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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.
Can't someone kill this zombie process
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
to prevent this blood sucking vampire from rising again. Can we ship some to the IBM lawyers ?
Nice to know that Darl still reads Slashdot.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
A bit early to be publishing these April 1 Zombie Apocalypse stories, no?
Who is funding the appeals at this point?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This seems to be the Notice of Appeal
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.
It was funded by various other OS vendors to create FUD to slow down the adoption of Linux.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
If it doesn't get summarily dismissed (highly likely) and becomes as entertaining as Caldera v. IBM, I wonder if pj will resurrect Groklaw.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/03/12/22/2356243/linus-blasts-scos-header-claims
They claimed basic header files.
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
"It's a good computer... for I to BM on!" - apologies to Triumph, the insult comic dog
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 ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
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?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
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.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
No, TSCOG is still TSCOG, bankrupt.
They sold SCO UNIX and UnixWare to Xinuos.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.