Yes, Cringely wrote about in his column on the PBS site. Basically, he argued that Paul McKenney's upstream rights to the RCU and NUMA ideas would preempt SCO's claims.
There was a lot of technology in SCO's amended complaint based on IBM work, such as JFS, 32 and 64 bit PPC ports, etc, yet none of it was mentioned in yesterday's phone conference except RCU, NUMA, and SMP.
It became apparent in yesterday's new that SCO was going after the Sequent SMP code that IBM donated to Linux.
Why the Sequent code? I'm guessing that Boies finally realized that the IBM sideletter gave IBM all rights to its own derivative work, which would burst most of SCO's claims. But the Sequent code would not have been protected from ATT's derivative works clause since Sequent didn't appear to have a side agreement like IBM's.
Of course, if Caldera/SCO had a programmer actually working on the code, as this article suggests, then Caldera/SCO is an equal partner in donating and modifying the SMP code for Linux.
Forget about whether they donated the code through "inadvertently" GPL'ing it. This proves they donated the SMP code knowingly, and even helped modify it for use with Linux. That's a much stronger case than relying on any of GPL's so-called viral qualities.
Seem to bear out what I posted above. They didn't make any reference to JFS, or porting Linux to PPC and Power chips, or any IBM derived and/modified works. They seem to be going after the works that apply to SMP and were purchased with Sequent.
This is the way Boies works: He throws everything at you in a complaint, makes his complaint more specific based on what you give him in response. Narrows it down closer, and closer, until he's got a legal document shaped by natural selection.
He finally figured out that he will have to go after IBM on copyright at this point, and that it's best to go after everyone on copyright once he files those amendments to the IBM case.
Problem with this is that SCO doesn't appear to own *any* Unix System V patents. Nor does it own any Unix (or for that matter Unixware) trademarks.
All it does have it copyright on the Unix System V Release 4.1 source code.
If there were no patents at all, then SCO might have some basis for a "look and feel" complaint based on their copyrights. But since there are patents, and these patents are owned by other coporations, SCO's "dimension of copyrightability" would seem to cover the source code only.
Unfortuantely, that will need to be decided by a judge, probably on the basis and interpretation of precedent rather than on the letter of the contracts and law. I am not a lawyer, could someone who is correct me?
IBM has filed an amended complaint to SCO's amendment of June 16, 2003. However, SCO hasn't put it up on their web site.
Nor has IBM amended complaint been put up anywhere else on the web.
So IBM is responding, we just don't know yet what their response is.
Also, the latest claims by SCO are not included in their last complaint. So, I'm guessing that means they will file yet another amended complaint and IBM will have to respond to that.
I wouldn't expect IBM to respond to McBride & Cos. assertions until they are written up and filed in court.
Most of the arguments here against SCO have been about how it violates the GPL, or otherwise come from an Open Source point of view. I thought it might be a good idea to look at the contracts and court filings themselves, ignoring the other issues, just to see if SCO has *any* contractual claims that can be held.
My conclusion is that the only claims they have any right to make are in regard to copyright, and that given Unix's tangled development history as well as its historical and continuing use in educational settings, they would have a very difficult time proving that as well.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Everything that follow is my own opinion. And it is my biased opinion that SCO is full of shit. However, when this first started, I was willing to give SCO the benefit of the doubt, and my opinion has been mosttly influenced by my reading of the complaints and contracts SCO itself has posted on its web site at http://www.sco.com/ibmlawsuit.
Argument:
A) I've assumed ever since Novell backed down from its copyright claims that SCO does own the copyrights. However, it's kind of immaterial, unless (and until, I'm guessing) SCO amends its complaint to include copyright infringement. SCO's other claims regarding trade secrets and "Unix methods and concepts" don't seem to have any contractual basis.
B) Novell claims to own the SYS V patents and SCO has not disputed that claim. Therefore, I assume Novell owns the patents.
C) The trademarks for Unix, and its specification, are owned by The Open Group. (I wonder if there is any legal way The Open Group could terminate SCO's rights to the trademarks for Unix and Unixware? Now *that* would really kill SCO's stock price.)
D) ATT sold IBM a license for a "SOFTWARE PRODUCT" consisting entirely of source code and Sys V documentation. There are no clauses in any of the contracts cited in SCO's complaint regarding "UNIX methods and concepts". SCO's claim to own the rights to "Unix methods and concepts" therefore doesn't hold water contractually, at least as applied to IBM.
E) ATT had very unusual contracts for SYS V, in that it required the licensee to grant ATT ownership of all derived work. However, and this is extremely important, IBM's side agreement with ATT, XFER-00015B, explicitly states that IBM owns all derivative work produced "by or for it" from the "SOFTWARE PRODUCTS", except for the portions of SOFTWARE PRODUCTS included in the derivative works. I. E., you can modify the work and own it, but don't claim to own anything we copyrighted.
ATT also specifically references section 2.01 of the license SOFT-00015, the clause that grants it right to derivative work, therby stating that section 2 of XFER-00015B overrides it.
F) SCO's assertion (in paragraph 105 of the amended complaint) that it owns the derivative work of IBM is therefore in bad faith. This is, in particular, really egregious, and I expect they will at least get a reprimand from the court for this part of the complaint. The case may even be thrown out on this basis since most of SCO's complaints crumble without this assertion, though maybe I'm just being hopeful.
I'm not sure why IBM hasn't brought this up in its responses yet. I think they're probably waiting to do so until the case is presented in a "proper venue" rather than in a Utah state or Utah federal court.
G) SCO's trade secret claims are also pretty bogus since the code is likely on the internet and has been used in educational settings for the past 20-35 years. See the judgement denying ATT's temporary injunction request against BSD for further elucidation (sorry, I don't have the URL handy but I know it's somewhere here on Slashdot).
H) Okay, here is a little bit of bad news: SCO's claims to own RCU and NUMA *may* have some *contractual* basis. Sequent signed contracts with ATT similiar to IBM's, however, Sequent didn't have any side agreement giving them ownership of their derivative works. As n
A) Win XP Home is a crippled piece of shit that no one should be running anyway. Pick up a copy of XP Pro (minimum) somewhere, install CD. Borrow it from work, borrow it from a friend, get a friend to make you an ISO copy of his/her disk, pirate it from the web if'n you got no better options.
B) Make sure you have all the drivers you need. Video, Sound, Monitor, Motherboard, NIC, USB Hub, DVD code/player. XP will find and install most of these for you, but you want disks for anything that it won't find or where you have drivers that are newer and better than the supplied WHQL drivers.
C) Format Drives: Create an NTFS C: partition of 8-16 GB, and a VFAT D: Partition of 32 GB. Keep all your installation programs, data, mp3's etc, on the D: drive where you can access them with ease from Windows or Linux. This way if you need to blow away your Windows boot partition you've got all the tools to rebuild from D:
D) Install system. Look ma! No AOL icon, No MS (Doesn') Works, No pre-installed MusicMatch (which also sucks). In other words: none of that annoying garbage with which system vendors load up their PC's.
E) Now change the theme to Windows Classic or Windows XP (modified). Move the start bar to top for that "Apple" feel. The start menu makes a lot more graphical sense this way. Make the background "None" and set up the backgroud as Black or Some Other Dark color, so you don't burn out your eyes as quickly and waste resources with Internet support screen backgrounds. Kill all the menu transition effects and all the shadow effects, unless you goal is have a slower interface.
D) You have a minimal Win XP Pro setup! Install the programs *you* want. But run the annoying little auto-updater -- you *want* to know about bug patches asap.
This is the best way to get performance out of WinXP. And don't run a lot of stupid bloaty shit like Bonzai Buddy, or the Weather Tray Bar, or msmsgs.exe, etc.
You shouldn't be running system configurations as the vendor ships them. That's a crock. They're always buggy, because they load too much crap.
Divide up the rest of you Hard Drive into Partitions for Linux, you should probably have room enough for several variants if'n you want
Point. Touche.
I thought they had removed that from their sites. Continued distribution after actually
filing the suit is definitely problematic for them.
Since SCO removed it's Linux distro *before* the suit was filed on June 16, I doubt that its continued presence after the initial termination *warning* will be a factor.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Cringely wrote about in his column on the PBS site. Basically, he argued that Paul McKenney's upstream rights to the RCU and NUMA ideas would preempt SCO's claims.
I disagree that it was apparent a month ago.
There was a lot of technology in SCO's amended complaint based on IBM work, such as JFS, 32 and 64 bit PPC ports, etc, yet none of it was mentioned in yesterday's phone conference except RCU, NUMA, and SMP.
Plus, it's not like you could remove the lines preventing compilation.
I mean, you'd need the source to do that, right?
Well, yeah, Boies is (or was) pretty hotshot.
For instance, he pretty much won the case against MS, but the judge screwed it up over supposedly biased comments to the press.
And the case was won in Florida, but lost in the Supreme Court to a, well, biased court that couldn't be held accountable.
But the SCO case? Yeah, he's definitely leaning towards loserhood now.
Oh, this is wonderful.
It became apparent in yesterday's new that SCO was going after the Sequent SMP code that IBM donated to Linux.
Why the Sequent code? I'm guessing that Boies finally realized that the IBM sideletter gave IBM all rights to its own derivative work, which would burst most of SCO's claims. But the Sequent code would not have been protected from ATT's derivative works clause since Sequent didn't appear to have a side agreement like IBM's.
Of course, if Caldera/SCO had a programmer actually working on the code, as this article suggests, then Caldera/SCO is an equal partner in donating and modifying the SMP code for Linux.
Forget about whether they donated the code through "inadvertently" GPL'ing it. This proves they donated the SMP code knowingly, and even helped modify it for use with Linux. That's a much stronger case than relying on any of GPL's so-called viral qualities.
Seem to bear out what I posted above. They didn't make any reference to JFS, or porting Linux to PPC and Power chips, or any IBM derived and/modified works. They seem to be going after the works that apply to SMP and were purchased with Sequent. This is the way Boies works: He throws everything at you in a complaint, makes his complaint more specific based on what you give him in response. Narrows it down closer, and closer, until he's got a legal document shaped by natural selection. He finally figured out that he will have to go after IBM on copyright at this point, and that it's best to go after everyone on copyright once he files those amendments to the IBM case.
Problem with this is that SCO doesn't appear to own *any* Unix System V patents. Nor does it own any Unix (or for that matter Unixware) trademarks. All it does have it copyright on the Unix System V Release 4.1 source code. If there were no patents at all, then SCO might have some basis for a "look and feel" complaint based on their copyrights. But since there are patents, and these patents are owned by other coporations, SCO's "dimension of copyrightability" would seem to cover the source code only. Unfortuantely, that will need to be decided by a judge, probably on the basis and interpretation of precedent rather than on the letter of the contracts and law. I am not a lawyer, could someone who is correct me?
Interestingly, the Canopy Group also owns a Linux company, Linux Networx .
IBM has filed an amended complaint to SCO's amendment of June 16, 2003. However, SCO hasn't put it up on their web site. Nor has IBM amended complaint been put up anywhere else on the web. So IBM is responding, we just don't know yet what their response is. Also, the latest claims by SCO are not included in their last complaint. So, I'm guessing that means they will file yet another amended complaint and IBM will have to respond to that. I wouldn't expect IBM to respond to McBride & Cos. assertions until they are written up and filed in court.
Introduction:
This is a bit long.
Most of the arguments here against SCO have been about how it violates the GPL, or otherwise come from an Open Source point of view. I thought it might be a good idea to look at the contracts and court filings themselves, ignoring the other issues, just to see if SCO has *any* contractual claims that can be held.
My conclusion is that the only claims they have any right to make are in regard to copyright, and that given Unix's tangled development history as well as its historical and continuing use in educational settings, they would have a very difficult time proving that as well.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Everything that follow is my own opinion. And it is my biased opinion that SCO is full of shit. However, when this first started, I was willing to give SCO the benefit of the doubt, and my opinion has been mosttly influenced by my reading of the complaints and contracts SCO itself has posted on its web site at http://www.sco.com/ibmlawsuit.
Argument:
A) I've assumed ever since Novell backed down from its copyright claims that SCO does own the copyrights. However, it's kind of immaterial, unless (and until, I'm guessing) SCO amends its complaint to include copyright infringement. SCO's other claims regarding trade secrets and "Unix methods and concepts" don't seem to have any contractual basis.
B) Novell claims to own the SYS V patents and SCO has not disputed that claim. Therefore, I assume Novell owns the patents.
C) The trademarks for Unix, and its specification, are owned by The Open Group. (I wonder if there is any legal way The Open Group could terminate SCO's rights to the trademarks for Unix and Unixware? Now *that* would really kill SCO's stock price.)
D) ATT sold IBM a license for a "SOFTWARE PRODUCT" consisting entirely of source code and Sys V documentation. There are no clauses in any of the contracts cited in SCO's complaint regarding "UNIX methods and concepts". SCO's claim to own the rights to "Unix methods and concepts" therefore doesn't hold water contractually, at least as applied to IBM.
E) ATT had very unusual contracts for SYS V, in that it required the licensee to grant ATT ownership of all derived work. However, and this is extremely important, IBM's side agreement with ATT, XFER-00015B, explicitly states that IBM owns all derivative work produced "by or for it" from the "SOFTWARE PRODUCTS", except for the portions of SOFTWARE PRODUCTS included in the derivative works. I. E., you can modify the work and own it, but don't claim to own anything we copyrighted.
ATT also specifically references section 2.01 of the license SOFT-00015, the clause that grants it right to derivative work, therby stating that section 2 of XFER-00015B overrides it.
F) SCO's assertion (in paragraph 105 of the amended complaint) that it owns the derivative work of IBM is therefore in bad faith. This is, in particular, really egregious, and I expect they will at least get a reprimand from the court for this part of the complaint. The case may even be thrown out on this basis since most of SCO's complaints crumble without this assertion, though maybe I'm just being hopeful.
I'm not sure why IBM hasn't brought this up in its responses yet. I think they're probably waiting to do so until the case is presented in a "proper venue" rather than in a Utah state or Utah federal court.
G) SCO's trade secret claims are also pretty bogus since the code is likely on the internet and has been used in educational settings for the past 20-35 years. See the judgement denying ATT's temporary injunction request against BSD for further elucidation (sorry, I don't have the URL handy but I know it's somewhere here on Slashdot).
H) Okay, here is a little bit of bad news: SCO's claims to own RCU and NUMA *may* have some *contractual* basis. Sequent signed contracts with ATT similiar to IBM's, however, Sequent didn't have any side agreement giving them ownership of their derivative works. As n
A) Win XP Home is a crippled piece of shit that no one should be running anyway. Pick up a copy of XP Pro (minimum) somewhere, install CD. Borrow it from work, borrow it from a friend, get a friend to make you an ISO copy of his/her disk, pirate it from the web if'n you got no better options.
B) Make sure you have all the drivers you need. Video, Sound, Monitor, Motherboard, NIC, USB Hub, DVD code/player. XP will find and install most of these for you, but you want disks for anything that it won't find or where you have drivers that are newer and better than the supplied WHQL drivers.
C) Format Drives: Create an NTFS C: partition of 8-16 GB, and a VFAT D: Partition of 32 GB. Keep all your installation programs, data, mp3's etc, on the D: drive where you can access them with ease from Windows or Linux. This way if you need to blow away your Windows boot partition you've got all the tools to rebuild from D:
D) Install system. Look ma! No AOL icon, No MS (Doesn') Works, No pre-installed MusicMatch (which also sucks). In other words: none of that annoying garbage with which system vendors load up their PC's.
E) Now change the theme to Windows Classic or Windows XP (modified). Move the start bar to top for that "Apple" feel. The start menu makes a lot more graphical sense this way. Make the background "None" and set up the backgroud as Black or Some Other Dark color, so you don't burn out your eyes as quickly and waste resources with Internet support screen backgrounds. Kill all the menu transition effects and all the shadow effects, unless you goal is have a slower interface.
D) You have a minimal Win XP Pro setup! Install the programs *you* want. But run the annoying little auto-updater -- you *want* to know about bug patches asap.
This is the best way to get performance out of WinXP. And don't run a lot of stupid bloaty shit like Bonzai Buddy, or the Weather Tray Bar, or msmsgs.exe, etc.
You shouldn't be running system configurations as the vendor ships them. That's a crock. They're always buggy, because they load too much crap.
Divide up the rest of you Hard Drive into Partitions for Linux, you should probably have room enough for several variants if'n you want
DIY!
Point. Touche. I thought they had removed that from their sites. Continued distribution after actually filing the suit is definitely problematic for them.
Since SCO removed it's Linux distro *before* the suit was filed on June 16, I doubt that its continued presence after the initial termination *warning* will be a factor.