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SCO Claims Ownership of ELF To Court
l2718 writes "In the most recent punch-counterpunch of the SCO v. IBM case, IBM is claiming that SCO is trying to vastly expand their claims beyond what they alleged in their list of material allegedly misused by IBM filed last December, using their expert reports. For example, two years ago we covered SCO's claim to own ELF, the main executable format of Linux. Apparently they are have finally made the same claim to a court of law, after the deadline for making such claims. From IBM's memorandum: 'The final disclosures identify 19 Linux files relating to the ELF specification, as well as excerpts from several specification documents. Dr. Cargill far exceeds this claims ... asserting infringement of the entire ELF format ... also ... for the first time, claims to the ELF magic number.'"
The day had started off normally with SCO making blatant claims--this time about ownership of ELF.
The SCO team was cut-off in mid sentence by a surprise defendent, Will Farrell. He appeared and rushed into the courtroom declaring that his legal team for the motion picture "ELF" had already secured rights to anything with that name.
The court room erupted into commotion as a second prosecutor entered the room. The legal team representing the Earth Liberation Front entered the room demanding all three parties to pay royalties for using their registered trademark name and threatened to bomb the livestock holdings of all parties involved should E.L.F. lose the case.
At this point, a hushed silence befelled the room as Christopher Tolkien (representing The Tolkien Estate) entered the room. He swore that "before the dawning of the next day", all mis-uses of his father's invention would force him to use his "+5 lawyers of speech twisting" to rectify the situation and bring unto him large sums of moneys.
SCO then revealed that they had purchased the rights to use & create ELF from a group of folklorists based in Europe. The judge then dismissed Will Farrell, E.L.F. & Mr. Tolkien. The SCO lawyer cleared his throat and resumed his sentence, "...as I was saying, having invented ones and zeros, we own the rights to all software ever developed..."
Seriously, when will this SCO shit end?
My work here is dung.
So the SCO are terrorists too, eh? I always had a feeling . . .
So... wait... SCO owns the elves and their magic? I knew they were smoking something, but it must be good!
Seriously, is the whole SCO strategy just sensationalism at this point? I mean, do they just put the kernel source on a dartboard, throw, and what gets hit - they own it! I can find any other rhyme or reason to this... Could be a good business plan for a whole company of attorneys.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
Admit it already! You thieves have blatantly stolen the number 0x0E7F which *obviously* belonged to SCO! ... Pffff kids nowadays!
BoD
BoD
Who was this TIS Committee that dared give away SCO's property?! Why, SCO themselves. Err, actually, it was Absoft, Autodesk, Borland International
Corporation, IBM Corporation, Intel Corporation, Lahey, Lotus Corporation, MetaWare
Corporation, Microtec Research, Microsoft Corporation, Novell Corporation, The Santa Cruz
Operation, and WATCOM International Corporation. Considering the number of companies that ownership was split across, one has to wonder: Did SCO ask permission from their partners before filing suit over technology that they (nee, Taratala) only helped develop?
Darl is getting incredibly desperate, don't you think? Anything to keep from losing the company under his feet, I guess.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
No no. That's Microsoft. SCO is more slimy than bratty.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
"(SCO) can't be bargained with.(SCO) can't be reasoned with. (SCO) doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And (SCO) absolutely will not stop, ever, until (it is) dead."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
"... asserting infringement of the entire ELF format ... also ... for the first time, claims to the ELF magic number.'"
Read it again. Then again. Then think quietly to yourself "did a highly paid legal expert really have to stand up in court and claim he owned the magic number of the elves?". Then start to giggle. Then laugh. Then just collapse in fits of hysterics, which is exactly what I'm doing right now.
What about the leprecauns' gold? That's what I want to know. And where's the last unicorn? Centaurs too, I've always wanted to know what happened to them...
Cheers,
Ian
People laughed at me for not bothering to switch from a.out, but who's laughing now? Go enjoy your fancy new 1.0 kernel in prison, losers! And take that newfangled glibc with you!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
IBM long ago had the opportunity to buy SCO off, or even buy them outright. Their strategy is to make all claims against Linux GO AWAY. If they buy SCO off, they still leave themselves (and everyone else) open to future claims against Linux. By winning the case, they close that door forever. Meanwhile, SCO is hanging on like a punch-drunk prizefighter; if they let their guard down for even a second, they're gonna get CLOBBERED.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Thats okay I only have 2 numbers on my hard drives, 0 and 1
But I'm still not paying the idiot tax.
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
"...It's like living near chernobyl--I'm going to get infected! I wish the judges would get a clue and just throw everything out...."
Point 1: Radiation isn't infectious.
Point 2: The judge in the SCO/IBM case is being very, very, very careful indeed not to give SCO any grounds for appeal when they ultimately get spanked.
Patience, grasshopper...
Political language
SCO must be hoping that IBM will eventually prefer to settle in order to cap the losses, as shareholders won't tolerate IBM paying out forever over something that won't earn so much as a dime.
If so, I think they picked the wrong target. IBM is doing great in this, as every time one of these ridiculous things hits the newsstands, IBM gets more press about being the good guy, defending Linux against corporate attacks. Plus, it's Big Blue, I'm sure their legal budget can absorb this without batting an eye (and SCO is most likely going to get pegged with IBM's legal fees when the case finally finishes, right before they declare bankruptcy).
"What is the ELF magic number?" and "Why is it important?"
IIRC, it's a special number that appears at the beginning of an ELF executable. It allows the ELF executable to be distinguished from other executable formats, such as (obsolete) a.out, shell scripts, etc. It's important because Unix has no naming convention for executable files that it could otherwise use to figure out how a particular executable needs to be run.
ELF experts, did I get this right?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
A magic number is just the first few bytes of a file. Linux uses these for e.g. telling the difference between an executable script and a binary file: scripts usually have "#!" as the first two bytes (followed by the interpreter executable), ELF has 0x7F + "ELF" for the first 4 characters.
Who wants to go with me to the SCO Forum this year? Held, appropriately, at The Mirage.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
The real question is why bother making the claims at all? I think the answer is a combination of
- bury the court in paper in an attempt to delay proceedings;
- try to salvage some of the original claims: there is a pending motion to throw out the bulk of SCO's items from last December on the basis of lack of specificity; they probably hope that, faced with a mountain of SCO claims, the judge may be reluctant to disallow absolutely everything and will allow some of the vague "methods and concepts" items on SCO's December list;
- material that can be used to spread FUD about UNIX IP in Linux; they can claim that these broad claims were thrown out on a "technicality", but they are "comfortable going to court with what remains".
They really are arseholes.SCO is barely in business. This last quarter it had revenues of just over $7 million compared to revenues of over $9 million for the same quarter last year. Losses for the quarter topped $4 million or $0.22 per share. If it hadn't been for Sun and Microsoft paying some dubious "licensing fees" at the beginning of the case and a completely wacky PIPE deal set up by some Microsoft executives SCO would have been forced to close its doors years ago. No one is the slightest bit interested in SCO's UNIX business these days.
Interestingly enough, if Caldera hadn't changed its name to SCO and followed its current course it is very likely that it would be benefitting from the current pro-Linux climate. Linux companies are making money these days, and Caldera was well situated to profit from a Linux upturn.
As *the* former Novell/USG employee who rescued the contents of the UNIX International server in 1994 when it went defunct, and saved the electronic copies of the ELF 1.0, DWARF 1.0, Spec1170 (the Single UNIC Specification), TET, ETET, and other documents from extenction before the UI FTP server (hosted in Sumit, NJ) was taken offline (all documents were kindly rehosted for FTP by Ken Germann of Digiboard, Inc., and Utah State University CS Department), I call BS.
I received verbal permission for making the contents of the archive available from USL's representative to TIS prior to the mirroring. I specificallly called on the phone for this, even though it was a publically acessible FTP site, just to be sure.
This can be corraborated by Daren Davis, a former Univel then Novell/USG then Caldera employee, and by others who worked at Novell at the time (Jim Freeman knew about the archive, as did Dan Grice, Ron Holt, Bryan Cardoza, and a number of others, some of whom ended up involved with Caldera, and some who didn't).
The orginal 1.0 ELF specification came primarily out of work by engineers at Intel. The 1.2 specification, which *did* have significant work done by USL, was done under the auspices of TIS, with the *explicit* understanding that the result would be available as an ABI standard for all.
ftp://ftp.digibd.com/ USA GMT -6 25-Jan-95 belal@sco.com (Bela Lubkin> {posting}
DigiBoard
keng@digibd.com
Server : http://www.digibd.com/
Files : Digiboard (digifax, digiline: drivers, isdn); pub: HP4laser (lp
model for autohandling of PCL/PostScript jobs), SCO-ports,
uiarchive (archive of the defunct Unix International effort),
unixware, WWW
Note that this is just an excerpt from a Usenet posting for the site listing for the site - the mirroring occurred in early 1994 (January, if I remember correctly), and the UI servers were defunct as of Mar 1994, when the mailing list archives were moved over. Novell acquired USL from AT&T in Jun 1994.
An ironic, IMO, thing to note in the posting above is that the location of the archive is being disseminated by an SCO (the real SCO) employee.
-- Terry
I hadnt really though about what the endgame to all this would be until now. But this is probably a very good point.
Microsoft must have realised they had a problem in having a 7 year gap in releases. They were worried a lot of companies may have switched or considered switching when the security side of XP started taking a battering as malware writers as such started to get to know all it little holes they left.
So they needed a tactic to make Linux look dubious from a mass deployment point of view for the same period. This was especially true when they found out that alot of stuff like WinFS was not going to be ready in time. Combine this with the specs for what Vista would actually contain were starting to look thinner and thinner. Meanwhile various linux developers have read the Vista specs and are trying to implement their versions, some of which may actually be available first (This is quite easy as no company can bring the same number of developers to bear on a problem as the Open Source Movement as a whole)
So their solution was to shop around for a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and offer the board a huge cash payout. this would keep the company afloat long enough for the various execs to find other work or reach retirement age. And if SCO get fined I doubt anyone at SCO or MS will care as the damage has been done, and the goldenhand shakes will be protected in the pension fund. (Personally if I was a SCO exec I would still want MS stock as a payout)
The real problem is that the american legal system is such a crock of shit that this tactic will probably work, and the case will still be running until one side stops throwing money at it. Being that IBM have put themselves in a position where they cannot back down (They backed Linux 100%) this will hopefully be if SCO give up.
But I do still worry that the (SCO) lawyers prevail and this results in all the Open Source resources I mentioned earlier being directed at rewriting a large chunk of the OS the same way MicroSoft has. In the case of MicroSoft this was because harsh deadlines caused poor design decisions. This is probably just MicroSoft's way of trying to cause similar problems to appear in Linux (or Linux 2) as the rewrite is hurried by the number of smaller companies that now rely on Linux (Mine Included as we use Linux to host almost everything).
In the situation of worrying about losing your day job if you dont get your hobby programming done quick enough, the hobby programming will suffer in quality. Less Time to complete a task = More Mistakes in it's implementation.
That could buy them decades being the only half decent OS supplier for the x86 platform again, just like the 80s. This would result in the development costs of Windows being halved as they stopped having to worry about quality to anywhere near the extend they do now.
I dont read
Yes, Caldera's strategy was stupid back in the day. Heck, both SuSE and Caldera had a better distribution than Red Hat, but Red Hat cornered the market by giving software away and selling services. However, you can always change your business model. SuSE did after Novell bought it. For years SuSE was essentially in the business of selling YaST.
Not to mention the fact that with both Caldera and Novell having common roots Caldera could easily have been the Linux company that Novell snapped up, had it not been for the fact that the two companies were already locked in litigation.
I think the word you want is batty, as in freakin nuts.
SCO is like some crazy old drunk ranting at a group of kids to get off his lawn... except that he's sitting in the middle of a park... and not wearing any clothes... and the kids are actually a bunch of squirrels in a nearby tree...
SCO is continuously claiming ownership to something they have no right to, they're threatening to attack the wrong people even if they did have ownership (SCO licenses for Linux users), and meanwhile their ass is flapping in the wind for everyone to see how nuts they really are.
I always knew seagulls were stupid, but how did they wind up in Utah?
While seagulls are optimized for ocean environments, have their breeding grounds there (so they really shouldn't vacation inland for more than 9 months or so), and tend to hang out there by preference, they do quite well on fresh-water lakes and land. A garbage dump is a banquet for them.
Like other soaring birds they get blown far inland by large storms from time to time - and may hang out there for weeks or months afterward if there's something (like food) to interest them.
Utah is a bit inland even for them, so they don't show up there TOO often. But there is one incident when they did, and it was very important.
Back when the Mormons were first out there, as with any bunch of new settlers trying to farm hostile land, their first crops were somewhat marginal. The spring of their first year the crops were beset by a local crop pest ("Mormon Crickets"), which was devouring whole fields.
Of course the Mormons prayed for assistance.
And suddenly a whole bunch of seaguls showed up (much to the surprise of the Mormons, who hadn't seen any in this place so far and knew how far they were from a seagul habitat).
The seagulls found the locusts, pigged out, and hung around until the locusts were pretty much gone and the crops saved.
This is the "Miracle of the Gulls" - the reason there is a monument to seagulls in Temple Square and why the California Seagull is the state bird of the Mormon-settled inland desert state of Utah.
Of course the story grew a bit over the years. My wife tells of the time, when she was a child and the family was visiting taking the Temple Square tour in Salt Lake City, they visited the monument. A small flock of seagulls had blown in and were hanging out around the monument, eating any dropped food and handouts from the tourists. The tour guide went into the spiel about the Miracle of the Gulls and how seagulls had never been seen in the area before or since - completely oblivious to the gulls wandering around, screeching, and squabbling over food in typical seagull style. B-)
("But Mommy..." pointing to the gulls all around. "Shhhhhh!" says mommy.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way