ESR's already done the serious bit. The OSI's latest document, written by Rob Landley and ESR, is such an awesome, sober, closely reasoned demolition of the SCO legal complaint that you would imagine IBM could just write "MOTION TO DISMISS" at the top of it and stick it in the mail.
The useful value of this amusing rant is that it potentially widens the audience. Because it's extreme and amusing it get passed around and will be seen by people who aren't going to click a headline to read the technical details.
This could have material value. There is a general assumption that when a company like SCO makes public statements, those statements have a reasonable amount of truth in them. That assumption's what's been keeping SCO's stock price up. If it becomes common water-cooler chatter that Darl McBride is a paranoid loony, then those ordinary business types are going to be a little more inclined to check the facts before believing the press releases.
If SCO's stock price were to collapse under a weight of disbelief, the backers would get cold feet and the whole problem could disappear.
How is this different from any other public forum?
SCO's theory is that Linus is a kind of "human Napster", a mechanism for throwing their valuable property into public while the individual contributors hide behind the smokescreen of "linux-kernel". Napster was found to be a contributory infringer of copyright.
It's a perfectly OK theory; the only problems with it are the facts -- that the kernel maintainers are very careful over the true ownership of code (and patents, for that matter), and very responsive to claims that particular pieces of code are not free for their use.
The Halloween IX document which someone referred to above cites examples of this happening.
I'm curious, when you say you "marched against[..]", was it againt inclusion in the EU or the Euro?
It was the ratification of the Treaty of Maastrict in 1992, which created the "European Union" (previously it had been known as the "European Economic Community"), and which also created the single currency. There was enormous domestic opposition at the time, and unlike most member states the UK's own laws did not require a referendum for ratification. Nevertheless in order to get the bill past his own party, then Prime Minister John Major had to negotiate a protocol to the treaty allowing Britain to "opt out" of the single currency. That opt out is still in force; Tony Blair says he wants to adopt the Euro, but his Chancellor Gordon Brown (chief Finance Minister) is believed to be against it, and it would be politically so difficult for Blair that his current Iraq-related problems have pushed it completely over the horizon.
IF we are to continue this conversation (massively irrelevant to exploding spaceships), you could switch to private email a.mcguinness at ntlworld.com
OK, OK, (calms down a bit). When you've marched in the street against something, you'll be a little bit miffed when someone tells you it never happened.
Flames aside, I'm curious where you came by your mistake. Are you American? Is there a common perception that the recent France-Germany anti-American alignment is "The EU" and that Britain (and maybe some other countries) are not part of it? That would be quite interesting.
Trying to force an email newsletter through the modern email system is an uphill battle that I think is doomed to failure. However careful and legitimate you are, you're going to take significant losses from spam filtering. It's going to keep on getting worse, and I can't see it ever getting better.
I advise you to plan ahead and adopt different distribution methods. Consider running an NNTP server and advising your clients to subscribe to that.
An interesting new approach would be to use a customised POP3 server that acts more like an NNTP server - i.e. all users get the same set of messages. Unlike NNTP, the server would need to keep track per-user of which messages had been seen, but unlike POP3 servers it would not need to keep copies of each message per user. The advantage of this would be that with many email clients (including Outlook?), the recipient would just need to set up your server as an additional mail account, and would get the mails from you dropped straight into their main inbox, whereas with NNTP it shows up separately. The disadvantage is that, as far as I know, no-one has yet written the server software.
In the long term, I think legitimate bulk mail has to move from a "push" system to a "pull" system, where subscription is handled entirely at the recipient end.
That is quite a good round-up of the multiple issues here.
The one true judgement according to amcguinn follows:
My incoming mail provider is entitled to employ a spam-filtering system that produces false positives, (provided they are not doing it maliciously or in order to harm their competitors,) but I think it is a mistake for them to do so, and I will see it as a reason to look for a new provider.
The only reasonable argument for legal actions against AOL would be on monopoly grounds. I am personally suspicious of anti-trust legislation, but then I am a bit of a Raymondite and therefore patently insane.
Why would anyone want to troll a 3-day-old discussion?
As another commenter pointed out, the UK's opt-out from the Single Currency makes it an imperfect example, but the UK is definitely a member of the EU, and has been since 1975 (even before it was called the EU).
Did
God tell you that the UK was not a member or something?
Slashdot discussions tend to attract ignorant morons who post without any knowledge of the subject, but really, why three days late?
Is it possible you made a mistake installing the new one?
If not, you would be performing a public service (in a small way) by trying to track down the problem and reporting it (e.g. on linux-kernel). This is a stable release, and dropped support for any hardware or configuration is a bug.
I wouldn't say a person who knows Quake II monsters is "dumber" than someone who knows moon features, but he's certainly more detached from the physical world.
That's not necessarily a bad thing -- the Quake II stuff could be described (at a stretch) as part of the "human" or "social" world rather than the "natural" world, and if you believe many modern biologists, the human world has been more important to each of us than the natural world has for a very long time.
Nevertheless, in a romantic way, if nothing else, the disconnection from the natural world is some kind of a loss. I tend to try to know at least what phase the moon is in, but right now I confess I don't have a clue. I don't even have moontool on this workstation, darn. Time to go to
find a copy
Also, keep in mind that fluorescents are efficient at staying on, and use more power when first turned on, so if you're updating areas in your house to use compact fluorescents, you might need to modify some habits (if you'll be back in a few hours, leave it on.
I have heard that that is a myth, and that the extra energy to start a fluorescent tube is equivalent to less than a second of leaving it on.
I've looked to see if I can back this up, and it is indeed listed as a myth in a
paper from the Lawrence Berkely Laboratories
On the other hand, it is certainly true (from my experience) that it takes a while for a fluorescent to brighten up, so they're not ideal for lights like the poster's paint closet, or even stair lights.
I missed a point. While the 32V version that esr suggests the malloc code was copied from was released by Caldera in 2002 under a BSD-like license, it was also distributed by AT&T before 1996 without a copyright notice, and therefore entered the public domain. Therefore, under esr's theory, even its pasting into Linux by SGI without attribution is OK.
The malloc code that was briefly in Linux wasn't copied from BSD. SCO claim it was copied from System V, which is possible. esr reckoned it was copied from an earlier Unix, which was released by by Caldera under a BSD-style license. The comment at the top of it (the Linux version) claimed it was copyright SGI, and didn't have any other attribution. If esr is right, then the code was copied by SGI in breach of SCO's BSD-style license. If SCO is right, then the code was copied in breach of SCO's commercial Unix license.
As it's so small, and just a straightforward implementation of an algorithm documented by Knuth in 1968, that possibly SGI could claim that cutting and pasting it into their own code was fair use, even without attribution. I don't know about that.
An interesting comment in an earlier discussion suggests that by accepting contributions without actively checking who really owns them (as opposed to who contributed them), the kernel maintainers could fall into the same legal hole as Napster, even if they are not aware that contributions are not legitimate.
First, it is very clear that if any license was violated by Linux it was an accident. It was not willful and deliberate. In contrast to SCO, which has been willfully and deliberately removing BSD copyright notices from their code right, left, and center.
On the contrary, the way the BSD attribution of the malloc code was removed from Linux is exactly the same as the way the BSD attribution of the BPF code was removed from SCO Unix
In both cases, it was done as Heise describe, by a Unix company, in the malloc case by SGI (apparently), and in the BPF case by SCO.
SGI might get into trouble over it. Linux developers and distributors who accepted the code from SGI in good faith, and removed it as soon as they noticed it was old Unix code (before it was revealed by SCO), would not be any trouble.
If you're talking about Linux's use of the BPF code, be aware that what SCO called "obfuscated copying" was in fact a well-documented clean-room clone done by a Linux developer without access to the BSD-licensed code, just using published documentation. It was not subject to the BSD license at all.
It's not quite as simple as you make out, because Denis Ritchie (who, with Ken Thompson, developed UNIX, as well as developing C with Brian Kernighan), was working for AT&T at the time. AT&T's rights now belong to SCO.
So, the fact that Ritchie wrote something, does not, by itself, mean that SCO doesn't own it. There's all the complicated stuff in between, such as the USL vs BSDI lawsuit and settlement.
But SCO couldn't have planned originally to take on all Linux users/distributors, or they wouldn't have been so uproariously incompetent. They must have just suddenly had the idea and run with it
Thanks a lot for pointing that out, I wasn't
aware of it and it's really interesting. The
earlier treaties use the word "irrevocable", as
well as the vague "Ever closer union".
There are a good number of different reasons for the EU to exist. In the first place, it was set up, with American support, to lock in wavering european countries to capitalism in the face of the Eastern Bloc. Remember that Italy and France, for instance, had very large and powerful communist parties from the post-war period up until the fall of the USSR. Holding them in a free trade area was intended to prevent them joining the communist bloc.
The second reason was to prevent or control any ambition to territorial ambition by Germany. The Germans were as keen as anyone on this: they did, and to a considerable extent still do, see the EU as safeguarding them from going down the same path as in the 1930s
A third reason, in more recent years, has been to build a new superpower to prevent the world from becoming American dominated. This is a particular obsession of the French. Britain has never been much interested with this - having been a superpower previously, Britain is not particularly keen on being a bit-part player in a new one. If you want to describe Britain's unwillingness to define its whole foreign policy in terms of starting a new cold war against a country that on most things it more or less agrees with as "lack of backbone", so be it.
On the same point, I don't think it makes any more sense to describe the Blair govt's support for the Iraq war as "bowing [to] the US", as it does to describe France's opposition as bowing to Iraq. Both governments made the decision based on what they thought was right and what they thought was in their national interests. In my opinion, both of them were wrong, but that is two other arguments.
It is important to note that many British people are much more distrustful of, and feel much more threatened by, the France-Germany axis than by the USA. I have no inside knowledge of how Danes or Poles feel, but in the case of the eastern European countries, I wouldn't be surprised if they saw the USA as their strong ally against threats from Russia, and France/Germany as weak and unreliable.
Lastly, it's important to distinguish between popular opinion from government policy. UK opinion was never very supportive of the Iraq war, but Tony Blair in my opinion geniunely belived he was bringing rightness and justice to the world (God help us!). On the other hand, I think you would find popular opinion in Germany opposes European monetary union and closer EU integration, but the political establishment has other views.
I had that in mind, but I was under the impression that they could not be sent out of the country (except in the capacity of US Army reserves under federal command). Was I mistaken? If Texas could have chosen to send troops in support of Argentina in 1982, for instance, without US govt approval, then my example was bad.
In some ways, a country like the UK has less independent power than Texas, as the EU regulates particularly economic matters more than the federal US government
In most ways, conversely, the EU member states are more independent than US states (e.g. they each have their own army - UK did not need EU approval to send troops to Iraq)
The interesting point is that there is no limit to the power that will be centralised in the EU, and an assumption that every few years a new round of treaties will centralise power further. The treaties are full of the phrase "Ever Closer Union", and explicitly prevent seccession. (To the best of my knowledge, the equivalent question in the USA was, um, unclear until 1861-65).
Obligatory plug (though my membership lapsed some years ago): UKIP
I looked at the RMX link - my suggestion would indeed require something like RMX to work at all, although what I described goes a lot further (which may not be a good idea: I propose it on the basis "If you really want to do something...", though personally I'm not sure that the benefits really justify the costs).
I was basically arguing at cross purposes though. A lot of people say "SMTP needs to be replaced/changed" when they really mean "The internet mail infrastructure needs to be changed". My argument that the SMTP protocol does not need modification is barely-relevant pedantry if you accept that "SMTP" is being used as shorthand.
SCO have made exactly two legal filings to go with all this PR dross they were boasting about.
First, they filed a suit against IBM (not on copyright grounds).
Second, they amended the suit to remove some of the more blatant lies from it.
That's the lot. None of the many contradictory allegations they've made against other Linux distributors or users have been backed by any legal action whatsoever. They didn't even bother to contest the application to get an injunction against them in Germany to stop them spreading this FUD. The injunction stands (in Germany).
The interview was indeed "barely coherent" in that you can't tell what he meant.
If he meant that the GPL is in conflict with copyright law (as he claimed previously) then he's been smoking what Linus says SCO've been smoking.
If he meant that SCO can't be held to an agreement (the GPL) that they were "tricked" into making by receiving kernel code that, unbeknownst to them, IBM had slipped SCO-owned code into, then (IANAL) he has a point, but one that doesn't cover the fact that SCO is still distributing the kernel (to its customers), or the fact that no genuinely SCO-owned code that wasn't deliberately released under free licenses has yet been revealed.
I believe it is deliberate that what his meaning is unclear, as that allows him the most flexibility for the future.
As far as publicity goes, I would refer everyone to msn's press releases page, which neatly flows from "Linux is great and will kick ass in the enterprise" to "Linux is a rip-off of SCO's 30-year-old code."
There are a lot of worse ideas than this around, but I have objections:
vote-selling: "Fill in your ballot paper and post it in front of me, and I'll pay you $5."
pressure canvassing: "Good afternoon Mrs. Oldlady, I'm your Slashdot Party candidate. Do you have one of these new-fangled postal ballots? Confusing, aren't they? Would you like some help filling it in, won't take a minute..."
Dependent on postal system. How many postal workers do you have to bribe/threaten to "lose" a sack of mail from a hostile ward? What happens if the post union goes on strike in election week?
(Minor objection) expense/complexity of printing and mailing out postal forms in necessary (enormous) quantities.
This is the direction the UK is actually considering going in (there were trials in some areas in the last local elections), and it's actually scaring me a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the problem with "Yes Minister". People mod it as "Funny" when really it's "Informative"
ESR's already done the serious bit. The OSI's latest document, written by Rob Landley and ESR, is such an awesome, sober, closely reasoned demolition of the SCO legal complaint that you would imagine IBM could just write "MOTION TO DISMISS" at the top of it and stick it in the mail.
The useful value of this amusing rant is that it potentially widens the audience. Because it's extreme and amusing it get passed around and will be seen by people who aren't going to click a headline to read the technical details.
This could have material value. There is a general assumption that when a company like SCO makes public statements, those statements have a reasonable amount of truth in them. That assumption's what's been keeping SCO's stock price up. If it becomes common water-cooler chatter that Darl McBride is a paranoid loony, then those ordinary business types are going to be a little more inclined to check the facts before believing the press releases.
If SCO's stock price were to collapse under a weight of disbelief, the backers would get cold feet and the whole problem could disappear.
How is this different from any other public forum?
SCO's theory is that Linus is a kind of "human Napster", a mechanism for throwing their valuable property into public while the individual contributors hide behind the smokescreen of "linux-kernel". Napster was found to be a contributory infringer of copyright.
It's a perfectly OK theory; the only problems with it are the facts -- that the kernel maintainers are very careful over the true ownership of code (and patents, for that matter), and very responsive to claims that particular pieces of code are not free for their use.
The Halloween IX document which someone referred to above cites examples of this happening.
I'm curious, when you say you "marched against[..]", was it againt inclusion in the EU or the Euro?
It was the ratification of the Treaty of Maastrict in 1992, which created the "European Union" (previously it had been known as the "European Economic Community"), and which also created the single currency. There was enormous domestic opposition at the time, and unlike most member states the UK's own laws did not require a referendum for ratification. Nevertheless in order to get the bill past his own party, then Prime Minister John Major had to negotiate a protocol to the treaty allowing Britain to "opt out" of the single currency. That opt out is still in force; Tony Blair says he wants to adopt the Euro, but his Chancellor Gordon Brown (chief Finance Minister) is believed to be against it, and it would be politically so difficult for Blair that his current Iraq-related problems have pushed it completely over the horizon.
IF we are to continue this conversation (massively irrelevant to exploding spaceships), you could switch to private email a.mcguinness at ntlworld.com
OK, OK, (calms down a bit). When you've marched in the street against something, you'll be a little bit miffed when someone tells you it never happened.
Flames aside, I'm curious where you came by your mistake. Are you American? Is there a common perception that the recent France-Germany anti-American alignment is "The EU" and that Britain (and maybe some other countries) are not part of it? That would be quite interesting.
Trying to force an email newsletter through the modern email system is an uphill battle that I think is doomed to failure. However careful and legitimate you are, you're going to take significant losses from spam filtering. It's going to keep on getting worse, and I can't see it ever getting better.
I advise you to plan ahead and adopt different distribution methods. Consider running an NNTP server and advising your clients to subscribe to that.
An interesting new approach would be to use a customised POP3 server that acts more like an NNTP server - i.e. all users get the same set of messages. Unlike NNTP, the server would need to keep track per-user of which messages had been seen, but unlike POP3 servers it would not need to keep copies of each message per user. The advantage of this would be that with many email clients (including Outlook?), the recipient would just need to set up your server as an additional mail account, and would get the mails from you dropped straight into their main inbox, whereas with NNTP it shows up separately. The disadvantage is that, as far as I know, no-one has yet written the server software.
In the long term, I think legitimate bulk mail has to move from a "push" system to a "pull" system, where subscription is handled entirely at the recipient end.
That is quite a good round-up of the multiple issues here.
The one true judgement according to amcguinn follows:
My incoming mail provider is entitled to employ a spam-filtering system that produces false positives, (provided they are not doing it maliciously or in order to harm their competitors,) but I think it is a mistake for them to do so, and I will see it as a reason to look for a new provider.
The only reasonable argument for legal actions against AOL would be on monopoly grounds. I am personally suspicious of anti-trust legislation, but then I am a bit of a Raymondite and therefore patently insane.
Why would anyone want to troll a 3-day-old discussion?
As another commenter pointed out, the UK's opt-out from the Single Currency makes it an imperfect example, but the UK is definitely a member of the EU, and has been since 1975 (even before it was called the EU).
Did God tell you that the UK was not a member or something?
Slashdot discussions tend to attract ignorant morons who post without any knowledge of the subject, but really, why three days late?
Is it possible you made a mistake installing the new one?
If not, you would be performing a public service (in a small way) by trying to track down the problem and reporting it (e.g. on linux-kernel). This is a stable release, and dropped support for any hardware or configuration is a bug.
I wouldn't say a person who knows Quake II monsters is "dumber" than someone who knows moon features, but he's certainly more detached from the physical world.
That's not necessarily a bad thing -- the Quake II stuff could be described (at a stretch) as part of the "human" or "social" world rather than the "natural" world, and if you believe many modern biologists, the human world has been more important to each of us than the natural world has for a very long time.
Nevertheless, in a romantic way, if nothing else, the disconnection from the natural world is some kind of a loss. I tend to try to know at least what phase the moon is in, but right now I confess I don't have a clue. I don't even have moontool on this workstation, darn. Time to go to find a copy
Also, keep in mind that fluorescents are efficient at staying on, and use more power when first turned on, so if you're updating areas in your house to use compact fluorescents, you might need to modify some habits (if you'll be back in a few hours, leave it on.
I have heard that that is a myth, and that the extra energy to start a fluorescent tube is equivalent to less than a second of leaving it on.
I've looked to see if I can back this up, and it is indeed listed as a myth in a paper from the Lawrence Berkely Laboratories
On the other hand, it is certainly true (from my experience) that it takes a while for a fluorescent to brighten up, so they're not ideal for lights like the poster's paint closet, or even stair lights.
I missed a point. While the 32V version that esr suggests the malloc code was copied from was released by Caldera in 2002 under a BSD-like license, it was also distributed by AT&T before 1996 without a copyright notice, and therefore entered the public domain. Therefore, under esr's theory, even its pasting into Linux by SGI without attribution is OK.
The malloc code that was briefly in Linux wasn't copied from BSD. SCO claim it was copied from System V, which is possible. esr reckoned it was copied from an earlier Unix, which was released by by Caldera under a BSD-style license. The comment at the top of it (the Linux version) claimed it was copyright SGI, and didn't have any other attribution. If esr is right, then the code was copied by SGI in breach of SCO's BSD-style license. If SCO is right, then the code was copied in breach of SCO's commercial Unix license.
As it's so small, and just a straightforward implementation of an algorithm documented by Knuth in 1968, that possibly SGI could claim that cutting and pasting it into their own code was fair use, even without attribution. I don't know about that.
An interesting comment in an earlier discussion suggests that by accepting contributions without actively checking who really owns them (as opposed to who contributed them), the kernel maintainers could fall into the same legal hole as Napster, even if they are not aware that contributions are not legitimate.
First, it is very clear that if any license was violated by Linux it was an accident. It was not willful and deliberate. In contrast to SCO, which has been willfully and deliberately removing BSD copyright notices from their code right, left, and center.
On the contrary, the way the BSD attribution of the malloc code was removed from Linux is exactly the same as the way the BSD attribution of the BPF code was removed from SCO Unix
In both cases, it was done as Heise describe, by a Unix company, in the malloc case by SGI (apparently), and in the BPF case by SCO.
SGI might get into trouble over it. Linux developers and distributors who accepted the code from SGI in good faith, and removed it as soon as they noticed it was old Unix code (before it was revealed by SCO), would not be any trouble.
If you're talking about Linux's use of the BPF code, be aware that what SCO called "obfuscated copying" was in fact a well-documented clean-room clone done by a Linux developer without access to the BSD-licensed code, just using published documentation. It was not subject to the BSD license at all.
What do SCO think they are doing?
It's not quite as simple as you make out, because Denis Ritchie (who, with Ken Thompson, developed UNIX, as well as developing C with Brian Kernighan), was working for AT&T at the time. AT&T's rights now belong to SCO.
So, the fact that Ritchie wrote something, does not, by itself, mean that SCO doesn't own it. There's all the complicated stuff in between, such as the USL vs BSDI lawsuit and settlement.
The OSI Position paper by esr is your best reference to the history and background to all this.
What does SCO think it's doing?
But SCO couldn't have planned originally to take on all Linux users/distributors, or they wouldn't have been so uproariously incompetent. They must have just suddenly had the idea and run with it
What do SCO think they're doing
I don't believe they ever did plan to roll over Linux. They just got carried away.
Read my journal for my interpretation.
Thanks a lot for pointing that out, I wasn't aware of it and it's really interesting. The earlier treaties use the word "irrevocable", as well as the vague "Ever closer union".
I shouldn't really rise to this troll, but...
There are a good number of different reasons for the EU to exist. In the first place, it was set up, with American support, to lock in wavering european countries to capitalism in the face of the Eastern Bloc. Remember that Italy and France, for instance, had very large and powerful communist parties from the post-war period up until the fall of the USSR. Holding them in a free trade area was intended to prevent them joining the communist bloc.
The second reason was to prevent or control any ambition to territorial ambition by Germany. The Germans were as keen as anyone on this: they did, and to a considerable extent still do, see the EU as safeguarding them from going down the same path as in the 1930s
A third reason, in more recent years, has been to build a new superpower to prevent the world from becoming American dominated. This is a particular obsession of the French. Britain has never been much interested with this - having been a superpower previously, Britain is not particularly keen on being a bit-part player in a new one. If you want to describe Britain's unwillingness to define its whole foreign policy in terms of starting a new cold war against a country that on most things it more or less agrees with as "lack of backbone", so be it.
On the same point, I don't think it makes any more sense to describe the Blair govt's support for the Iraq war as "bowing [to] the US", as it does to describe France's opposition as bowing to Iraq. Both governments made the decision based on what they thought was right and what they thought was in their national interests. In my opinion, both of them were wrong, but that is two other arguments.
It is important to note that many British people are much more distrustful of, and feel much more threatened by, the France-Germany axis than by the USA. I have no inside knowledge of how Danes or Poles feel, but in the case of the eastern European countries, I wouldn't be surprised if they saw the USA as their strong ally against threats from Russia, and France/Germany as weak and unreliable.
Lastly, it's important to distinguish between popular opinion from government policy. UK opinion was never very supportive of the Iraq war, but Tony Blair in my opinion geniunely belived he was bringing rightness and justice to the world (God help us!). On the other hand, I think you would find popular opinion in Germany opposes European monetary union and closer EU integration, but the political establishment has other views.
I had that in mind, but I was under the impression that they could not be sent out of the country (except in the capacity of US Army reserves under federal command). Was I mistaken? If Texas could have chosen to send troops in support of Argentina in 1982, for instance, without US govt approval, then my example was bad.
In some ways, a country like the UK has less independent power than Texas, as the EU regulates particularly economic matters more than the federal US government
In most ways, conversely, the EU member states are more independent than US states (e.g. they each have their own army - UK did not need EU approval to send troops to Iraq)
The interesting point is that there is no limit to the power that will be centralised in the EU, and an assumption that every few years a new round of treaties will centralise power further. The treaties are full of the phrase "Ever Closer Union", and explicitly prevent seccession. (To the best of my knowledge, the equivalent question in the USA was, um, unclear until 1861-65).
Obligatory plug (though my membership lapsed some years ago): UKIP
I looked at the RMX link - my suggestion would indeed require something like RMX to work at all, although what I described goes a lot further (which may not be a good idea: I propose it on the basis "If you really want to do something...", though personally I'm not sure that the benefits really justify the costs).
I was basically arguing at cross purposes though. A lot of people say "SMTP needs to be replaced/changed" when they really mean "The internet mail infrastructure needs to be changed". My argument that the SMTP protocol does not need modification is barely-relevant pedantry if you accept that "SMTP" is being used as shorthand.
SCO have made exactly two legal filings to go with all this PR dross they were boasting about.
First, they filed a suit against IBM (not on copyright grounds).
Second, they amended the suit to remove some of the more blatant lies from it.
That's the lot. None of the many contradictory allegations they've made against other Linux distributors or users have been backed by any legal action whatsoever. They didn't even bother to contest the application to get an injunction against them in Germany to stop them spreading this FUD. The injunction stands (in Germany).
The interview was indeed "barely coherent" in that you can't tell what he meant.
If he meant that the GPL is in conflict with copyright law (as he claimed previously) then he's been smoking what Linus says SCO've been smoking.
If he meant that SCO can't be held to an agreement (the GPL) that they were "tricked" into making by receiving kernel code that, unbeknownst to them, IBM had slipped SCO-owned code into, then (IANAL) he has a point, but one that doesn't cover the fact that SCO is still distributing the kernel (to its customers), or the fact that no genuinely SCO-owned code that wasn't deliberately released under free licenses has yet been revealed.
I believe it is deliberate that what his meaning is unclear, as that allows him the most flexibility for the future.
As far as publicity goes, I would refer everyone to msn's press releases page, which neatly flows from "Linux is great and will kick ass in the enterprise" to "Linux is a rip-off of SCO's 30-year-old code."
There are a lot of worse ideas than this around, but I have objections:
This is the direction the UK is actually considering going in (there were trials in some areas in the last local elections), and it's actually scaring me a lot.