Re:Question about their threat to sue Linus Torval
on
SCO vs Linux.. Continued
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is always an issue with technical manuals and datasheets... how many ways ARE there to describe the way a parallel port works or how the PCI signalling protocol works. And when two parties are writing about something that complies with a published specification it gets even more similar.
When you get down to OS-level stuff, the code will HAVE to be identical in spots. Your degrees of freedom in word choice are constrained by the need to use certain commands, and the need to optimize the code.
You avoid blatant plagiarism, by creating your own artwork and writing your own examples, comments, and non-technical materials, but that's as far as it can go.
And it is acknowledged in copyright law that there will be overlapping content and strong similarities in non-fiction material.
The one copyright infringement case I was involved in did not use the switch setting tables, nor their identical alphabetical arrangement by software name, as proof of infringement. Out of any 10 technical writers creating that section, all would have arranged things alphabetically, and there was only one way to set the switches. Where we got them was where they copied the examples and troubleshooting section...:) including my Canadian spellings.
Only if you define currency as that printed as legal tender by governments.
It pays with status in the OSS community, it pays in ego-points, it pays in skills improvement, or it pays by relieving cases of the well-known "programmer's itch".
They may have hundreds. I've never asked. HP paid driver writers, then released the drivers as OSS. Intel programmers are working on OSS projects, as are AMEX programmers. They gain financually by haviog a code base to start from, instead of having to write from scratch every time they start a project.
"OSS does not pay, by it very definition."
It's free as in "libre" not free as in "gratis". And the rate of pay for customizing OSS for a business is comparable to the rate of pay for writing proprietary code.
"Just because a few people are so lucky to be on somone's payroll to develop OSS does not mean that writing OSS pays."
A few? IBM has dozens of them, as do several other corporations I am not at liberty to identify. Then add in all those employed to MODIFY some OSS for internal corporate use... that's where the bulk of programming jobs are. One company I worked for had a team of programmers who customised OSS to bettter fit the company needs.
"For the most part it is working pro bono." Go read the children's book called "Stone Soup". that's the OSS paradigm. Many OSS contributions consist of a single bug fix or a small patch. For a skilled programmer it's a few minutes to hours of work.
"I seriously doubt in a country where many are trying to break free of poverty that they will work for next to nothing on OSS."
Next to nothing? Have you checked what a good Linux admin or Compiere customizer makes? Support and customization is profitable. It won't ever buy you a mega-huge house and a private jet, but you won't starve.
Some of the OSS developers are collecting FULL salary from some large corporations to work on OSS. Many OSS contributors hand over a bug fix or a small code patch that took them a few hours of their spare time and amused them while they coded. None of them are working for "next to nothing" all the time. The distributed development minimizes the cost to any one individual or corporation.
If Indian businesses had inexpensive OSS software, they could become more efficient and profitable. And the money they paid for local support and customization would stay in the local economy and be recycled. The only "losers" in this would be those companies who want to have ALL of a small pie instead of modest portions of a very large pie.
It's SOP for a company that has purchased a patent to send the USPTO the proper notifications. For one, it makes it easy for people who want to license your technology to find you.
"very active with major investors, partners and executives of each board's respective company."
ROFLMAO! The publically available message boards (Yahoo, Raging Bull, etc.) are the realm of daytraders trying to make the price jump a skosh so they can make a buck. It's more like a singles bar named Rumor Central in Pump & Dump City.
Wednesday last week, after the "momentous" announcement by Microsoft about licensing that boosted their stock to a whopping $6.90, SCO does the big PR thing, claims they own UNIX, invites the world to their conference call... stock jumps a couple of points Thursday to around $9 (max $9.22 for the last year) and hovers.
Today Novell says "All your UNIX are belong to us" and the stock price collapses back to where it was before the self-serving PR puff piece, and even below where the Microsoft announcement boosted it to. Closed at $6.60, although it was as low as $5.85.
Here's hoping you sold a couple thousand shares short at $9 and covered your shorts at $6.50
I've been involved in a couple of patent and copyright negotiations as well as infringement cases. Normally when the intent is to truly SELL, it is absolutely emphatic about it, down to listing patent numbers and copyright dates, expiration dates for everything, and entering change of ownership in any applicable registries.
"Novell exclusively licensed Unix to company X which in turn exclusively licensed Unix to SCO Group."
It's not clear that the licensing was exclusive. But the right to alter the code and sell licenses for using it WAS sold by someone to what is now SCO.
SCO's legal filing is a breach of contract suit. But in it they claim ownership of UNIX... they do not specify (AFAIR) that they only have rights to license it not absolute owenership. But in their letters to Linux users it was all about IP infringement and their ownership of UNIX.
The chain of ownership is apparently this: "AT&T sold the rights to the operating system to Novell, which later sold them to the Santa Cruz Operation. That company renamed itself Tarantella at the same time that it sold the Unix intellectual property to Linux seller Caldera International, which in turn changed its name to SCO Group."
Maybe the rights that Novell sold to the old SCO are NOT the same as the rights that Tarantella sold to Caldera which is now the new SCO Group. Maybe someone misrepresented what Caldera was getting for their money.
They have to get a better editor! SCO states this: "SCO owns the contract rights to the UNIX® operating system." By implication and English rules of grammar and usage, the use of "the" is exclusionary and there is only one set of contract rights and only one UNIX® operating system.
We already know that there are/were multiple UNIX systems. But only one set of rights? Without being able to see the full agreement between Novell and SCO, I admit that this may be true. But Novell was never a stupid company, and they would be extremely unlikely to sell rights to another company in a manner that prevented them from reselling those rights elsewhere later.
"So maybe I just misundersand how SCO can sell licenses to something that Novell owns the copyrights to."
As a copyright/patent OWNER, Novell legally could sell another company or companies the right (exclusive or non-exclusive) to reproduce and resell their IP, alter it, and even license it further down the line (taking on the support and maintenance obligations for anyone they sold it to, of course). Apparently they sold such rights to SCO, but retained their position as the owners of the copyright.
We've all seen the spams about making money buying rights to reprint and sell "informative" brochures. That is a right that the original copyright holder or patent holder can grant if they wish.
But the possibility that SCO was so brain-damaged by greed or desperation that they thought they could assert ownership over something they only licensed "reprint rights" for has me flabbergasted.
And how could a high-quality film or digital copy of the Matrix Reloaded become available? The studio is the likely source.
The DVDs are in production now, getting all the "extra" content together, subtitling and dubbing, coding digital copies for the scene selection jumps, etc. It's a lot of work to get them ready to send to the pressing plant.
The film has to be converted to DVD file format first, because everything else depends on it, and multiple people will be using various copies of this file as they do their bit. All it takes is one low-paid studio gofer in a state of disgruntlement to slide a disk into his/her pocket and walk out the door. Burn a copy and upload it to somewhere and they have their revenge against the PHBs at the studio.
"The judgment won't be for $1.00, most likely it will be for the maximum amount that the jurisdiction can allow"
And which courts have jurisdiction over libel and intellectual property suits? It's NOT small claims court, which is more properly called "small PROPERTY claims court". If you file in the wrong court, you have just pissed off the judge and get the suit thrown out for "lack of jurisdiction" and lost the filing fees.
Cranking out thousands of "request to transfer to higher court and/or consolidate cases" is a relatively easy matter for a lawyer's clerk with a word processor, and if a judge sees dozens of individual cases against a single corporation for the same reason, they usually grant it unless EACH defendant can prove they will be damaged by the consolidation.
Several flaws in this idea, the largest of which is that "small claims court" does not have jurisdiction over libel and tortuous interference with a business cases.
You would have to file in the state or federal court that had jurisdiction over this, and be able to prove that you had "standing"... be actually affected by SCOs actions, not just be an affronted contributor to the latest widget on OSS. And have large enough potential damages ($75,000 for federal court) to beallowed to bring suit. And you do not want to claim standing/damages you don't have with state and federal courts. They can throw out the suit, and declare perjury, and it gets very nasty if it's a frivolous suit.
You apparently don't understand how ISO certification works. What is required to get ISO certified (outside of a product production area) is pretty much what the applicable laws require for that activity plus whatever the company decides will be required. I've been through getting "ISO ready" several times for different companies, and here's the way it works:
1. You create corporate and departmental policies that govern the work processes and procedures, define records to be kept, etc. There will be security policies, hiring and firing policies, vacation policies, etc., in addition to the more widely known manufacturing production and quality policies. You also include what to do if policy is not followed, and when the poplicy can be overruled and by whom and how they can do it.
2. You document your processes and procedures according to the abovementioned policies, in sufficient detaiil that they CAN be followed and produce an adequate "end product".
3. You follow the documented processes and procedures as you work.
4. You keep enough records, in whatever manner the policy states (according to the documented processes and procedures for record keeping as set forth in the companby policy for such) to prove to the ISO examiners that you are indeed following the documented processes and procedures for the work flows.
If the company management POLICY stated that "all employees must sign an NDA and NCA"... then the HR department has to have company-approved forms, a hiring procedure to make sure they sign, and a way to keep track of who has signed and who has not. ISO itself does not require any NDA/NCA but they DO require that you follow the written policy of the company. If the company has the policy and does not enforce it, they get dinged by the ISO examiner for not following stated policy.
The more practical thing when writing policies is to make sure there is a way to override all but the legally mandated policies. In the case of NCAs, having an "offered and refused" checkmark on the form, or a manager override "not required for this position" is adequate. Given a high-ranking management signature, there should be very few policies that can't be over-ruled (provided, of course you have a clearly stated list of who can do this and a way to track it when it happens).
They in effect did... They got the case moved to a federal court, out of the Utah court where SCO had orignally filed it. That deprived them of "home court" advantage and upped the stakes considerably.
ISO certification for a company HR department would require that they have complete records on all the employees, complete meaning that they have all records the corporate standards deem "essential"... and perhaps the PHBs decided that NCAs were essential bits of paperwork.
"his spouse couldn't work for a competitor either. So essentially, they limit who I can work for as well"
Legally, unless you have poersonally signed a binding contract with them, they can NOT restrict anything you do. Your husband does not have the right to sign contracts in your name. And a contract signed under DURESS (sign or get fired) is not enforceable anyway.
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When you get down to OS-level stuff, the code will HAVE to be identical in spots. Your degrees of freedom in word choice are constrained by the need to use certain commands, and the need to optimize the code.
You avoid blatant plagiarism, by creating your own artwork and writing your own examples, comments, and non-technical materials, but that's as far as it can go.
And it is acknowledged in copyright law that there will be overlapping content and strong similarities in non-fiction material.
The one copyright infringement case I was involved in did not use the switch setting tables, nor their identical alphabetical arrangement by software name, as proof of infringement. Out of any 10 technical writers creating that section, all would have arranged things alphabetically, and there was only one way to set the switches. Where we got them was where they copied the examples and troubleshooting section ... :) including my Canadian spellings.
Only if you define currency as that printed as legal tender by governments.
It pays with status in the OSS community, it pays in ego-points, it pays in skills improvement, or it pays by relieving cases of the well-known "programmer's itch".
"OSS does not pay, by it very definition." It's free as in "libre" not free as in "gratis". And the rate of pay for customizing OSS for a business is comparable to the rate of pay for writing proprietary code.
A few? IBM has dozens of them, as do several other corporations I am not at liberty to identify. Then add in all those employed to MODIFY some OSS for internal corporate use ... that's where the bulk of programming jobs are. One company I worked for had a team of programmers who customised OSS to bettter fit the company needs.
"For the most part it is working pro bono." Go read the children's book called "Stone Soup". that's the OSS paradigm. Many OSS contributions consist of a single bug fix or a small patch. For a skilled programmer it's a few minutes to hours of work.
Next to nothing? Have you checked what a good Linux admin or Compiere customizer makes? Support and customization is profitable. It won't ever buy you a mega-huge house and a private jet, but you won't starve.
Some of the OSS developers are collecting FULL salary from some large corporations to work on OSS. Many OSS contributors hand over a bug fix or a small code patch that took them a few hours of their spare time and amused them while they coded. None of them are working for "next to nothing" all the time. The distributed development minimizes the cost to any one individual or corporation.
If Indian businesses had inexpensive OSS software, they could become more efficient and profitable. And the money they paid for local support and customization would stay in the local economy and be recycled. The only "losers" in this would be those companies who want to have ALL of a small pie instead of modest portions of a very large pie.
It's SOP for a company that has purchased a patent to send the USPTO the proper notifications. For one, it makes it easy for people who want to license your technology to find you.
Bruce - Good point. One does not pass along 95% of licensing fees if one is the owner of the IP being licensed.
ROFLMAO! The publically available message boards (Yahoo, Raging Bull, etc.) are the realm of daytraders trying to make the price jump a skosh so they can make a buck. It's more like a singles bar named Rumor Central in Pump & Dump City.
Wednesday last week, after the "momentous" announcement by Microsoft about licensing that boosted their stock to a whopping $6.90, SCO does the big PR thing, claims they own UNIX, invites the world to their conference call ... stock jumps a couple of points Thursday to around $9 (max $9.22 for the last year) and hovers.
Today Novell says "All your UNIX are belong to us" and the stock price collapses back to where it was before the self-serving PR puff piece, and even below where the Microsoft announcement boosted it to. Closed at $6.60, although it was as low as $5.85.
Here's hoping you sold a couple thousand shares short at $9 and covered your shorts at $6.50
I've been involved in a couple of patent and copyright negotiations as well as infringement cases. Normally when the intent is to truly SELL, it is absolutely emphatic about it, down to listing patent numbers and copyright dates, expiration dates for everything, and entering change of ownership in any applicable registries.
Unfortunately not. SCO does have the right to sublicense whatever UNIX they bought from Novell and any improvements they mnade.
It's not clear that the licensing was exclusive. But the right to alter the code and sell licenses for using it WAS sold by someone to what is now SCO.
and that's a BIG difference.
The chain of ownership is apparently this: "AT&T sold the rights to the operating system to Novell, which later sold them to the Santa Cruz Operation. That company renamed itself Tarantella at the same time that it sold the Unix intellectual property to Linux seller Caldera International, which in turn changed its name to SCO Group." Maybe the rights that Novell sold to the old SCO are NOT the same as the rights that Tarantella sold to Caldera which is now the new SCO Group. Maybe someone misrepresented what Caldera was getting for their money.
We already know that there are/were multiple UNIX systems. But only one set of rights? Without being able to see the full agreement between Novell and SCO, I admit that this may be true. But Novell was never a stupid company, and they would be extremely unlikely to sell rights to another company in a manner that prevented them from reselling those rights elsewhere later.
As a copyright/patent OWNER, Novell legally could sell another company or companies the right (exclusive or non-exclusive) to reproduce and resell their IP, alter it, and even license it further down the line (taking on the support and maintenance obligations for anyone they sold it to, of course). Apparently they sold such rights to SCO, but retained their position as the owners of the copyright.
But the possibility that SCO was so brain-damaged by greed or desperation that they thought they could assert ownership over something they only licensed "reprint rights" for has me flabbergasted.
If XP is allowed to go find its master and patch itself, any problem with a patch will spread widely to the people least able to deal with it.
At least this patch made it perfectly obvious that it had a bug.
The DVDs are in production now, getting all the "extra" content together, subtitling and dubbing, coding digital copies for the scene selection jumps, etc. It's a lot of work to get them ready to send to the pressing plant.
The film has to be converted to DVD file format first, because everything else depends on it, and multiple people will be using various copies of this file as they do their bit. All it takes is one low-paid studio gofer in a state of disgruntlement to slide a disk into his/her pocket and walk out the door. Burn a copy and upload it to somewhere and they have their revenge against the PHBs at the studio.
And which courts have jurisdiction over libel and intellectual property suits? It's NOT small claims court, which is more properly called "small PROPERTY claims court". If you file in the wrong court, you have just pissed off the judge and get the suit thrown out for "lack of jurisdiction" and lost the filing fees.
Cranking out thousands of "request to transfer to higher court and/or consolidate cases" is a relatively easy matter for a lawyer's clerk with a word processor, and if a judge sees dozens of individual cases against a single corporation for the same reason, they usually grant it unless EACH defendant can prove they will be damaged by the consolidation.
You would have to file in the state or federal court that had jurisdiction over this, and be able to prove that you had "standing" ... be actually affected by SCOs actions, not just be an affronted contributor to the latest widget on OSS. And have large enough potential damages ($75,000 for federal court) to beallowed to bring suit. And you do not want to claim standing/damages you don't have with state and federal courts. They can throw out the suit, and declare perjury, and it gets very nasty if it's a frivolous suit.
1. You create corporate and departmental policies that govern the work processes and procedures, define records to be kept, etc. There will be security policies, hiring and firing policies, vacation policies, etc., in addition to the more widely known manufacturing production and quality policies. You also include what to do if policy is not followed, and when the poplicy can be overruled and by whom and how they can do it.
2. You document your processes and procedures according to the abovementioned policies, in sufficient detaiil that they CAN be followed and produce an adequate "end product".
3. You follow the documented processes and procedures as you work.
4. You keep enough records, in whatever manner the policy states (according to the documented processes and procedures for record keeping as set forth in the companby policy for such) to prove to the ISO examiners that you are indeed following the documented processes and procedures for the work flows.
If the company management POLICY stated that "all employees must sign an NDA and NCA" ... then the HR department has to have company-approved forms, a hiring procedure to make sure they sign, and a way to keep track of who has signed and who has not. ISO itself does not require any NDA/NCA but they DO require that you follow the written policy of the company. If the company has the policy and does not enforce it, they get dinged by the ISO examiner for not following stated policy.
The more practical thing when writing policies is to make sure there is a way to override all but the legally mandated policies. In the case of NCAs, having an "offered and refused" checkmark on the form, or a manager override "not required for this position" is adequate. Given a high-ranking management signature, there should be very few policies that can't be over-ruled (provided, of course you have a clearly stated list of who can do this and a way to track it when it happens).
They in effect did ... They got the case moved to a federal court, out of the Utah court where SCO had orignally filed it. That deprived them of "home court" advantage and upped the stakes considerably.
ISO certification for a company HR department would require that they have complete records on all the employees, complete meaning that they have all records the corporate standards deem "essential" ... and perhaps the PHBs decided that NCAs were essential bits of paperwork.
Legally, unless you have poersonally signed a binding contract with them, they can NOT restrict anything you do. Your husband does not have the right to sign contracts in your name. And a contract signed under DURESS (sign or get fired) is not enforceable anyway.