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.'"

Comments

Could SCO have a chance after all?

[bmw]

OK, so this guy might have a valid point that SCO does not need to provide a line-by-line code comparison in order to prove their case but, if this is really the situation, how come they have failed so miserably to provide anything substantial in their favor? All of their claims seem so utterly ridiculous that I can't imagine them ever getting anywhere with this in court. The outcomes so far support this view. They seem to get bitch slapped out of court every time they actually bring something in front of a judge. Does anyone know of ANYTHING real that SCO has shown to prove their case? So far it just seems like they're spreading a bunch of BS and trying to scare people into buying licenses from them. Is it possible they still have an ace up their sleave?

Something else I found interesting in the article...

To some, the fact that SCO sees Linux as a Unix clone not only makes holding that view morally wrong but requires the immediate repudiation of nonbelievers and indeed the remarketing of Linux as "not Unix" -- a move that would replace the academic and open-source heritage powering its development with a lie and thus destroy it.

Re:Could SCO have a chance after all?

[zerocool^]

I know it's a hard concept for the non-techie to grasp, but it goes like this:

UNIX is a trademarked word. UNIX is also a POSIX compliant operating system. In order to be a posix compliant operating system, an operating system must follow X, Y, and Z criteria. Linux follows X, Y, and Z criteria. Linux is a POSIX compliant operating system. The Linux code has been built from scratch with the aim of being POSIX compliant. Since the POSIX standard is based on the UNIX operating system, Linux is a relative of, but not a derivitive of, UNIX.

That's not exactly it, but it's close enough, and simple enough, that a reporter can digest it.

So, in some ways, you could say "Linux is a UNIX clone". In the same ways, you could say "Margarine is a Butter clone". Margarine was built from scratch, using entirely different ingrediants than butter, but with the aim of looking, smelling, and tasting like butter. But, margarine is not butter. However, I don't think anyone who went around calling margarine "Not Butter" is going to kill either industry.

So, I'm not even sure I know what this guy is trying to say. It sounds like he thinks that we are mad that SCO says linux is a unix clone. I don't know a linux user that would be bothered by this statement. All we (as linux users) are saying is "Linux contains no stolen copyrighted code from Unix", and "Linux is not Unix". And maybe a "Linux is similar enough in function to Unix that they share a computing standard".

~Will

From the article...

[Future Man 3000]

The problem here is that the underlying assumptions about the lawsuit being both over and baseless are unfounded. The claim that a failure to find copied code today proves that previous processes were uncontaminated is fallacious. And the presumptive consequence about due diligence having been widely rendered is unsupported wishful thinking.

The crux of the matter is this: IBM does not have to prove previous processes were uncontaminated to win the case -- rather, the burden is on SCO to prove that they were, and they don't appear to have come up with anything substantial. Perhaps this is a wake-up call to open source developers to vet submitted code carefully, but I don't believe the wishful thinking is coming from the Linux camp.

Third Paragraph Says It All

[canfirman]

It's interesting the author states, "By itself this was a straightforward contractual dispute that could, and should, have been settled quickly and easily." If it was so straightforward and should have "been settled quickly and easily", then the judge should have seen that too. So, the fact that the case is still going on shows that it's definitely not a "straightforward" case. (However, as we all know with SCO, that it's never straightforward, or quick and easy.)

If you read the beginning of the article, it sounds like the author assumes that SCO is in the right, but that has yet to be proven. I thought that's what courts were for.