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SCO Spreads Rumors About IBM Lawsuit
yeremein writes "SCO says it has found a new smoking gun in its battle with IBM. This 'bombshell' was not found in a court document; instead it came from a reporter's interview at SCOforum. The scoop? 'SCO alleges that since 2001, AIX has contained code for which IBM does not have a license. Moreover SCO claims to have found internal IBM e-mails in which IBMers acknowledge this shortcoming.' With the announcement comes a hefty boost in SCO's stock price." SCO is also going to bundle its worthless linux licenses with its Unix operating systems.
What would happen to the *Linux* case, if SCO would turn out to be right on this one?
At a glance, this seems like purely an AIX issue - so even if IBM should get into hot water with that one (I'm not saying they are going to be), what impact would it have on the linux case? (Say, besides the fact that SCOs war chest for their lawsuit would get a big refill)
The boost is a 14.5% increase in their stock price (as of 11:30am). That's hefty indeed. Anyone who has been holding their stock in SCO has no idea how to invest. Those who have been buying it when it's low precisely for days such as this when SCO releases yet another batch of their FUD, are quite shrewd.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
FTA
"SCO says it discovered the e-mails in a mountain of documents IBM produced in discovery related to SCO's lawsuit against IBM over the Linux operating system. "
No espionage involved.
It's all FUD tho.
"Indeed, SCO says the company's biggest investor, BayStar Capital, has been pushing SCO to drop its Unix business altogether and simply become a litigation machine, bringing intellectual property-related lawsuits. But SCO insists it remains committed to selling Unix software--when it's not busy fighting people in court."
The same Baystar that claims that SCO must return its investment as SCO has been misleading them?
"goatse? What's that? Anyone have a link?" - AC
and I'm not familiar with laws on discovery ... but if I'd found the "smoking gun" that was going to win me my case, I'd keep it under my hat, and then reveal it (in true John Grisham style) just when it looks like my case was going down the pan.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Please, let this soap opera end for the love of God. If i wanted to see bad acting and finger pointing on a daily basis, I'd stay home from work and watch Guiding Light or Days of our Lives.
When will these dickless wonders get the information that their M$ backing is gone, and nobody wants them around anymore. Fuck off, SCO.
Read the only personal Runyon page out there.
SCO claims IBM didn't have a license to use SCO's SVR4 product, which it obtained during the abortive "Project Monterey," to enhance its [Linux][AIX] offerings. SCO says it will be able to prove this through IBM's own internal documentation consisting of [records of contributions to Linux][e-mails concerning AIX licensing].
Did you notice that all of the related articles about Linux have a negative slant? They also didn't link to IBM's reply to the charges. The article is surprisingly useless.
Maybe, just maybe, they're jerks. (girlish giggle)
The only reason for SCO to release this info to the public now is to help the battle for public opinion, and if you want to do that, you should start with a source a bit higher up the chain then SCOforum, such as, say, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, or some other well reputed paper.
I think we need a corollary to godwin's law referring to the invocation of the DMCA. It seems impossible to have a rational conversation after such an event. Let me have a go anyway: This has nothing whatsoever to do with the DMCA because it refers to copy protection circumvention, and cracking systems for the purpose of personal gain is covered by several other laws which have nothing to do with it.
Unless the documents were scanned and laid into a CSS-encoded DVD, the DMCA has nothing to say about it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One needs to know a lot about human psychology to do well in the market, just knowing a lot about business doesn't make one rich.
This has nothing to do with Linux, although I'm sure SCO will try to make it sound as if it does.
It'll be interesting to see how this turns out, if it's anything, since my understanding is that during discovery you have to stick to what you're looking for. In other words, it's not a fishing expedition. This is definitely fishing.
But I'm not a lawyer, although I'd have little trouble standing up to SCO's lawyers in court...
Do you have ESP?
They are doing so well legally, that the Daimler-Chrysler case got tossed, except that they are allowed to try the claim the response took too long. The judge in the Novell case told them he saw no evidence the copyrights were transferred to SCO in accordance with federal law. The 'Millions of lines' of SCO code copied verbatum into Linux has deteriorated into some bizzare 'non-literal copying' legal theory which means IBM's motion to declare there is no SCO copyrighted code in Linux appears to have a very real chance of being granted. Just where is this heap of evidence Darl? The only heap produced by SCO seems to fall under the catagory of fertilizer.
As long as those monkeys land on the desk of a prosecutor who's got political aspirations, or an SEC head should he actually be something more than theif himself, I'll look foreward to the house falling on Darryl.
1) We need to make sure those convicted of securities violations can't collect their paychecks. The head of Fog Cutter pled guilty will collect more than a million bucks for a job he won't be showing up to (they don't let you work for the company in prison) and get a multimillion dollar bonus. If I stole from the shareholders of the company I work for, I doubt the executives would be so generous to me.
2) We need to start taking them down like they were drug dealers and lived in crack dens. Foot on the neck. Booked in with bruises and minor cuts. Sometimes shot for menacing the TV with a remote control. None of this turn yourself in crap.
3) They need to be in general population.
Wake me up when SCO actually says it in court. What they say to the press is so disconnected from reality that I refuse to bother worrying about "what if" this one happens to actually be true.
Seems to me that this is a nice end-run for SCO to allow them to claim that they have "sold" a whole bunch more of those Linux licenses (as part of a "package deal") in order to give that license some additional, but false, credibility.
Believe it when you see it in court, and nowhere else. If we took them at their word, we'd (most of us I suspect) all be $699 poorer by now. To my recollection there has not been a single release from SCO which has not been spun or otherwise doctored the straight goods into something more palatable for current and potential SCO investors (if there's such a thing).
In most circles this is called self-incrimination. It is the duty of SCO to prove that IBM was involved in wrongdoing, not the other way around. If you dig deep enough into any companies documents I'm sure you will find evidince of many minor crimes. (come on kids, copyright infringement is easy to do and easy to overlook -- welcome to zero marginal cost of copying)
Shouldn't the whole damn thing be thrown out, on the basis that SCO never had a basis in the first place, and IBM incriminated themselves?
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
For someone interested in shorting SCOX, a temporary bubble like this is a great opportunity -- as soon as the enthusiasm dissipates and everyone catches on that this is smoke & mirrors, the price will drop down to it's previous levels (if not further)
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
hah... my dad (who's an environmental lawyer) frequently tries to convince me that law would be a good thing to do.
Now I'm currently pursuing CompE, but there's apparently lots of opportunity for people with technical knowledge, good logical skills (they say that computer people often do well in law because of the type of logic involved), and good writing skills.
However, lawyers work their asses off, have to deal with other lawyers, and typically only get big money for representing morally bankrupt assholes.
The article is surprisingly useless.
What do you mean useless? Lyons did his job as a paid shill for SCO and made sure the stock got pumped today.
While the lambs are buying into SCOX on the recommendations of SCO-paid shills like Lyons and The Enderle Troll (who just a few days ago called SCOX a great investment), the insiders and big holders are having a nice little lamb slaughter unloading their stock.
Note how SCO didn't go to court with their "new hot evidence", they went to a paid shill. Now, why is that?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Mind you, I'm talking about trial lawyers here. I have nothing against contract attorneys, since the whole reason they exist is to KEEP disputes that could lead to trials from occuring.
And as for this:Nope. He didn't reveal any information that was released in confidence -- he revealed that they have such information. That's a completely different thing.
If they did find stuff like that, it would not matter in the Multi-Billion dollar lawsuit at all.
They would have to start another lawsuit with this claim. The current MB lawsuit is about misappropriation of code to linux, not about AIX at all.
So THIS smoking gun, means nothing to the lawsuit they are elluding to. AFAIKT
Scott Carr
IBM has already asserted that SCO's code contains some violations of IBM patents, so if SCO pulls out this gun, IBM may well pull out a cannon.
Sure, of course SCO got emails. But do they say what SCO says they say? How do we know this? SCO says a lot of things
2) SCO only licenses IBM to distribute AIX code on Intel platforms, not PPC platforms, and that is the crux of this announcement.
Do we know this? SCO says so, but they say a lot of things
4) The fact this is AIX not Linux is interesting. Essentially, this has nothing to do with SCO patent claims against Linux.
This has never been about Linux, had it been, SCO would have nickled and dimed at smaller more edible Linux companies, not IBM.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
However, lawyers work their asses off, have to deal with other lawyers, and typically only get big money for representing morally bankrupt assholes.
As opposed to computer people, who work their asses off, have to deal with end-users, and practically never get big money while working for morally bankrupt assholes.
The real issue here is that SCO notified IBM that they were revoking IBM's SysV license which is required for IBM to ship AIX. IBM's license says that it is irrevokable(sp?), and so they have ignored the revokation notice, especially with Novell's support.
Note that this leaves IBM in an interesting position. It is remotely possible that the court could hold that IBM's license had been revoked or at least the terms exceeded as in Sun v. Microsoft. And they could rule that Novell did not retain the right to waive the revokation. In this case, IBM does not have a license and the distribution is probably some form of infringement on SCO's rights under the contract. However, this seems to me to be a very remote possibility, and extremely unlikely.
Nevertheless, I am sure that executives mentioned it and discussed ways of mitigating the risk. SCO has found this to be a smoking gun, but the only issue here is that it shows that IBM was discussing worst-case scenarios.
SCO is just up to their old games. Nothing new.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Libel perhaps? I'm assuming that like all the rest of SCO's claims this is baloney.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
On your last point "The fact this is AIX not Linux is interesting. Essentially, this has nothing to do with SCO patent claims against Linux." may not be completely accurate, or at least it's not fair to make that assumption so quickly.
If you look at what happened, SCO and IBM teamed up to work on a 64 bit version of Unix for 64 bit intel processors. IBM backed out of the deal and in doing so SCO claims IBM also backed out of their licensing agreement for SVR4 code. Yet AIX is now an SVR4 Unix and there is no licensing agreement for it. This aspect of the case doesn't seem unreasonable enough to not give SCO the benefit of the doubt enough to let them have their day in court.
Now, IBM developers have been contributing a lot to the Linux kernel. Who do you think they got to write the kernel code? Probably a good chance that it was people that were familiar with AIX. IBM is going to have to prove that there was a clear seperation of Linux developers and developers exposed to the SVR4 and Project Monterey code. Otherwise the Linux code is at risk too from this new discovery.
There are a lot of people on here that are just going to blindly dismiss it. Also, I don't give two shits about SCO, my point is that everyone should try and look at what's going on objectively because there is a lot at stake.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
He didn't reveal that they have such information, he claimed they have it--just like ownership of UNIX, BIGNUM lines of infringing code, etc. Certainly no one would ever accuse Darl of actually releasing information. ;)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Sure, of course SCO got emails. But do they say what SCO says they say? How do we know this? SCO says a lot of things
No doubt, no doubt. The original poster's point was that SCO could not have access to these emails without a court order. I fairly pointed out this is how they received them.
Do we know this? SCO says so, but they say a lot of things
In regards to the AIX code, yes we do. One of the major thrusts behind project monterey was to bring Unix to the PPC platform, and the project fell through in the negotiation stage.
This has never been about Linux, had it been, SCO would have nickled and dimed at smaller more edible Linux companies, not IBM.
I wholly disagree with this statement for purely financial reasons. If SCO could prove a part of the kernel belonged to them, every device, server, computer, etc. running linux would be fair game. The extent to which SCO would be able to make claims like this depends wholly on the amount of code they are able to prove in court has been included in the product. If you add on top of that the fact a $3B claim against IBM would put individual stock prices in the $450 range. This is all about making money off Linux, and the road to the 'payoff' goes through AIX.
M
you can bet that it is at least a gross exageration of the truth, at a minimum.
More than likely, it is an outright, bald-faced lie.
Read the Project Monterey Agreement - the limitation on specific archetecture applies to SCO, not IBM!
IBM was free to use "SCO's" code on any platform they choose, but SCO was not allowed to do the reverse. The rights of each party are explicitly spelled out separately. IBM gets to use SCO's code on any platform they choose (including PowerPC), SCO can only use IBM's code on i386.
There is no corresponding paragraph in the section entitled "License to IBM of Licensed SCO Materials and SCO Project Work"
Unless of course they are rewarding you for being the fall guy and protecting the company from further scrutiny that might put more people and money at risk.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Would it be possible for us to have a class action lawsuit against SCO if they lose the case?
Can we as a community seek damages against SCO for all their FUD they are spreading? Surely you can't just go do this and not have anything done about it.
Wait you are in the US....
Who on earth cares what McNugget tells a paid stooge of Lyon's caliber? So now its AIX that contains....
'millions of lines of line-for-line copied code'.
Paint up the stock price and dump those shares, boys. See any insiders buying this turnip?
BFD.
SH
According to the article, they recieved it when they were working with The Santa Cruz Operation (not to be confused with SCOX) on Project Monterey. Of course, you'd know this if you read the article. The real question is why they needed IBM e-mails to discover this, when IBM has supplied them with AIX source code already. Should be a simple matter to check the differences between SVR3 and SVR4, and see if those same differences show up in AIX, should it not? IF this is true, then this might be the first solid claim SCOX has against IBM. Maybe...
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
IBM paying off SCO in any way whatsoever would indeed mark the end of Linux.
This has nothing to do with Linux, or IBM's motion for a preliminary injunction. IBM has asked the court to find that SCO has found no UNIX in Linux. SCO's "smoking gun" says they found UNIX in AIX. Gee, big surprise. That's why IBM pays licensing fees for AIX. All SCO is claiming is that they should have paid more. Of course Forbe's -- impartial reporters that they are -- can't resist a gratuitous jab at "Linux zealots", but Linux just is not involved here.
Nothing to see here, just SCO blowing their usual smoke.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
SCO only licenses IBM to distribute AIX code on Intel platforms, not PPC platforms, and that is the crux of this announcement.
Actually, if you read the Project Monterey agreement, you'll find that it's SCO who was only licensed to use IBM's code on Intel. IBM was not restricted to any platform at all.
SCO got it wrong *again*.
this has nothing to do with SCO patent claims against Linux.
I'm sorry, but WHAT PATENT CLAIMS?!?!? SCO doesn't even *HAVE* any patents, let alone made claims against Linux.
Except that everything SCO has said, at least up to this time, has been bogus!
Note that SCO has claimed since the start that they have a "mountain of evidence", yet they have yet to provide any of it to IBM, which is why in IBM's cross-complaint(effectively a counter suit), they are filing for a Declaration that they did NOT infringe on any of SCO's copyrights vis-a-vis any of IBM's work with Linux. The truth is shocking isn't it? With regards to IBM's Linux work, SCO NEVER filed a copyright claim against IBM, they never filed a patent claim against IBM, and they've dropped their trade-secret claim. In other words, SCO's whole case rests on a nebulous and purile reading of a contract. Which will very likely be thrown out soon after the judge gives IBM the win in their Summary Judgement on their copyright cross-complaint.
Secondly, the "news" article is sooo chalk full of mistakes that the reporter should be ashamed of himself. He's fallen for SCO's story hook, line & sinker. Note how he calls it a suit against IBM over Linux, well as I've pointed out above, SCO never filed any suit over Linux per-se, they filed a suit over a contract claim with AIX.
Furthermore, the story claims that the SCO suit was filed over code that SCO claimed was "stolen". The facts of the filing couldn't be further from the truth! SCO has never claimed ownership or ownership rights over any code IBM has contributed to Linux, at least in the court filings. They've made all kinds of statements in public.
So this latest claim is just more of the same. First, it could easily be falsely represented information from SCO. Nothing they have said in public has been true. If you can find one schtickel of evidence for SCO's public claims I'm sure they would love to have it because they have shown none themselves. You don't need to believe me, just go read the court filings. IBM would not have asked for Summary Judgement regarding their copyright claim if SCO had handed them ANY evidence of copyright violations. What was SCO's answer to the request for Summary Judgement? "We need more time, and we need more discovery." In other words, SCO knows they are royally screwed on the copyright claim.
Secondly, even if SCO has found evidence of License violations by IBM over AIX 5L. This in NO WAY affects Linux. Note that SCO's public statement isn't that they found code that IBM copied to Linux, it's a claim that IBM didn't have a License to use SVR4 in AIX 5L. SCO still hasn't presented any evidence of SCO code in Linux, and this new statement doesn't indicate otherwise.
In fact SCO has so tried to twist everything into a pretzel shape of their liking that I don't believe a single word they say. This article is very likely more of the same and the writer made himself part of the scam by publishing an article that completely misrepresents the original case and derides both IBM and "Linux zealots".
By the way, if you don't believe me that SCO has absolutely NO evidence go to Groklaw and follow the "Legal Docs" link. Than read the court filings by both IBM and SCO. While we aren't privy to the evidence submitted under seal, it is clear from the back and forth of the filings that SCO has shown no evidence of wrong doing by IBM.
Sure information wants to be free, but how much are you willing to pay for the packaging?
One certain thing is that SCO has lost none of its appetite for litigation. To date the firm has sued IBM, Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ), AutoZone (nyse: AZ - news - people ) and DaimlerChrysler (nyse: DCX - news - people ). Also, SCO has been sued by Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ). Now SCO threatens to bring a new complaint against IBM.
Indeed, SCO says the company's biggest investor, BayStar Capital, has been pushing SCO to drop its Unix business altogether and simply become a litigation machine, bringing intellectual property-related lawsuits. But SCO insists it remains committed to selling Unix software--when it's not busy fighting people in court.
doesn't sound very pro-SCOG, to me...
...until I see or hear it come from someone who isn't Daniel Lyons. That guy has consistently been on about how "Linux-loving crunchies" should "wake up" because "these guys in Utah are no dummies"... "What SCO wants, SCO gets"... "SCO is on to something"... etc., etc., ad infinitum... As far as I know he has only once briefly entertained the possibility that SCO might be anything but a bunch of shining, white knights, and as far as I'm concerned his copy is of absolutely no value. Unless, that is, you have caged birds or want for toilet paper.
Making the world a better place, one psychotic episode at a time.
Barratry, fraud, libel -- there are a few terms for what new-SCO likes to pull.
What Darl and his crack pipe forget, as per usual, is that AIX5L is AIX + Linux compatability. Monterey was specifically related to an x86 port of AIX, which as far as I know was never done.
I seriously, seriously doubt that IBM's lawyers allowed AIX5L to be released without addressing the engineer's notes about any IP issues. It's perfectly normal to flag potential issues to management, and hardly a "smoking gun."
Anyone who has ever dealt with IBM's legal team knows damn well they cover all their bases. If someone mentioned the possibility of a problem, I am quite comfortable assuming IBM's lawyers followed up on it before proceeding.
Will somebody please just shoot SCO's "lawyers" already? There has been more than enough damage to the industry over their bullshit, and it's far past time for them to prove something, shut the hell up, or be arrested on barratry and worse.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.