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SCO Tells Courts What IBM Did Wrong
linumax writes "It took more than two and a half years, but the SCO Group finally has disclosed a list of areas it believes IBM violated its Unix contract, allegedly by moving proprietary Unix technology into open-source Linux. In a five-page document filed Friday, SCO attorneys say they identify 217 areas in which it believes IBM or Sequent, a Unix server company IBM acquired, violated contracts under which SCO and its predecessors licensed the Unix operating system. However, the curious won't be able to see for themselves the details of SCO's claims: The full list of alleged abuses were filed in a separate document under court seal. The Lindon, Utah-based company did provide some information about what it believes IBM moved improperly to Linux, though."
Not quite. There were two filings. One was five pages. The other, the one that's sealed, includes the 217 "violations" and is of unknown length.
It's Letterman who does the Top Ten, not Leno.
While somewhat amusing, it's not at all accurate. The SCO lawyers stopped getting paid a while back. They, foolishly perhaps, agreed to a cap on legal fees which has been reached.
- AMW
Are you forgetting where they claimed that errno.h got lifted wholesale?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Yes, and Letterman opens the bit as "Tonight's top ten list"
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
Actually, one of the novelties brought by C99 was the possibility of declaring variables anywhere in the code, just like C++; therefore,
for (int i = 0; i < something; i++)
is perfectly valid C (according to the latest standard).
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
they could (and almost certainly would) then argue that Linux was improperly licensed under the GPL
How? The only person who could (possibly) revoke the right to something is the copyright owner. That's IBM.
Unless you're arguing that SCOX *OWNS* the code (which they have just admitted they don't) then there's nothing they can do. I have it *WITH PERMISSION* from the copyright holder - if the copyright holder had other obligations that should have prevented them from giving it to me, then they can go after the copyright holder, but they have no basis for trying to stop me.
(This is beside the fact that SCOX distributed the code *themselves*.)
Anyone else would be infringing on their copyright
BULLSHIT. As SCOX IS NOT the copyright holder (we've already established this), then nobody would be infringing on their copyright.
Not that it's a good bet, but when lawyers agree to a cap on complex litigation, there's usually a 1/3 award fee at the other end...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"It's been reported that IBM's contract with SCO stated that they weren't allowed to put technologies from their Unix into any other OS."
This is what SCO is trying to imply by twisting the meaning of the contract. IBM and the OSS world is on to their little scam however.
What SCO would like the court to rule is that any code that IBM included in any of the products covered by the original contract become derivative works and therefore is under the control of SCO.
This is not what the authors of the contract intended and they have testified proving that it was not their intention or understanding that IBM would lose control of its own code if it added it to the products covered under the contracts.
SCO has no real case.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
SCO's legal fees are capped through the appeals process by an arrangement between the company and the BSF law firm. There is clear evidence that this is already resulting in lower quality legal work, presumably an effort by the firm to cut costs since they are already guaranteed* a fixed fee.
*Well, not really guaranteed. Since SCO is paying out chunks of the total amount (around 8 million) over time, there is the possibility that lawyers may not get all their money due to a motion by Novell to set aside more of SCO's money than exists in order to pay Novell 95% of the $50 million they received from BayStar/Microsoft for SCOSource Licenses.
No, they didn't pick that date, the court did. This friday was the "interim deadline" for "Parties to Disclose with Specificity All Allegedly Misused Material Identified to Date and to Update Interrogatory Responses Accordingly". December 22 is set as the final deadline.
JFS was originally developed for AIX, but it was so dependent on the kernel that it was cleanroom-implemented for OS/2, and then ported to AIX, replacing the old version of JFS.
There are some catches. Valid (though pointless) C++:All four declarations are invalid in C, because only the special support for 'for' was copied to C, and labels must be followed by a statement, but declarations aren't statements in C.
The lawyers HAVE NOT stopped getting paid. There are still two more quarters of payments due. 30+ million for their "service" is a nice chunk of change.