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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 author uses some fallacies of his own. He shows how Linux said "you've got X,y,Z, and that is UNIX" and then goes on to say that the Linux community says "Linux is not UNIX". He's keying off two different usages of the term UNIX, which isn't a valid point.
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.
"Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'."
Man, Darl's got more personalities than a Sweeps Week episode of "The Love Boat".
Admittedly, the word "idiots" may not be totally inapplicable in some of those cases (and "useful" is also debatable) but the benefits were certainly there.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
If the two teams have no contact except through the specifications documents, and neither team is contaminated by knowledge of the original engineering, then the new product is considered just that: a new product and not an illegal copy. It's possible, therefore, to recast SCO's basic claim as saying that IBM was contractually obligated to ensure that this type of "chinese wall" existed between those of its people who had some contact with the protected Unix knowledge or code and those of its people who contributed to the Linux development effort in the run-up to the 2.4 kernel release, but failed to do it. What a stupid argument. You don't need to do a "Chinese Wall" to be legal, you do it in order to prove that what you did was legal. The IBM ROM-BIOS was likely going to have a lot of code in common with the Phoenix bios that Compaq purchased. In other words, if the data is physically identically, then you're going to need some pretty strong proof that what you did didn't involve copying. On the other hand, Linux and SCO didn't contain any identical duplicate code. There were some pieces that were similar, IIRC, but those were lists of variables out of a book and had to do with meeting standards. And secondly, the "Chinese Wall" is all about preventing copyright infringement. This was a contract dispute, not a copyright case, because Linux wasn't a copy of SCO. offensive tshirts
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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 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.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
Software reverse engineering requires two teams
Says you. I can see how an entity might be on firmer legal ground if they adopt the procedure you've outlined. However, to say that legal reverse engineering "requires" two teams is a total fabrication.
What a troll article.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I mean really this is a bad opinion piece by someone that has no legal training about a law suite. If you print any story about SCO will it end up on Slashdot? Great way to drive up your ad income.
Next week at Playboy on line. The women of SCO.
The suite has been setup by SCO as Linux is evil and belongs to us and we will sue all the users that do no pay us.
There are no Linux advocates involved with the court case it is Freaking IBM that is involved.
Here is what happened.
Someone convinced SCO that Linux could only have gotten so good by stealing SCO's code. SCO was going down fast and grabbed that straw with the hopes that IBM would just buy them to shut them up.
IBM knew that SCO did not have a case so it decided to make an example of them.
SCO trying to get more people to pony up attacked any deep pockets that it could. Autozone and other show the court that SCO had nothing so that backfired.
Frankly at this point I really want to believe that McBride really did believe that IBM had stolen the code. I would like to think that he has just backed himself into a corner and can not see anyway out. The only other answer is he is delusional.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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/
Quoth the article:
"According to SCO, it is the legal successor to AT&T..."
That is a fact in dispute. It seems the rest of the article is founded on this premise.
If SCO does not "own" Unix, then the arguments in the article fall flat.
$ echo "dream" | su congress -c 'chmod 444 open\ source'
done. what next?
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).
He's getting destroyed by readers on his very own forum.. Also, from his website, are a bunch of his other writings on the SCO case.
Me, I've read the correspondence filed with the Court on the subject. IBM asked what they were supposed to have done wrong so that they could remedy the problem, SCOX told them they'd see them in court.
Yeah, that's bad faith on IBM's part all right. Here we are more than two years later and IBM is still trying to get the Court to make SCOX tell them what IBM is supposed to have done wrong, so far with no luck.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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
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
is a more appropriate title to the tripe the FA has in it.
The man makes wild assumptions based on loose guesses he himself made, where-as 20 minutes with google would have produced facts to write an article that would have had some merit. Most of what he rants on about are flat-out wrong. He knows nothing about linux and I strongly suspect his claims about Unix experience.
I am very interested in how supposedly linux supporters are suddenly claiming that Linux is not unix as he mentions in the article? From what I remember this has been the norm cince 1994 when I started dabbling in it and I bet that if someone looked they would find even earlier evidence of that fact.
that article tarnishes not only the writers reputation but the publication that carried it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
In Darl's infamous open letter, he clearly defines the combatants:
Despite the raw emotions, however, the issue is clear: do you support copyrights and ownership of intellectual property as envisioned by our elected officials in Congress and the European Union, or do you support "free" - as in free from ownership - intellectual property envisioned by the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and others? There really is no middle ground. The future of the global economy hangs in the balance.
This is not a disinterested "I'm just thinking about my shareholders" approach. After bringing in discussion about competing interpretations of the Constitution, Darl ends the monologue with this:
We take these actions secure in the knowledge that our system of copyright laws is built on the foundation of the U.S. Constitution and that our rights will be protected under law. We do so knowing that those who believe "software should be free" cannot prevail against the U.S. Congress and voices of seven U.S. Supreme Court justices who believe that "the motive of profit is the engine that ensures the progress of science."
The stated intent of SCO is to eliminate free software, because SCO views the mere existence of free software as incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. To me that's about as extreme a position as you can take, given that nowhere in the Constitution does it say that creators are not free to give away their works as they see fit.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
and many of the advantages of a micro kernel are in Linux's current design using modules. Of course, that does not include the main one, which is that one bad module can not take down the kernel.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The entire article looks suspiciously like what the public relations firms call a "press hit", meaning that the public relations firm feed factual background information to one of their reporter contacts, which may not be entirely false but almost certainly represents a selected truth (e.g., figures don't lie, but liars sure do figure), who then cuts and pastes the "facts" into an article. The end result is that one news bureau after another reprints the "facts" until the real source of the information in the article, (.i.e., the public relations firm), becomes entirely obscured. The vast majority of the public has no idea that the majority of the articles that they read today, especially trade-magazine articles and technology pieces where reporters have to rely more on outside experts, are "press hits" prepared by public relations firms for their clients. If I were SCO then I would certainly be engaging the services of a PR firm in light of the acrimonious nature of the ongoing litigation. A good PR firm can charge upwards of $20,000 per month for their services, but the really good ones get results and marketers, advertisers, and lawyers everywhere know that.
But here is what it actually comes down to: what SCO has done, and is doing -- indeed the only thing they *can* do...
SCO has proved through this absurd circus-show that they are motivated by profit margins, political assassination of FOSS, and spreading FUD about the whole Linux development community.
And what is this whole talk about when Linux "... became a new kernel by March of 1991 and a whole new Unix clone when file system processing was internalized in June." That is the pivot point that makes Linux a "UNIX clone?"
Linux is anything but a "UNIX clone." We could point to a lot of things that linux is *kind of like*. Linux is kind of like BSD, or Minix, or even some parts are like UNIX -- but it is anything but a "UNIX clone" -- linux is a GNU clone, hence whole NotUnix thing (get the acronym?).
The overall article speaks of somebody who has a command over *NIX rhetoric, but very little command over what makes a *NIX and how they work. He shows a little knowledge of AT&T UNIX history, but very little knowledge of a *NIX varient in terms of technology and development.
It is ironic that Paul Murphy references the 1982 IBM legal case. The conclusion that he positing -- potential SCO victory over IBM -- would be the tipping point that would thrust us away from FOSS progress and back into the land of proprietary obfuscation -- the exact opposite from what IBM's defeat in 1982 meant to the tech world. Instead of gaining freedom from proprietary operating systems we would be gaining again the time when one (or at least very few) companies could hold total control over where and what computers do and making us pay for it at the same time. No offense Mr. Murphy, but after being a "20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry..." you would think you would have gained one thing: a clue.
Since no one has seen fit to respond to this so far, let me point out emphatically that this post is making an an outrageous and completely unsubstantiated accusation, and it is a lousy, indecent thing to be doing to Paul Murphy. You may or may not like what he says about SCO, but he most certainly does not deserve an anonymous accusation of attempted rape.
I frankly would like to meet the person who wrote this post, so that I could give him solid kick in the ass. I'm not using a figure of speech here. Far from acknowledging any "obvious reasons", Mr. Anonymous Accuser, I say that you are loathsome coward, and you damn well better come back with something more substantial, or shut your filthy mouth.
As for you moderators who modded the post up to 5 Interesting, I submit that you are among the stupidest morons ever to visit Slashdot. If anything deserves a -1 Troll, this is it.
As for the question of whether or not the accusation is true, in the absence of any verifiable evidence there is no reason at all to consider such a possibility. To make any such assumption about Paul Murphy on the basis of an anonymous accusation is so unfair as to be utterly indecent.
I never thought I would attack someone for an anonymous post, because I'm often irritated by all of the pithy sigs about how anonymous posters cannot be believed. In almost all cases, that's a logical fallacy, because the merit of post in a discussion group lies solely in the strength of the evidence and arguments it presents, which usually has nothing at all to do with the identity of the poster. The only situation in which the anonymity of the poster detracts from his credibility is when his identity is one of the issues addressed in his post.
But this is precisely that kind of situation. Someone here is saying that he knows Paul Murphy personally and is accusing him of a crime, but the accuser won't tell us who he is and how he supposedly knows these things. That kind of crap deserves no credibility until the poster comes back and tells us why we should believe anything he says.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind