SCO Says Email Is Inaccurate

daria42 writes "The SCO Group has slammed as 'inaccurate' suggestions that an e-mail from one of its own engineers showed Linux did not contain copyright Unix code, and even forwarded its own historical memo to journalists in an attempt to discredit the e-mail published on Groklaw." From the article: "This memo shows that Mr. Davidson's e-mail is referring to an investigation limited to literal copying, which is not the standard for copyright violations, and which can be avoided by deliberate obfuscation, as the memo itself points out..." We reported on the email yesterday.

Comments

Avoiding Jail

[drooling-dog]

Anybody else getting the feeling that these guys are just trying to stay out of jail now?

Scrambling...

[Phs2501]

I love the sweet smell of desperation. From the letter in question (strong tag mine):

Bob worked on the project for (I think) 4 to 6 months during which time he looked at the Linux kernel, and a large number of libraries and utilities and compared them with several different vesrions of AT&T UNIX source code. (Most of this work was automated using tools which were designed to to fuzzy matching and ignore trivial differences in formatting and spelling)

At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.

but Darl said there was literal copying!

[crimethinker]

So if Darl says that the 2002 memo only cleared linux of "literal" copying and didn't find deliberate obfuscation, how does he justify the "entire sections of code verbatim" remarks he made to the press?

I smell a shareholder lawsuit, an SEC investigation, and hopefully, a Sarbanes-Oxley smackdown of such grand proportions as to make Bernie Ebbers look like a slap on the wrist.

-paul

Re:Nice try, Darl, but...

[bigjocker]

Not only that, but they are claiming that a 1999 investigation proves wrong the one performed on 2002.

Also, later on they claim that 'SCO also pointed out its legal wrangling with IBM dealt with more recent versions of the Linux code than were mentioned in the memo'. Are they saying the more recent version was available on 1999, but not in 2002?

The beauty of the GPL

[RealProgrammer]

I'm not a GNU fanboy, but the GPL works wonderfully.

You see, SCO shipped Linux for years. They did so, knowingly, under the GPL. The GPL was their license.

They claimed that they stopped shipping Linux as soon as they could when they realized that IBM was "dumping UNIX code into Linux". That's hogwash, but that's not my point.

The point is that now, when they claim there were pre-IBM copyright violations, they are caught by the GPL. They shipped all that code included in Linux and other supporting programs under the GPL.

If they believed there was SCO code hidden in Linux, shipping under the GPL means they approved of it.

OMGWTFBBQ

[aws4y]

I just read the Fscking email and it says the opposite of what Stowell said. The email states directly that this entire scheme was concoted because executives cannot understand that simpling because two things work the same way it dosent mean that one thing is a copy of the other. This just makes them look more guilty of sock manipulation, this also brings into question there direct statements to the public. If an officer at a corporation lies to the public but didn't know it at the time then he or she made a mistake. If you lie to the public and you know its a lie, then that is fraud.

this memo clearly shows that SCO executives knew that there was no litteral copying in GNU/Linux, they then went out and made statements that they new were demonstrably false, i.e. Daryl's Line by Line copying comment. It is now very clear that SCO executives should at least be charged with fraud.

OT, but somewhat relevant to the issues at hand

[Anonymous Coward]

If SCO does end up prevailing at all in this circus, then I predict that someday musical instument makers, like say for example, Stienway Pianos, will claim that because you used one of their pianos to compose a song, then that song is automatically a "derivative work" of their I.P. and therefore you must pay license royalties back to them. Ditto for public performances played on the instruments. A portion of each concert ticket sold must be paid back to them, and free public performances would be outlawed because that would be "stealing potential revenue" from them.

Someday, you will have to agree to a usage rights control contract for everything you buy.

Somebody will patent some kind of registration system to track all kinds of usages of all these products and you're be required to be a member of that before you'll even be able permitted to purchase anything at all, and you'll actually not be purchaing anything, but rather leasing the temporary usage rights for a short term.