They are trying to lick the leftovers from the plate now. The funny thing is somebody lost and its not us(Open Source people), its the people who bought the stock.
One thing is for sure, this whole fiasco made more good publicity to FOSS. More people know about linux and more importantly what open source is.
Since Novell bought SuSe they are now a Linux distributor and bound by the terms of the GPL. If Novell owns the Unix copyrights (looks like they do from what I read on Groklaw), we're all VERY safe from them attempting to pull an SCO.
Personally, I'd worry more about "submarine" software patents that someone will suddenly complain are being infringed ala PanIP, RAMBUS, et al. You will note how easily IBM was able to find four patents for their counter-suit against SCO.
(You can go back to worrying now)
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Not only that, but it is a very large business organization that contains a huge number of SCOG's current and potential customers*. Point of sale systems are a large percentage of SCOG's non-litigation business; think companies like McDonald's and Goodyear.
* Assuming this business still exists for them and that anyone would be foolish enough to buy one of their systems, of course.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Before this all started they were at ~0.75. Plenty of opportunity for whomever to cash out.
I find it funny that every 1% drop is met with OMG!! ITS TEH BEGINING OF THE END FOR SCOX!! Fuck the stock market.
The conundrum is that it took a major corporation to back Linux to bring an Evil Corporation out to sue, necessitating the corporate backing to withstand it.
Until the final death knell, traders basically are in it for two reasons: (1) to make a buck, (2) to have fun playing a risky game. They will keep kicking the price around as long as they can force the price up and down, even if the overall trend is down and will hit zero eventually, traders will drive it up and down making money on every change. When the price tanks because all the real investors bail out, the gamblers will lose interest too and the price will tank towards zero.
Amazing that a website made by a paralegal can be taken as gospel.
It isn't the paralegal's words that are taken as gospel. Those words are just opinion.
The credibility of that opinion, and the opinion of people commenting in the discussion rests on the mountains of information that Groklaw compiles in one convenient place.
SCO press releases. All manner of court filings. All relevant press coverage. Transcripts of court hearings. (And there is an important one comming up on May 11.) SEC filings.
All of that information is verifiable. Just follow the collected links back to their original sources. Download scanned PDF's of court documents. Or better go to the courthouse and get your own copies of originals from the court clerk.
Groklaw is credible because the collected facts of what SCO says in court, says to the SEC, and then says in the press paints a picture that any reasonable person can see. Too bad it is embarrasing for poor SCO to have all this information conveniently collected and available for comparison in one place.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
It's a good idea to keep an eye out for things like this - future owners of Novell may not be a sympathetic to FOSS as the current ones. But let's try and keep from muddying the water
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Because the thing is that Novell is selling linux, and in fact owns SUSE and Ximian, and as a result are bound by the terms of the GPL.
The neat thing about the GPL is its seemingly foolproof method of making sure everyone plays fair: they make it in everyone's interests to play fair, by making everyone not just borrow from everyone else, but depend on everyone else.
For example, let's say a company releases a piece of software under the GPL, then the next day decides to recant and announces that no, we changed our mind, it wasn't GPLed after all. If the company never sold anyone a copy, just put it up for download on a website, well then, who's to disagree with them? If someone had given them money for it that could be construed as having some sort of contractual validity, and the license that they included when they originally distributed the license irrevocable. But if it was just a free download, and the license included with the download as a written offer... well that's kind of fuzzier, isn't it? It would seem the company couldn't "go back" on their license offer, but the company could claim all kinds of things. They could claim the release was "unauthorized", or not intended for public release outside the company, or there were mitigating copyright and contractual cirucmstances the company was not aware of at the time doctrine of mutual mistake blah blah blah. And if this were the BSD license, that's where things would end.
But the GPL, among doing other things, adds an interesting wrinkle to things by legally intertwining to a certain extent everyone who cooperates using it. If someone releases some code they own under the GPL, they still own it and can do whatever they like with that code outside the context of the GPLed product However if someone is distributing or redistributing a product containing someone else's GPL code-- anyone's-- then they suddenly find themselves with a small and reasonable, but important, set of obligations.
So, here's another hypothetical example. Let's say Novell announces they own lines 5000-5435 of the linux kernel; that those lines were stolen from NetWare by a disgruntled employee who then submitted them to Linux as his own work at some point; that they have indisputable proof of this; and they further announce that anyone who wants to sell linux owes them $699 a copy for Novell's 435 lines of code there.
The problem here is that they can't do that; the instant Novell points out those 435 lines of code are unlicensed, distributing Linux becomes illegal, period. The reason for this is that the GPL says that in order to distribute under the GPL, you must be able to offer to anyone who you distribute it to an unlimited GPL license themselves, which includes the right to freely redistribute and modify. If you don't have the rights to distribute Linux under the GPL, you certainly don't have the right to distribute Linux by any other mechanism. And if you have to pay $699 to distribute the Linux kernel, then you don't have the right to distribute it under the GPL. The rest of Linux, everything except those 435 lines, is still GPLed and freely distributable; but the whole package, or any package that contains those 435 non-Free lines linked against GPL code, is something nobody-- including Novell-- has the right to distribute at all until those lines are removed or replaced.
So, Novell currently lacks the ability to attack Linux in this fashion without losing the right to sell Linux in the process-- which would be a major problem for them since they currently have a decent amount riding on their Linux-based products. And the really fun thing is, if Novell does as SCO did after raising their apparently fraudulent claims against Linux, and continues to distribute Linux even after they make the public claim that they own code in Linux that they never gave Linux a license to, then one of
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Nevertheless, looking at your article history, you don't seem to be a troll. So, one tip: Go to your preferences, and exclude Caldera from the homepage. Voila, you won't see those articles any more. Others, who want to see them because they don't have the time to read Groklaw, can leave that flag on.
See, best of both worlds for all of us.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
I was referring more to the kind of clout an organization like this has, than their truth-handling ability.
When this sluggish market-force monster rears its ugly head and blasts SCO with this strength, there is even less chance that any white knight will come to the rescue of SCO (the princess in the tower? nah, the warty witch).
SCO should have let this sleeping dragon lie.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
- Caused major corporates like IBM and HP to assess how important FOSS is to them, and act accordingly
- Probably influenced the acquisition of SuSE by Novell, and helped commercialise Linux
- Raised the profile of Linux in the world at large, by making business analysts realise there is something here that people will fight over
- Probably speeded up improvements in the FOSS creation process, helping to ensure that its IP status is robust
- Made a heroine of PJ
- Given the entire IT industry a new hate figure to mold in wax and stick pins in, doubtless helping Bill G sleep better at nights of the full moon
- Enriched several poor and deserving attorneys and helped to ensure that neither DaimlerChrysler nor Porsche have too many layoffs
- Further educated some of the people who thought they understood the stock market
Darl McB deserves some sort of award for all this. With his remarkable combination of tact, diplomacy and tireless negotation, he should at least be made Ambassador to Iraq.Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I bet even Microsoft know by now that this entire affair is stupid and for sure they would not waste any more money on this.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
SCO cuts jobs to reach product profit
Investors seem to always assume job cuts will lead to profitability.
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
There are already Point Of Sale systems for Linux, and with the announcement of the IBM Retail Environment for SuSE Linux, that will give retailers more assurance that it's safe to use Linux.
It's not "nervous nellies", it's suckers. There is one born every minute. Just because somebody is a CIO that does not mean they are not suckers. In fact my anecdotal evidence suggests that a greter percentage of CIOs are suckers compared to the general populace.
evil is as evil does
As to daily fluctuations, studies going back nearly half a century show that short-term movements can be explained as well by the Random Walk theory as anything else.
To see what "The Street" really thinks about SCOX, take a look at the 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year price history.
Stock price is based on perception and speculation... It is not at all directly tied to actual profit or revenue or assets of the company
Perhaps in the extremely short term. It's obvious that sotck prices change minute-by-minute every day, and no one really has access to information about sales in that sort of resolution.
But long term, stock prices track earnings remarkably well.
Bubbles involving tulips or dot-coms are not only rare, but examples of short term "perceived" prices being corrected in the long term.