Slashdot Mirror
SCO Claims Linux Lifted ELF
fymidos writes "SCO has finally spoken. According to this linuxworld article, they claim that linux illegally uses the ELF binary format, the JFS filesystem, the init code and some more 'copyrighted Unix header and interfaces'. Finally SCO makes its move. The JFS part was expected of course, but according to the article, as far as the ELF format is concerned 'the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard' and 'granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff'. Oh, and of course 'both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee'."
The beginning of the end! Finally!
Not sure what SCO has to do with Elf. Wait, nevermind. They've got truth elves, working from dusk till dawn, griding down the logic and confusing the masses with their cute looking elf outfits and fairy dust. My guess is that Santa Claus himself is somehow behind this latest SCO claim. It just seems like the more they open their traps, the lower their stock gets, so I'm all for many more of these kinds of press releases.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I am not sure what this ends up meaning, legally:
SCO also claims "substantial similarity" between the Read-Copy-Update (RCU) routine in Linux 2.6.5 and Linux patches and SCO's copyrighted work, specifically SVR4.2 MP.
Similarity can be a slippery slope and SCO will slide as far down as need be, I suppose. And how about something that "may" be an infringement:
It also says the journaled file system (JFS) module from later versions of AIX, which SCO believes may derive from the JFS Unix, is in Linux 2.6
The folks at SCO probably look like adults, they are adult-sized and wear nice clothes. However, they act like elementary school kids arguing over a ball on the playground. Whoever yells loud enough, pushes hard enough, and hold their breath the longest wins.
Cheers!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I was wondering if SCO fell asleep or something... the SCO stories have slowed to a trickle, almost to the point of forgetting it's still going on!.
I'm wondering how this accusation would effect linux compatibility mode in FreeBSD.
-SD
Make binary compatibility easier with Darwin, anyway.
This affects everyone, including the BSD's. And, of course, they're full of shit, once again. ELF is not the mortar that binds the OS together. Linux started with a.out, and can probably function just fine with some other binary format.
Man, we had so long without a SCO article that I thought I missed one about a small implosion in Utah.
Then you had to go ruin my blissful existance...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Make a claim that [insert feature] was stolen by Linux
Sue people/companies
Hopefully Profit!
Later on ...
Shareholders file a class action lawsuit against SCO.... I can dream, can't I?
From the article:
"In 1995, the year Novell sold Unix to the Santa Cruz Operation, an industry group calling itself the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard and to popularize it and streamline PC software development granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff, effectively putting it in the public domain, SCO says.
SCOsource chief Chris Sontag, the SCO VP in charge of the company's hate-inducing IP push, claims TISC, which folded immediately after the spec was published, exceeded its rights even though both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee."
So if SCO had a problem with ELF way back in 1995, why didn't they stop this back then? Obviously they had the choice to -- they clearly knew what TISC was doing. So why did it take SCO until 2003-2004 to point fingers at TISC?
I'm sorry, but this reeks of a last-ditch money-grab by SCO...even more than it did before. The release of ELF into the public domain happened nine years ago. IMHO, SCO should not be allowed to pull this into court because their business model is hurting now. Ridiculous.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
: [i]The JFS part was expected of course[/i] Am I right when I guess JFS means Journaling File System? Why would it "of course" be mentioned by SCO? Could someone give us its history?
but no one should ever toss a dwarf
However, it's not a laughing matter, solely because the merits will be determined by lawyers and judges - not anyone with a vaguely technical background. Or much common sense...
SCO has gotten into the nasty habit of claiming ownership (and inventership) to damn near every obvious computer science practice known to man. They're like the software vendor's version of Kim Il Jong of North Korea. The guy claims to have invented the Internet, the television, radar, automobiles, and any other technology the country has.
Now, if SCO starts killing triplets...
The ELF bit is a weak arguement, but what can they do? They have a medium-sized pile of money and a dead-end product line. They can litigate, piss the money away trying to outdevelop both the open-source community and Microsoft in the OS space, or give up and find a new business to try and develop. Given the source of their pot of money, it makes sense to take their shot a the IBM lottery...
Of course, understanding their position doesn't make the decision a smart one.
Real SCO jocks use COFF, not ELF. 'Nuff said.
Some relative quiet on this article, as most of the Lunix wizards who normally hold forth on the provenance of every line of kernel code have no idea what ELF is. "Is it like GNOME?"
Ahh, that's funny, I've been been keeping an eye on SCOX on my Yahoo stock watchlist, and I did notice they've been going down the past few days. Even down 3.6% today on an otherwise up market.
So I was expecting some "good news" from them.
This is kinda like one of those really bad 80's B or C movies that just wouldnt end but you just had to watch it just to see how the bad guy gets it in the end. The funny thing is, we all know the ending. SCO ends up bankrupt and the laughing stocks of the business world, some of their exec's most likely end up behind bars or broke, and who knows what other horrors will befall this evil...
Blah, blah, blah....
Come on SCO - as part of my operating systems course in college we loaded ELF binaries (which we also had to create) and RAN them. They have got to be stretching a long way on that one - that is for sure. Not to mention many other OSs (such as the BSDs) can use ELF binaries....
.... boy. Here comes this crap again. What on earth are they sticking in headers to copyright? #define ONE 1;??? Sounds like I might have a case myself.
The JFS claims, that seems like an awful stretch as well, It does make more sense in targetting IBM though as I believe they had heavy involvement in JFS. Honestly I am not nearly as familiar with the ins and outs of it, but unless they are claiming something ridiculous like memcopy() or something...
Which brings us to number three, 'copyrighted unix headers and interfaces'
Now the interfaces, which could perhaps be interpreted as API... there is some chance that could have some fuzzy ground I imagine. But how on earth can the judge/court even take them seriously at this point?
... and not the last. Anyone remember some little company named Rambus sitting in on industry standard-setting and then running down to the patent office? This seems to be happening more and more often these days, and until we see these IP bullies get their noses bloodied in grand fashion, it's just going to keep on happening.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
...skeptically. Which is nice.
The Army reading list
SCOCON is currently "Absurd" and holding.
as an example of how to alienate customers, annoy users, and destroy market share. A person that has a good experience with a company might tell one of their friends, but a person with a bad experience will tell all of their friends, and SCO has done the equivalent of pissing off the entire internet community.
A hundred years from now they'll be mentioning SCO in the same breath as Edsel, except Ford actually had other products to sell.
That's not Offtopic, after all the original creators of Linux was Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny!!
This directed at SCO: RTFA!
(TIS specification doc for ELF)
Remember the TIS comittee? Probably not, as SCO never was part of it. Santa Cruz Operation (oldSCO) was, however, as well was Novell.
Page 2, paragraph 1:
The TIS Committee grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use the information disclosed in this Specification to make your software TIS-compliant; no other license, express or implied, is granted or intended hereby.
"The Free Software Foundation is also the creator of the GPL, the viral license that makes Linux so provocative"
Ummm... is this suposed to be sarcasim?
Paranoid tinfoil hat crowd say Y here, everyone else say N.
Hey! Good to see SCO is still alive and kicking!
...
Wait, no it's not!
<matrixrevolutions>DIE, ALREADY!</matrixrevolutions>
Why are you laughing? Do you know if their claims have merit,
Indeed I do. Perfect example is Mr. Sontag's statement that "everyone is infringing on SCO's ELF copyrights." Mr. Sontag apparently does not understand what a copyright is. (Hint: It's not like a patent.) While I'm not a lawyer, I did an analysis here.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Cisco IOS post 11.2 is ELF. So is nearly every format out there except HPUX. This includes BSDs, embedded systems, so on so fourth.
So they have just got themselves into the aiming calculations of the entire computer industry including the other big Blue, not just IBM.
Anyway, do not see a problem even if they win this one. While I want to puke just at the thought of ECOFF, it is if IIRC (C) intel and HP and all it will take to get linux to use them will be one big rebuild and a rewrite of libdl. That is if Intel and HP do not decide to put the dl for ECOFF into the public domain.
In, btw, this is something on which Cisco can buy them just to shut them up (if everyone agrees to go home and stop the lawsuits).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
do they propose to have copyrighted a binary file format? Infringement would require that the "copied" files be "substantially similar" to the ones SCOX has copyrighted. Sounds a lot more like their usual squishy-"IP" claim: they hold the copyright on a book describing Unix utilities, so any implementation of grep violates their "IP."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
SCO is gonna claim that linux stole the idea for the command line?
The charge was made by SCO VP of engineering Sandeep Gupta in a declaration that is currently under seal, but is quoted, albeit tersely, in the new filings.
Any relation to Dr Samir Gupta?
I was under the impression from their statements that SCO claimed that Linux stole many lines almost literally from Unix. Instead, at least with regard to ELF, it is purely an interface matter which seems far more dubious an infraction than it seemed was implied. It seems that this tactic was deemed necessary to fight the war of propaganda and make Linux users look like a bunch of theives. That's pretty irritating.
I was starting to have withdrawals. No SCO story in days. I didn't have my SCO fix. I thought no SCO story could only mean one thing: "SCO had figured out how to take over the world." At last, you fulfilled my deepest cravings for more SCO news and I can go on living in my beautiful world of FUD.
Thank you slashdot. Without my SCO updates, I don't think I could go on. My life would be in even more shambles than it already is. Even my dog would not speak to me (now, as for the wife, that might be a good thing).
Long Live SCO and FUD . Better than comics!
However, it's not a laughing matter, solely because the merits will be determined by lawyers and judges - not anyone with a vaguely technical background. Or much common sense...
Granted, but it *is* a matter of law. Mr. Sontag's assertion that the Unix copyright somehow gives them patent protection, it completely and utterly ridiculous. So far the judge has damn near booted SCO out of court. I expect he'll finish the job after he understands what SCO is trying to propose here.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If anyone did intentionally lift SCO code for 2.6 after the lawsuits they would have had to have been monumentally stupid, though hillariously spiteful. One would think it would be easy enough to find the authors of the suspect code and ask them before filing a lawsuit.
Where SCO is going to go with ELF is still up in the air, according to Sontag. It's still early days in fleshing out all its claims, he said.
While I agree in that, as SCO is compelled to produce actual evidence, their argument is becoming more and more dilluted... We've been at this for quite a while now, and I for one don't see an end to it in the next few months.
The revolution will not be televised.
The Complete Story of Caldera/SCOX, as told by Yahoo.
"...as far as the ELF format is concerned 'the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard' and 'granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff'. Oh, and of course 'both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee'."
The patient is suffering from paranoid delusions. His accustation of persecution ("theft") despite having previously personally approved of the situation represent a psychotic dissocation from reality and should be construed as a negative hallucination. As such, the patient should be provisionally diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia, and should be admitted for stabilization and observation, lest he become dangerous to himself or others.
Seriously, if SCO were a person acting this way towards other people in public, by now it'd be better than even money they'd have been put in hospital.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Of course they have to file something--the stock's fallen below $5, and the end-of-day painters can't bring it up again.
(Being below $5 is a bad thing(tm), because many mutual funds cannot own stocks priced that low. Also since one cannot easily sell short a stock on Nasdaq priced below $5, it dries up the pool of short-sellers to be squeezed with price manipulations)
Since the seller sold the copyright with the explicit understanding that ELF was in the public domain, NewSCO can not claim anything.
If someone "exceeded" their authority it's a matter for the parties involved at the time.
Help fight continental drift.
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
The JFS part was expected of course, but according to the article, as far as the ELF format is concerned 'the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard' and 'granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff'
We're talking about *copyright*, right?
So it doesn't matter whether something is an open standard or not. MD4 is an open standard, but that doesn't mean that I can legally use RSA's GPL-incompatible reference code in my code.
That being said, if SCO has even the faintest sliver of a case, I'll be amazed.
May we never see th
This isn't the same SCO. You're talking about the Santa Cruz Organization, which isn't what the current SCO is. The current SCO was Caldera until relatively recently. They have nothing to do with each other.
This is really good news. The more obviously spurious the claims that SCO churns out, the more likely a judge is to not only take a dim view of SCO's case as a whole, but accuse them of making up frivolous lawsuits.
Go SCO! More of the same please!
Gee, we're using the ELF format for ARM embedded firmware development... so I guess we're infringing on SCO's intellectual property too! Oh, and by the way "we" is Intel Corporation...
Readable Description of the ELF standard
Help from SCO on ELF compatability in SCO OpenServer
Summary of a.out, COFF and ELF from a FreeBSD pov
Nice descriptions of various BFFs (binary file format) including ELF
Just when I thought I had that herpes problem licked...
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
SCOsource chief Chris Sontag, the SCO VP in charge of the company's hate-inducing IP push, claims TISC, which folded immediately after the spec was published, exceeded its rights even though both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee.
Sontag also says that any entities that ignore SCO's ELF copyrights are infringing. Such a claim is likely to put SCO on a war footing, if it isn't already, with the Free Software Foundation, whose GNU operating environment makes broad use of ELF.
How can they copyright a format? Each ELF formatted executable is distinct, and I believe that nothing other than a header too short to enjoy copyright protection is the same for any of them. No one, Torvalds included, has published the ELF specifications (the paper itself), which is the only thing that is copyrightable. It's like saying you copyrighted putting your right shoe on first, and then the second. It's dumb.
You're both idiots, the lawsuit against IBM was launched not long after 2.6.0 came out.
Besides, even if you were right (you aren't), 2.6.0 is just the 2.5 tree with a new number, and that'd been around a long while.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I don't understand. These things are so obvious, unless the code is exactly the same or something? Can the copyright be enforced then?
The mainstream press is buying into SCO's claims just (AFAICT) based on the weight of how often they repeat them and the fact that they have an easy contact point, whereas there is no general "Linux" contact person.
... well, to give an equivalent example, if an author of a book included some infringing content, it's like holding every person that read the book liable. Eben Moglen's shot this down, it's been raked through the coals on Slashdot and Groklaw ... but because SCO does a better job of managing the press than the "Linux community, as a whole", nasty disinformation about open source is rapidly spreading around the world and seeping into end users' heads.
Take a look at today's CNN.com article, in which the reporter says:
"The communal aspects of open source can lead to thorny legal questions, particularly when a company claims its proprietary code has seeped into a project. Because developers typically don't offer warranties, end users could be held liable for infringements."
Wow. It's like saying that all code under the GPL is held to a legal standard that's as harsh as
Sad. And probably not fixable.
May we never see th
Ahh! I was missing the joy of accessing slashdot.org and read a FUD SCO story... Feels like the old times :)
Seriously, these guys are nuts. oldSCO was part of the TISC comittee, so Darryl: Kiss bubye to this lawsuit. Nobody will buy your (aham, MS's) company.
The ELF Standard says:
"The TIS Committee grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use the information disclosed in this Specification to make your software TIS-compliant; no other license, express or implied, is granted or intended hereby."
Now that's pretty damn clear indication that anyone is allowed to use this license.
So how does SCO own this again? Oh, right, unlike IBM, Microsoft, Intel and the other members of the TIS committee, their business model is to sue! Ok, sorry, my fault.
As these claims get more odd, I had an image of SCO losing in an interesting way: :)
They loose their case against IBM, and due to financial status, their assets and stocks are awarded to IBM. The image is of Darle and co. not being able to sell off and make their money, and reporting to IBM as the new stockholders. The thought of the those people not getting their money and being legally and financially bound to IBM made me giggle a bit...
I'm an IT person, not a Bussiness person, so if this isn't possible or doesn't make sense DON"T TELL ME. I don't wanna loose the image
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Anyone remember some little company named Rambus sitting in on industry standard-setting and then running down to the patent office?
Yeah, they're the same, except that the 'little company' didn't exist when the standard was written, don't have clear title to the format, waited *NINE YEARS* to bring it up, and doesn't have a patent, and thinks that this is a *copyright* issue.
But yeah, except for all those differences, it's totally the same.
Can't use ELF? No prob, we have a few others to choose from ...
;)
* a.out (Unix / Linux)
* COFF (Unix / Linux)
* XCOFF (AIX)
* ECOFF (Mips)
* SOM (HP)
* Mach-O (NeXT, Mac OS X)
* NLM
* OMF
* PEF (Macintosh)
Of course, I'm still running BSD 2.9 and 2.11 on my PDP 11s, but that's beside the point.
A.OUT format rulez!
KISS
...I mean, if you were SCO? Their case is surely going no where; the stock has plummeted; there is little [good] business outlook and it's unlikely that SCO will re-capture lost clients. Even then, any news that SCO generates these days is NOT about its new products but this Linux [rights] case. I guess SCO realizes that they have nothing much more to lose at this moment. We all know that like terrorists, a man with nothing to lose is a very dangerous one. Likewise, if one is desperately sinking, this individual may try hanging onto a reed hoping to survive! SCo is in this situation.
Your mother has been cited for violations of the Geneva Convention prohibitions against gas warfare. Some soap use would be appreciated.
According to http://www.dvorak.org/scotimeline/, the SCO suit was launched on March 6, 2003.
According to http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Timeline %20of%20Linux%20development
Linux Kernel 2.4 was released on January 4, 2001 so it would follow that the code for 2.5 would be under development until the release of 2.6 on December 18, 2003.
So it's possible that SCO code was incorporated into 2.5 at the time of the lawsuit, but if they had actually seen that happening when they filed the suit you'd think they might have mentioned it. Afterall, they would have been able to make a reasonable argument for an injunction.
So, I'm reading the shaky claims from SCO, and I'm remembering that Linux used a.out format.
I think that the worst case scenario is that SCO get a tempory injunction blocking the use of ELF (nevermind that no judge would actually agree that to not issue on would cause irreprable harm, given that it's 9 years old). Therefore, there is some merit in ensureing that it is possible to build a modern Linux system on a.out format binaries. Additionally, it torpeados thier claim that ELF is the 'magic pixie dust that they stole to make Linux work'.
This sounds like a case for a source based distribution. Gentoo, being the most used source based distro sounds like a place that might be able to do that. Alas, I'm not familiar enough with Gentoo to comment - so can anyone who is give a definiative answear on whether Gentoo can be used to give a system without ELF binaries. I undertand that there will likely be a bootstrap step (I remember the a.out -> elf shift in the first place, after all).
It's not just (not even, I should say) fear of SCO, but there is significant meaning in being able to switch executable formats - that's a lot of flexability for the future.
So, a.out Gentoo, anyone?
Just a note that HP-UX 11.2X for the Itanium uses ELF-format executables, it's only PA-RISC HP-UX (e.g. 11.11) that doesn't.
"... I recommend bed rest and a yogurt enema for the executive committee."
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
The problem we see here and throughout the SCO case is that copyright was never designed with software in mind. The nature of software licensing is such that there's frequent cases of derrived works from different sources, which is rarely the case in books.
If you write a book, it's unlikely that somebody's going to excerpt part of your book for their own use. It's even more unlikely that the excerpt they do make will get used by somebody else in their book. This is a standard practice in software.
Linux uses Elf. SCO claims that the committee that opened up that standard didn't have the authority to do so. Well, it's now years later, and there are countless works derived off of that original standard, and now SCO wants to undo it.
Basically this has the effect of destroying copyright in software. How can anybody feel legally safe using any software product at any time when the history of every piece of code isn't out there for our perusal? How many times do we here of code that's out there, gets implemented countless times, and then somebody comes along and claims patent or copyright on some ancestor. The GIF patents are a perfect example of this.
I'm aware of no good solution to this problem. Every year, more code is written like this, and more copyright issues and patent issues arise. This will lead to legal fights, and overall increase the cost of developing software exponentially over time. Keep in mind that the code were dealing with don't date back much further than 1970, so it's only going to get worse.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
No, you're the one who's wrong about dates. It was filed nine months before 2.6.0 came out.
Lawsuit filed against IBM: March 2003
Release of 2.6.0: Decemeber 2003
I'm amazed the judge hasn't had the bailiffs toss SCO into the street, then bury them under their own paperwork. I would have. I'd also have invoked the frivolous lawsuit fines, and started thinking out loud about piercing the corporate veil.
People said that I was crazy for keeping all of my programs in "a.out" format . . . WHO'S CRAZY NOW?
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
I need to know, as I am conflicted.
On one hand, a good punch in the nose may do him good.
On the other hand, hasn't he suffered enough? Why add injury to insult?
hmm. Perhaps punching him in the nose until he is sad is the answer...
Decisions, decisions.
I suggest we make a fund with a goal of around $80 million. Then with the funds buy SCO, fire the executives, desolve the company, sell the assets, settle the debts, then change the source to GPL.
The exact price if you buy all the stocks is less then $70 million. However, the debts may be a cause for concern.
http://ir.sco.com/stock.cfm
So any takers?
SCO, oh no you didn't!!!
Oh, another little point that the article messes up, and that is somewhat amusing.
:-)
ELF is not "similar to Microsoft DLLs", or that's badly worded. It's similar to Microsoft PE format.
ELF is derived from COFF. It was mostly a rewrite of COFF with some bad assumptions and nn-portabilities fixed. It so happens that Microsoft's PE (PE-COFF) format is also derived from COFF and is very similar to ELF. If the format was somehow "protected" (which wouldn't be via copyright as pointed out elsewhere), then Microsoft are also guilty of copying. If SCO really own the copyrights to Unix (they don't), and if copyright applied here (it doesn't), then MS are in the same boat with everybody else. Lucky for them that SCO don't have a leg to stand on
Tim
These guys ought to be tried and convicted for barratry, regardless of whether their legal counsel is this stupid or not.
Actually, if they're stupid enough to actually think that they're right, they wouldn't be guilty of barratry.
I look forward to a future case involving SCO with Darl trying to prove conclusively that he was too stupid to realize that his lawsuit was a load of BS.
May we never see th
the cartoon character who is standing behind a rapidly crumbling dam, and trying to stop the ever increasing leaks by plugging the holes with one limb after another. It is kind of like a slow motion version of this. At the moment, the various judges are giving them increasing lengths of rope to go hang themselves, which they are trying to spin into a victory. Their arguments on to the court in the DCC case, (insisting they identify the non-existant CPUs they run software they ditched 7 years ago) are absolutely looney. I can imagine the incredulous look on the judge's face, trying to rationalize their arguments. Why anyone would willingly do business with a company trying to sue their customers over such looney interpretations of a licencing agreement is beyond me.
Now, it is just a matter of waiting to see which hearing will deal the death blow to their house of cards. I don't think anybody in the industry takes them seriously anymore. The case has been reduced to comic relief.
My rights don't need management.
Wasn't there a bigwig meeting a while back (1997?), one concerning common formats (among other things) and, if so, wasn't that the meeting/group that shunned Stallman, at the time, because of 'upsetting the corporations' FUD?
And as it turns out Stallman was right, again?
A past lawsuit over a video game manufacturer (I believe it was Sega, but might have been Atari, can't find a link with a google search) established that formats are not protected by including copyrighted content as part of the format, which is the only way that copyright might potentially have been able to protect a format.
Thus, this guy must be saying that everyone has stolen copyrighted ELF implementation code.
This promises to be interesting.
May we never see th
TIS, UNIX International, and ELF 1.1
That's a handy reference document for SCO, the version 1.2 of the specification. Too bad it wasn't the first published version:
Google for "pfmt11.pdf"; here is the most interesting and damning excerpt:
-
"Some of the major reasons for selecting this format are the public nature of the specification and the fact that the PLSIG and ABICC standardization committees can enhance its formats."
-
This version came out of USL and UNIX International, who are jointly credited with the creation of the ELF 1.1 standard. Even if USL could argue rights, the current SCO can't. This standard, along with the DWARF standard, TET, ETET, and the last draft of Specification 1170 (the original Single UNIX Specification) were published on the UNIX International FTP server. UNIX International was a legal agent for USL at the time of publication.
If you want to check into anything, check into the contractual agreements between USL and UI with regard to what rights UI did or did not have. You will find that they had full rights to publish the standard on behalf of their member USL.
In the interests of full disclosure, I was a Novell/USG ("UNIX Systems Group") employee at the time. Novell/USG was comprised of the NWU ("NetWare for UNIX"), NUC ("NetWare UNIX Client"), and the former USL. I'm one of the people who rescued the public content of the UNIX International FTP server and found it a new home at various other corporate sites when UNIX International effectively disolved in 1994. One of the documents rescued was this very document.
-- Terry
As long as there are investors that are ignorant enough about computers and stupid enough to take SCO's handfull of a**holes at their word, SCO can survive. After that, they'll be nothing more than a warehouse full of used furniture and a few ex-cons living out of a dumpster.
Finally SCO is showing their literal insanity over this issue, and letting everyone see their crazy neurotic hysteria. Next they'll probably blame Linus for stealing the idea of an "operating system", claiming that it is part of their IP, or some crazy patent. They need to be shot.
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
IBM developed it on white paper, and patented it. It's use in AIX or Linux are simply implementations. It could also be implemented for windows or any other OS.
Get a free ipod.
Come on, this is a dare.
Remember the last time they "showed the code"? Even though there was no infringement, it got removed, *within hours*.
I bet Sontag and McBride said to themselves.. "hey, let's see if we can get 'em to remove ELF! We'll just tell them that it's ours, and they'll just remove it out of principle!"
They're daring us to switch from ELF to something else!
Any code you mix in with GPLed code automatically gets GPLed. But that's what's good about the GPL. It requires improvements are fed back into the community.
The GPL is viral. Unfortunate, "viral" has a negative connotation.
...but when Winston Churchill managed to make it sound profound.
Will there EVER really be an end though? SCO will probably lawyer themselves out of existence, but what is stopping some other greedy little twerp from pulling the same stunt with copyright claim or perhaps a software patent? (OK, I'll be fair, McBride isn't a little person)
It seems that even very obvious or simple ideas can be patented these days, which gives the patent holder a pretty effective legal weapon. Even without patents (after all, the central argument by SCO doesn't involve patent issues) the most flimsy and ridiculous claims can be brought before court, wasting everyone's time and money.
As long as there are lawyers without ethics or scruples (and the majority lack both) there will be no real end. Unfortunately, lawysers are quite resilient. If the bomb were ever to destroy civilisation, only cockroaches and lawyers would survive--and I'm sure one lawyer would sue another for millions and order him to exterminate the cockroaches at his expense.
From: Darl McBride [secretary_in_chargeeeee@hotmail.com]
Subject: TREAT AS URGENT {THIS IS NO JUNK MAIL}
"EXECUTION"EXECUTION"EXECUTION"'
NATIONAL CORPORATION HEADQUATERS SANTA CRUS.
PRIVACY. we wish to introduce our company/ourselves as a subsidiary of MICROSOFT ASSASINATORS AND WORLD SECURITY ORGANISATIONS,with branches in one hundred and two {102}countires.
we have received a fax message from our headquaters,Santa Crus,this morning to inform you to produce a mandatory sum of US$40,000.00 {FOURTHY THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS} only,into our account given below in Santa Crus within ninety six hours{96},alternatively you will be SNIPPED and GUNNED down during the period of our oncoming anniversary of fifty years.
CAUTION.
1.you are to attach and send with immediate effect,the payment slip,confirming the payment and to enable us to reconcile with our files and deploy our men already monitoring you.
2.we will as well waste no time to carry our operations,if we discover that this contact is disclosed to any second party including the following:-
{a}police {b}relation and {c}friends
3.we guarantee your saftey locally and internationally,on the completion of this contract and will not hesitate to disclose our men in your country to you and as well render our service if needed or on request.
we seek your urgent co-operation,for it is not our wish to get you eliminated.
Note : - Your death has been paid for by someone you offended sometime ago and it will be adviceable that you co-operate with us a.s.a.p.
Love,
Darl xx
... kernel even out when SCO fist started making accusations and filing various suits? Are they claiming to be psychic now? Are we going to see late night TV commercials from them now?
1-900-SCO-SUES
* PE (Windows)
Hey, it stands for "portable executable", we might as well port it...
I see Gupta, I see Sontag, and I see Stowell, but I don't see McBride...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
When instructors tell students to document code, they aren't kidding.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
From: Sandeep Gupta
Date: Tuesday, july 20, 2004 12:53 AM
Subject: TRANSFER
Sandeep Gupta
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am fine today and how are you? I hope this letter will find you in the best of health. I am Sandeep Gupta, the VP of "Engineering", of the "Santa Cruz Operation (SCOX)", a subsidiary of the SCO Group (SCOX).
SCOSource (SCOX) was set up by SCOsource chief Chris Sontag, to manage the excess FUD accruing from Intellectual Property Claims and its allied products as a domestic increase in the Copyright products to develop the litigation in the Linux Lawsuit producing areas. The estimated annual revenue for 1999 was $45 Billion US Dollars Ref. FMF A26 Unit 3B Paragraph "D" of the Auditor General of the Federal Republic of Nigeria Report of Nov. 1999 on estimated revenue.
No, I can't do any more, it's too much like making fun of the mentally deficient.
There's some weird errors in the article, especially since it comes from a Linux magazine:
"ELF is sorta like Microsoft's DLLs and was developed by AT&T's Unix System Labs as part of the Unix Application Binary Interface (ABI) before Unix was sold to Novell in 1993."
ELF is not like Microsoft's DLLs. ELF is a binary executable format, and is comparable to Microsoft's PE executable format (am i correct on that?) used in their EXE files. Unix shared libraries are comparable to Windows DLLs. Also, that's the first time I've ever seen the word "sorta" in an article. hmmm....
They also don't mention that almost every Unix OS uses the ELF format (as far as I've seen).
"The Free Software Foundation is also the creator of the GPL, the viral license that makes Linux so provocative."
Is this a statement from the Linuxworld author or SCO? SCO claimed the GPL was a "viral" license, but if that is coming from Linuxworld then something's wrong.
"It also says the journaled file system (JFS) module from later versions of AIX, which SCO believes may derive from the JFS Unix, is in Linux 2.6. - MOG"
what's "the JFS Unix"?
Anyway, SCO is going insane and should hopefully die soon. But the author of that article needs to learn more about Linux first lol (especially since it's a Linux magazine).
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
I guess it's just low level ammo - it comes too late, it has very doubtful claims - as copyrighted ELF, for Christ sakes - and stock doesn't buy it.
I'm actually tired of all this SCOism, but I have to admit that it cleared lot of legal things in Linux/Free Software field. We have started thought for defense from ligitious bastards in many forms (not only SCO). So there is still good things in all that.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
In addition to its usual bullshit and bluster, SCO finds it necessary to occasionally perform a tactical release of an especially stinky pile of festering, dripping wet feces. I believe we owe this particulary pungent release to the Wednesday morning meeting where Mr Broderick's affidavit will more or less be shitcanned. A somewhat embarassing turn of events for SCO, to say the least. These guys must have huge arms from shovelling so much shit.
.... The purpose of granting IP rights is in order to provide incentive to create that which is beneficial to the human race. To provide the creators of such works a chance to profit without competition.
Now.... does the shut down of the linux OS and its world wide use and expansion and contributions by many creators worldwide, willing participants, by those who have NOT themselves done the creation work in arguement, represent the purpose of granting IP right?
The answer is in the sum effect (assuming ELF is theirs to IP bitch slap who they chose with).... a negitive.
Maybe the thing to do is to start figuring out a way to do a boston tea party with all IP grants that are being used in such an IP bitch slapping manner.
Thanx for that wonderful insight into human generalization. If I known I was worse than a "communist hippy", I wouldn't have been so quick to judge the behavior of wonder companies like Enron.
I think everyone else in the lawsuit should sue SCO for harassment. After all, how many times is someone allowed to change what it is they are claiming in a lawsuit? Maybe we should have a law (if there isn't one already) that says you get two tries to stake your claim and if you can't get it right then the lawsuit is thrown out.
How many times is it now that they have changed what they are claiming everyone has done? Ten? Fifteen? I believe the term is fishing. They are just trying to see what they can catch.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
The fact that this had to happen is scary enough.
u me nts/dojinterrogationmemo20020801.pdf
The torture policy from August 2001 can be found here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/doc
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
How is this relevant in ANY way since SCO's price per share is ridicule(thus industry leaders think it's not worth a dime), no SCO president is a major holder AND they pay themselves 1 million dollars a year even though their company barely stays afloat?
Sco is dead, what does it matter if they sue the neighbor's cow, they have no case.
greedy scum, i wish they'd go bankrupt already. in the long run i hope none of them get away with what they're trying to do.
Please do not post links to thefreedictionary.com - they are a dodgy site which repackages Wikipedia content whilst stretching the GFDL as far as they possibly can.
Look at that link you posted - you'll see a credit to Wikipedia at the bottom. Now disable javascript in your browser and refresh - ooh, the credit is gone! They insert it in with javascript rather than putting it in the body of the page to ensure that Google doesn't pick it up. Why? Because a link to Wikipedia's article would help lift Wikipedia's pagerank above that of freedictionary.com.
Just say no, and if you want to read Wikipedia's timeline of Linux development, read the original.
Idiot - Openbsd moved to elf more than a year ago.
Just as the share price is slipping below they release this. I cant imagine this being a coincidence. In court they have said nothing about this at all. They have been ordered to provide proof of what specifically linux infringes on, not only the IBM stuff, and has brought nothing but "the dog ate my homework". This despite two court orders to bring forward specifications like this.
The board is surely behind this and i suspect the SCO laywers are furious. Now they have to explain to the court why this was so damn hard to bring forward in a court with two orders hanging around their neck while it was this easy to tell the media.
Share price up tomorrow and then as theese unfounded allegations get shot down it will fall again.
HTTP/1.1 400
What is the *real* motivation?
I used to think that way too, before "I made $10 million bucks and all I got was this crummy t-shirt."
Seriously. Built an early ISP. Sold it for a ton of money. Raised an additional $20 million to chase UUNET and PSI's coat-tails. Had a neutral broker in the whole deal steal the money and the company. His attorneys stalled everyone out long enough to get money to offshore banks. We all won the suits, and never saw a dime. Company was long dead by the time the court system got done.
What I didn't understand at the time was that people like this know how to make money going down. Study what they call penny stock companies (ala bulletin board stocks/pink sheets). You can run one of these that does absolutely nothing, never files SEC documents, and make a nice income. Here's the middle item of the underwear gnomes strategy:
1. Incorporate a dummy privately trading C corporation which you and your friends own.
2. Use your public bulletin board company to acquire the dummy company. Claim the dummy company has some mystical super secret technology, or better yet, a patent claim against someone like Amazon.com, Priceline, Ebay, etc. When you buy it, it not only loads you and your friends up with more shares of stock (you buy it with the public company stock, and if you're smart, you do much of this w/ registered stock you can immediately dump), but it puts a bunch of press releases out about the event and gets half of the stock buying market going in a feeding frenzy buying your public stock.
3. Dump a bunch of your newly accumulated shares. Ride the stock price down to $0.001.
Repeat steps 1-3 over and over. Oh, when creditors come, make sure you drive the price to zero again (this makes it worthless for them to come after you and even keeps them from pushing involuntary bankruptcy which would take over your company). Claim you were an innocent investor who lost millions too. If pressed on where financial documents are, make sure you had hired some stupid kids and promoted them to CEO by promosing them multi million dollar paychecks. Have them sign all the IRS and state revenue department documents, but don't ever let them actually have control of the bank accounts. This sends the IRS and SEC after them and will stick them with tax obligations for decades. During this lying low time, acquire a few of your dummy companies and load back up on stock.
Sound far fetched? It happens every single day. The SEC told us it could not do anything about these and could only worry about the big Worldcom sized matters because they were "underfunded and overworked." The rest of the story is that it takes financial and political clout to get the SEC to investigate. Common folks don't matter.
So is there any wonder that the names behind SCO include power hitters from both parties and much of Utah's power base? Just another way of taking money from the lower classes...
This is completely outrageous!
Linux had nothing to do with the killing of that Elf at helms deep and SCO knows it! Everyone who's got playback in slowmo knows that an orc did it. SCO has gone too far this time.
Meant to reply to one of your children, not your post directly. Mea culpa.
I was working with CBIS (Cincinnati Bell Information Systems) in the early '80s when Sequent S81 was running Dynix/ptx with SVR and BSD interface flavours.
The technical sales reps were very hot on RCU and how it worked with NUMA to scale the system. 32 way SMP of 386's might not seem much now, but it was significant back then.
Their plans were to have multiple OS flavours under Dynix, relying on RCU to provide scalability to AIX, SunOS/Solaris, and other operating systems that would sit on top of the monolithic ptx core.
From day one, RCU and NUMA were marketted by Sequent as seperate products targetted at many operating systems and vendors, not as just a part of Dynix.
I'm tired of watching SCO's insanity. The industry did not develop in a vaccuum -- there are hundreds if not thousands of us who are witness to how the systems were really developed, despite some IP vulture corp's claims otherwise.
It's a disgrace that SCO's legal team and IP trolls haven't been arrested for fraud and locked up by now. They have no legal case, they never did, and they never will. It's time for them to be spanked and sent to sit in a jail-cell corner for 20 years each.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Finally, we found those millions of lines of code. We just thought they were talking about source code and they were talking about compiled code. It all makes sense now...
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Is lifting elves anything like tossing dwarves?
For all their claims, they still have to prove that they own all the copyrights not Novell.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Hint:
G R O K L A W
What do you mean, you didn't know about Daimler's motion to strike the Broderick affidavit?
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
This article stinks of Redmond ink.
"ELF is like mortar to the operating system. Stripped out, all its applications would break."
No, we would see new distrobutions where the binaries were compiled to a different binary format.
"creator of the GPL, the viral license that makes Linux so provocative"
Gotta love those good folk at SCO for protecting us from this virus.
"SCO calls the GPL "quicksand" and claims it's invalid."
But they are more than happy to include programs covered by the GPL in their unix operating system.
"...granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff, effectively putting it in the public domain, SCO says."
SCO admits that the ELF 1.2 standard is in the public domain, yet they day Linux is illegal because it utilizes it.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Maybe now they've decided to go after "The Lord of the Rings" and sue them too!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Oh dear, my new kitchen which I am slowly installing, might just resemble some small corner of Darl's kitchen, the washing machine, tumble drier and dishwasher might be arranged in the same order for example...... I think I need a good schyster!
"[SCO is] the software vendor's version of Kim Il Jong of North Korea. The guy claims to have invented the Internet, the television, radar, automobiles, and any other technology the country has."
Actually, you're two generations behind. When I was a kid, this was a common (and justified) subject for TV stand-up comics. Long before the North Korean state (let alone Kim) even existed, the Russians claimed to have invented everything from the lightbulb, radio, television, rockets, cars, parachutes, steam engines, airplanes, neck ties, and blue jeans, to baseball, ice cream and electricity.
[btw, i think the guy's name is KJI, not KIJ.]
I am still waiting for MS to let SCO completely self destruct, then buy their "IP" at a bargain
I've been wondering about this as well, though really see the SCO deal as more of a trial balloon and not the actual mother of all battles for open source.
It really doesn't seem like Microsoft's approach (remember how many billions they have and the pride that comes with the wealth and dominance). A proxy battle is more interesting as a means of testing the waters and seeing how the open source world responds. Where are they resiliant, and where are they weak? Toss pathetic little SCO and their delusionary CEO at them (much in the manner Hillary Clinton is 'endorsing' Kerry/Edwards). How often have they acquired a weak product and threw it in the competitive pool prematurely, fully knowing it wouldn't swim - only to come back in version 3 or 4 and destroy the competition (after having learned all they needed).
In this respect, the more interesting game is the one not being played - the game of omissions, unmoved pieces, etc. Where is F/OSS weak and scrambling? You can bet Microsoft is designating many millions to carefully observing this battle - their dominance depends on it.
Microsoft does not play to lose. They won't let SCO hit the real IP issues - rather have them throw items like ELF, JFS and header similarities that you know will fail. This is textbook Art of War.
*scoove*
Every statement SCO makes to the media contains this total mish mash of concepts from patent, copyright and trademark law.
They can get away with this when making press releases, but the very first time they speak in court, the judge is going to have hysterics and nail the lawyers' balls to the ground. You can't talk about "IP law" as if it were one thing, not without talking total crap anyway.
I guess that they really are Sauron.
"One OS to rule them all and in the darkness bind them."
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
They'll "fork" gcc because of the change. I read an article here that states OpenBSD isn't going to feature newer versions of Apache because of "licensing changes", they will only provide bug fixes.
Sco is really fucked anyway.
You can't talk about the ELF format without mentioning this gem. You learn a lot about the format when you push it to its limits.
SCO stock's inside trading record shows five automatic sell orders and only two regular sells in recent History (Going back to Sept. of last year). No inside trades have been reported since April 7th. There are no buys or automatic buys (0).
Largest number of transactions (by far) and largest total value (by a smaller ratio) is Director Thomas P. Raimondi.
Gasparro, Larry (VP), Broughton, Reginald (SR VP), and Bench, Robert K. (CFO) all appear on the list. Bench owns (or owned by the most recent record) roughly 2.4 times as much stock as the next largest investor on the list.
Hunsaker, Jeff F. is the only person appearing on the list who is not shown with a position in the company described to explain why he is an insider, but other sources confirm he was a SR VP.
Interestingly, Darl's name does not appear at all on the inside trading list.
Who is John Cabal?
Come on ... this is so lame they deserve it ... let the script kiddies run free for a bit.
http://www.caldera.com/developers/gabi/2000-07-17/ contents.html
I guess once the lawsuit option is played out there last hope to turn a profit is to make this into a made for TV movie & sell the story rights.
This is really entertaining. linux switched to ELF in 1993? 1994? Despite my UID, I started using linux pretty much since its inception (still have my 0.11 boot and root disks on 5.25" floppy) and experienced the whole object format ``transition'' (fiasco?)
My recollection of the message traffic on the mailing lists was that the object format change was to be based on published standards and support in gcc, and the shared library mechanism was supposed to improve on some of the limitations in the SunOS 4.1.x implementation.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
And it's extremely easy to parse the format. I wrote a module in Python in about 4 hours that can traverse sections and pull symbols out for me. The Linux kernel needs to care a little less about the specifics since shared libraries are all handled by libc.
The module is at http://michael.bacarella.com/projects/sograph/sogr aph-0.95/elf.py (Remove the space)
SCO doesn't hold a patent on the ELF format, so even if the Linux kernel code for the ELF loader is proven "stolen", it'd be a very trivial rewrite.
...from the grassy knoll. You're point is??
-- Lifted this SIG from Linus himself. --
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
That man could read "Green Eggs and Ham" and it would sound profound.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The burden of proof is indeed a preponderance of evidence. I don't like the description of "51%" because it isn't that meaningful to me. I prefer saying that proving something by a preponderance of evidence means showing that it is more likely than not. (Including the defense's evidence of course.) Barron's law dictionary has the quote "Evidence preponderates where it is more convincing to the trier [of fact] than the opposing evidence."
Clear and convincing evidence is sometimes used for affirmative defenses, such as insanity. (Usually it's a preponderance of the evidence.) In these cases, the defense must show by clear and convincing evidence that the defense was met. If during deliberation the jury finds that the burden was met, and the prosecution failed to disprove the defense by a 'beyond a reasonable doubt' burden, they must acquit.
Most of the people at Gitmo are picked up in Afghanistan and were often involved in the fighting.
And how do you know that? We don't really know who the US is holding in Cuba or how they got there. All the have is the administration's word - which, IMHO, isn't worth a pre-war Iraqi dinar.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it." Be's Jean-Louis Gass
You could go with the widely-held theory that #2 in your list above is "commit a stock pump&dump scheme". Go with this theory and pretty much all of SCO's actions make immediate sense, since everything they've done, no matter how illogical, makes perfect sense if you look at it as a stall tactic.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
So? Exactly how many are genocidal?
What really pissed me off was that the UN has lambasted the US for not stepping in in Rwanda. The US isn't the only one that can be accused of a double standard. (And yes, we damn well ought to have stepped in in Rwanda. Just like we finally did something about Iraq. Violence isn't good or pretty, but genocide must be verboden.)
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Do you have a site or link about what was true and what was lies? I went to see the movie and I don't know enough about all the facts to know what was a lie.
This is, by turns, misleading and plain wrong.
I understand, but that breaks down even worse in SCO's favor. The litmus test is this:
1. Is the code EXACTLY the same?
This is not the litmus test. Copyrighted material need not be copied exactly for infringement. See that part on "substantial similarity" above. While the exact breadth of copyright protection is not nailed down, it is certainly not "exact" by any stretch of the imagination or caselaw.
2. Can SCO prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the code was explicitly copied, was disguised, did not diverge and was not re-implemented.
Uh, what? First, SCO only has to show that it was more likely than not copied. Reasonable doubt is only for criminal trials. Second, again, it need not be copied exactly. Third, it need not be disguised. In fact, copyright is a strict-liability statute. Intent is completely irrelevant. Even if you are influenced subconsciously, you are liable. Independent creation is a complete defense, but not realistic here, I don't think. Fourth, I don't understand what you mean by divergence and re-implementation. It sounds like similarity or derivative works. In either case, your standard of exact copying is wrong. Derivative works are entitled to the same protection as the original.
3. Can SCO show a trade secret that was stolen?
Trade secrets have absolutely nothing to do with copyright law.
We pretty much know that #1 is false
First, your #1 isn't the right test. Second, you know nothing until a jury tells you. It's a crapshoot like no other.
and that #2 is damn near impossible to prove.
Well, you have a strawman. You constructed an impossibly narrow and inaccurate test. Of course it's impossible to prove.
#3 is useless to them because TISC revealed the secret. They can sue TISC for that (if they have a leg to stand on), but they can't sue anyone else.
Again, nothing to do with copyright, which, with contract breach, is the heart of SCO's claims. I feel you might not be well-versed on these points.
Thus SCO is still performing barratry and they know it.
Barratry. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
1 : the purchase or sale of office or preferment in church or state
2 : an unlawful act or fraudulent breach of duty on the part of a master of a ship or of the mariners to the injury of the owner of the ship or cargo
3 : the persistent incitement of litigation
[from http://www.m-w.com/]
They're not inciting litigation. They're instigating it. Furthermore, they haven't done it persistently, just one big, long case.
IANAL, but I have taken copyright and contract law classes. I am not Just Guessing here.
I thought we were waiting for them to stop speaking.
...is create the argument that if their contract stating that the creation of derivative works is allowed "...provided the resulting materials were treated as part of the Original Software." is invalid then the GPL stating "...or any derivative work..." is invalid.
Actually, if they're stupid enough to actually think that they're right, they wouldn't be guilty of barratry.
That's why they've hired attorneys. Whoever their IP attorneys are can't use that excuse and would be subject to malpractice. Do you really think that Boys and company are that incompetent and won't have covered their butts on this end? Then again, maybe that's why they haven't assigned senior partners to this case. Still, plausible deniability might be a little hard to achieve on this one.
Yes, I know that UPX packages the current executable formats, but we could spec a new format that includes the compression options and changes the resulting binary enough to be less like ELF/COFF than PE is. That way they would have to sue the hand that feeds them first.
I am sure there is some new thinking about how the loader could be more efficient if the file format could be changed to support it.
It could be added as a new option for code generation and the loader could contain a case stmt to choose the ELF loader or the new one.
/me stands back and waits for Sony to crush SCO like a bullant that's just bitten them.
There are three ways of 'owning' a standard:
The first is patents. For example, something about Betamax tapes were patented, and thus people had to license the standard from the owner, Sony. SCO has no patents, so can't possibly have one over ELF, so let's move on.
The second is trademarks. For example, Firewire is trademarked by Apple. This doesn't stop anyone from making Firewire ports on their laptop, but it does stop them from calling them Firewire ports, without paying a fee. Likewise, anyone can impliment ISO-9001, but you have to get certified if you want to call yourself that. (Technically, I don't think these are trademarks, they're 'seal of approval' marks, but they're under trademark law somewhere.)
The third is ownership of the copyright of the standards document. Quite a few standards organizations make their money this way.
While I know SCO does not have a trademark on ELF, and I doubt they somehow have copyright on the standards document that someone else released into the public domain before they were born, the important thing to remember is that only patents can stop someone from implimenting a standard.
I can sit here without having pay any money to Phillips for their standards documentation or their trademark and build a CD player. I can't call it a 'CD' player without getting their approval, and I'll have a hell of a time building it without looking at their documenation, but as all patents on basic CD players obviously expired already (Yeah, it's been 20 years.), I can build one, and even sell it.
As there never were any ELF patents, there has never been anything to prevent anyone else from implimenting it, period. Even if TISC trademarked 'ELF' and sold the standards documentation, it's still perfectly legal for someone to use that document, or in fact any way of figuring out the format they want, and impliment a system that uses ELF, even if they have to call it 'HOBBIT' or something. (Remember, reverse engineering for compatiblity reasons is still legal.)
(For everyone still paying attention, there is standard information in the format, and I can just hear everyone thinking 'what about copyright on those bytes?'. Well, no go. It's been explicitly ruled that, since copyright is only on creative works, and as information required by a standard is not 'creative', but 'factual', thus, you can't copyright it.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Someone up there mentioned something that got me thinking. SCO keeps talking about linux source that is very "similar" to their copyrighted works. Now, what if that is true. Say some algorithm, some way of solving a problem that is common between the two operating systems, is repeated. Forget which one came first. Now, that algorithm may have just been floating around in the 80s and 90s, some clever guy through it in, wow look at this fast way to schedule such and such, whatever. He writes it into My Little OS. Someone else sees it, sticks it in linux, in sunos, in SCO's shitty unix. SCO's source there is a copyrighted work. But that algorithm was never Patented, so reimplementing it on linux isnt even a legal issue, even if it WAS written on SCO first, which it probably wasnt, because SCOs a bunch of jerks. Isnt that how this boils down? Concepts like intellectual property, their /legal/ framework is patents, right? If there arent any patents for the specific algorithms that SCO finds "similar" between the two operating systems, what exactly is their argument?
Why stick up for big business?
Does anybody here presently know if SCO's claims are true? Also, does anybody know of a place to get an in-depth history of UNIX to present day linux, *BSD, etc? I was reading other posts concerning a.out and realized that I didn't really know what they were talking about, and that's why I ask.
Are you telling me that you don't see the connection between government and laughing at people? - Interviewer
As of today, how much is SCO worth on paper? Even if we all know SCO on the mid-term (I'm thinking more like ... very short-term) is worth NOTHING.
How much money / Linux users do we need to make a hostile takeover of SCO? Once we have the control, we can shutdown SCO by using their own code... "init 5" !!!
This comment is (C)2004 under the GNU LGPL license. SCO, feel free to re-distribute this information to your shareholder assets -- Don't forget to keep the license part of this comment, otherwise we'll sue you!On a side note, ex post facto, while expressed in something like Latin, is properly a barbarism: a late coinage that is in bad style (including a colliding and far from euphonious series of prepositions that no Latin poet would ever have uttered). Furthermore, it does not mean "after the fact," as factum means something done and ex means "out of" or "on the basis of." What ex post facto really means is "on the basis of something done afterward." This comes into legal terminology to refer to the situation where a new law makes a previous act illegal. Smart constitutions or bodies of laws have clauses that prevent things from being made illegal ex post facto, the new legislation in this case being the thing that is done afterward.
</pedantry> Sorry about that. Just had to get it out of my system.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
> One would think it would be easy enough to find the authors of the suspect code and ask them before filing a lawsuit.
One would be assuming that lawsuit to be genuine, though, wouldn't one?...SCO's suits are *far* from sincere. They've NEVER existed for valid legal reasons, only for valid stock market pump/dump reasons.
Maybe I watch too much Law & Order, but I've heard that referred to as a plea of "not guilty by reason of mental defect."
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I think SCO claims are meritless mostly because I have a much greater respect of Linus & IBM than I do of the SCOG for _anything_. I rely on other people for technical appraisals but I think I can personally judge that SCOG and the Canopy group are without honour or merit.
Imagine if this were a Microsoft claim after the computing world moved to MONO? Honourable futures are like our honourable past based on clear choices and concensus.
I would love our supposedly moral governments to realize what backward damage they are doing with IP protectionism, monopoly making, and submarine patents.
ls
Sorry bud. The Demos get just as many campaign donations from big business as the republicans and libertarians and anyone else. Checkout who has donated to Fritz Hollings, the Senator from Disney, who is a Democrat. Yup - the RIAA and other big businesses. All political parties are corrupt and blaming just one or two of them for the ills of this country is just plain wrong.
Now we have installation hell, borne of the same DLL nonsense that make installing apps on Windows hellish. And for much the same reasons. Mostly dependencies. Not only do you have to have This version 1.5.3, but you have to have That version 2.0.4 (beta). You install a new distribution, and gee whiz, libc.so.4 isn't available. So all your old binaries need to be reinstalled, or you have to go find a libc.so.4, and perhaps others.
Now, we could insist that distributed, non distribution binaries be compiled statically. However, the idiots that be decided that static compilation should not be the default. Why not? If I'm going to take the time to compile something, what makes anyone think that I want to do that again, after every distribution installation, by default?
Feh.
Of course, at this point, I need Elf compatibility.
-- Stephen.
Just goes to show that fingers and the mind aren't always on the same page. The funnier admission is that I actually read Helenistic Greek... :-()
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Total troll, and promotes illegal activity.
SCO would you just shut up and go away? nobody gives a flying horse cr@p about you anymore
Join Team Mozilla #38050 Folding@home
hehe
yet another sheep.
baaaa baaa baaaa
using 'liberal' as if its some kind of insult, as if views opposing his can't possibly have any validity.
I wish you guys that throw out that weak insult would learn to think forselves for once. This constant repeating of that weak insult isn't getting you anywhere, we've heard you say it for years and knew from the start that you got sucked in good by your local non-liberal political cronies, like a collie rounding up the herd.
All you do by saying 'liberal!' is tell us how you think, and expose how flawed your reasoning is.
Now excuse me, I have to go make up some lies so my fellow dumbfuck americans will let me drop my bombs on Iran, killing thousands more innocent civilians for no reason whatsoever. That way, by keeping them scared over NOTHING, they will re-elect me in November. Seems bombing Iraq didnt work.
You sheep actually realized that Al-Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq, that sending 200,000 troops there, but only 11,000 after Osama in Afghanistan was a little too obvious.
But hey, come on now! the Bin Ladin's gave me and daddy Bush $1.4BILLION dollars! you don't really expect me to seriously chase down Osama when all he did was kill 3000 people on american soil do you? For that kind of money in my pocket he deserves to kill a few of you dumbfucks while I'm in charge!
oh ya, and go buy more duct tape! booo ! be scared! buy duct tape!
--Dubya
when you're only ability to exist as a corporation seems to be in suing others. Granted you may have legal right to in some cases, but if that seems to become your business model then you are truly a sad group.
SCO must surely know that they can't possibly "own" an implementation of a standard such as ELF unless they have patents in the methods used - and I'm pretty sure they don't. They kind of try to imply that this is about copyright, and talk about the "codes" to ELF being copied, but that surely isn't at issue here. Whilst it is possible that they own copyright on the source code to a specific implementation that reads/writes ELF format, copyright wouldn't extend to any other implementation, just because it reads/writes the ELF format.
So what are they talking about here? And why don't they say? The only viable reason I can imagine for them not stating whether they claim to own copyright, patent or trademark in the format is because if they did, it would be transparently obvious they're holding nothing in their hand and it's all a big bluff.
Of course, I'd be deeply shocked if it turned out SCO was just bluffing...
So now they come up with this one...
Except ELF has widely known to have been a part of Linux since early 1.x, and there's no way in hell that SCO could feasably claim they didn't know that, so by their own prior admission, ELF does not infringe.
I say let them try to bring this one up in court...It'd be funny as heck to see SCO commit purgery.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Rollin' rollin' rollin'
Claim your code is stolen,
Keep them lawsuits rollin'
mcbride!
There's no evidence for your case
Just lie with a straight face
We're spreadin' our FUD far and wide
Whine and pout, make it up
Make it up, drag it on,
Whine and pout, make it up
mcbride
Lie and shout, fud and spin,
fud and spin, lie and shout
Lie and shout, fud and spin,
mcbride!
The bsd CASE cause that source to be giveout ie the Lose of it was Novell sorry you can not go back before Novell that stuffed it up everything before them was called stolen from bsd ie can not use stolen code to proff of theif or code that was use to pay off the cost of using BSD code by removing the licence. So Init and elf not a problem read the linux source please lot of elf sections are BSD kinda kills everything BSD allows GPL to be put over the top with the version that was on that code. As for the filesystem almost no linux systems use it so lossing it would not be a problem.
So basicly SCO is stuffed with both fights most of the init files in linux also came from bsd so also protected.
...all jokes must have basis in reality, in order to exist.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
No shit. Boolean should be a typedef, not a #define. Jesus, I would want to do more than scream. :-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I think we must be missing something here. I understand your logic, but if you only have $5, you don't go buy a slingshot and take on a Kodiac bear, unless your goal isn't to win to begin with.
That's right. No sane company would do that. Which is why that if you do, people believe you have some kind of secret weapon. Some way you're going to win anyway, David vs. Goliath style (there's your sling btw).
But in order to fight the fight, they need money. Investors. With promises of big pay-offs to them after the fight. And people buy into it. They keep their jobs, get to sell their stock options and so on.
Basicly, it is the corporate version of a Nigerian 419 scam. Get you to pay some money first, for huge rewards later. Same with all the pyramid games. Notice a trend here? Those running the operating is making money, the suckers are not. Same goes for SCO.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
mod the parent off-topic damnit
According to SCO, if code EVER touches SysV code, it is contaminated. Look at JFS2. It came from OS2 and was backported to AIX.
Ooops... it touched AIX, so SCO owns it.
IP Crack smokers...
Their stock went up around April. What did they claim they owned *that* time?
But I don't want to get a migraine just from doing that. So please....
LBW, change the damned yellow/black chequered background. Just try looking at it while scrolling...Bleagh!
Skiing? Check out The Independant Skiers Portal
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=6m&l=on&z=m &q=l&c=
SCOX stock 1/3 value in 6 months.
No further comment needed.
KRYTEN: I ask the court one key question: would the Space Corps have allowed this man ever to be in a position where he might endanger the ship? A man so petty and small-minded he would while away his evenings sewing name labels on to his ship-issue condoms? A man of such awsome stupidity...
RIMMER: Objection.
JUSTICE: Objection overruled.
KRYTEN: A man of such awsome stupidity, he even objects to his own defence counsel.
by giving IBM and others the chance to shoot down every possible attack on the open source movement.
>>SCO calls the GPL "quicksand" and claims it's invalid.
According to scox, the gpl is not just invalid, it actually defies the USA constitution. The reason the gpl is unconstitutional is because it forces the author of the code to surrender his/her copyright to the public domain. That is what scox said.
Sorry for not being specific.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
Came across it in a boardgame named empire, but you can find proof
I actually read the above link and I'm not sure that the people referred to themselves as "the Gupta", maybe it was just the name of the King.
The first King I saw with the name is Chandragupta Maurya, whose empire is referred to as the Mauryan empire, which is followed by the Gupta Era.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
>These guys ought to be tried and convicted for barratry, regardless of whether their legal counsel is this stupid or not.
Actually, if they're stupid enough to actually think that they're right, they wouldn't be guilty of barratry.
If their lawyers are that stupid, wouldn't they be guilty of malpractice?
Actually, I work in the construction industry, and it's incredibly common (to the point that it's almost unenforced; I've never heard of a case going to court.) I remember one client even got the "trial copies" of a set of plans from a large design firm, photocopied them, whited out the Copyright stamp and removed the titleblock, and submitted it with modifications to make it match current code for our area.
... but that's too much effort.
He paid for it in the end. The house cost twice as much as it should have because of the number of errors due to misplacement of doors / windows and other sundry issues like that. (The drawings were drawn for California-like weather - 2x4 walls - and was built for Oregon weather - 2x6 walls.)
Oh, and my company now has an official policy not to touch people who ask us to do that. On the other hand, duplicating a plan isn't that bad, as long as you do a large portion of the work yourself. IE: If you woulc have to redraw the building from scratch, but you base it off of someone elses's drawings, it's really not a bad thing. I've even considered using Creative Commons licensing for mine, and giving out disks
Basically, 90% of the cheap houses out there are based off of the same 100 designs or so. And let me add this: I don't want to be prevented from building my dream house simply because some guy in North Dakota has the same tastes as me. And I'm not going to buy the plans from him and modify them; I don't want to duplicate his errors.
Excuse me, but what the fuck are you smoking? This "Redundant" post was submitted a full hour before the "Informative" post explaining the same damn thing. Fucking dumbasses.
Sudden big drop this morning. New 52-week low. Bad news from the hearing?
The stock is actually dropping like lead in the water.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
I figure MSFT is behind the scenes, taking a look at the code and telling SCO where they should concentrate. This is along the lines of marketing a product below cost, because you have enough liquid assets to ride along until you have the market share to dominate your competition. Hence the MSFT buy-back of Ballmer's and Gate's stock. If they are forced to bail out of MSFT (the company won't ever go completely under), they'll open another company with their own cash and start anew in the open-source arena. MSFT will dwindle to an Office productivity developer.
.iso's, and probably go after some of the applications for Linux. Kill the applications to an OS, and you will starve the OS for userbase. This is the one thing, right now, that would utterly revamp the entire game strategy. Application usability. Develop applications that can rival Photoshop, Visual Studio, and Autocad, both in terms of ease-of-use and performance, and the entire issue would dissolve in 6 months.
It's getting dirty, and it's going to get even more dirty. I expect them to file "John Doe" lawsuits against people who are downloading
Truth is, every stock that I buy goes broke. So I bought some Caldera a few years ago when
it, it turned out, was half owned by microsoft silent partner Paul Allen. He and his bitch Ransom Love then proceeded to excercise their options and the result was a downward pressure on the stock that ended up taking 98 percent of the value of Caldera down the old tube. It is all in the transactions and they are public record somewhere. Quicken had a list of insiders of Caldera, and that is how I found out about Ransom Love and Paul Allen. Paul is half owner of Micro$$$. What the hell was he doing with ownership of his primary competition?
NOW WE KNOW!!
Which brings us to number three, 'copyrighted unix headers and interfaces' .... boy. Here comes this crap again. What on earth are they sticking in headers to copyright? #define ONE 1;??? Sounds like I might have a case myself.
But if you dare to use my
#define FOURTHY_THOUSAND 40000
I'll pay that amount in dollars and have you SNIPPED.
When I was reading it the first time, I was sure you have misspelled "Cisco." Then, when I didn't get the joke, I reread it only to realise that in fact there is such a word as "disco." Then, I went out, as at that point it was quite obvious that I have to get out more often either.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."