Follow the frickin money! Go to www.sec.gov, get into Edgar, look up SCO, and see where their revenue actually comes from!
40% of SCO's revenue, and *all* of SCO's profit, come from SCO Source licenses to Microsoft and Sun.
That is 15 million dollars, cold cash, in the last six months, with more on the way.
SCO isn't counting on winning the lawsuit, although Canopy Group, their major shareholder, received $150 million from Microsoft and $40 million from Computer Associates to settle previous suits. SCO isn't counting on anything.
You don't need wild theories about how SCO is going to make money from this. SCO already got paid for their actions to date. The checks have already cleared. And $15 million is actually more money than the entire SCO company was worth last year, before SCO went down this path.
The Ninth Circuit (which this case is not in, but Ninth Circuit rules on a lot of technology cases) wrote a lot about contributory infringement and vicarious infringement recently. Here is a summary:
Here's my analysis. Unlike the authors in the links above, IANAL, so this may have errors in it.
Direct infringement: is when I take your copyrighted material and make more copies without permission (either statutory permission, like making a backup, or express permission, like following the terms of your license).
Contributory infringement: is when someone sends me a bunch of copyrighted material illegally, and then I knowingly make lots of copies and give them to other people.
Vicarious infringement: is when I run a system where a lot of direct infringement happens.
The line between contributory and vicarious infringement is blurry to me.
In this case, direct infringement would be if Linus sat down and personally copied foo/bar/super-sco-source.c into the kernel. Nobody is alleging that he did that.
Contributory infringement would be if SGI copied foo/bar/super-sco-source.c, sent it to Linus, and Linus knew that it was SCO's source code, and Linus published it anyways. One element of contributory infringement is knowledge. The Ninth Circuit said that before a plaintiff can sue for contributory infringement, they have to provide specific notice to the defendant of the infringing material. SCO has not done that -- in fact, SCO has publicly and willfully refused to do that. McBride said at a press conference "if we identified the infringing material, Red Hat would just take it out". In my amateur opinion, those facts defeat any SCO claims of contributory infringement.
My take on "contributory infringement" is similar to the populist view here. I believe that nobody is liable for contributory infringement until the offended party identifies specific files. No files and no line numbers mean that there is no contributory infringement.
Vicarious infringement is more troublesome. To be liable for vicarious infringement, one just has to operate a service where direct infringement takes place, with any degree of control over the users. There's no requirement that the vicarious infringer have actual knowledge that infringing material is available through the service.
SCO claims, in its amended lawsuit against IBM, that Linus Torvalds "cannot or will not" identify the IP owners of the code that is sent to him. SCO is lining up their ducks for a vicarious infringement claim against Torvalds!
Note that the FSF is safe here. Before the FSF accepts copyrighted code from other people, they require a signed contract where the contributor states that they own the copyright on the code that they are contributing, and that they will indemnify the FSF if they actually contribute someone else's code. That is a strong pro-active policy to prevent direct infringement, so I think the FSF is safe against claims of vicarious infringement.
I don't know how far a court will go with vicarious infringement. I think, though, that any open source author who accepts contributions from other people needs to have SOME process in place to filter out illegal contributions and disconnect anybody who submits them.
First you have to register, which is free. Then PACER sends you an account login and password via snail mail.
The registration instructions say that if you are outside of the USA then you need to use the Fax registration form.
After you get a login and password (takes about a week), then you can login. Login and go to the appropriate court. You want District Court of Utah.
Search for party -- SCO. Then start clicking and reading!
Pacer costs $0.07 per page, but if you use less than $10.00 per calendar year, then the charges are waived.
Also the documents themselves often come in TIFF format which is a pain in the ass.
It would be worthwhile for someone to hit Pacer, download all the documents, convert them to gif or jpeg or pdf, and then offer them on a website.
In this particular case, SCO provides their own copies of the documents. They may not offer ALL the documents (especially damaging documents that IBM files) and you can't quite trust that the documents they display are actually the documents that they filed with the court (although if someone catches them cheating on this it would be a great news story). But you can start getting some instant gratification by reading here:
SCO sued IBM on March 6. They got some reaction from the Linux community, but not this extraordinary amount.
Then SCO sent letters to 1500 large companies who use Linux. And SCO attributed a quote to RMS on their web site that RMS never actually said. And SCO announced they were charging $699 per seat for a Linux license, and the price goes up to $1399 in October.
You know, SCO, back when this was just a contract dispute with Linux (and your stock was back at $3), you weren't drawing much flak from the Linux community. But SCO comes in the press and impugns our ethics and our capabilities, and then they fucking claim -- with a straight face -- that we're mad because we're part of a vast IBM conspiracy.
I don't know why the volume was so high yesterday, either. But it doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It could just be an ordinary dotcom-style crescendo, or an ordinary short squeeze.
BTW, in addition to the Microsoft bashing, can we do a little Sun bashing, too? Sun is also funding SCO via the "SCO Source" program, and Sun even got cheap options ($1.83 per share) on SCOX stock in exchange for doing so.
I wish Slashdot would run a Slashdot semi-interview with sCO. Everybody submit questions as usual, we mod them as usual, we send them to Darl McBride as usual.
I don't expect SCO to respond. If they do, fine, we get to see answers to our questions.
But even if they don't respond, I do expect that Slashdot can generate some usable questions for real journalists. If our top ten questions are on the Slashdot front page, there is a chance that someone else can pick up on them.
My questions:
You announced that you are shipping Samba 3.0, which is GPL licensed software. Do you accept the GPL as a valid license for Samba?
Do you write your own implementation of Java, or do you obtain it from another supplier? Who is your supplier of Java code?
Do you plan to continue supporting gcc and gdb for UnixWare?
Did you have a contract with IBM for the joint development work that you did with IBM for Project Monterey? If you did have a contract, are you going to file that contract as an exhibit to your lawsuit?
My point is that privacy restrictions are copying restrictions.
I support both privacy restrictions and copying restrictions. But I am pointing out, to people who value privacy (as I do), that the only action that happens in a privacy violation is that some bits are copied from one place to another. And I am also pointing out, to people who believe that it's okay to make copies of all the bits that hysically can be copied (as I do NOT), that means the Scott McNealy model of privacy ("You have no privacy. Get over it.")
So if you want privacy (as I do), then you have to endorse restrictions on what other people can do with bits that are accessible to them.
Copying music and copying personal information are similar, but different.
Sure, I agree with that. They are similar in that they are both instances of bit-copying. They are different in what types of bit-copying they are. Different people can have different (consistent) paradigms for what kinds of bit-copying they view as right and wrong.
But I'm suspicious and hostile to people whose decision procedure works out to "my bits are wrong for other people to copy, but other people's bits are fine for me to copy".
Also I'm antipathic to the argument that, if a seller is willing to sell a CD for $20 to anybody who wants to buy, that it is also okay for other people to make copies without buying it. That would destroy the GPL, among other things.
To answer my own question: I believe that spyware is the agent of a crime if the software copies information (phones home) without the informed consent of the person who owns the information. What constitutes "informed consent"? To me, clicking on a EULA or clicking on an a "Register" screen are informed consent.
So the (alleged) spyware sends copies of certain information about your computer back to the company that produced the software.
The user still has all the information they started with. No one has been deprived of any information. All that has happened is that an additional copy of this information has been created and distributed.
In order to object to this, you have to admit that some information does have owners, and also that it is wrong to copy information without the consent of the owner.
Then, this being slashdot, you have to do a little song and dance, like this: "when other people create music and software and movies, and I make a copy of their stuff, it's fine. But when someone else makes a copy of information from me without my consent, that's wrong!"
Your information wants to be free; my information wants to be private. See?
My own beliefs are the same as Linus Torvalds: "He who writes the code chooses the license". If you don't like spyware, don't friggin run it. I don't.
I agree that the graphics looked bad in the burly brawl.
My explanation: the Matrix itself is getting overloaded when 100 Smith's show up and need to be rendered. When the Matrix renders 100 people in a normal crowd, those 100 people have 100 brains that can be tapped for distributed rendering. But when it renders 100 clones of Smith, there's a bottleneck.
I enjoy the bits where the Matrix simulation gets overstressed, like the Deja Vu scene in the first movie. I'm hoping to see more and more of that as this cycle of the Matrix goes through, well, Ragnarok.
Okay, there are plenty of comments analyzing the code in SCO's slide show. Let's have a look at the legal argument.
Slides 3, 4, and 5 document SCO's contract with Novell to acquire Unix IP. I don't see anything funny there.
The funny part is on slides 6 and 7. Slide 6 contains excerpts of the AT&T License Agreement with IBM. Slide 7 contains more excerpts from the AT&T License Agreement with IBM, except that "AT&T" is changed to SCO in one place.
However, this is just the Licensing Agreement. This just the contract that allows IBM to use AT&T Unix within its organization.
Beyond this contract, IBM also has a Sub-Licensing Agreement. The sub-licensing agreement allows IBM to sell Unix products to its customers. SCO's presentation does not talk about the sub-licensing agreement at all, but this agreement is one of the contracts filed with the Court.
To draw an analogy: the License Agreement is like the agreement that lets you run Windows on your PC. The Sub-License Agreement is like the contract that lets Dell sell Windows to other people. SCO's presentation quotes the License Agreement, and says that license prohibits IBM from distributing code. But SCO's presentation ignores the Sub-License Agreement, which allows IBM to sell UNIX to its customers.
On top of that, IBM has a third agreement with AT&T which grants IBM additional rights on top of the Sub-Licensing Agreement. The third agreement explicitly states: 2. Regarding section 2.01, we agree that modifications and derivative works prepared by or for you are owned by you.
7.06(a) Nothing in this agreement shall prevent LICENSEE from developing or marketing products or services employing ideas, concepts, know-how or techniques related to data processing embodied in SOFTWARE PRODUTCS subject to this Agreement, provided that LICENSEE shall not copy any code from such SOFTWARE PRODUCTS into any such product or in connection with any such service and employees of LICENSEE shall not refer to the physical documents and materials comprising SOFTWARE PRODUCTS subject to this Agreement when they are developing any such products or service or providing any such service.
You can read the contracts for yourself. They are Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and Exhibit C at SCO Lawsuit Documents.
So IBM has an explicit right for their engineers who have worked on the UNIX source code use ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques in other IBM products. IBM paid good money for this right from the lawful copyright holders. (This may explain why SCO is attacking the Sequent contributions, because Sequent doesn't have as much rights in its contract as IBM has in theirs).
This brings us to Slide #22, where an IBM engineer posts information about his experience with scalability in AIX. Under section 7.06(a) above, IBM has the explicit right to disseminate such information about Unix (let alone IBM's rights to talk about property which is purely theirs, such as JFS).
SCO knows this. SCO filed these contracts with the Court (accessible through Pacer) and SCO also published these contracts on their web site.
I would love for reporters to dig into the actual exhibits and ask questions based on the exhibits. Just hit the SCO Lawsuit Documents link above and read the exhibits.
(2) Requests for certified or uncertified reproductions of the copies, phonorecords, or identifying material deposited in connection with a copyright registration of published or unpublished works in the custody of the Copyright Office will be granted only when one of the following three conditions has been met:
(i) The Copyright Office receives written authorization from the copyright claimant of record or his or her designated agent, or from the owner of any of the exclusive rights in the copyright as long as this ownership can be demonstrated by written documentation of the transfer of ownership.
(ii) The Copyright Office receives a written request from an attorney on behalf of either the plaintiff or defendant in connection with litigation, actual or prospective, involving the copyrighted work.
The following information must be included in such a request:
(A) The names of all the parties involved and the nature of the controversy;
(B) The name of the court in which the actual case is pending or, in the case of a prospective proceeding, a full statement of the facts of the controversy in which the copyrighted work is involved; and
(C) Satisfactory assurance that the requested reproduction will be used only in connection with the specified litigation.
So, anyone who gets such a letter, you may want to ask your attorney to ask the Copyright Office for a copy of the code that SCO actually owns before you take any action.
I agree, 4 bits suffices for castling (one for each castling possibility). I don't know why I didn't see that before! Blind spot.
For three-fold repetition, you don't need to know what the previous moves were. You just need to know that the board position has occurred 0 times, 1 time, or 2+ times before, ever. If it is occurred 2+ times before, then "claim draw" is a legal move.
Actually it occurs to me that you need more bits than that, because you need to know if the position that you are moving to is going to occur for the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd+ time, because those are different positions. So there is a source of more state information, quite a bit of it, actually. Argh!
I never did implement three-fold repetition which is why I'm weak on the design of this part.
If you can access what the last 5 moves are...
The idea is to reduce this to a graph exercise. The boards are nodes, and the moves are directed edges from one board to another. If a board carries "the last 5 moves", then that's an additional 60 bits of state information on the board, for 334 bits (give or take a few).
Three-fold repetition doesn't have to be on consecutive moves. So storing the previous 5 moves would not be enough.
Scroll down to the bottom and start reading at "(2) Requests for certified or uncertified reproductions...".
Interestingly, the regulation has some slack. There are three cases. Case (i) is for the copyright owner or their agent. Case (iii) is for a court -- a court can ask for anything they want, as long as they are hearing a case and have jurisdiction and the material is relevant. Those are straightforward; I expected those.
But case (ii) allows an attorney for a case, actual or prospective, to make a request. I don't know how real the case has to be before the Copyright Office will give it up. But I'll bet that "ummm, sure, I'm thinking about suing SCO, gimme" is not enough.
In my armchair opinion, it would be very interesting for someone who's actually received a "buy your license or we might sue" letter from SCO to pay an attorney to send a letter to the Copyright Office saying "SCO is contemplating suing us for copyright infringement, they have gone so far as to dun us, they refuse to identify their copyrighted material, please send us copies of SCO's registered copyrighted material so that we can defend ourselves against a prospective suit".
I co-wrote a chess program on a miserably tiny piece of hardware once, so I looked into this.
For representing the moves, the simple 12-bit scheme (from-square, to-square) handles en passants and castling.
En passant example: white pawn on e5, black pawn moves f7-f5, white moves e5-f6. Unambiguous.
Castling example, even easier: o-o is e1-g1 or e8-g8; o-o-o is e1-c1 or e8-c8.
You can even do pawn promotion with 12 bits, if you adopt some clever encoding when the source square contains a pawn that is going to promote. If the source square has a pawn in it, then the second 6 bits are not a square. They are: two bits to specify left-ahead-right (instead of 6 bits of destination) and two bits to specify queen-rook-bishop-knight.
In fact you can take this further and always encode the destination in 5 bits instead of 6, because given the source square you know what piece is on it, and there are at most 27 moves which a piece can make (queen in the center).
That's 11 bits for encoding a move.
Grab a few unused bit patterns for "offer draw" and the like.
For encoding a board, you can use 4 bits per square to encode what is on the square. There are 13 things that can go on a square so you lose a little to rounding. You have to encode whose move it is. You have to record 1 bit each for the a1, e1, h1, a8, e8, and h8 squares to indicate if the piece on them has ever moved, for castling. You have to encode en passant information. That is 4 bits off the top of my head (once you know whose move it is, there are eight possible last-pawn moves that could be e.p.'ed, plus the possibility of no e.p., so 9 things to encode). You need the 50-move counter or whatever the limit is in FIDE rules these days, that's another 6 bits. And you need three-fold repetition counter, another 2 bits. And you need a bit to indicate whether the side that just moved offered a draw.
So for the board: 4*64 (position) + 1 (move) + 6 (castling state) + 4 (en passant state) + 6 (50-move counter) + 2 (3-fold repetition) + 1 (draw offer) = 276 bits.
Specifically: Q: How can I obtain copies of someone else's work and/or registration certificate?
A: The Copyright Office will not honor a request for a copyo f someone else's protected work without written authorization of the copyright owner or from his or her designated agent, unless the work is involved in litigation. In the latter case, litigation statement is required. A certificate of registration for any registered work can be obtained for a fee of $30.
You could say about any SCO action: they are just misdirecting us.
And, indeed, I believe there is a lot of weight to that explanation. Some of their telephone press conferences were oriented towards baiting Linux users rather than announcing anything resembling news.
Or in other words, their game plan is: say something outrageous today; then while we all react, say something else outrageous tomorrow. People forget last week's outrageous statements but the PR effects live on.
This will destroy SCO's credibility in a matter of months, but since they are just a tentacle of Canopy Group, it's okay with them to trash out their credibility. The important part is to deliver the $15 million of FUD that Microsoft and Sun have already paid for.
That said...
It really pushes the envelope for SCO to sacrifice their big chance at SCO Forum just to bait the Linux community some more. SCO has a big stake in continuing to be seen as a company with real products and services, not just Sock Puppets with Lawyers, Inc. IMO they would have been better off pulling some really daming code SCO Forum, not this cheesy 1970's ancient crap.
I don't think they rope-a-doped this one. Not to say that they won't rope-a-dope plenty of other times.
Well, armchair lawyer, comment on these legal observations:
(1) In a copyright suit several years ago, Judge Kimball dismissed the case because the plaintiff had declined to inform the defendant of infringing activity. Similarly, SCO has declined to inform Linus Torvalds of any infringing lines of code in any kernel that Torvalds distributes.
You do know who Judge Kimball is and why his opinions are important in this case, don't you?
(2) In the Napster case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that an action for contributory infringement requires the plaintiff to provide specific notice to the defendant of the infringing work. Point to the specific notice which SCO has provided Linus Torvalds.
(3) For a preliminary injunction, the movant must claim that the actions of the other party are causing ongoing, irreversible harm to the movant. The court then balances this claim with the irreversible harm to the other party that would be caused by granting the injunction.
Question: identify the ongoing actions which IBM, the defendant, is currently taking which are causing irreversible harm to SCO. Remember what "irreversible" means in this context. On the other side, identify the irreversible harm to Linus Torvalds, Red Hat, and other people who are not even parties to the suit, if a court enjoins them from publishing their own work on their own terms.
(4) Bonus question: discuss the doctrine of mitigation of harm. Reconcile this with Darl McBride's public statement that SCO will not identify the specific code in question "because then Red Hat would just take it out".
The license agreements are in the exhibits. The exhibits are in big-ass PDF files. Someone might want to set up a mirror and save SCO some bandwidth... wait, what am I saying, everyone download their own copy from sco.com now!
IBM's contract explicitly states that IBM owns the copyright on work that IBM does, and IBM may use methods and ideas from Unix in their own works, as long as they don't actually copy literal code.
Sequent's contract doesn't have that clause and is silent on that matter.
Level 7, another Canopy Group tentacle, sued CA and settled for $40 million. Check this line out: Level 7 didn't write its own software, it bought software, entered a contract with Computer Associates, and then turned around and sued them.
Wake the hell up, everyone, and take a close look at exactly who and what we are dealing with.
Like I said, I agree with you. These aren't the death spasms of a dying company. It's actually the ordinary life cycle of a Canopy tentacle. The very name "The SCO Group" masks this, because it's associated with 20 years of Unix history.
So you think that maybe SCO is taking their buzzwords from Linux documentation. That they saw NUMA, RCU, SMP, JFS, and just grabbed the words.
Maybe we should make sure that Linux 2.6 has awesome enterprise features such as GOAT.SE and YHBT. And make sure those are featured prominently in the documentation. I'd like to see Darl taking about that!
Hey, Apple did it to Carl Sagan with the BHA project.
Look at the world of software today and trace how much impact he has had. Emacs, gcc, gdb. The GPL. The idea that people can give away what they want, and other people (or the same people) can charge money for making distros and providing support.
Entire companies operate now in the intellectual eco-sphere that Stallman invented.
To be sure, several other people have also had an impact bigger than Stallman's. So what? Out of the millions of people who have spent their careers working with computers, he's easily in the top 0.1% of impact -- of people who made the world more like the way they want it.
Your analysis of stock options and tax events is completely correct.
But that's not the important point. The important point is that everybody on Wall Street KNOWS this stuff very well. Which means that McBride just flat out lied to all those analysts about something that the analysts KNOW is a lie.
This isn't a lie about Unix history, where the chart is tangled. It's not a lie about a legal claim, where there is always uncertainty about what a judge might believe by the time Boies gets through making the case. Unlike SCO's other lies, this is a lie about something that everybody on the street KNOWS about.
Between this and their "GPL is invalid because it grants rights to make more than one copy" trial balloon, I really think SCO is nearing the end of their FUD run.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, my temper is getting a little frazzled ...
Follow the frickin money! Go to www.sec.gov, get into Edgar, look up SCO, and see where their revenue actually comes from!
40% of SCO's revenue, and *all* of SCO's profit, come from SCO Source licenses to Microsoft and Sun.
That is 15 million dollars, cold cash, in the last six months, with more on the way.
SCO isn't counting on winning the lawsuit, although Canopy Group, their major shareholder, received $150 million from Microsoft and $40 million from Computer Associates to settle previous suits. SCO isn't counting on anything.
You don't need wild theories about how SCO is going to make money from this. SCO already got paid for their actions to date. The checks have already cleared. And $15 million is actually more money than the entire SCO company was worth last year, before SCO went down this path.
The Ninth Circuit (which this case is not in, but Ninth Circuit rules on a lot of technology cases) wrote a lot about contributory infringement and vicarious infringement recently. Here is a summary:
EFF P2P Executive Summary
And the actual words of the court:
A&M Records v Napster
Here's my analysis. Unlike the authors in the links above, IANAL, so this may have errors in it.
Direct infringement: is when I take your copyrighted material and make more copies without permission (either statutory permission, like making a backup, or express permission, like following the terms of your license).
Contributory infringement: is when someone sends me a bunch of copyrighted material illegally, and then I knowingly make lots of copies and give them to other people.
Vicarious infringement: is when I run a system where a lot of direct infringement happens.
The line between contributory and vicarious infringement is blurry to me.
In this case, direct infringement would be if Linus sat down and personally copied foo/bar/super-sco-source.c into the kernel. Nobody is alleging that he did that.
Contributory infringement would be if SGI copied foo/bar/super-sco-source.c, sent it to Linus, and Linus knew that it was SCO's source code, and Linus published it anyways. One element of contributory infringement is knowledge. The Ninth Circuit said that before a plaintiff can sue for contributory infringement, they have to provide specific notice to the defendant of the infringing material. SCO has not done that -- in fact, SCO has publicly and willfully refused to do that. McBride said at a press conference "if we identified the infringing material, Red Hat would just take it out". In my amateur opinion, those facts defeat any SCO claims of contributory infringement.
My take on "contributory infringement" is similar to the populist view here. I believe that nobody is liable for contributory infringement until the offended party identifies specific files. No files and no line numbers mean that there is no contributory infringement.
Vicarious infringement is more troublesome. To be liable for vicarious infringement, one just has to operate a service where direct infringement takes place, with any degree of control over the users. There's no requirement that the vicarious infringer have actual knowledge that infringing material is available through the service.
SCO claims, in its amended lawsuit against IBM, that Linus Torvalds "cannot or will not" identify the IP owners of the code that is sent to him. SCO is lining up their ducks for a vicarious infringement claim against Torvalds!
Note that the FSF is safe here. Before the FSF accepts copyrighted code from other people, they require a signed contract where the contributor states that they own the copyright on the code that they are contributing, and that they will indemnify the FSF if they actually contribute someone else's code. That is a strong pro-active policy to prevent direct infringement, so I think the FSF is safe against claims of vicarious infringement.
I don't know how far a court will go with vicarious infringement. I think, though, that any open source author who accepts contributions from other people needs to have SOME process in place to filter out illegal contributions and disconnect anybody who submits them.
Legal cases are generally public record, are they not?
Yes, they are. US federal courts offer electronic access through the PACER system, Public Access to Court Electronic Records.
PACER
First you have to register, which is free. Then PACER sends you an account login and password via snail mail.
The registration instructions say that if you are outside of the USA then you need to use the Fax registration form.
After you get a login and password (takes about a week), then you can login. Login and go to the appropriate court. You want District Court of Utah.
Search for party -- SCO. Then start clicking and reading!
Pacer costs $0.07 per page, but if you use less than $10.00 per calendar year, then the charges are waived.
Also the documents themselves often come in TIFF format which is a pain in the ass.
It would be worthwhile for someone to hit Pacer, download all the documents, convert them to gif or jpeg or pdf, and then offer them on a website.
In this particular case, SCO provides their own copies of the documents. They may not offer ALL the documents (especially damaging documents that IBM files) and you can't quite trust that the documents they display are actually the documents that they filed with the court (although if someone catches them cheating on this it would be a great news story). But you can start getting some instant gratification by reading here:
SCO Documents on IBM Lawsuit
Fuckin' A.
SCO sued IBM on March 6. They got some reaction from the Linux community, but not this extraordinary amount.
Then SCO sent letters to 1500 large companies who use Linux. And SCO attributed a quote to RMS on their web site that RMS never actually said. And SCO announced they were charging $699 per seat for a Linux license, and the price goes up to $1399 in October.
You know, SCO, back when this was just a contract dispute with Linux (and your stock was back at $3), you weren't drawing much flak from the Linux community. But SCO comes in the press and impugns our ethics and our capabilities, and then they fucking claim -- with a straight face -- that we're mad because we're part of a vast IBM conspiracy.
Here's the table:
Price and Volume for SCOX
I don't know why the volume was so high yesterday, either. But it doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It could just be an ordinary dotcom-style crescendo, or an ordinary short squeeze.
BTW, in addition to the Microsoft bashing, can we do a little Sun bashing, too? Sun is also funding SCO via the "SCO Source" program, and Sun even got cheap options ($1.83 per share) on SCOX stock in exchange for doing so.
I wish Slashdot would run a Slashdot semi-interview with sCO. Everybody submit questions as usual, we mod them as usual, we send them to Darl McBride as usual.
I don't expect SCO to respond. If they do, fine, we get to see answers to our questions.
But even if they don't respond, I do expect that Slashdot can generate some usable questions for real journalists. If our top ten questions are on the Slashdot front page, there is a chance that someone else can pick up on them.
My questions:
You announced that you are shipping Samba 3.0, which is GPL licensed software. Do you accept the GPL as a valid license for Samba?
Do you write your own implementation of Java, or do you obtain it from another supplier? Who is your supplier of Java code?
Do you plan to continue supporting gcc and gdb for UnixWare?
Did you have a contract with IBM for the joint development work that you did with IBM for Project Monterey? If you did have a contract, are you going to file that contract as an exhibit to your lawsuit?
My point is that privacy restrictions are copying restrictions.
I support both privacy restrictions and copying restrictions. But I am pointing out, to people who value privacy (as I do), that the only action that happens in a privacy violation is that some bits are copied from one place to another. And I am also pointing out, to people who believe that it's okay to make copies of all the bits that hysically can be copied (as I do NOT), that means the Scott McNealy model of privacy ("You have no privacy. Get over it.")
So if you want privacy (as I do), then you have to endorse restrictions on what other people can do with bits that are accessible to them.
Copying music and copying personal information are similar, but different.
Sure, I agree with that. They are similar in that they are both instances of bit-copying. They are different in what types of bit-copying they are. Different people can have different (consistent) paradigms for what kinds of bit-copying they view as right and wrong.
But I'm suspicious and hostile to people whose decision procedure works out to "my bits are wrong for other people to copy, but other people's bits are fine for me to copy".
Also I'm antipathic to the argument that, if a seller is willing to sell a CD for $20 to anybody who wants to buy, that it is also okay for other people to make copies without buying it. That would destroy the GPL, among other things.
To answer my own question: I believe that spyware is the agent of a crime if the software copies information (phones home) without the informed consent of the person who owns the information. What constitutes "informed consent"? To me, clicking on a EULA or clicking on an a "Register" screen are informed consent.
So the (alleged) spyware sends copies of certain information about your computer back to the company that produced the software.
The user still has all the information they started with. No one has been deprived of any information. All that has happened is that an additional copy of this information has been created and distributed.
In order to object to this, you have to admit that some information does have owners, and also that it is wrong to copy information without the consent of the owner.
Then, this being slashdot, you have to do a little song and dance, like this: "when other people create music and software and movies, and I make a copy of their stuff, it's fine. But when someone else makes a copy of information from me without my consent, that's wrong!"
Your information wants to be free; my information wants to be private. See?
My own beliefs are the same as Linus Torvalds: "He who writes the code chooses the license". If you don't like spyware, don't friggin run it. I don't.
Here's some links
Groklaw on Judge Kimball
Kimball rules on Jacobsen copyright case
I agree that the graphics looked bad in the burly brawl.
My explanation: the Matrix itself is getting overloaded when 100 Smith's show up and need to be rendered. When the Matrix renders 100 people in a normal crowd, those 100 people have 100 brains that can be tapped for distributed rendering. But when it renders 100 clones of Smith, there's a bottleneck.
I enjoy the bits where the Matrix simulation gets overstressed, like the Deja Vu scene in the first movie. I'm hoping to see more and more of that as this cycle of the Matrix goes through, well, Ragnarok.
Okay, there are plenty of comments analyzing the code in SCO's slide show. Let's have a look at the legal argument.
Slides 3, 4, and 5 document SCO's contract with Novell to acquire Unix IP. I don't see anything funny there.
The funny part is on slides 6 and 7. Slide 6 contains excerpts of the AT&T License Agreement with IBM. Slide 7 contains more excerpts from the AT&T License Agreement with IBM, except that "AT&T" is changed to SCO in one place.
However, this is just the Licensing Agreement. This just the contract that allows IBM to use AT&T Unix within its organization.
Beyond this contract, IBM also has a Sub-Licensing Agreement. The sub-licensing agreement allows IBM to sell Unix products to its customers. SCO's presentation does not talk about the sub-licensing agreement at all, but this agreement is one of the contracts filed with the Court.
To draw an analogy: the License Agreement is like the agreement that lets you run Windows on your PC. The Sub-License Agreement is like the contract that lets Dell sell Windows to other people. SCO's presentation quotes the License Agreement, and says that license prohibits IBM from distributing code. But SCO's presentation ignores the Sub-License Agreement, which allows IBM to sell UNIX to its customers.
On top of that, IBM has a third agreement with AT&T which grants IBM additional rights on top of the Sub-Licensing Agreement. The third agreement explicitly states:
2. Regarding section 2.01, we agree that modifications and derivative works prepared by or for you are owned by you.
7.06(a) Nothing in this agreement shall prevent LICENSEE from developing or marketing products or services employing ideas, concepts, know-how or techniques related to data processing embodied in SOFTWARE PRODUTCS subject to this Agreement, provided that LICENSEE shall not copy any code from such SOFTWARE PRODUCTS into any such product or in connection with any such service and employees of LICENSEE shall not refer to the physical documents and materials comprising SOFTWARE PRODUCTS subject to this Agreement when they are developing any such products or service or providing any such service.
You can read the contracts for yourself. They are Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and Exhibit C at SCO Lawsuit Documents.
So IBM has an explicit right for their engineers who have worked on the UNIX source code use ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques in other IBM products. IBM paid good money for this right from the lawful copyright holders. (This may explain why SCO is attacking the Sequent contributions, because Sequent doesn't have as much rights in its contract as IBM has in theirs).
This brings us to Slide #22, where an IBM engineer posts information about his experience with scalability in AIX. Under section 7.06(a) above, IBM has the explicit right to disseminate such information about Unix (let alone IBM's rights to talk about property which is purely theirs, such as JFS).
SCO knows this. SCO filed these contracts with the Court (accessible through Pacer) and SCO also published these contracts on their web site.
I would love for reporters to dig into the actual exhibits and ask questions based on the exhibits. Just hit the SCO Lawsuit Documents link above and read the exhibits.
I was reading the Copyright Office regulations last night and I found this section.
U.S. Copyright Office--Regulations
Here is a big block of legalese:
(2) Requests for certified or uncertified reproductions of the copies, phonorecords, or identifying material deposited in connection with a copyright registration of published or unpublished works in the custody of the Copyright Office will be granted only when one of the following three conditions has been met:
(i) The Copyright Office receives written authorization from the copyright claimant of record or his or her designated agent, or from the owner of any of the exclusive rights in the copyright as long as this ownership can be demonstrated by written documentation of the transfer
of ownership.
(ii) The Copyright Office receives a written request from an attorney on behalf of either the plaintiff or defendant in connection with litigation, actual or prospective, involving the copyrighted work.
The following information must be included in such a request:
(A) The names of all the parties involved and the nature of the controversy;
(B) The name of the court in which the actual case is pending or, in the case of a prospective proceeding, a full statement of the facts of the controversy in which the copyrighted work is involved; and
(C) Satisfactory assurance that the requested reproduction will be used only in connection with the specified litigation.
So, anyone who gets such a letter, you may want to ask your attorney to ask the Copyright Office for a copy of the code that SCO actually owns before you take any action.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I agree, 4 bits suffices for castling (one for each castling possibility). I don't know why I didn't see that before! Blind spot.
...
For three-fold repetition, you don't need to know what the previous moves were. You just need to know that the board position has occurred 0 times, 1 time, or 2+ times before, ever. If it is occurred 2+ times before, then "claim draw" is a legal move.
Actually it occurs to me that you need more bits than that, because you need to know if the position that you are moving to is going to occur for the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd+ time, because those are different positions. So there is a source of more state information, quite a bit of it, actually. Argh!
I never did implement three-fold repetition which is why I'm weak on the design of this part.
If you can access what the last 5 moves are
The idea is to reduce this to a graph exercise. The boards are nodes, and the moves are directed edges from one board to another. If a board carries "the last 5 moves", then that's an additional 60 bits of state information on the board, for 334 bits (give or take a few).
Three-fold repetition doesn't have to be on consecutive moves. So storing the previous 5 moves would not be enough.
Yes, SCO's code is in litigation.
...".
That means that IBM's attorneys can request copies of anything they think is relevant to their case. Similar for Red Hat's attorneys.
See this regulation:
37CFR201.2
Scroll down to the bottom and start reading at "(2) Requests for certified or uncertified reproductions
Interestingly, the regulation has some slack. There are three cases. Case (i) is for the copyright owner or their agent. Case (iii) is for a court -- a court can ask for anything they want, as long as they are hearing a case and have jurisdiction and the material is relevant. Those are straightforward; I expected those.
But case (ii) allows an attorney for a case, actual or prospective, to make a request. I don't know how real the case has to be before the Copyright Office will give it up. But I'll bet that "ummm, sure, I'm thinking about suing SCO, gimme" is not enough.
In my armchair opinion, it would be very interesting for someone who's actually received a "buy your license or we might sue" letter from SCO to pay an attorney to send a letter to the Copyright Office saying "SCO is contemplating suing us for copyright infringement, they have gone so far as to dun us, they refuse to identify their copyrighted material, please send us copies of SCO's registered copyrighted material so that we can defend ourselves against a prospective suit".
I co-wrote a chess program on a miserably tiny piece of hardware once, so I looked into this.
For representing the moves, the simple 12-bit scheme (from-square, to-square) handles en passants and castling.
En passant example: white pawn on e5, black pawn moves f7-f5, white moves e5-f6. Unambiguous.
Castling example, even easier: o-o is e1-g1 or e8-g8; o-o-o is e1-c1 or e8-c8.
You can even do pawn promotion with 12 bits, if you adopt some clever encoding when the source square contains a pawn that is going to promote. If the source square has a pawn in it, then the second 6 bits are not a square. They are: two bits to specify left-ahead-right (instead of 6 bits of destination) and two bits to specify queen-rook-bishop-knight.
In fact you can take this further and always encode the destination in 5 bits instead of 6, because given the source square you know what piece is on it, and there are at most 27 moves which a piece can make (queen in the center).
That's 11 bits for encoding a move.
Grab a few unused bit patterns for "offer draw" and the like.
For encoding a board, you can use 4 bits per square to encode what is on the square. There are 13 things that can go on a square so you lose a little to rounding. You have to encode whose move it is. You have to record 1 bit each for the a1, e1, h1, a8, e8, and h8 squares to indicate if the piece on them has ever moved, for castling. You have to encode en passant information. That is 4 bits off the top of my head (once you know whose move it is, there are eight possible last-pawn moves that could be e.p.'ed, plus the possibility of no e.p., so 9 things to encode). You need the 50-move counter or whatever the limit is in FIDE rules these days, that's another 6 bits. And you need three-fold repetition counter, another 2 bits. And you need a bit to indicate whether the side that just moved offered a draw.
So for the board: 4*64 (position) + 1 (move) + 6 (castling state) + 4 (en passant state) + 6 (50-move counter) + 2 (3-fold repetition) + 1 (draw offer) = 276 bits.
Basic copyright law:
Copyright exists as soon as the work is written down ("fixed in a tangible medium").
You don't have to register your copyright. But if you do, more legal protection is available to you.
To register the copyright in the USA, you have to send a copy of the work to the Library of Congress.
The copyright office will not give copies of these works to other people.
Copyright Office FAQ
Specifically:
Q: How can I obtain copies of someone else's work and/or registration certificate?
A: The Copyright Office will not honor a request for a copyo f someone else's protected work without written authorization of the copyright owner or from his or her designated agent, unless the work is involved in litigation. In the latter case, litigation statement is required. A certificate of registration for any registered work can be obtained for a fee of $30.
You could say about any SCO action: they are just misdirecting us.
...
And, indeed, I believe there is a lot of weight to that explanation. Some of their telephone press conferences were oriented towards baiting Linux users rather than announcing anything resembling news.
Or in other words, their game plan is: say something outrageous today; then while we all react, say something else outrageous tomorrow. People forget last week's outrageous statements but the PR effects live on.
This will destroy SCO's credibility in a matter of months, but since they are just a tentacle of Canopy Group, it's okay with them to trash out their credibility. The important part is to deliver the $15 million of FUD that Microsoft and Sun have already paid for.
That said
It really pushes the envelope for SCO to sacrifice their big chance at SCO Forum just to bait the Linux community some more. SCO has a big stake in continuing to be seen as a company with real products and services, not just Sock Puppets with Lawyers, Inc. IMO they would have been better off pulling some really daming code SCO Forum, not this cheesy 1970's ancient crap.
I don't think they rope-a-doped this one. Not to say that they won't rope-a-dope plenty of other times.
Well, armchair lawyer, comment on these legal observations:
(1) In a copyright suit several years ago, Judge Kimball dismissed the case because the plaintiff had declined to inform the defendant of infringing activity. Similarly, SCO has declined to inform Linus Torvalds of any infringing lines of code in any kernel that Torvalds distributes.
You do know who Judge Kimball is and why his opinions are important in this case, don't you?
(2) In the Napster case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that an action for contributory infringement requires the plaintiff to provide specific notice to the defendant of the infringing work. Point to the specific notice which SCO has provided Linus Torvalds.
(3) For a preliminary injunction, the movant must claim that the actions of the other party are causing ongoing, irreversible harm to the movant. The court then balances this claim with the irreversible harm to the other party that would be caused by granting the injunction.
Question: identify the ongoing actions which IBM, the defendant, is currently taking which are causing irreversible harm to SCO. Remember what "irreversible" means in this context. On the other side, identify the irreversible harm to Linus Torvalds, Red Hat, and other people who are not even parties to the suit, if a court enjoins them from publishing their own work on their own terms.
(4) Bonus question: discuss the doctrine of mitigation of harm. Reconcile this with Darl McBride's public statement that SCO will not identify the specific code in question "because then Red Hat would just take it out".
Read it for yourself:
... wait, what am I saying, everyone download their own copy from sco.com now!
SCO Lawsuit Documents
The license agreements are in the exhibits. The exhibits are in big-ass PDF files. Someone might want to set up a mirror and save SCO some bandwidth
IBM's contract explicitly states that IBM owns the copyright on work that IBM does, and IBM may use methods and ideas from Unix in their own works, as long as they don't actually copy literal code.
Sequent's contract doesn't have that clause and is silent on that matter.
I agree with you. The SCO Group is not a real company. They are an operating tentacle of The Canopy Group.
More news of interest:
Computer Associates Agrees to a $40 million settlement
Level 7, another Canopy Group tentacle, sued CA and settled for $40 million. Check this line out: Level 7 didn't write its own software, it bought software, entered a contract with Computer Associates, and then turned around and sued them.
Wake the hell up, everyone, and take a close look at exactly who and what we are dealing with.
Like I said, I agree with you. These aren't the death spasms of a dying company. It's actually the ordinary life cycle of a Canopy tentacle. The very name "The SCO Group" masks this, because it's associated with 20 years of Unix history.
So you think that maybe SCO is taking their buzzwords from Linux documentation. That they saw NUMA, RCU, SMP, JFS, and just grabbed the words.
Maybe we should make sure that Linux 2.6 has awesome enterprise features such as GOAT.SE and YHBT. And make sure those are featured prominently in the documentation. I'd like to see Darl taking about that!
Hey, Apple did it to Carl Sagan with the BHA project.
I'm not kidding.
Look at the world of software today and trace how much impact he has had. Emacs, gcc, gdb. The GPL. The idea that people can give away what they want, and other people (or the same people) can charge money for making distros and providing support.
Entire companies operate now in the intellectual eco-sphere that Stallman invented.
To be sure, several other people have also had an impact bigger than Stallman's. So what? Out of the millions of people who have spent their careers working with computers, he's easily in the top 0.1% of impact -- of people who made the world more like the way they want it.
That's practical.
Your analysis of stock options and tax events is completely correct.
But that's not the important point. The important point is that everybody on Wall Street KNOWS this stuff very well. Which means that McBride just flat out lied to all those analysts about something that the analysts KNOW is a lie.
This isn't a lie about Unix history, where the chart is tangled. It's not a lie about a legal claim, where there is always uncertainty about what a judge might believe by the time Boies gets through making the case. Unlike SCO's other lies, this is a lie about something that everybody on the street KNOWS about.
Between this and their "GPL is invalid because it grants rights to make more than one copy" trial balloon, I really think SCO is nearing the end of their FUD run.
Looks like I need a lesson in PREVIEW! Argh!
SCO Posts 3Q Profit, Says Can Afford Legal Fight
SCO is paying their lawyers partly on contingency, partly straight up.
The "partly on contingency" part came from SCO's earnings conference call last quarter.
The $500,000 per quarter part comes from here:
SCO Posts 3Q Profit, Says Can Afford Legal Fight
And here's another lesson on becoming a stock geek:
Start at finance.yahoo.com.
Type in the ticker symbol of the company you want, SCOX.
Click on all the pretty links, starting with the news stories.
It actually is pretty easy.