RTFA when the site isn't slashdotted. The kernel contribution records are just a small part of the puzzle. There is a s-pile of Caldera and SCO marketing blurbage, white papers and official technical documentation that says that SCOO knew at a corporate level what was in the 2.4.X Linux kernel (JFS, NUMA, SMP) and these details were being used as a selling point by Caldera/SCO. Admittedly, RCU tends to be burried pretty deeply but their is also evidence of official input from SCO and this is there least plausible "intellectual property" claim since, as an example, I was doing read, copy, update of circular buffers on VAX 782s (two CPU vaxen) in 1983.
What PJ & company have done is assemble the pieces to show that what was being contributed by Christoph Hellwig (and other peons at SCO) was well understood by both his immediate boss and by corporate management. There is no plausible deniability.
Probably the best thing to come out of all the GrokLaw digging is this quote:
"From: Jeff V. Merkey (jmerkey@timpanogas.com)
"Date: Wed Aug 23 2000 - 12:19:53 EST
"This whole SCO thing is overrated. I worked on the Unixware code base at Novell, and it's putrid in comparison to Linux. It's got a lot of good apps, but so does Linux. This kind of tripe propaganda is what the "cult" followers of Unixware are good at. They lost @ $ 38,000,000 dollars each year at Novell ramming UnixWare down our throats and pissing of our customers -- Novell finally cut rheir losses and sold it. Don't get me wrong, it's decent Unix stuff, but Linux is tons better as a general purpose PC Unix. Just remember, Caldera is a LINUX company -- they will take the best of both, and use it to improve Linux...."
v:-)
My personal favorite
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
P4ssw0rd!
You will note that it has all of the elements of a good password such as both upper and lower case letters, numerals as well as characters and punctuation. Its also easy to remember.
See subject. Some folks over at www.groklaw.net would probably be very interested in this. If nothing else, e-mail the reference to PJ at groklaw.com (she runs the site and, yeah, the e-mail address is.com but the site is.net).
SCO asserted this claim in their "Reply to IBM's Amended Answer with Counterclaims". GrokLaw's short version of the high points is here. There is a link to the full PDF filing from SCO at the very beginning of the article although it doesn't really give any additional information beyond what PJ excerpted in her summary. There are some other articles on GrokLaw (SCO Archive section) that speculate on what grounds SCO will seek to challenge the GPL but SCO has not provided anything themselves.
On a tactical level the GPL screws up any lasting benefit from a settlement with IBM because SCO released the code containing the same supposedly valuable IP under the GPL. So even if SCO really does own the IP they are claiming, they published it under the GPL and so its available for all under the GPL. They may be able to collect some $$$ from IBM but the cat is out of the bag and they haven't stopped Linux. On a strategic level, SCO ideally wants to be the only entity who can charge a licensing fee for Linux and *BSD. You donate your Linux code under a GPL that allows SCO and only SCO to collect a licensing fee. There are some obvious, lasting benefits to SCO if this happens.
You need to look at this in the context of their attack on the GPL. My guess is that their ultimate goal is that anyone who "buys" a free OS (Linux, *BSD) has to pay SCO a licensing fee. This is why SCO is not suing any of the distros but is suing IBM for IP infringement and they will sue an end user for unlicensed use of their IP. Assuming they can win the IBM case (not quite as bad as assuming division by zero, but close), they establish ownership of IP incorporated in Linux. If they can collect from an end user, they establish that they are entitled to a license payment for use of Linux.
Likewise, I'm guessing their ultimate goal in attacking the AT&T-BSD settlement is to establish ownership of some IP in *BSD. At this point SCO would establish that users of *any* free/open source OS owe them a licensing fee for using it. Contributing to open source then becomes a form of slave labor for SCO. If that doesn't kill open source, SCO milks the profits of other people's labor and, if it does kill open source, they're in better shape competition-wise than they are now because they only have to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Sun, etc.
Let me state that again on its own: SCO doesn't want to kill open source, they want to turn contributing to open source into a form of slave labor (no compensation) that benefits SCO.
Think of Boise as the technical specialist in the field of lawsuits. Boise's job is to analyze the pros and cons of the various possible targets. Assuming SCO is legitimately attempting to defend their IP and this isn't all a bunch of PR spin to pump up the stock, factors are things like how strong is the case, what if any precedent is established, how strong is the defense, will they fight or settle, what will be the PR fall-out, etc. Think of it the same as deciding which programming language you'll use on your next project. Hopefully your PHB won't decide this but will let someone with some technical expertise in the subject matter distill the various factors down to the point that it becomes a management decision (cost, schedule, risk, life-cycle factors, etc.). The final decision will be made by McBribe and the SCO management team but, as a guess, Boise will make a case for who he thinks the victim should be and McBride and Co. will probably go along with Boise's choice.
Actually, I'm not really all that shocked about Darl's choice of words. He isn't exactly known for his ability to keep his foot out of his mouth when it comes to discussing litigation.
I only considered multi-seat. B-58 had a crew of three IIRC; XB70 about the same. There was a two seat trainer version of the Blackbird but that was the only version that wasn't single seat.
My bet is that something like your proposal is what will eventually get built as an executive jet (think Gulfstream IV size). Actually the availability of subsonic executive jets with intercontinental range is also a factor in the demise of the Concorde: you can come and go on your own schedule and the extra flight time is offset by both the scheduling flexibility and that you can land the thing at the nearest airstrip instead of being stuck flying in or out of New York, London or Paris only.
I saw an article recently about McDonalds exploring moving to Linux for their point of sale systems. Of all places, the trial will be at franchise units in Germany. Now what was the name of that German Linux distro?
I would love to see somebody go through at least the concept exercise of defining a next generation SST. One design element that lots of the critics of the SST don't take into account is that the Concordes pushed the state of the art when they were designed in the 1960s. Nothing that big had ever been made to go that fast and definitely not on a regular schedule. The closest military predecessors were the B-58 (small, very uneconomical) and the XB-70 (never made it to production). It wasn't until the B-1 that there was something in military service that even came close.
I don't expect anyone to rush something like this into production but it could be an interesting aerospace engineering exercise to define a strawman Concorde replacement using currently available technology. About the only "push the state of the art" item I would want to see included would be technologies to limit the sonic boom. I just wonder what the operational break-even point (ticket price * load factor) would be if such a Concorde replacement were built.
On the other hand, for those of you who can't get enough SCO news, I strongly recommend GrokLaw.
OK. No whinning about too much SCO news and no whinning about too little SCO news./.ers will just have to whine about the RIAA, MPAA, etc. until we find something else for you to whine about.
GrokLaw points out that no papers have been filed. As usual, Blake Stowell is not a lawyer and should keep is mouth shut about things he doesn't understand. This is not to say that SCO won't file the papers tomorrow or some other time but, as of close of business today, the paper work to subpoena the people SCO claims they have subpoenaed hasn't even made it to the courthouse let alone been served. Also as usual, SCO can't keep their "facts" straight if they even know what a fact is.
Hmmm. Maybe SCO has been doing that crack Linus accused them of being on.
I have this vision of an SCO lawyer trying to question Stallman about "Linux" and not calling it "GNU/Linux" and Stallman just keeps reapeatedly correcting the SCO lawyer with, "If you mean GNU/Linux..." to the point that the SCO lawyer says something like "GNU/Unixware." That would be priceless.
Other than the "B.S." comment you seem to be agreeing with me so I'm confused. You may not realize that most news organizations consider being hit with a subpoena (even in a civil case) to be a major affront to their first ammendment rights (it isn't in a civil suit but they like to pretend it is). Only someone with something to hide would bury the news that they too had been served with a subpoena on the very subject of the article most of the way down the article and then only provide a single sentence.
If you want to call "B.S.", I suggest you call it on Forbes. They are pretending to be unbiased when they are coming really close to becoming a party to the suit. Things could get really interesting if Laura Dingbat, sorry DiDio, and people like Daniel Lyons actually have to testify to what SCO showed them.
The author of this piece, Daniel Lyons, should use the by line, "SCO Mouthpiece." He is the same hack who wrote the "Linux's Hit Men" article about the FSF plus there was another recent piece of SCO FUD that I've managed to flush out of my memory.
You will also note that quietly buried in the body of the article is that Forbes was also served with a subpoena. This is undoubtedly because of Mr. Lyons' articles.
DiDio doesn't know the meaning of "journalistic integrity" or "independent analysis" so my bet would be she's a shill for SCO on this one too. So, the real question becomes, how is the threat of Novell/SuSE being an acquisition target somehow beneficial to SCO? IBM buying the combined entity is obviously bogus given IBM's investment of $50M that was part of the deal. Also, if IBM had wanted SuSE they could have easily outbid Novell and Novell has been down and out for so long, IBM could have bought them too if they had wanted to. Besides, SuSE and Novell seem to be doing just fine with regard to supporting IBM against SCO as independent companies. IBM acquiring the combined entity would, if anything, indicate that IBM thinks it needs Novell's rights to the UNIX licenses to bolster its case.
I could go down the rest of the list of other possible buyers but none of them make any sense either. The only thing I can think of is that, by painting Novell/SuSE as a possible acquisition target, SCO hopes to convince people not to take the combination seriously. This may be the angle, maybe not. DiDio says what she's paid to say so SCO wants people to think of Novell/SuSE as probably getting bought out soon.
IBM's countersuit against SCO is for, among other things, copyright infringement for violating the GPL in their licensing scheme. When the Nazgul of Armonk (also known as IBM's IP legal team) are done with SCO, there won't be enough of SCO left to bother with. IBM has a huge amount of money from their Linux support services at stake so they will not only want to put a lid on SCO, they will want to make sure no one else gets a similar idea. Darl may as well start saying ouch now 'cause this one's going to hurt.
In the mean time, you might want to look into whether you can get a shareholder issue onto the next SCO proxy ballot. I can think of a variety of questions like calling for a corporate position respecting the GPL that could be quite interesting and amusing.
Linda Boreman (aka, Linda Lovelace) would have been perfect to play Laura DiDio. I'm having trouble coming up with appropriate people to play the SCO legal team but the gang of crooked lawyers from "The Firm" comes to mind other than they seemed to be halfway competent. Of course, the Iraqi Information Minister plays Darl McBride. Any one have any suggestions of an actor who played a corrupt but incompetent journalist for the part of Daniel Lyons?
I frequent Groklaw so I chased your article through Google to finally end up with this article which digests the fallout from the case. The critical quote from the paper is (top of page two)
One particularly interesting point: it did not appear that anyone was arguing that the GPL did not apply or was not a valid license.
Though what Judge Saris said in the proceedings has no value as precedent in other cases, it sounded as though the GPL would be treated as any other license would be in a software context.
I would have loved to have come up with a finding that says the GPL is enforceable and binding but this would seem to indicate that MySql vs. NuSphere doesn't provide it. I'm guessing this is because the GPL itself was not in dispute, but rather, the question was whether it applied to NuSphere's proprietary extensions to MySQL.
Its probably not an accident that these folks were based in Canada and running their scam against folks in the U.S. Even with countries as close as the U.S. and Canada are, it is notoriously difficult to extradite people for non-violent money crimes like fraud, ponzi schemes, etc. This is especially true with something like the Nigerian money scam where the whole thing is supposed to some big secret with no paper trail of contracts, documented agreements, receipts, etc.
Agreed. If there is a code review, it is usually conducted using nature's legacy groupware: paper hardcopy. Generally, no one has the time to recheck some developer's changes to the reviewed code to implement whatever was determined to be needed in the code review. The code goes into the baseline and the developer is the last person to see it. QA might look at it if there is a problem but QA generally just tests that the code does what it's supposed to do and doesn't crash and burn for off nominal conditions.
Something like this that cleanly implements an "undocumented feature" could easily be slipped into most proprietary code and no one would be the wiser. This is especially true when the company developing the product is noted for including "undocumented features" and capabilities that are only available to other products from the same company (I won't name names).
BTW, the thread is quite intersting. Linus even chimes in from time to time.
I work on OSS in my free time and I work at the company with a Linux hosted commercial product. So, lets see how many ways I don't fit this bozo's stereotypical OSS contributor:
> a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond,
Nope. I hit the big 50 in a couple of years. Still have a punch card hanging in my office as a reminder of "the old days".
> hackers,
No again. The company I work for makes network security software.
> virus creators,
Nope. See above.
> and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.
Gee, the Air Force let me write software to target ICBMs and build radar systems, the Navy let me build radar system, for the Army it was logistics and air defense command and control software, I've also written software for maintaining civilian airliners and I now work for a company that makes really good money selling the network monitoring software I help create. Menagerie is a funny word to use to describe a group of people with this kind of credentials, but, maybe he was at a loss for words.
Are we sure Laura DiDio didn't just take on another pseudonym?
Slashdot Mirror
What PJ & company have done is assemble the pieces to show that what was being contributed by Christoph Hellwig (and other peons at SCO) was well understood by both his immediate boss and by corporate management. There is no plausible deniability.
Probably the best thing to come out of all the GrokLaw digging is this quote:
The full thread is here.P4ssw0rd!
You will note that it has all of the elements of a good password such as both upper and lower case letters, numerals as well as characters and punctuation. Its also easy to remember.
See subject. Some folks over at www.groklaw.net would probably be very interested in this. If nothing else, e-mail the reference to PJ at groklaw.com (she runs the site and, yeah, the e-mail address is .com but the site is .net).
On a tactical level the GPL screws up any lasting benefit from a settlement with IBM because SCO released the code containing the same supposedly valuable IP under the GPL. So even if SCO really does own the IP they are claiming, they published it under the GPL and so its available for all under the GPL. They may be able to collect some $$$ from IBM but the cat is out of the bag and they haven't stopped Linux. On a strategic level, SCO ideally wants to be the only entity who can charge a licensing fee for Linux and *BSD. You donate your Linux code under a GPL that allows SCO and only SCO to collect a licensing fee. There are some obvious, lasting benefits to SCO if this happens.
You need to look at this in the context of their attack on the GPL. My guess is that their ultimate goal is that anyone who "buys" a free OS (Linux, *BSD) has to pay SCO a licensing fee. This is why SCO is not suing any of the distros but is suing IBM for IP infringement and they will sue an end user for unlicensed use of their IP. Assuming they can win the IBM case (not quite as bad as assuming division by zero, but close), they establish ownership of IP incorporated in Linux. If they can collect from an end user, they establish that they are entitled to a license payment for use of Linux.
Likewise, I'm guessing their ultimate goal in attacking the AT&T-BSD settlement is to establish ownership of some IP in *BSD. At this point SCO would establish that users of *any* free/open source OS owe them a licensing fee for using it. Contributing to open source then becomes a form of slave labor for SCO. If that doesn't kill open source, SCO milks the profits of other people's labor and, if it does kill open source, they're in better shape competition-wise than they are now because they only have to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Sun, etc.
Let me state that again on its own: SCO doesn't want to kill open source, they want to turn contributing to open source into a form of slave labor (no compensation) that benefits SCO.
Think of Boise as the technical specialist in the field of lawsuits. Boise's job is to analyze the pros and cons of the various possible targets. Assuming SCO is legitimately attempting to defend their IP and this isn't all a bunch of PR spin to pump up the stock, factors are things like how strong is the case, what if any precedent is established, how strong is the defense, will they fight or settle, what will be the PR fall-out, etc. Think of it the same as deciding which programming language you'll use on your next project. Hopefully your PHB won't decide this but will let someone with some technical expertise in the subject matter distill the various factors down to the point that it becomes a management decision (cost, schedule, risk, life-cycle factors, etc.). The final decision will be made by McBribe and the SCO management team but, as a guess, Boise will make a case for who he thinks the victim should be and McBride and Co. will probably go along with Boise's choice.
Actually, I'm not really all that shocked about Darl's choice of words. He isn't exactly known for his ability to keep his foot out of his mouth when it comes to discussing litigation.
I only considered multi-seat. B-58 had a crew of three IIRC; XB70 about the same. There was a two seat trainer version of the Blackbird but that was the only version that wasn't single seat.
My bet is that something like your proposal is what will eventually get built as an executive jet (think Gulfstream IV size). Actually the availability of subsonic executive jets with intercontinental range is also a factor in the demise of the Concorde: you can come and go on your own schedule and the extra flight time is offset by both the scheduling flexibility and that you can land the thing at the nearest airstrip instead of being stuck flying in or out of New York, London or Paris only.
I saw an article recently about McDonalds exploring moving to Linux for their point of sale systems. Of all places, the trial will be at franchise units in Germany. Now what was the name of that German Linux distro?
Nahhh
NewsForge picked up on the BSDi comment.
I would love to see somebody go through at least the concept exercise of defining a next generation SST. One design element that lots of the critics of the SST don't take into account is that the Concordes pushed the state of the art when they were designed in the 1960s. Nothing that big had ever been made to go that fast and definitely not on a regular schedule. The closest military predecessors were the B-58 (small, very uneconomical) and the XB-70 (never made it to production). It wasn't until the B-1 that there was something in military service that even came close.
I don't expect anyone to rush something like this into production but it could be an interesting aerospace engineering exercise to define a strawman Concorde replacement using currently available technology. About the only "push the state of the art" item I would want to see included would be technologies to limit the sonic boom. I just wonder what the operational break-even point (ticket price * load factor) would be if such a Concorde replacement were built.
OK. No whinning about too much SCO news and no whinning about too little SCO news. /.ers will just have to whine about the RIAA, MPAA, etc. until we find something else for you to whine about.
Apparently Linus got his served with dinner. Unfortunately, this is not a joke.
Looks like the only thing Blake Stowell got wrong was the "tense" of his staement. He should have said that they "will be served."
Hmmm. Maybe SCO has been doing that crack Linus accused them of being on.
I have this vision of an SCO lawyer trying to question Stallman about "Linux" and not calling it "GNU/Linux" and Stallman just keeps reapeatedly correcting the SCO lawyer with, "If you mean GNU/Linux..." to the point that the SCO lawyer says something like "GNU/Unixware." That would be priceless.
Other than the "B.S." comment you seem to be agreeing with me so I'm confused. You may not realize that most news organizations consider being hit with a subpoena (even in a civil case) to be a major affront to their first ammendment rights (it isn't in a civil suit but they like to pretend it is). Only someone with something to hide would bury the news that they too had been served with a subpoena on the very subject of the article most of the way down the article and then only provide a single sentence.
If you want to call "B.S.", I suggest you call it on Forbes. They are pretending to be unbiased when they are coming really close to becoming a party to the suit. Things could get really interesting if Laura Dingbat, sorry DiDio, and people like Daniel Lyons actually have to testify to what SCO showed them.
The author of this piece, Daniel Lyons, should use the by line, "SCO Mouthpiece." He is the same hack who wrote the "Linux's Hit Men" article about the FSF plus there was another recent piece of SCO FUD that I've managed to flush out of my memory.
You will also note that quietly buried in the body of the article is that Forbes was also served with a subpoena. This is undoubtedly because of Mr. Lyons' articles.
DiDio doesn't know the meaning of "journalistic integrity" or "independent analysis" so my bet would be she's a shill for SCO on this one too. So, the real question becomes, how is the threat of Novell/SuSE being an acquisition target somehow beneficial to SCO? IBM buying the combined entity is obviously bogus given IBM's investment of $50M that was part of the deal. Also, if IBM had wanted SuSE they could have easily outbid Novell and Novell has been down and out for so long, IBM could have bought them too if they had wanted to. Besides, SuSE and Novell seem to be doing just fine with regard to supporting IBM against SCO as independent companies. IBM acquiring the combined entity would, if anything, indicate that IBM thinks it needs Novell's rights to the UNIX licenses to bolster its case.
I could go down the rest of the list of other possible buyers but none of them make any sense either. The only thing I can think of is that, by painting Novell/SuSE as a possible acquisition target, SCO hopes to convince people not to take the combination seriously. This may be the angle, maybe not. DiDio says what she's paid to say so SCO wants people to think of Novell/SuSE as probably getting bought out soon.
IBM's countersuit against SCO is for, among other things, copyright infringement for violating the GPL in their licensing scheme. When the Nazgul of Armonk (also known as IBM's IP legal team) are done with SCO, there won't be enough of SCO left to bother with. IBM has a huge amount of money from their Linux support services at stake so they will not only want to put a lid on SCO, they will want to make sure no one else gets a similar idea. Darl may as well start saying ouch now 'cause this one's going to hurt.
In the mean time, you might want to look into whether you can get a shareholder issue onto the next SCO proxy ballot. I can think of a variety of questions like calling for a corporate position respecting the GPL that could be quite interesting and amusing.
Linda Boreman (aka, Linda Lovelace) would have been perfect to play Laura DiDio. I'm having trouble coming up with appropriate people to play the SCO legal team but the gang of crooked lawyers from "The Firm" comes to mind other than they seemed to be halfway competent. Of course, the Iraqi Information Minister plays Darl McBride. Any one have any suggestions of an actor who played a corrupt but incompetent journalist for the part of Daniel Lyons?
BLAME CANADA!
What is slashdot coming to?
Its probably not an accident that these folks were based in Canada and running their scam against folks in the U.S. Even with countries as close as the U.S. and Canada are, it is notoriously difficult to extradite people for non-violent money crimes like fraud, ponzi schemes, etc. This is especially true with something like the Nigerian money scam where the whole thing is supposed to some big secret with no paper trail of contracts, documented agreements, receipts, etc.
Agreed. If there is a code review, it is usually conducted using nature's legacy groupware: paper hardcopy. Generally, no one has the time to recheck some developer's changes to the reviewed code to implement whatever was determined to be needed in the code review. The code goes into the baseline and the developer is the last person to see it. QA might look at it if there is a problem but QA generally just tests that the code does what it's supposed to do and doesn't crash and burn for off nominal conditions.
Something like this that cleanly implements an "undocumented feature" could easily be slipped into most proprietary code and no one would be the wiser. This is especially true when the company developing the product is noted for including "undocumented features" and capabilities that are only available to other products from the same company (I won't name names).
BTW, the thread is quite intersting. Linus even chimes in from time to time.
> a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond,
Nope. I hit the big 50 in a couple of years. Still have a punch card hanging in my office as a reminder of "the old days".
> hackers,
No again. The company I work for makes network security software.
> virus creators,
Nope. See above.
> and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.
Gee, the Air Force let me write software to target ICBMs and build radar systems, the Navy let me build radar system, for the Army it was logistics and air defense command and control software, I've also written software for maintaining civilian airliners and I now work for a company that makes really good money selling the network monitoring software I help create. Menagerie is a funny word to use to describe a group of people with this kind of credentials, but, maybe he was at a loss for words.
Are we sure Laura DiDio didn't just take on another pseudonym?