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The SCO Trial Through A New Lens
An anonymous reader writes "On Yahoo! News they've got an article by Paul Murphy entitled, SCO, IBM and Outcomes-Based Circular Reasoning. Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'. He writes, 'By itself this was a straightforward contractual dispute that could, and should, have been settled quickly and easily.' And that, 'Although SCO hasn't formulated its complaint in this way, I believe it could meet these, or similar, requirements quite easily and therefore has every reason to be confident that the court will eventually enforce its stop-use order against IBM.' He also goes on to insult Linux advocates by stating that, 'the position being run up the flagpole by what Stalin famously called "useful idiots" is first that the lawsuit itself is no longer a real issue and secondly that its consequences have been generally positive.'"
The reason Tannenbaum apparently gave Linus a "C" for his kernel hack probably wouldn't have been that the code was bad or derivative, but that he disapproved of sacrificing design elegance for a performance benefit available only on the x86.
Here is what Tannenbaum really said:-I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)
Note the smiley.Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
I find it hard that you have to negotiate to settle an issue when you are completely in the clear by the terms of the contract.
SCO's interpretation of the contract is so overbroad that it is absurd. The definitions they are using for the terms are completely different from the normal usage of the same terms.
For example, a derivative work incorporates the original work or elements of the original work. But SCO takes the view, with nothing in the contract to support them, that developing your own code to run under their UNIX makes it a derivative work even though it has never contained any element of the original work.
If he had paid attention to any of the hooplah surrounding this case, he would have known 2 things:
It is more commonly attributed to Lenin, but it seems that he didn't really say it either:
"Lenin, it is said, once described left-liberals and social democrats as 'useful idiots,' and for years anti-communists have used the phrase to describe Soviet sympathizers in the West, sometimes suggesting that Lenin himself talked about 'useful idiots in the West.' But the expression does not appear in Lenin's writing. We get queries on 'useful idiots of the West' all the time, declared Grant Harris, senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress, in the spring of 1987. We have not been able to identify this phrase among his published works."
The source of this passage is a work entitled "They Never Said It: a Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions", authored by Paul F. Boller Jr. and John George, published by Oxford University Press in 1989. The text goes on to explain that the phrase apparently first appeared in a John Birch Society pamphlet labeling President Ronald Reagan a "useful idiot" because of some agreement he had negotiated with the Soviet Union.
btw, most of Lenin's writings are available for searching at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/
It was Lenin who said that and he actually didn't say it. It was invented by the John Birch Society to describe Ronald Regan.
Source
There is much more evidence that Lenin referred to them instead as "Deaf Mutes" which is much less of a marketable term for the anti-communists to use in describing how communists view their dupes.
Article that Makes Reference to the Deaf Mutes Quote. This quote was also referenced by Theodore Radzinsky in his Stalin Biography as being authentic.
"The so-called cultural element of Western Eurpoe and America are incapable of comprehening the present state of affairs and the actual balance of forces; these elements must be regarded as deaf-mutes and treated accordingly....
(The Lufkin News, King Featurers Syndicate, Inc., 31 July 1962, p. 4, as quoted by the Freeman Report, 30 Sept. 1973, p. 8).
This guy is making a totally specious argument, by comparing the Compaq vs. IBM case to the Linux case. I stopped reading after that, because it was quite stupid. In another mal-formed post below I elucidated this, but here's a summary: Compaq V. IBM was about copyright infringement. Any re-implementation of the BIOS was likely to have identical code, since we're talking about optimized assembly. Compaq had their "Chinese wall" in place to be able to prove that they didn't copy anything. There was no contract dispute, either.
On the other hand, all you need to do to prove that Linux is not a copy of SCO is compare the source. They're different. Linux does not infringe SCO's copyright, and it never did.
He also confuses Trademarks and Copyrights. He says "Linux is Unix" because it does what Unix does. But when people say "Linux isn't Unix" they're talking about trademarks.
Imagine if Coca-Cola sued pepsi for violating their trade secrets or something. You wouldn't say "Pepsi is Coca-cola because it tastes kind of like Coca-cola.". No, Pepsi is a Cola (that's the name of the flavor of Coca-cola, pepsi, RC-cola and so on). You can't make the argument that Pepsi tastes like coke, and because you want to call it Coca-cola, then Pepsi is violating Coke's trademarks. That would be retarded. This isn't a "new" perspective, it's just some retards musings.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This could be of interest to PJ at Groklaw.
Re: SCO V. IBM -Thursday April 28/05
Author: Robert Weiler (204.247.40.---)
Date: 04-29-05 16:45
Dear Paul,
I have over 25 years in the software business, most of it on Unix systems and I have worked for two SVR4 licensees. It was very clear at both of these companies that code that we created belonged to us and that AT&T did not control it in any way. The only copright notices that we placed in our code was our own, not AT&T's. This is explicit in IBM's agreement, and it was made explicit in the $echo newsletter. The notion that SCO controls the subsequent work product of everybody that has ever seen Unix source is complete nonsense and would in fact be illegal restraint of trade in most states. Your notion seems to be even more expansive than SCO's; as I read your argument, any code that ever ran on AIX and was subsequently ported to Linux would belong to AT&T. This idea is so silly it doesn't even merit a response, so I'm asuming that I've misinterpreted what you wrote.
SCO's notion of what constitutes a derivative work is not only completely at odds with the SOFT aggreements, it is at odds with copyright law. If the only thing that SCO has is a few suggestive emails and the 'mental tainiting' argument that you espouse, then IBM will win on summary judgement as a matter of law. And according to Judge Kimall, that is apparently all they have.
Finally I should note that even if SCO were to prevail on their contract dispute with IBM, it means absolutely nothing to Linux. At worse, the offending code is removed, any liability is IBM's.
I would greatly appreciate it if you would inform yourself on the issues of this case and write a followup article. Every CIO should be evaluating a migration from Windows and proprietary Unix to Linux as the cost savings are dramatic. It would be very, very unfortunate if any CIO delayed a transition to Linux based on misinformation about SCO's legal propects which are virtually nonexistant.
This guy is way out there
this guy is really just spreading more SCOx FUD for them.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
SCO issued a stop-use order with the 100-day hiatus required under the contract, but IBM neither changed its behavior nor embarked on good-faith negotiations to settle the issue.
And what really happend:
SCO issued a stop-use order with the 100-day hiatus, but failed to include in that order an explanation of what IBM did wrong, or how they could correct it as required under the contract, and so therefore IBM neither changed its behavior nor embarked on good-faith negotiations to settle the issue, because SCO never gave them that option.
I'm not calling Mr. Graham a troll or shill. Just wrong. Consistently wrong on this issue.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Rumour had it that he started as an entry level sysadmin and wrecked so much stuff they made him a manager. This is the Peter Principle at work boys and girls... Posted anonymously for obvious reasons.
The Peter Principle is where you get promoted because you're good at what you do until you become incompetent at your new position and stagnate.
The Dilbert Principle is probably what you mean. You're a total dumbass, therefore you get promoted to management.
The author ignores a number of inconvenient facts.
First, and foremost, SCO's bluster about Linux and copyright infringement predates their lawsuit against IBM. Whether or not IBM violated its contract with SCO is not the community's beef with SCO; the community is up in arms because SCO had the gall to suggest that Linux was a big ripoff of SCO's proprietary unix code and began to do things like sell linux licenses, as if it had some right to collect that money. So this is not merely a "simple contract dispute".
Moreover, he is skewing the origin of Linux. Regardless of the author's qualifications, the two people most able to state whether or not Linux was or was not dervied from Minix or contained Minix code would certainly be Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tannenbaum. Tannenbaum said, "I told [Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution] that MINIX had clearly had a huge influence on Linux in many ways, from the layout of the file system to the names in the source tree, but I didn't think Linus had used any of my code." Eric Raymond may have been citing this to make a point, but when Linus and Andrew both are clear on the point that Linux did not use Minix code, then I believe take their assertions on that point.
The assertions about due diligence are equally off-base, as the Open Source Risk Management company is offering insurance against claims of copyright infringement. It is basically absurd to suggest they could get millions and millions of dollars of insurance underwritten without due diligence against the product they were insuring - which, in this case, is the code that comprises Linux.
Finally, the author completely ignores how unclean SCO is with its own source management. They distributed a version of Linux for quite some time, and continued to distribute it even after they had made public claims. If they had discovered claims but continued to distribute the code, one could quite easily argue (and surely IBM will) that they have themselves have placed whatever code is in question under the GPL.
This only touches on the number of issues he manages to gloss over in a few brief pages. By no means do I think that David Boies would have been involved on contingency unless he felt he had some chance of winning, but the fact is, SCO is bleeding money like tomorrow's bacon, and it is hard to imagine how anyone would care to purchase a real product from SCO in the future, given their propensity to do things like, say, sue their customers.
Certainly, at this point, Canopy can only be hoping that the payoff from the lawsuit against IBM and other actions will be sufficient to justify flushing the company. But even *if* SCO managed to prove IBM contributed tainted code, there's a mountain of counterclaims to deal with and SCO has to try to establish damages, and it's hard to see how SCO can justify damages that are a significant multiple of its own market capitalization at the time the offense occurred. It would be like Harold Welte suing Asus for $2B or such. It may sound like a nice round number, and SCO can say that it wants "infinity times infinity" for damages, but that doesn't give it a snowball's chance in hell of actually seeing such damages.