Apparently they've been showing people AIX and HP-UX source code. How can they claim trade secret then:
"We own all that intellectual property and have relationships with a lot of vendors. If people want to come and see the original HP-UX source code, they come to us. We get several dozen requests a month just to come in and see AIX or HP-UX code base. And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++. It was interesting to see the depth of Caldera's intellectual capital."
Bull. It is still the best metric. Compilers don't matter. User the best available for each platform and compare systems of equivalent price. The one with the better ops/second wins -- simple.
If there is a vector unit present, it should enable the proc to do more ops/sec so it is included in the metric. No of procs don't matter either, we're talking systems here. They should learn from the TPC benchmarks. What matters should be how fast and how chep, not what compiler or how many CPUs or how many MHz etc.
MFLOPS = (million floating point operations) / second MHz = (million cycles) / second
MFLOPS / MHz = (million floating point operations) / (million cycles) => (floating point operations) / cycle
So this unit is deliberately chosen to disfavor the P4 since it measures only number of operations per cycle and and is not a measure of speed or how fast. To measure speed it has to be per second.
We all know that the P4 has more cycles per second than the G5, this benchmark is the other extreme of the MHz myth. More floating point operations per cycle does not mean much without considering the number of cycles per second.
A computer that does 10 ops per cycle, and 1 cycle in 10 seconds only does 1 op per second.
Another computer that does 1 op per cycle and does 10 cycles in 1 second, would do 10 ops per second.
Which is faster? I'm sure you don't need a research institution to tell you that.
Nasa compares them only on the ops/cycle metric. And some G5 zealots here tend to agree. What a disgrace to common sense.
If you want it secret don't sell it at all. It is like selling an apple to someone and the shrink-wrapped license says not to look at it while eating lest they find out what is so nice about it and try to get it from the tree by themselves.
If SCO wins, which they won't, the best judgement they could ever get would be to remove said code from Linux.
If they claim that they did not know that their code was in it, then linux users and other Linux distributors can not be bothered because they too did not know it was SCO's code. The law cannot be more forgiving of SCO for its negligence than to the Linux users/distributors.
SCO should forget about getting anything out lincensing from Linux ever.
The case between SCO and IBM now has boiled down to a contract dispute, which has to do with interpretation of the meaning of derivative works. In any case SCO is doomed because they inherited the documents and can not claim to interpret what it was intended to mean. Since SCO did not draft those documents, expert witnesses from AT&T which drafted those contracts will clearify what they meant by derivative works and SCO would be screwed.
The SCO letter claims that buying Linux from them means buying a license to use their intellectual property. If one of those who bought Linux from SCO modified it and distributed it according to the license would they be sued? Is SCO now allowing them to make modifications and do what they want with those modifications (according to the GPL). If so then they have Licensed they IP under the GPL. If not then they are violating the GPL because of all the other code that they distributed with it that does not belong to them.
They keep shooting themselves in the foot every now and then. Very soon they'll have no toes left.
The lawsuit is very clearly about the definition of derivative.
A = SysV B = RCU, NUMA, JFS C = AIX
IBM licenses A, independently develops B, combines A + B to produce C.
C is a derivative of A, C is also a derivative of B. B is not a derivative of A. Although TSG (The SCO Group) wants B to be a derivative of A. They are trying to reinterpret their contracts to imply that B is a derivative of A.
IBM has the right to do what it wants with B (including contributing it to Linux). If SCO got B through Project Monterey into Unixware, then of course there is going to be common code between Unixware and Linux.
I doubt verymuch if McBride, Sontag, or any of their attornies know enough about code to know what a derivative is. By their argument, all software written for Windows is a derivative of Windows(TM), and if you have a Windows(TM) License that prohibits distribution of derivatives (all Windows users) you can legally open-source your code!
CALDERA INTERNATIONAL: Faces Securities Fraud Lawsuits in S.D. New York
Four class action lawsuits were filed against the Company, certain of its officers and directors, and the underwriters of the Company's initial public offering in the Unites States District Court for the Southern District of New York by parties alleging violations of the securities laws.
The complaints allege certain improprieties regarding the circumstances surrounding the underwriters' conduct during the IPO and the failure to disclose such conduct in the registration statement. The complaints have recently been amended and consolidated into a single complaint. Over 300 other issuers, and their underwriters and officers and directors, have been sued in similar cases pending in the same court.
The Company is not aware of any improper conduct by the Company, its officers and directors, or its underwriters, and the Company denies any liability relating thereto. The Company has notified its underwriters and insurance carriers of the existence of the claims and plans to vigorously defend the action.
Caldera International, which plans to change its name to The SCO Group, develops operating systems and network management software for PCs and servers. In addition to its OpenLinux and OpenServer operating systems, Caldera also sells its OpenUnix business software and Volution, a Web and directory-based network management application. Services such as consulting, custom development, technical support, and training account for about 15% of sales, a Hoover.com dossier says.
Chairman Ralph Yarro and director Raymond Noorda share control of 47% of the company through The Canopy Group (a venture capital firm) and MTI Technology.
Officially the company is still Caldera. The name has not yet changed officially. Caldera was never bought out. Caldera bought SCO's unix business. SCO is now called Tarantella, and Caldera has decided to change its name to The SCO Group.
I thought it was "contract rights" or was it "control rights" or "intellectual property rights" or "copyrights" or "trade-secrets" or "license rights"?
<sarcasm> They seem to have made it crystal clear over the past few months what rights they really mean;-/ </sarcasm>
David Boies is a lawyer and a chief partner of Boies, Schiller & Flexner. He has been involved in a number of high-profile cases in the United States.
He helped defend IBM in an antitrust case, and years later famously took the other side by representing the Justice Department in the Microsoft antitrust case. Following the 2000 U.S. presidential election, he represented Vice President Al Gore in the ensuing legal battle and participated in Bush v. Gore, one of the few Supreme Court cases ever televised.
He is representing Enron executive Andrew Fastow, and has been retained by the SCO Group in their pursuit of infringement of their rights to the UNIX intellectual properties.
Comments from POSIX
on
Settling SCOres
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It makes a lot of sense for a developer to copy the specification as comments and fill it up with implementation details. That's the way I would do it! That would explain why comments are the same and code is different.
They would! All they have to do is submit it to the testing procedure of the Open Group. If it passes, it's Unix whether its based off of SCO's code or not
Check this out... My goodness, did people read the latest 10Q?
You know those licensing deals that gave SCO its first quarter in the black? It issued 210K options at strike $1.83 to one of the licensees, priced them at half a million and accounted for it by reducing their license revenue!
Those options are 2 mio in the money now and the owner will be looking to dump. Did you check out the insider trades info?
" In connection with the execution of the first license agreement, we granted a warrant to the licensee to purchase up to 210,000 shares of our common stock, for a period of five years, at a price of $1.83 per share. This warrant has been valued, using the Black-Scholes valuation method, at $500,000. Because the warrant was issued for no consideration, $500,000 of the license proceeds have been recorded as warrant outstanding and the license revenue reduced accordingly."
IBM Chooses Caldera's OpenLinux eServer as First Linux Pre-load On Netfinity Servers eServer Pre-load Saves Customers Time and Money OREM, Utah--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 24, 2000--Caldera Systems Inc., (NASDAQ: CALD - news), the ``Linux for eBusiness'' leader, today announced that IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) will pre-load Caldera's OpenLinux eServer on its IBM Netfinity servers.
The Netfinity servers may be purchased either pre-installed or bundled with OpenLinux eServer through IBM Direct. This is IBM's first Linux pre-load on Netfinity servers.
IBM believes that Linux will help drive the long-term growth of the Internet by providing an open application platform that can harness leading-edge technologies and simplify customer choice. The common application platform will help ensure software interoperability across heterogeneous servers.
SCO: Dear old enemy, you know the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. So what do we do about this common enemy of ours. I have something going already but things are not going as planned.
M$: F*ck off sc*mbag. You sued me before about DRDOS why would I trust you now?
SCO: Well, wether you like it or not our 20 horsepower luxury cars are becoming irrelevant because of this 1000 horsepower bicycle and something must be done about it. Infact I think I know what will help us both, and the fact that we are enemies is just sweet. Nobody would suspect.
M$: Keep talking.
SCO: finance legal bills for one year so I can stall the bicycle. During that time, your luxury car can catch up and overtake.
M$: Huh!
SCO: Don't worry, just claim you are buying licenses for Unix code in the media so money transfers between us will have an explanation. Besides, what is money to you, with the crumbs falling off your plate you can drag this thing for > 10 years. By that time, the bicycle will be rusted.
M$: Nice Nice. I have been wondering when I'll be able to sleep peacefully with a smile on my face again. This sounds nice. When do we start?
these are the allegations as I understand them. It's not yet proven in court.
The facts are that IBM became involved in Linux almost 10 years after Linux started, SCO then Caldera was already contributing and distributing to Linux long before IBM became involved.
I'm embarassed on their behalf. Just check out the links they have put up on the site. And you say this use to be a Linux company?
I thought they had no clue but I couldn't imagine they'll stoop this low. This is really embarassing to the Unix world. I would be surprised if M$ has nothing to do with this.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently they've been showing people AIX and HP-UX source code. How can they claim trade secret then:
"We own all that intellectual property and have relationships with a lot of vendors. If people want to come and see the original HP-UX source code, they come to us. We get several dozen requests a month just to come in and see AIX or HP-UX code base. And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++. It was interesting to see the depth of Caldera's intellectual capital."
Copyright disclaimers?
How many of those p2p'ers are doing
/dev/random > J.Lo.mp3
cat
Bull. It is still the best metric. Compilers don't matter. User the best available for each platform and compare systems of equivalent price. The one with the better ops/second wins -- simple.
If there is a vector unit present, it should enable the proc to do more ops/sec so it is included in the metric. No of procs don't matter either, we're talking systems here. They should learn from the TPC benchmarks. What matters should be how fast and how chep, not what compiler or how many CPUs or how many MHz etc.
MFLOPS = (million floating point operations) / second
.
MHz = (million cycles) / second
MFLOPS / MHz = (million floating point operations) / (million cycles)
=> (floating point operations) / cycle
So this unit is deliberately chosen to disfavor the P4 since it measures only number of operations per cycle and and is not a measure of speed or how fast. To measure speed it has to be per second
We all know that the P4 has more cycles per second than the G5, this benchmark is the other extreme of the MHz myth. More floating point operations per cycle does not mean much without considering the number of cycles per second.
A computer that does 10 ops per cycle, and 1 cycle in 10 seconds only does 1 op per second.
Another computer that does 1 op per cycle and does 10 cycles in 1 second, would do 10 ops per second.
Which is faster? I'm sure you don't need a research institution to tell you that.
Nasa compares them only on the ops/cycle metric. And some G5 zealots here tend to agree. What a disgrace to common sense.
And they could afford a dual G5 machine? Come again.
http://www.opengroup.org/publications/graphics/n90 0cov.jpg
If you want it secret don't sell it at all. It is like selling an apple to someone and the shrink-wrapped license says not to look at it while eating lest they find out what is so nice about it and try to get it from the tree by themselves.
If SCO wins, which they won't, the best judgement they could ever get would be to remove said code from Linux.
If they claim that they did not know that their code was in it, then linux users and other Linux distributors can not be bothered because they too did not know it was SCO's code. The law cannot be more forgiving of SCO for its negligence than to the Linux users/distributors.
SCO should forget about getting anything out lincensing from Linux ever.
The case between SCO and IBM now has boiled down to a contract dispute, which has to do with interpretation of the meaning of derivative works. In any case SCO is doomed because they inherited the documents and can not claim to interpret what it was intended to mean. Since SCO did not draft those documents, expert witnesses from AT&T which drafted those contracts will clearify what they meant by derivative works and SCO would be screwed.
So that is why there was no Athlon benchmarks in the comparison -- because the athlon does not care what compiler you use.
The SCO letter claims that buying Linux from them means buying a license to use their intellectual property. If one of those who bought Linux from SCO modified it and distributed it according to the license would they be sued? Is SCO now allowing them to make modifications and do what they want with those modifications (according to the GPL). If so then they have Licensed they IP under the GPL. If not then they are violating the GPL because of all the other code that they distributed with it that does not belong to them.
They keep shooting themselves in the foot every now and then. Very soon they'll have no toes left.
The lawsuit is very clearly about the definition of derivative.
A = SysV
B = RCU, NUMA, JFS
C = AIX
IBM licenses A, independently develops B, combines A + B to produce C.
C is a derivative of A,
C is also a derivative of B.
B is not a derivative of A. Although TSG (The SCO Group) wants B to be a derivative of A. They are trying to reinterpret their contracts to imply that B is a derivative of A.
IBM has the right to do what it wants with B (including contributing it to Linux). If SCO got B through Project Monterey into Unixware, then of course there is going to be common code between Unixware and Linux.
I doubt verymuch if McBride, Sontag, or any of their attornies know enough about code to know what a derivative is. By their argument, all software written for Windows is a derivative of Windows(TM), and if you have a Windows(TM) License that prohibits distribution of derivatives (all Windows users) you can legally open-source your code!
http://bankrupt.com/CAR_Public/020924.mbx
CALDERA INTERNATIONAL: Faces Securities Fraud Lawsuits in S.D. New York
Four class action lawsuits were filed against the Company, certain of
its officers and directors, and the underwriters of the Company's
initial public offering in the Unites States District Court for the
Southern District of New York by parties alleging violations of the
securities laws.
The complaints allege certain improprieties regarding the circumstances
surrounding the underwriters' conduct during the IPO and the failure to
disclose such conduct in the registration statement. The complaints
have recently been amended and consolidated into a single complaint.
Over 300 other issuers, and their underwriters and officers and
directors, have been sued in similar cases pending in the same court.
The Company is not aware of any improper conduct by the Company, its
officers and directors, or its underwriters, and the Company denies any
liability relating thereto. The Company has notified its underwriters
and insurance carriers of the existence of the claims and plans to
vigorously defend the action.
Caldera International, which plans to change its name to The SCO Group,
develops operating systems and network management software for PCs and
servers. In addition to its OpenLinux and OpenServer operating
systems, Caldera also sells its OpenUnix business software and
Volution, a Web and directory-based network management application.
Services such as consulting, custom development, technical support, and
training account for about 15% of sales, a Hoover.com dossier says.
Chairman Ralph Yarro and director Raymond Noorda share control of 47%
of the company through The Canopy Group (a venture capital firm) and
MTI Technology.
Officially the company is still Caldera. The name has not yet changed officially. Caldera was never bought out. Caldera bought SCO's unix business. SCO is now called Tarantella, and Caldera has decided to change its name to The SCO Group.
I thought it was "contract rights" or was it "control rights" or "intellectual property rights" or "copyrights" or "trade-secrets" or "license rights"?
;-/
<sarcasm>
They seem to have made it crystal clear over the past few months what rights they really mean
</sarcasm>
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=David +Boies&go=Go
David Boies is a lawyer and a chief partner of Boies, Schiller & Flexner. He has been involved in a number of high-profile cases in the United States.
He helped defend IBM in an antitrust case, and years later famously took the other side by representing the Justice Department in the Microsoft antitrust case. Following the 2000 U.S. presidential election, he represented Vice President Al Gore in the ensuing legal battle and participated in Bush v. Gore, one of the few Supreme Court cases ever televised.
He is representing Enron executive Andrew Fastow, and has been retained by the SCO Group in their pursuit of infringement of their rights to the UNIX intellectual properties.
Many of the comments in the Linux kernel are from the posix specification which is available on the internet. http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/
It makes a lot of sense for a developer to copy the specification as comments and fill it up with implementation details. That's the way I would do it! That would explain why comments are the same and code is different.
They would! All they have to do is submit it to the testing procedure of the Open Group. If it passes, it's Unix whether its based off of SCO's code or not
Check this out ...
My goodness, did people read the latest 10Q?
You know those licensing deals that gave SCO its
first quarter in the black? It issued 210K options
at strike $1.83 to one of the licensees, priced them
at half a million and accounted for it by reducing their
license revenue!
Those options are 2 mio in the money now and the
owner will be looking to dump. Did you check out
the insider trades info?
People, you are being majorly scammed!
http://biz.yahoo.com/e/030613/cald10-q.html
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/S/SCOX.html
" In connection with the execution of the first license agreement, we granted a warrant to the licensee to purchase up to 210,000 shares of our common stock, for a period of five years, at a price of $1.83 per share. This warrant has been valued, using the Black-Scholes valuation method, at $500,000. Because the warrant was issued for no consideration, $500,000 of the license proceeds have been recorded as warrant outstanding and the license revenue reduced accordingly."
IBM Chooses Caldera's OpenLinux eServer as First Linux Pre-load On Netfinity Servers
eServer Pre-load Saves Customers Time and Money
OREM, Utah--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 24, 2000--Caldera Systems Inc., (NASDAQ: CALD - news), the ``Linux for eBusiness'' leader, today announced that IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) will pre-load Caldera's OpenLinux eServer on its IBM Netfinity servers.
The Netfinity servers may be purchased either pre-installed or bundled with OpenLinux eServer through IBM Direct. This is IBM's first Linux pre-load on Netfinity servers.
IBM believes that Linux will help drive the long-term growth of the Internet by providing an open application platform that can harness leading-edge technologies and simplify customer choice. The common application platform will help ensure software interoperability across heterogeneous servers.
SCO: Dear old enemy, you know the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. So what do we do about this common enemy of ours. I have something going already but things are not going as planned.
M$: F*ck off sc*mbag. You sued me before about DRDOS why would I trust you now?
SCO: Well, wether you like it or not our 20 horsepower luxury cars are becoming irrelevant because of this 1000
horsepower bicycle and something must be done about it. Infact I think I know what will help us both, and the fact that we are enemies is just sweet. Nobody would suspect.
M$: Keep talking.
SCO: finance legal bills for one year so I can stall the bicycle. During that time, your luxury car can catch up and overtake.
M$: Huh!
SCO: Don't worry, just claim you are buying licenses for Unix code in the media so money transfers between us will have an explanation. Besides, what is money to you, with the crumbs falling off your plate you can drag this thing for > 10 years. By that time, the bicycle will be rusted.
M$: Nice Nice. I have been wondering when I'll be able to sleep peacefully with a smile on my face again. This sounds nice. When do we start?
SCO: Hold on!
SCO: Now would be fine.
Said What?
Correction:
these are the allegations as I understand them. It's not yet proven in court.
The facts are that IBM became involved in Linux almost 10 years after Linux started, SCO then Caldera was already contributing and distributing to Linux long before IBM became involved.
Check this site to get a clue of the real facts:
http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html
I'm embarassed on their behalf. Just check out the links they have put up on the site. And you say this use to be a Linux company?
I thought they had no clue but I couldn't imagine they'll stoop this low. This is really embarassing to the Unix world. I would be surprised if M$ has nothing to do with this.