"I was wondering what was taking IBM so long to respond - the wanted enough ammo to give SCO's lawyers heart attacks."
I think that they were waiting for them to make so many outrageous claims (while still presenting no more evidence to back them up than "trust us") so as to put themselves so far out on the limb they can't crawl back before it's sawn through.
"Don't remember the Carter years too well, do you? "Ran out of money" isn't that bad an exaggeration!"
Ran out of gas, ran out of job, ran out of Iran, everything... Those who think times are bad now don't KNOW bad times like the late 70's under Carter...
Speaking of inflation, I wonder how long it will take SCOX to drop back to the penny range? If they lose an injunction and are forced to stop shipping software, it will expose to all that they don't actually HAVE a product.
SCO is no longer a "going business concern". Meaning that they no longer have a product, that they market, that generates revenue, that minus overhead is profit...
The business model of buying dubious IP and then litigating has GOT to be stopped... But then, they took on MS and won... Now MS is helping them take on IBM. Go figure.
"Why, oh why, don't they seek an injunction against SCO contacting organizations and demanding royalties while this is pending? This is a no-brainer. They have alot more than they need!"
IANAL...
Could be because that is exactly what Red Hat has asked a court to do. And theirs will likely get heard a lot sooner. Since RH is a Linux vendor who is a VICTIM of SCO contacting and threatening their customers, they have a clearer path to that kind of action.
Why? RH can show _REAL_ tangible irreparable harm to their business if SCO is allowed to continue to make unsubstantiated claims to their customers. IBM couldn't. Well, they CAN, but not to the same degree.
I have no doubt that IBM will participate, and send their own "friend of the court" brief in support of RH's injunction motion.
My gut feeling is RH will get their injunction. Unless a "Judge Kaplan" (of DeCSS fame) is presiding over the court, as SCO is making claims they REFUSE to provide any evidence of. They should either be made to substantiate their claims, or else, be slapped with an injunction until the trial when they will get the opportunity to prove their claims.
"Considering the fact that IBM popularized the practice of litigating a company till they run out of money to fight... it shouldn't take long for this one to end.
If Microsoft should decide to pile more cash on TSG, it might take a bit longer"
And if they did, THEY could become party to the suits...
If the theroy holds, that every negative thing that causes SCaldera stock to fall prompts an even MORE bizzare release from SCO to get it back up, I wonder what we'll get by this evening?
SCO claiming that because AT&T once owned Unix that everyone with a phone owes them $700 for a license?
As a result of MS's monopoly abuse, IE is now the dominant browser, with nearly 90% of the web.
And IE is arguably the WORST browser produced, with it's ActiveX vulnerabilities, complete lack of popup blocking, poor cookie management, etc.
Only because it's supported by a MONOPOLY, who can "lock people in" by their proprietary media player plugins, FrontPage extensions, etc, not to mention the fact that the whole OS uses it for a desktop shell, can IE beat out Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera...
"Gentoo uses it's very own system called Portage. It downloads the sources and compile them for you, and fix dependencies. It's by far, in my opinion, the best of them all, except that making a full install from stage one and getting a fully-functional work environment will take you a few days."
Interesting... I'll have to try it out on a spare partition and see how that goes.
All my Linux experience is with RPM based distros (Redhat, Mandrake), but I REALLY have wanted to try a Debian based one for the flexibility APT gives you. The only problem is, Debian isn't very cutting edge (not a bad thing, it's just a very conservative distro), and the other Debian based distros are basically commercial...
RPM's and dependencies suck... I don't know how many times I've gone to install a RPM only go get into a "go get this RPM first, then go get THIS one first before you can install THAT RPM..." clusterfuck...
I wish Redhat would do something about this, or switch to APT... It's the only major flaw in their distro.
"SCO would probably make more money if the charged less for their "license". Let's say below $100. At that price people might actually have payed to be on the safe side from SCO lawsuits. At the current prices most companies are probably waiting until they are taken to court or the outcome of the Red Hat counter suit."
Being reasonable is not their goal. Sure, they could charge, say, $50 per CPU for their "license" and probably get tens of thousands of people who'd do it just to avoid the possibility of a suit.
But they don't want to do that. They want to OWN that which they don't own. And charge $1,000 for it.
For a company that is paranoid about losing their "trade secrets" and their intellectual property, they aren't acting like it. Their failure to disclose what is infringing means that the infringement isn't able to be ceased... Their charging of an exorbitant license fee makes it more likely that people will laugh at them, and snarl in defiance, rather than suck it up, and send in $50 to not worry about a lawsuit...
"And Intel is also a partner maybe we should write to HP and Intel and ask them nicely to not attend. Or face getting SCO dirt on their reputations. Or more bluntly boycott HP and Intel if they continue to work with SCO."
I'm not real happy with HP since Queen Carly took absolute power when she overthrew the Hewletts in pushing the Compaq merger through...
They seem to have started adopting a Dell-like suck Intel and Microsoft's cocks strategy.
Privately, I bet Carly wishes Linux would go away so she could get huggy feely with Bill Gates.
Too bad, HP and Compaq BOTH were great companies before the merger.
One thing I like about IBM, is that they are a leader, not a follower. And when they decide to do something, they do it, and stick with it, even if the rest of the industry thinks they are silly.
But hey, isn't that how REAL money is made? And isn't that why Dell, a company completely devoid of innovation, that sells products that are the most conservative, the most cheap possible, will NEVER have revenues approaching the size of a boil on IBM's ass?
"Just get a copy of SuSE Linux and replace the kernel of whatever you are using with the kernel from the SuSE Linux distribution on every computer in the place."
Or use the kernel SCO is still allowing anyone to download with the distro of your choice.
"So in words this thing really is a money grab, because if they are wrong about their copyright ownership, there is no reason to pay, and if they are right, there is no reason to pay. The whole idea of the GPL is to prevent someone from somehow contributing to a GPL'd project and then somehow restricting distribution of the whole project."
Seems to me the GPL was designed to prevent exactly what SCO is attempting.
Clearly, Caldera was aware of what was in the kernel. They contributed to it. They CONTINUED to release Linux distros after acquiring SCO. They even continued to sell a Linux distro AFTER making their claims and suing IBM! And they STILL make the kernel available for download, with GPL license attatched.
SCaldera is basically attempting to TAKE BACK what they contributed, and oh by the way, grab ownership of the 99.9% they don't have any claim to at all...
"I guess the majority of desktop users wouldn't use half the features/technology in dispute. Some even still use kernel 2.2.20. This would also take away much of the string in the SCO attack."
Retreat gives this travesty of legal system abuse LEGITIMACY.
I e-mailed SCO's sales department and told them to fuck off. I run Red Hat Linux on both my laptop and my PC here at home. I use both commercially (I am a network administrator).
MS backing SCO, or trying to buy them, could be construed as using their client monopoly to force a server monopoly. If MS could grab Linux's share of the server OS market, they'd have a number similar to their client OS share...
"If SCO is right, which they are not, but let's just PRETEND they were - it would still be best to find out ASAP, because then you could redeploy with some other OS. You're only opening yourself up to other lawsuits from Linux developers if you continue to use Linux while violating the GPL"
Or revert to 2.2 until 2.4 and 2.6 were fixed. It's not as if 2.2.x isn't good enough for 90% of all Linux users.
Which makes me wonder... SCO keeps claiming (hard to keep track of, because their goal posts move frequently) that the infringing code CANT be taken out. So I suspect they will make claims against 2.2 as well.
Either way, better to force the issue. Better to see SCO's money pot drained by countersuits, and get this case heard somewhere NOT of SCO's choosing.
Either Linux will be exonerated and SCO joins Enron/Woldcomm in the dustbin of corporate abuse turned bust, or Linux becomes an outlaw system.
What is on trial here is the whole open source/free as in freedom software movement. If a scumbag like SCO is allowed to pollute open code, then the law clearly won't protect us.
SCO is going to have a problem getting significant damages even IF there is infringing code.
Why? They have done NOTHING to mitigate the damage. They won't tell ANYONE what is theirs, which means they aren't offering ANY opportunity to remove the infringement.
It's clear that SCO wants the infringement to continue, so they can collect license fees for the 99.9% of the noninfringing code they don't own.
"Even the majority of servers dont use the features in dispute. SCO is even trying to license embedded linux (YOUR LINKSYS ROUTER IS NOW ILLEGAL"
EXCELLENT point... Linksys is owned by... Cisco. Not exactly a tiny company.
What does SCaldera do if Cisco sues their ass? And doesn't this illustrate the impossibility of their claims? SCO can be sued in all 50 states, and every country that has a Linux user, vendor, embedder, etc...
I doubt the whole Canopy Group has enough funds to pay THAT many lawyers...
Slashdot Mirror
"I was wondering what was taking IBM so long to respond - the wanted enough ammo to give SCO's lawyers heart attacks."
I think that they were waiting for them to make so many outrageous claims (while still presenting no more evidence to back them up than "trust us") so as to put themselves so far out on the limb they can't crawl back before it's sawn through.
Barratry
"1. The offense of persistently instigating lawsuits, typically groundless ones."
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=
Looks like what SCO is doing to me!
"'d be willing to bet that this whole charade by SCO is just a shell game to pump and dump stock
a shell game? You can say that again!"
WOW! What an article! So, Canopy shifted another company that it owns to SCO (which it also owns), using SCO's inflated stock to pocket $2 million...
SEC? AHEM!
Seems to me that Canopy is doing things that Enron couldn't have dreamed of.
"Don't remember the Carter years too well, do you? "Ran out of money" isn't that bad an exaggeration!"
Ran out of gas, ran out of job, ran out of Iran, everything... Those who think times are bad now don't KNOW bad times like the late 70's under Carter...
Speaking of inflation, I wonder how long it will take SCOX to drop back to the penny range? If they lose an injunction and are forced to stop shipping software, it will expose to all that they don't actually HAVE a product.
SCO is no longer a "going business concern". Meaning that they no longer have a product, that they market, that generates revenue, that minus overhead is profit...
The business model of buying dubious IP and then litigating has GOT to be stopped... But then, they took on MS and won... Now MS is helping them take on IBM. Go figure.
"Why, oh why, don't they seek an injunction against SCO contacting organizations and demanding royalties while this is pending? This is a no-brainer. They have alot more than they need!"
IANAL...
Could be because that is exactly what Red Hat has asked a court to do. And theirs will likely get heard a lot sooner. Since RH is a Linux vendor who is a VICTIM of SCO contacting and threatening their customers, they have a clearer path to that kind of action.
Why? RH can show _REAL_ tangible irreparable harm to their business if SCO is allowed to continue to make unsubstantiated claims to their customers. IBM couldn't. Well, they CAN, but not to the same degree.
I have no doubt that IBM will participate, and send their own "friend of the court" brief in support of RH's injunction motion.
My gut feeling is RH will get their injunction. Unless a "Judge Kaplan" (of DeCSS fame) is presiding over the court, as SCO is making claims they REFUSE to provide any evidence of. They should either be made to substantiate their claims, or else, be slapped with an injunction until the trial when they will get the opportunity to prove their claims.
"Considering the fact that IBM popularized the practice of litigating a company till they run out of money to fight... it shouldn't take long for this one to end.
If Microsoft should decide to pile more cash on TSG, it might take a bit longer"
And if they did, THEY could become party to the suits...
SCO will invoke the DMCA's provision arguing that DeSCO unencrypts their profit algorhythm. And a Norweigein teenager will be tried for it.
http://investor.news.com/Engine?Account=cnet&PageN ame=QUOTE&Ticker=SCOX
If the theroy holds, that every negative thing that causes SCaldera stock to fall prompts an even MORE bizzare release from SCO to get it back up, I wonder what we'll get by this evening?
SCO claiming that because AT&T once owned Unix that everyone with a phone owes them $700 for a license?
How bad is the installer? I must dual boot with Windows at work... How hard is it to install in that configuration?
"Wrong game. What you really want to give them is the lead pipe. In the library."
Repeated pipe wrench to the head followed by use of the revolver in the study is how I'd do it.
As a result of MS's monopoly abuse, IE is now the dominant browser, with nearly 90% of the web.
And IE is arguably the WORST browser produced, with it's ActiveX vulnerabilities, complete lack of popup blocking, poor cookie management, etc.
Only because it's supported by a MONOPOLY, who can "lock people in" by their proprietary media player plugins, FrontPage extensions, etc, not to mention the fact that the whole OS uses it for a desktop shell, can IE beat out Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera...
"Gentoo uses it's very own system called Portage. It downloads the sources and compile them for you, and fix dependencies. It's by far, in my opinion, the best of them all, except that making a full install from stage one and getting a fully-functional work environment will take you a few days."
Interesting... I'll have to try it out on a spare partition and see how that goes.
All my Linux experience is with RPM based distros (Redhat, Mandrake), but I REALLY have wanted to try a Debian based one for the flexibility APT gives you. The only problem is, Debian isn't very cutting edge (not a bad thing, it's just a very conservative distro), and the other Debian based distros are basically commercial...
RPM's and dependencies suck... I don't know how many times I've gone to install a RPM only go get into a "go get this RPM first, then go get THIS one first before you can install THAT RPM..." clusterfuck...
I wish Redhat would do something about this, or switch to APT... It's the only major flaw in their distro.
Is it Debian based, or RPM based?
Or neither?
"SCO would probably make more money if the charged less for their "license". Let's say below $100. At that price people might actually have payed to be on the safe side from SCO lawsuits. At the current prices most companies are probably waiting until they are taken to court or the outcome of the Red Hat counter suit."
Being reasonable is not their goal. Sure, they could charge, say, $50 per CPU for their "license" and probably get tens of thousands of people who'd do it just to avoid the possibility of a suit.
But they don't want to do that. They want to OWN that which they don't own. And charge $1,000 for it.
For a company that is paranoid about losing their "trade secrets" and their intellectual property, they aren't acting like it. Their failure to disclose what is infringing means that the infringement isn't able to be ceased... Their charging of an exorbitant license fee makes it more likely that people will laugh at them, and snarl in defiance, rather than suck it up, and send in $50 to not worry about a lawsuit...
"P4's are "high speed" computers, and are the equavalent of 14 "regular" computers. You must buy the appropriate number of licenses."
So what would that make my AMD Athlon XP's?
Not to mention (shudder) the Athlon 64 I plan to buy later this year...
"And Intel is also a partner maybe we should write to HP and Intel and ask them nicely to not attend. Or face getting SCO dirt on their reputations. Or more bluntly boycott HP and Intel if they continue to work with SCO."
I'm not real happy with HP since Queen Carly took absolute power when she overthrew the Hewletts in pushing the Compaq merger through...
They seem to have started adopting a Dell-like suck Intel and Microsoft's cocks strategy.
Privately, I bet Carly wishes Linux would go away so she could get huggy feely with Bill Gates.
Too bad, HP and Compaq BOTH were great companies before the merger.
One thing I like about IBM, is that they are a leader, not a follower. And when they decide to do something, they do it, and stick with it, even if the rest of the industry thinks they are silly.
But hey, isn't that how REAL money is made? And isn't that why Dell, a company completely devoid of innovation, that sells products that are the most conservative, the most cheap possible, will NEVER have revenues approaching the size of a boil on IBM's ass?
"Just get a copy of SuSE Linux and replace the kernel of whatever you are using with the kernel from the SuSE Linux distribution on every computer in the place."
Or use the kernel SCO is still allowing anyone to download with the distro of your choice.
"So in words this thing really is a money grab, because if they are wrong about their copyright ownership, there is no reason to pay, and if they are right, there is no reason to pay. The whole idea of the GPL is to prevent someone from somehow contributing to a GPL'd project and then somehow restricting distribution of the whole project."
Seems to me the GPL was designed to prevent exactly what SCO is attempting.
Clearly, Caldera was aware of what was in the kernel. They contributed to it. They CONTINUED to release Linux distros after acquiring SCO. They even continued to sell a Linux distro AFTER making their claims and suing IBM! And they STILL make the kernel available for download, with GPL license attatched.
SCaldera is basically attempting to TAKE BACK what they contributed, and oh by the way, grab ownership of the 99.9% they don't have any claim to at all...
"I guess the majority of desktop users wouldn't use half the features/technology in dispute. Some even still use kernel 2.2.20. This would also take away much of the string in the SCO attack."
Retreat gives this travesty of legal system abuse LEGITIMACY.
I e-mailed SCO's sales department and told them to fuck off. I run Red Hat Linux on both my laptop and my PC here at home. I use both commercially (I am a network administrator).
"CO Sales and product enquiries
;)
1-800-726-8649
How many phone calls will it take to empty SCO's coffers?"
How soon do they change that to a 1-900 number?
MS backing SCO, or trying to buy them, could be construed as using their client monopoly to force a server monopoly. If MS could grab Linux's share of the server OS market, they'd have a number similar to their client OS share...
"If SCO is right, which they are not, but let's just PRETEND they were - it would still be best to find out ASAP, because then you could redeploy with some other OS. You're only opening yourself up to other lawsuits from Linux developers if you continue to use Linux while violating the GPL"
Or revert to 2.2 until 2.4 and 2.6 were fixed. It's not as if 2.2.x isn't good enough for 90% of all Linux users.
Which makes me wonder... SCO keeps claiming (hard to keep track of, because their goal posts move frequently) that the infringing code CANT be taken out. So I suspect they will make claims against 2.2 as well.
Either way, better to force the issue. Better to see SCO's money pot drained by countersuits, and get this case heard somewhere NOT of SCO's choosing.
Either Linux will be exonerated and SCO joins Enron/Woldcomm in the dustbin of corporate abuse turned bust, or Linux becomes an outlaw system.
What is on trial here is the whole open source/free as in freedom software movement. If a scumbag like SCO is allowed to pollute open code, then the law clearly won't protect us.
SCO is going to have a problem getting significant damages even IF there is infringing code.
Why? They have done NOTHING to mitigate the damage. They won't tell ANYONE what is theirs, which means they aren't offering ANY opportunity to remove the infringement.
It's clear that SCO wants the infringement to continue, so they can collect license fees for the 99.9% of the noninfringing code they don't own.
Sent ;)
I sent the worst flame I could come up with.
"Even the majority of servers dont use the features in dispute. SCO is even trying to license embedded linux (YOUR LINKSYS ROUTER IS NOW ILLEGAL"
EXCELLENT point... Linksys is owned by... Cisco. Not exactly a tiny company.
What does SCaldera do if Cisco sues their ass? And doesn't this illustrate the impossibility of their claims? SCO can be sued in all 50 states, and every country that has a Linux user, vendor, embedder, etc...
I doubt the whole Canopy Group has enough funds to pay THAT many lawyers...