13-Year-Old Linux Dispute Returns As SCO Files New Appeal (theinquirer.net)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from THE INQUIRER: Now-defunct Unix vendor, which claimed that Linux infringed its intellectual property and sought as much as $5 billion in compensation from IBM, has filed notice of yet another appeal in the 13-year-old dispute. The appeal comes after a ruling at the end of February when SCO's arguments claiming intellectual property ownership over parts of Unix were rejected by a U.S. district court. That judgment noted that SCO had minimal resources to defend counter-claims filed by IBM due to SCO's bankruptcy. "It is ordered and adjudged that pursuant to the orders of the court entered on July 10, 2013, February 5, 2016, and February 8, 2016, judgement is entered in favor of the defendant and plaintiff's causes of action are dismissed with prejudice," stated the document. Now, though, SCO has filed yet again to appeal that judgement, although the precise grounds it is claiming haven't yet been disclosed.

Comments

Zombie

[DarkOx]

Can't someone kill this zombie process

Re:Zombie

[MrKaos]

Can't someone kill this zombie process

No, it's maintained by systemd now.

Re:Zombie

[Anonymous Coward]

They tried and that's why SCO filed the appeal, apparently they own the rights to 'kill', 'killall' and derivatives.

Re:Zombie

[korgitser]

Sometimes a process gets so zombied it actually cannot die anymore. Do not remember the details, but happened to me once. Only a reboot will fix these.

Re:Zombie

[mikael]

I've seen it happen a lot on servers. It usually happens because the process is already suspended while waiting for a resource to be freed. Like trying to get an exclusive lock on a network shared file after the connection is lost. As it is waiting for a response from the network, it's put in a suspended state. But since there is no connection, there's never going to be a reply. So it just waits and waits.

Sending a kill signal might nudge it closer to the afterlife and get local resource freed, but when remote resources on network servers are tried to be released, it locks up.

Re:Zombie

[Lisias]

kill -1 1

Re:Zombie

[Phreakiture]

while ps -ef | grep sco | grep -v grep
do
pkill -9 sco
done

Re:Zombie

[houghi]

We could, but we would need to reboot the copyright and trademark process.

Re:Zombie

[silentcoder]

I've never seen that on Linux. In fact I've hardly ever seen it on a modern Unix. The one where I saw it a *lot* was HPUX. A zombie process on at least some HPUX versions was basically unkillable, it just flat-out ignored a -9.

Re:Zombie

[KGIII]

Some of the people here, some of the ones I communicate with off-list, have had in my home, and have visited in my travels - some of them, have children that are younger than these shenanigans from SCO.

At this point, I'll give SCO $500 just to go away. I don't want them getting any money but I'll give it to them if they promise to go away and never return. The suit certainly is no longer about being backed by Microsoft in order to discredit Linux or open source. That horse has already left the barn and Microsoft is doing "okay" at getting used to it. It can't be about money, they can't possibly think they're going to come out ahead after all of this.

So, what the hell is the point? I really can't think of a good reason for them to be even bothering with this - or any other suit. I can't think of anything to be gained from it - it's not like they're going to win this or any other suit they try to throw at anyone. Someone, somewhere, is urging them to continue. Why? I believe they were still facing a suit from one of the other players - just so it buries them deep enough that they should be dead.

Actually, shouldn't they be dead in the water already? Who is paying for the lawyers? I guess we'll have to wait for that to come out, just like we'll have to wait for the papers to come out that explain their next argument. Someone, somewhere, must think there's a chance of succeeding and is willing to foot the bill, at least for this? Maybe? Who? Why?

Since day one it has looked, at least to a layman, like it was not going to go anywhere. I still haven't been billed my $699 for my copy of Linux. In fact, at last count, I was streaming more than 140 different versions (some are older versions - older LTS and things like that). Boy am I gonna owe 'em a hefty sum of money when they win! *snickers*

Re:Zombie

[KGIII]

It's not 1995 any more. You can just load it up in HTOP and use a mouse!

Re:Zombie

[Ixokai]

It hasn't really been about "them" getting anything for awhile now, is my perspective. There's a certain pile of cash and the lawyers want it and they'll get it (ahead of other creditors) by actively perusing lawsuit.

I just thought the pile ran out, but if that lawfirm filed again, clearly there's money somewhere they can grab.

This stopped being about anything but billable hours... years ago.

Re:Zombie

[whoever57]

while ps -ef | grep [s]co

FTFY

Re:Zombie

[RabidReindeer]

You have been assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Actually, a good idea. Can't some judge just rule that they don't have enough to pay the legal expenses and order the company forfeited to IBM lock, stock, and barrel?

IBM can start by firing the SCO people and handing them lead parachutes instead of the usual golden ones. Along with termination terms that forbid ever getting involved with any Unix-like product ever again.

Then it can grind up the rest of the company into a fine power and distribute it over Chernobyl.

And just for good measure, destroy all records that SCO ever had back to the Beginning of Time.

Heck, ravening corporate behemoths need to be good for something, anyway.

Re:Zombie

[phrostie]

or we could wait till after Aprilfools day and see if it's real.

it's that time of year.
believe nothing.

Re:Zombie

[Jason Levine]

Some of the people here, some of the ones I communicate with off-list, have had in my home, and have visited in my travels - some of them, have children that are younger than these shenanigans from SCO.

My oldest son was born in the same year that the SCO-IBM lawsuit began - albeit five months later. He's having his Bar Mitzvah later this year. My youngest son is turning 9 in a couple of months and was born in the thick of the SCO-IBM/SCO-Novell /SCO-Everyone muck.

Re:Zombie

[Z00L00K]

Looks like a shotgun wedding.

Re:Zombie

[tinkerghost]

Actually, the lawyers don't want to do anything. They signed a contract to get paid up front through the end of the case. They have been working on their own dime for years now. What I want to know is who in the bankruptcy court authorized them to spend money to file the paperwork?

Re:Zombie

[mlts]

I saw it on early versions of Solaris 2, back in the mid to late 1990s, where there would be a ton of zombie processes, they would laugh at a -9, and the only way to deal with them was a reboot, and even then, there almost certainly would be a NFS hang, preventing the machine from completely shutting down, so most likely a reset would be needed (which meant a force fsck of all drives because back then, journaling filesystems were not common.)

It makes me glad that operating systems eventually almost have solved this. Software RAID is doable in multiple ways (btrfs, LVM2, md-raid, ZFS), filesystems have rollback functionality to keep consistant, HDDs have moved to SSDs which have a different set of problems, etc.

I might encounter a zombie process here and there, but the only time it gets noticable is with a drive that is on the edge of disgorging its contents into oblivion, or network/storage fabric issues.

Re:Zombie

[Dutch Gun]

I'll give SCO $500 just to go away.

Well, it's a good thing it's not up to you then. That's precisely what IBM is refusing to do, because that gives these slimes a precedent and an opportunity to go after potentially softer targets. Good on IBM for not taking the easy way out.

You're over-thinking this. This is absolutely still about money. It's just lawyers on contingent (meaning no one is paying them) just putting in a minimal amount of effort and expenses to file a few more court documents, hoping for a big miracle payday. Sure, the odds are low, but when the potential payout is massive, why not?

Re:Zombie

[DarkOx]

basically no process can die on its own.
once exit() is called its the job of parent to read the exist status. If the parent process does not do it then the process remains a zombie.

Usually the fix for the leak is to kill the parent. Doing so allows init to read the parents exit status, and the now orphaned children are then adopted by init which will read their status and clean them up.

Re:Zombie

[bev_tech_rob]

Can't someone kill this zombie process

I wonder if wooden stakes and holy water would work?

Re:Zombie

[bev_tech_rob]

Better yet, give them blindfolds and cigarettes and tell them to line up over by that big brick wall...

Re:Zombie

[PPH]

So use the systemd halt service.

Re:Zombie

[JustBoo]

They tried and that's why SCO filed the appeal, apparently they own the rights to 'kill', 'killall' and derivatives.

I think Shakespeare said it best: "The first thing we do, let's killall the lawyers."

I suspect by now, with all the parasitic legal fees, SCO is now mostly owned by blood-sucking 'lowya's.' Where is Van Helsing when we really need him.

Re:Zombie

[gstoddart]

So, what the hell is the point? I really can't think of a good reason for them to be even bothering with this

It really is simple:

Greedy douchebags convinced they own something and seeking to capitalize on it.

Actually, shouldn't they be dead in the water already? Who is paying for the lawyers?

My guess, somewhere along the line the "property" SCO claims got transferred to some consortium of lawyers (wikipedia tells me the latest name is "TSG Operations, Inc.") and other bottom feeding assholes convinced they're going to eventually hit paydirt.

Someone has assigned a monetary value to that, and until all possible venues are finally killed off (and I have no idea what that entails), whatever deluded crooks claim to own it will keep coming. Someone is convinced they're sitting on a gold mine, and if they can establish the right precedent can go on a binge of shaking down the world.

Essentially the Ponzi scheme has new owners.

Re:Zombie

[MrKaos]

And just for good measure, destroy all records that SCO ever had back to the Beginning of Time.

We should probably find everyone who has ever been involved, move them to another planet, erase their timeline, remove every atoms interaction with the universe then nuke them from orbit, just to be sure.

Re:Zombie

[Anonymous Coward]

April 1 in Japan?

Probably not.

But it's almost time. In a few hours, Slashdot goes on vacation. The have a robot post jokes composed of random strings for 24 hours. Users are expected to go to science daily or the onion during this outage. (users are expected to return the next day, please).

Re:Zombie

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I would add in silver bullets probably need to be uses too.

Re:Zombie

[fahrbot-bot]

Can't someone kill this zombie process

Not for a while, SCO just got signed as a character on The Walking Dead.

Re:Zombie

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

while ps -ef | grep darlmcbride | grep -v grep
do
pkill -9 darlmcbride
done

Re:Zombie

[Immerman]

Let's leave Chernobyl out of it - I'm pretty sure SCO evolved from some sort of parasitic pond scum, so grinding it up is unlikely to kill it, and I'd hate to see what it mutates into with all that radiation at its disposal.

Re:Zombie

[Immerman]

Well that's convenient - our legal system could really use a reboot anyway, maybe it will even remain a justice system for a while.

Re:Zombie

[Hognoxious]

At this point, I'll give SCO $500 just to go away.

That's $199 short.
    Signed,
    Darl.

Re:Zombie

[sjames]

I'm wondering why not just revoke their charter at this point. They're out of cash, and long ago got rid of anyone needed to do any sort of economically productive work. There is zero chance the company will ever return to any economic activity that is even vaguely in the public interest.

At BEST, this is about a lawyer wanting to bill against a small pile of cash that should have been handed over to creditors by now anyway.

Re:Zombie

[sjames]

If a 3rd party gives them $500 to just go away, it sets no precedent of any kind.

Re:Zombie

[jfbilodeau]

Zombies are created when a process terminates but it's parent does not call wait() on it.

Killing the negligent parent kills the zombie.

Re:Zombie

[Stinky Cheese Man]

Pro tip:

Instead of: ps -ef | grep darlmcbride | grep -v grep

Do this: ps -ef | grep [d]arlmcbride

Re:Zombie

[Dutch Gun]

Since we're apparently being pedantic here, they're not going to go away for $500 either.

The point I'm making is that it's not a good idea to settle, because that just encourages more of the same behavior.

Re: Zombie

[TimMD909]

Cigarettes are unhealthy. Let them vape.

Re:Zombie

[Anonymous Coward]

A zombie process ("Z" state) is already dead. It no longer holds any resources but remains in the process table until either its parent retrieves its exit status with wait() (or waitpid() or similar) or the parent no longer exists.

You're probably thinking of processes in uninterruptable sleep ("D" state). These are waiting on a blocking system call which cannot be interrupted.

The single most common cause of the "D" state is network file systems (NFS or SMBFS/CIFS). Operations on files (as opposed to pipes, sockets, ttys, etc) are typically uninterruptable because they aren't supposed to be able to block indefinitely, so there should be no reason to interrupt them.

Fundamentally, the problem stems from trying to pretend that a remote system or a user-space process is actually a local hardware device with a bounded response time.

This is part of the reason why many Unix admins will tell you that "NFS" stands for "Not a File System" (although its non-conformance goes far deeper than just having failure modes which file systems aren't supposed to have).

Re:Zombie

[Immerman]

Agreed. The original SCO has essentially nothing to do with the malignancy currently bearing the name. At worst they were the first victim, but I don't think there's anything of them left.

Re:Zombie

[armanox]

Just be warned that strsignal() doesn't exist on most UNIX platforms - I went to run your code for the fun of it and got:

ld32: ERROR 33 : Unresolved text symbol "strsignal" -- 1st referenced by zombie.o.

Eliminating strsignal from that line and changing %s to %d makes it all better

Re:Zombie

[sjames]

And I was pointing out that nobody was suggesting a settlement of any kind. KGIII was suggesting (mostly in jest) that HE PERSONALLY would give them $500 so they would go away and he wouldn't have to read about them any more.

But no, they wouldn't take such an offer. You can't bribe a disease.

Re:Zombie

[macs4all]

I've seen it happen a lot on servers. It usually happens because the process is already suspended while waiting for a resource to be freed. Like trying to get an exclusive lock on a network shared file after the connection is lost. As it is waiting for a response from the network, it's put in a suspended state. But since there is no connection, there's never going to be a reply. So it just waits and waits.

Sending a kill signal might nudge it closer to the afterlife and get local resource freed, but when remote resources on network servers are tried to be released, it locks up.

IMHO, there's a special place in Hell for Developers that write code that waits for a handshake, but then don't put some sort of a reasonable timeout in the code. Really, even if we're talking about waiting for something to respond through a Dialup connection, if that resource isn't available in a couple of hours, it probably is safe to assume it ain't comin' back.

So, unless you're writing code to collect data from outer space, there's absolutely no reason to "wait forever" (and even then, "forever" is too frickin' long)...

Re:Zombie

[Dutch Gun]

Isn't paying someone to end legal proceedings pretty much the definition of a settlement?

But no, they wouldn't take such an offer. You can't bribe a disease.

Well, good to see we agree on this point.

Re:Zombie

[sjames]

Isn't paying someone to end legal proceedings pretty much the definition of a settlement?

Only if the offer comes from a party to the suit. But in general, settlements don't set precedent.

Re:Zombie

[Zeroko]

Others mentioned the D state (uninterruptible sleep), but it is also possible for a process in R state (running) to be unkillable if it gets stuck in certain system calls (that usually finish quickly but can exhibit pathological behavior), which seems a bit worse as it sits there hogging 100% of a CPU core rather than just a process ID & a bit of RAM.

Re:Zombie

[Dutch Gun]

Well, I'm sure you're probably correct from a legal standpoint, but I think my point of "bad idea to pay off these arseholes" still stands. Fair enough?

Re:Zombie

[guruevi]

SCO's only "asset" is this case. This is just a strategy for the officers/lawyers of the company to squeeze the last remaining money out of the accounts before it's forced to give the remains to IBM (quote: "given SCO’s bankruptcy and its explanation that it has de minimis financial resources beyond the value of the claims on which the Court has granted summary judgment for IBM")

Re:Zombie

[KGIII]

Yeah, someone above mentions that a group (consortium) of lawyers own the "property" now. Man, I've seen some crappy distros out there. I'm not gonna pay $699 for Puppy or Damn Small either - I want a discount for those!

I really would give 'em $500 to go away, by the way. If we all chip a little in and offer it to them to go lay down next to their dish (selling us their "property") then... No, they still won't take that. Oh well, they can get nothing instead.

Re: Zombie

[ihtoit]

oh, they're arguing about the safety of that now as well... to the point where they've had to invent a silhouette in attempts to stop people vaping up in public open spaces.

Re:Zombie

[ihtoit]

Alternatively, you know, just fucking destroy the brain case.

Re:Zombie

[JImbob0i0]

You're using pkill but then grepping the result of ps for the state of the while loop?

while pgrep sco &> /dev/null
do
    pkill -9 sco
done

Of course that will only kill sco once as as soon as no sco is in the process table the while loop will exit ... given how sco behaves though perhaps we should do:

while true
do
    if pgrep sco &> /dev/null
    then
        pkill -9 sco
    fi
sleep 1
done

Re:Zombie

[JImbob0i0]

or just use pgrep ...

Re:Zombie

[macs4all]

What about server whose job it is to sit and wait for clients to connect? Does that need a timeout?

You don't read so well, do you?

I specifically limited that hypothetical "special place in Hell" to those Devs. who were writing code that waited for a HANDSHAKE.

If you don't know the difference between that scenario and "waiting for a login", (which, BTW, is NOT what a "Server" "sits and waits for"), then you obviously shouldn't be commenting on my Post in the first place.

Re:Zombie

[Stinky Cheese Man]

Thanks for the tip. I didn't know about that.

Re:Zombie

[david_thornley]

No, SCO doesn't own those rights. However, if someone attempts to use them against SCO, SCO will file a court case arguing that they do.

Re:Zombie

[david_thornley]

I believe that dousing the computer with holy water is likely to stop all zombie processes.

Its a blast from the past

[MichaelSmith]

I can't wait.

Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[Alain Williams]

to prevent this blood sucking vampire from rising again. Can we ship some to the IBM lawyers ?

Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[packrat0x]

The lawsuit was dismissed "with prejudice", and the lawyers still filed an appeal. Apparently the only thing these lawyers understand is physical violence. Wooden stakes might help.

Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[Z00L00K]

The first point here is to figure out the individuals behind this and who's sponsoring them. Then publish who they are and see if they still are interested in pursuing the matter.

Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[Z00L00K]

Maybe what's needed is an exorcist.

Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[TWX]

The lawsuit was dismissed "with prejudice", and the lawyers still filed an appeal. Apparently the only thing these lawyers understand is physical violence. Wooden stakes might help.

I would be very much amused if they're held in-contempt and thrown in jail for a couple of months.

You know, just long enough to have some moderate real-world consequences.

Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[Gort65]

Maybe what's needed is an exorcist.

More like an Exocet.

Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[cyberchondriac]

It's like a bad sequel. Who'd want to watch "Jaws 17" ? .. they just don't get the hint, it's game over.

Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[Just Some Guy]

What makes you think IBM lawyers are able to touch garlic and wooden stakes?

Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[Mike Van Pelt]

Or a judge willing to say "What part of 'With Prejudice' is unclear to you? You did pass the bar, didn't you? Did you? Contempt of court, 90 days in jail, $100,000 fine. And I *will* repeat as necessary."

Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[Areyoukiddingme]

What makes you think IBM lawyers are able to touch garlic and wooden stakes?

The Nazgul are allowed to touch anything they like, except possibly the One Ring.

Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ...

[ihtoit]

So much this.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[Zontar The Mindless]

Nice to know that Darl still reads Slashdot.

March 31

[ChunderDownunder]

A bit early to be publishing these April 1 Zombie Apocalypse stories, no?

Re:March 31

[bug1]

No, i look forward to SCO suing microsoft as well, because they might have ported linux kernel code into windows as the screenshots of Microsoft/GNU/Linux BASH show.

Re:March 31

[MrKaos]

No, i look forward to SCO suing microsoft as well, because they might have ported linux kernel code into windows as the screenshots of Microsoft/GNU/Linux BASH show.

Microsoft is one of SCO's shareholders, they have been funding SCO since the 80's. SCO is a proxy, so that the press is SCO vs IBM and I haven't seen anything that suggests Microsoft has exited the SCO board.

Re:March 31

[Teun]

The licensing was taken care of, Miscrosoft purchased legal protection from SCO for their UNIX tool-kit for windows,.

Re:March 31

[silentcoder]

Microsoft was basically the only company to buy a "unix license for linux" from SCO back in the day (mostly to keep the fight going and undermine their competition) so suing them now would be idiotic even by SCO standards. Don't bite the hand that fed you and all that.

Re:March 31

[MrKaos]

Sorry, you get a failing grade in History, but an A+ in dumbassery.

Maybe I can get some pointers from you in Assholery, it looks like you topped that class.

The company currently calling itself SCO is an imposter that has only existed since 2001.

The Santa Cruz Operation (the original SCO) was founded in 1979 and then sold its UNIX business to Caldera in 2001. After that sale, SCO changed its name to Tarantella and Caldera then changed its name to The SCO Group.

Caldera, now calling itself SCO, began pretending to be the original SCO. For example, in 2004 proclaiming "our 25th anniversary" despite the fact that Caldera was only founded on 1994.

Ok, so who's on the board then?

Re:March 31

[bug1]

Nothing is idiotic on April fools day, apparently

Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is funding the appeals at this point?

Re:Follow the money

[gtall]

The lawyers are on autopilot due to their agreement to continue to proceed long after reason and/ior the death of SCO. Their paralegals are working overtime during coffee breaks to file these appeals.

Re:Follow the money

[ThatsNotPudding]

Who is funding the appeals at this point?

Probably a certain NBA team.

Re:Follow the money

[StormReaver]

The sleezy law firm representing SCO and Oracle contracted with SCO to represent them through all appeals for the up-front payment of $20M that SCO paid.

Re:Follow the money

[RogueWarrior65]

Came here to ask this question. Trial lawyers don't work for free. Somebody has to be paying them to keep working on this. My guess is that it's a long con. SCO figures that Linux is EVERYWHERE and will reach even further with IoT so if they can win a court case, they can go after license fees till the cows come home.

Re:Follow the money

[whoever57]

1. Lawyers have been paid up front, including appeals.
2. None of the remaining claims affect Linux, they are contract claims against IBM. At this point, even if IBM lost, SCO could not get license fees for Linux usage.

Re:Follow the money

[StormReaver]

I should also add that SCO paid its attorney fees with Novell's money.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[0xdeaddead]

Yes yes, SGI sent in some 32v memory code, which was quickly tossed out.

The joke being that 32v is free now, so it doesn't even matter.

Covering Asses

[nateman1352]

At this point they are probably just trying to prevent SCO's former shareholders from suing McBride and his cronies for professional negligence.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from the fact that SCO NEVER owened the code they showed you're doing fine. Novel PROVED that they owened it and even got a judgement to show it.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[cheesybagel]

The source code they pointed to was header files. You know POSIX API interface header files. Besides most of the claims they made had been shot down beforehand in the BSD/Unix lawsuit decades prior.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting take on reality.

This might give you some pointers on what they did show, why they didn't own it, and why trying to claim copyright on POSIX APIs is a daft thing to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO/Linux_controversies#SVRx_code_allegedly_in_Linux

However code was (allegedly) found that had been illegally copied into SCO's Unix products from Linux as part of it's Linux Kernel Personality feature.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[nikkipolya]

If I remember correctly, you are talking absolute non-sense Mr. Daryl McBride.

The few infringing lines of code that they claimed and showed were actually UNIX header files and some API's. Novell clarified that UNIX header files and API's are in the public domain having been transferred to UNIX Sys Labs. SCO showed code from 'Berkeley Packet Filter' which then was shown to be under the BSD license. Then they went to show some macro definitions for silly things like MAX, MIN. When it got clarified by Torvalds that there were very very few ways to implement those silly macros in the *right* way, SCO just went mum. SCO refused to show anymore infringing source code and went about selling legal protection from "we want tell you" product. Intel, IBM and a few other companies pooled some money and told small and medium companies that the pooled money would help them defend against the stupid cases SCO was threatening to file against them if they did not pay their legal protection fees. Miscrosoft on the contrary went ahead and purchased legal protection from SCO for their UNIX tool-kit for windows, in order to help fund SCO in their legal litigation and there by undermine Linux.

Basically SCO lacked the ability to innovate and tried to become a troll.

Freddy Kreuger to SCO

[jargonburn]

"Why won't you DIE?"

Court document on groklaw.net

[bartjan]

This seems to be the Notice of Appeal

Why is it possible to keep doing this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this harassment or something?
Isn't there some point where if the courts have ruled against you several times it's over?
Or can you just keep doing this forever as long as you can pay a lawyer?

Re:Why is it possible to keep doing this?

[bluefoxlucid]

Legal barratry. If dismissed with prejudice, it means they're no longer allowed to do this. Dismissal with prejudice means this case is over and can no longer come to court.

Re:Why is it possible to keep doing this?

[Todd Knarr]

They can, however, unfortunately appeal the dismissal with prejudice, which is probably what they're doing. The appeal will probably result in a one-line rejection, but it delays the inevitable for them by another few weeks while the appeals court processes the paperwork.

The Turd That Won't Flush

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO is like a turd that won't flush. No matter how many times you bury it in paperwork, just when you think it's finally gone ... then it comes bubbling up again.

Seriously

[Quzak]

Just fucking die already SCO. FFS

Re:US Justice System Failure

[mikael]

It was funded by various other OS vendors to create FUD to slow down the adoption of Linux.

Re:Now-defunct Unix vendor...

[Lisias]

no.

SCO, Santa Cruz Operation, was an UNIX vendor. They bought XENIX from Microsoft and rebranded it as SCO Unix.

Re:US Justice System Failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifically Microsoft and Sun.

Here we go again!

[some old guy]

If it doesn't get summarily dismissed (highly likely) and becomes as entertaining as Caldera v. IBM, I wonder if pj will resurrect Groklaw.

April Fool!

[GrahamCox]

Surely. Has to be. Hasn't it?

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[mwvdlee]

You wouldn't be saying such nonsense if you actually understood what source code is.

D state, waiting for kernel (often blocking io)

[raymorris]

Those will show D state in ps, indicating that the process is waiting on the kernel. Frequently it's waiting for blocking io - it has asked the kernel for some disk block and won't do anything else until the kernel wakes it up when the data is available. The program code itself isn't running on the cpu at this point, the kernel code is (and the kernel thread may be deadlocked).

I helped fix such an issue related to LVM on top of RAID1, where it was possible for LVM the lvm layer to be waiting on the raid layer, while the raid layer was waiting on the LVM layer.

Recent (two years ago?) kernels handle D state processes better.

Re:D state, waiting for kernel (often blocking io)

[PetiePooo]

Funny you mentioned this. I was recently using Intel software raid (isw, aka fakeraid) to mirror my root flash drives. Big mistake! The dmraid package, on closer inspection, says, "DO NOT USE; Not production quality." The flash drives would hiccup (still don't know why) and "sort of" drop out of the RAID. I say sort of because, near as I could figure, they'd completely stop responding to IO, but the kernel would still queue IP calls to them. I'd end up with a slew of processes in state D, mostly cron, and if I didn't catch it in time, it would fill the process table with them.

It was weird in that, often I could still ssh to the machine and run some programs, but anything that pulled lots of blocks from root or try to flush to root would go into state D and never return. That includes, oh, shutdown, reboot, init, and the like... :( I was able to load an IPMI utility and tell the PMU to reset the system, though, and it would come up like nothing ever happened.

The solution was to delete the RAID metadata block and reboot, which switched the root mount to the underlying device instead of the devicemapper. No more RAID, but no more strange diskIO issues either. With a little resize2fs and fdisk magic, I could then repartition the non-used mirror drive as an mdadm mirror, reboot onto it and sync to the other to regain my redundancy.

Good times!

Re:Now-defunct Unix vendor...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Santa Cruz Operation sold of it's unix to Caldera, rebranded itself as tarantella inc. Caldera rebranded as the SCO we know and love.

PS use killable IO and locks to prevent this

[raymorris]

One way to prevent this is to use KILLABLE system calls instead of blocking ones. The _killable versions block just like blocking mode, but they allow kill -9 to work. The userspace program doesn't have to worry about handling half-completed io, because it dies without passing go.

Re:US Justice System Failure

[rudy_wayne]

This case is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the US justice system. If anyone needs any more evidence that it's time to just completely start again, the fact that this utter crap has been allowed to drag on for something like 13-odd years is it.

I followed the case for a while and I was quite shocked by the complete corruption and incompetence of the various federal judges involved. Over and over again they allowed SCO to play ridiculous games in order to keep their case alive.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[Revek]

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/03/12/22/2356243/linus-blasts-scos-header-claims
They claimed basic header files.

SCO is unreliably, deniably dead

[Lotus456]

I know, didn't we just have a funeral for these clowns?

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/03/01/154214/sco-is-undeniably-reliably-dead

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[silentcoder]

Of course the uncopyrightable nature of API's have irked many a corporation before, and seems to particularly irk them when Linux is involved in any way. Just look at the current Oracle/Google case over Java vs Dalvik.

The sad reality is that crime and lawsuits are, by a massive margine, the largest profit centers there are - so pretty much every corporation ends up doing lots of both. Just making products customers want to buy will make you rich... but it won't make you THE RICHEST - and nothing less will do for the kind of people who run them.

- One way to think about it: if all crime was done by one company, that company would make more money every year than the top 50 fortune 500 companies combined. Thats a massive percentage of the entire global GDP. There's absolutely no way all that money can be laundered unless two other things are true (it's literally mathematically impossible for them to be false):
1) Every major corporation must be including a fairly significant chunk of that money in their annual earnings (where it already looks legitimate).
2) Pretty much every large bank is complicite in the laundering of the rest. So when companies like HSBC get caught laundering money for terrorists, don't be shocked - they are not doing anything that every other bank wasn't doing as well - they just got caught.

Of course the pretty sucky part of having damn near a quarter of all global profits made from crime is that crime has victims - but since nearly every single victim is poor, who cares about them right ?

Whew...

[110010001000]

Now I am glad I paid my $699 license fee to SCO.

Re:US Justice System Failure

[silentcoder]

Some of the little boys who were born on the day this case was filed have had their first wet dreams by now - and still it drags on.

Just like the Rocky and Bullwinkle show... again!!

[MegOnWheels]

Wow first the recent resurrection of the crypto escrow / back door arguments by various governments and now SCO have sadly returned from the dead to try and eat brains again.

Re:Now-defunct Unix vendor...

[drinkypoo]

SCO, Santa Cruz Operation, was an UNIX vendor. They bought XENIX from Microsoft and rebranded it as SCO Unix.

No. SCO, Santa Cruz Operation, was a UNIX vendor. They bought XENIX from Microsoft and rebranded it as SCO XENIX. They maintained this product line separately from their UNIX line. It did less, and they sold it for less money. It would, however, run on a 286. I used to have a 286-6 with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB Seizegate RLL disk running Xenix 2.3.2 as a UUCP node.

They real way to kill a zombie process...

[SadButResolved]

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao... Or perhaps Microsoft Azure sales guys can stop them? We love Linux!!!!

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, actually not a true statement. I work for the US Courts and a surprising many of them are at least technically literate; of course there are some that are complete Luddites and have no business being on the bench in this day and age. Then there are some (thinking 2nd Circuit) who know a surprising amount about the technology and how to employ it in the courts. We have judges using the iPad to review filings, their dockets, orders, and pleadings while commuting to work. When you have life tenure on the bench sometime the only way to get them off the bench is on a stretcher or in a body bag. Posting anonymously because I work for the US Courts in the technology division; I have a 5 digit /. id but I want to keep my job.

Re:The question now is: Microsoft money?

[mikael]

Remember "Embrace , Extend, Extinguish" and "Developers, Developers, Developers".

Microsoft just needs to pull off those developers with new ideas from Linux to Windows.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[LWATCDR]

Wow a wildly inappropriate comment and a wildly inappropriate reply.
Couldn't you just have said, "stop being a bigot" and move on?

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[fnj]

Mr. Daryl McBride

Darl. DARL. His name is Darl, not Daryl. Jeeze.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[KGIII]

It just so happens that I have a copy of the Linux kernel right here in front of me - oddly enough. As in, it's open in a folder and I've been looking at it. What, specifically, are these lines of code so that I might verify this for myself?

Re:Zombie (the "d" in systemd)

[Provocateur]

The d in systemd stands for defunct, as originally intended.

The court case will determine if it stands for "die, already"

The planets are in alignment. Slashdot will be forced to print a dupe of a 13 year old story, on April Fool's Day no less, which triggers a fresh 13-year cycle of dupes that really aren't. And we have SCO to thank. Whodathunkit?

Re:What if?

[armanox]

Then SCO can provide some evidence that IBM did infringe on code that they own, which they have failed to do to date. And should they be able to show that code is infringing, the Linux community will alter the code so that it no longer infringes. But like I said, SCO first needs to show that code was copied, and that it was copied from them (the last time they provided code that was BSD licensed).

Re:SCO had minimal resources due to SCO's bankrupt

[Eunuchswear]

Duh. I once asked an executive why they didn't sue another company who had given them grief. Executive said it's a good way to waste your employee's time and your company's money. He said suing isn't a good business plan. SCO should have listened.

Oh, SCO listened. That's why they sold their rights to sell UNIX to Caldera.

They must have long gone but founders Doug Michels and Larry Michels must cringe everytime they hear someone mention SCO.

Doug and Larry have nothing to do with TSCOG.

Re:What if?

[Eunuchswear]

The joke is that the original claims from Caldera had some truth. It's just that someone went insane and thought they could sick up IBM for money.

If you go back to the very beginning you'll find that what was happening was that some unscrupulous consultants were porting applications from SCO UNIX to Linux by copying the SCO shared libraries to Linux systems without a license. Somehow, by a convoluted system of chinese whispers this got misunderstood as "Linux contains UNIX code", and some crazy person at Caldera's eyes lit up with flashing dollar signs.

And the rest is hysteria.

Re:SCO is now Xinuos ?

[Eunuchswear]

No, TSCOG is still TSCOG, bankrupt.

They sold SCO UNIX and UnixWare to Xinuos.

Re:US Justice System Failure

[Anonymous Coward]

You have it all Wrong - in the U.S. we have a LEGAL SYSTEM, NOT a Justice System!!

Re:Requests to Slashdot's Management

[tom229]

After all that, fix the God damned mobile site. My slashdotting is entirely done on my phone using the desktop interface. Not because I dislike the mobile interface look, but because it lacks similar functionality. Minor things like not being able to collapse comments makes it almost unusable. The first rule of mobile interfaces is they need to have the same functionality as the desktop. It's no surprise the hipsters at dice didn't know this. Now let's move forward.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[mark-t]

"Of course the uncopyrightable nature of API's have irked many a corporation before..."

I see you haven't been following the Oracle vs Google case, since it's my understanding that the latest ruling on the matter determined exactly the opposite.

Re:Now-defunct Unix vendor...

[Gr8Apes]

Xenix, IIRC, was a reason Windows 3.0 succeeded. That thing just wouldn't run anything.

snowdon, detective, groklaw...

[Midnight Thunder]

The first point here is to figure out the individuals behind this and who's sponsoring them. Then publish who they are and see if they still are interested in pursuing the matter.

Does Snowdon not have any files on this entity? Next bet it we sponsor the EFF to hire a private detective to do an investigation to the finances of flow of money to this entity? Also wondering whether this will be story enough to revive Groklaw?

Re:The question now is: Microsoft money?

[JustBoo]

Remember "Embrace , Extend, Extinguish" and "Developers, Developers, Developers".

Microsoft just needs to pull off those developers with new ideas from Linux to Windows.

Bingo! I wish I had mod points. If anyone thinks Microsoft has fundamentally changed, they are in for a big surprise.

Microsoft's persona is no longer that sweaty coke-fueled guy throwing chairs. It's now the kindly Grandma coming up and offering sweets, then when you are distracted, she sticks a stiletto in your back and twists, and smiles as she watches the life drain from your eyes. EEE indeed.

OT, sorry

[JazzLad]

Ping me via email unless you can guess why I'm asking you to ping me :)

Re:OT, sorry

[KGIII]

LOL I don't know what did it yet - but they've got logs showing the CPU spiked out of control so I've gotta figure that out. They'll let me back in tomorrow morning. ;-)

Re:What if?

[halivar]

Other way around. Caldera/SCO was copying Linux code into Unix for their Linux Kernel Personality project. This was their "smoking gun" that got dropped like a hot potato.

Fun. mdadm indeed

[raymorris]

> I was recently using Intel software raid (isw, aka fakeraid) to mirror my root flash drives. Big mistake! The dmraid package ...

Indeed. I tried out all the different kinds of RAID and settled on mdadm. Hardware RAID is handy if you're using a CPU from 1999 and also don't need any flexibility. LVM mirrors are a handy way to make a one-time copy of data.

Re:What if?

[Eunuchswear]

No, I'm not talking about copying source code.

I'm literally talking about some fly by night "consultant" copying /usr/lib/libc.so.1 from a UNIX system to a Linux system so that their crappy app written for SCO UNIX could be run on Linux.

This actually happened. Go look at the very first filings from TSCOG and you'll see that that was what they were first complaining about.

But then they went mad.

13 Years Later, we find out What SCO Really Means

[Provocateur]

SCOuting for money

de-defunct

It happens to be April 1 somewhere where SCO's lawyers are hiding; we're reading tomorrow's news for nerds today.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[cyberchondriac]

"Hiah, Ah'm Darl, and this is mah other brother Daryl" ...

Inflation

[Hognoxious]

Can anybody tell me what - after adjusting for inflation - the current value of a cock-smoking teabagger is?

Re: SCO actually got a bad deal here

[silentcoder]

We cant mock bigots anymore ?

April Fools Day is tomorrow!

[anegg]

Please let this be an early April Fools Day joke.

Re:What if?

[halivar]

That exact file you mention is part of the OpenServer LKP, and contained Linux code SCO/Caldera had no right to distribute outside the GPL.

kill -9 SCO

[swschrad]

dayamn, some fool keeps restarting it. what terminal are they on? -- send a guy with a sledge down there.

Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind...

[GrumpySteen]

Just 30 days ago... SCO Is Undeniably, Reliably Dead.

Re: SCO actually got a bad deal here

[LWATCDR]

Simply wondering if the graphic nature off the mocking was needed. In fact I would say that the effectiveness of the mocking was decreased by the over the top reply.
In other words you reply would not change anyone's mind and puts the original post in a less offensive light in comparison to your reply.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[DickBreath]

SCO was ordered by the court THREE TIMES to show their source code to the court. That is a different thing than a PR dog and pony show. SCO whined. Stalled. The court had to order them three times.

Eventually the court give SCO a third and final deadline. Dec 22, 2005. Disclose ALL allegedly misused materials in Linux by then.

What did we get? A lot of hand waving and nonsense. Nothing substantial.

After months more arguing, the court tossed out 2/3 of that. Of the remaining 1/3, the magistrate judge (Wells) was quite skeptical. But technically it wasn't crazy enough to throw out with the other 2/3, so SCO could keep it, although they probably wouldn't get anything out of it.

A side show in this matter was that SCO did not own any copyright in Unix in the first place. Years later, by 2007, the court finally concluded that SCO didn't even own any copyright in Unix. So they have no standing to sue in the first place. (eg, I can't sue you for stealing Jane's tires. Only Jane has standing to sue you for that.)

There are many more facets to this entire fiaSCO. And none of them are good for the SCOundrels.

On the Friday before SCO's scheduled trial to start on Monday in Sept 2007, where after years of saying they wanted to get their day in court, SCO declared bankruptcy. On the eve of the trial that would give them their supposed victory. And SCO was still financially solvent.

Everything about this entire farce stinks to high heaven.

Dun dun, dun di-duhn.

[twotacocombo]

Listen, and understand! That SCO is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until...?

Re:Requests to Slashdot's Management

[hankwang]

http://avantslash.org/ - I browse slashdot nearly exclusively using this mobile interface, especially while commuting. Main downside: you need to host it as a script on your own server.

Re:What if?

[Eunuchswear]

No it isn't. It's the C library.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[nikkipolya]

https://science.slashdot.org/s...

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[ihtoit]

SCO showed no such thing. No external analyst ever agreed any such thing. SCO never, not one time, showed a single line of code that they could legitimately claim ownership to that was in the mainstream Linux kernel. Which is why they LOST THEIR CASE.

Re: SCO actually got a bad deal here

[ihtoit]

problem is they're no longer a minority.

Re:Darl McBride is a waste of breath

[ihtoit]

Groklaw rocked. Whatever happened to PJ?

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[david_thornley]

It determined that APIs are copyrightable. It rejected Google's interoperability argument on the grounds that Android and Java programs aren't actually interoperable, and that Google was copying the APIs for the convenience to Android programmers rather than to make things work in both environments, which means the interoperability defense wasn't tested. It said Google at least had an argument based on fair use, and sent that back to the district court to decide. The decision seemed very well-informed on technical matters.

Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here

[Insanity Defense]

JVM don't you have a Yahoo forum to troll or Wikipedia puppets to pretend aren't you? SCO lost and never owned the Unix copyrights, give it up.