I would hope that the Berkeley Regents would not stand idly by when their IP is pirated like that. Hopefully they will sue SCO for copyright infringement.
You don't want a balanced story. You want a rabid rant supporting your view.
I want the facts. I want the truth. Let the chips fall where they may.
If the balanced story is a rabid rant supporting my view, then yes, that is what I want. As a journalist you have a duty to independently check the factual allegations that news-worthy people are making. If you conclude that the facts are profoundly inconsistent with allegations and that there is no reasonable way that they could believe otherwise, then report what you find out about the facts.
SCOs allegations and try to represent them to the best of my ability.
That is fine. But you also have a duty to try to independently verify factual assertions they make and report what you find. Even on matters of law, you can independently verify things like "the legal standard for showing cause of action A is to show X, Y, and Z".
We should just report the facts and let you make the judgements.
My complaint is that "journalists" are NOT doing this.
SCO has now made allegations about RCU, NUMA, JFS, SMP, malloc, and netfilter. How about reporting the facts, then? Who did write these pieces of code as found in the Linux kernel? When SCO claims that they own these, are there ANY facts that you can independently verify that support their position?
Take the malloc code. Ask yourself as a journalist this questions: what facts can I gather that would be relevent to identifying if Linux can use the code in question. Then report those facts. If the conclusion is "SCO is smoking crack", by which I really mean "SCO's assertions about reality are verifiably false", then report that.
Yes, stealing is illegal. What does that have to do with "keeping" secrets?
You ought to read the Bartnicki v Vopper case from the Supreme Court if you think the First Amendment has nothing to do with it.
Even if Bruce got it from someone who was NDA'd, Bruce wouldn't be liable unless he knowingly colluded the person (say by funding him) to violate the NDA. The California DVD-CCA case is a good one to prove this point. Of course, the guy who did have the NDA could be sued for breach. It's hard to see any damages that might have occured however.
I wish someone would analyze the IBM patent claims. Unlike SCO, IBM has named specific patents. It should be rather easy for someone familiar with SCO's products to assess whether these are hair-brain patents or real-deal patents.
I understand people don't like software patents (I don't either), but given that the law is otherwise, I'm interested in how credible IBM's counterclaims are going to be.
The funny thing about this whole mess is that it just doesn't seem to matter how clear it becomes that SCO is just completely insane -- people in the press still put on a game face and act like they are serious. That is truly, truly sad.
I want to see an article from a non-open source advocate called "SCO is Smoking Crack". Maybe the judge will hold as much.
Perhaps Linux could simply get rid of all the BSD code. That would avoid this kind of crap in the future. Not that SCO has a point, but it just seems like Linux ought to be it's own purebred thing.
Have you read the IBM reply and counterclaims. Four separate patent claims nicely covering all of SCO's products, trademark, copyright, breach of contract, deceptive trade practices, and a few others I've never heard of.
Don't worry, SCO is dead.
I honestly have no idea how such lunatics could get to run a company. "Don't get involved in a land war in Asia" probably is 2nd to "Don't get involved in litigation with IBM".
The only possible rational I can think of for what SCO is doing is that MS subversively decided to send them running into the machine guns to "slow down Linux".
More precisely, IBM cannot GPL SCO's code. However, SCO can certainly GPL SCO's code, and since the GPL requires distributors to independently GPL the whole, this is exactly what happened.
Moreover, what exactly are the real damages to SCO. "Your honor, we give this code away for free, but damn them, they do too, under the same terms we use."
I've been in a similar situation: contractor (military, no less) wrongly accused, had to leave the site, wasn't sure if I'd have a job, etc...
The advice I can give you is: 1) Cooperate fully. Be honest. Be forthcoming. 2) Deny clearly, forcefully, politely wrongdoing 3) Remind them that the world is full of black hat hackers, some of whom have tremendous skill. 4) Ask them how to clear your name and how you can help achieve that. 5) Remind them of your benefit to the organziation -- acomplishments etc. 6) Tell them you understand this needs a full investigation. Tell them you have confidence in them to gather the evidence that will clear you. 7) Remind them that a false positive might be them next time.
Some advice on your specific question:
1) Do you know what you were doing at that particular time? Where you in a meeting? On the phone? Using another machine? Find proof: coworkers at the same meeting, phone records. Look at file timestamps. If one of the offending timestamps occurs in a period where you can prove you weren't using the computer, you are cleared.
2) Ask for network logs connecting to your machine. If this is a normal PC, there should be any from strange places. If there are, that was the bad guy, not you. If they don't have such logs, point out that keeping logs is critical for clearing the innocent and exposing the criminal.
3) If you are on a Unix box, ask that chkrootkit be run to identify if you've been hacked and had a rootkit installed. Hackers often install rootkits to avoid detection and this program finds them.
I think it's even more simple than that. MS goes behind the scenes and maybe drops $20 million to send SCO off to battle knowing full well they will be crushed. If the net effect is that Linux is slowed down by say 1 fiscal quarter, then they probably make their $20 million back several times over.
Sue them for what, exactly ? This is not a frivilous question.
Copyright infringement, based on unlicenced distribution of the linux kernel, a derivitive of copyrighted elements of their original expression.
Suppose there are N total contributors to the linux kernel, not counting you, IBM and SCO. Suppose you are contributor N.
a1 = copyrighted work of the 1st kernel contributor (kc1 = Linus) a2 = copyrighted work of the 2nd kernel contributor (kc2)... aN = copyright work of Nth kernel contributor (kcN) aY = your copyrighted work contributed to the kernel A = a1 + a2 +... aN + aY B = supposed IBM lifting of unix code C = A + B
SCO is distributing C, by 17 USC 106, they need a licence from all authors from which C is derivied. Since C is a derivitive of A and A is a derivitive of aY, C is a derivitive of aY.
It is irrelevent that IBM created C. The copyright act provides a separate cause of action for infringing distribution than for infringing derivitive creation. If SCO turns out to be right, you could sue IBM too, although you might choose to look at all the positive contributions they've made and pass on doing so. It's up to you.
Since you wrote aY, that means you have a cause of action against SCO for copyright infringement unless you have given your authority to them via a licence. SCO claims C is not under the GPL, as it is derived from B which is not under the GPL.
So unless SCO has another licence from you to distribute a derivite of aY, they owe you actual damages, including profits derived from the infringement. Their distribution of C is clearly willful -- it is the basis of their business, so they probably owe you statutory damages as well.
Agreed. The lawsuits are piling up. Red Hat, a 1 Billion dollar company that is 7 times large than SCO has filed a wholely separate lawsuit from IBM.
Anyone out there who contributed any code that shipped in kernel 2.4.19 should consider taking up Red Hat's litigation fund offer and sue SCO. Hell even if you represent yourself, SCO simply isn't going to have the bandwidth to respond.
B) The Linux community needs exactly this kind of 'inoculation' as the OS moves from a hobbyist platform to a real business tool.
Not really. Linux completed the move from a hobbyist platform to a real business tool 2 to 4 years ago. That's old news.
What perhaps is valueable is to demonstrate a point to the world: sham litigation against open source interests is a suicidal strategy with zero chance of success.
Many people do not realize the corporate force supporting open source and a demonstration of this fact by public immolation of an "old guard" tech company will be both entertaining and educational to the general public.
In fact, the best result here would be an early injucntion ruling in favor of either Red Hat or IBM, coinciding with a pouring on of half a dozen more lawsuits from other parties, followed by a stock selloff by SCO holders, followed by a complete collapse from within by SCO, perhaps accompanied by a few stock holder lawsuits against the execs and an SEC investigation.
What do you mean "the" developer? Are you talking about SCO? IBM? Linux Torvalds? Alan Cox? etc...
The case absolutely will test the GPL, because both IBM and Red Hat have raised GPL license issues. SCO distributed GPL'd code (even if they assert it was a mix of GPL'd code with their own code) and the legal question is what legal rights did they agree to waive by doing so.
Your argument is summed up when you stated "the main effect of the new format is that you cannot use the traditional Unix tools anymore".
Well, if existing unix command line tools don't deal with it well, then obviously we need some new command line tools. XML is not going away, so this is a good idea regardless.
Torvalds can't sue SCO until SCO actually *distributes* linux under something more restrictive than the GPL.
Which they've already done. They have filed suit claiming to hold trade secret rights to part of Linux. And I guess you've been sleeping, since they are asking for a sub-licence for their IP. Both actions, as well as their "Section 0" disavowel crap violate the GPL.
Your post makes me sick. But not at SCO. SCO is achieving what it set out to achieve. I'm disgusted by the lack of fight on the pro-Linux side. We have plenty of whining, but what is needed here is aggressive counter litigation. Several weeks ago I posted that unless kernel contributors (companies and/or individuals) sue SCO for violating their copyrights (which they are in about as blatent a way as possible), unfair competition, patent infringement, and anything and everything else that they can, that Linux would suffer serious damage.
Finally, at least Red Hat has taken action. Better late than never. Still, other stakeholders must take actions. SCO does not have the bandwidth to fight even the existing lawsuits (they've already non-responded in Germany).
At the end of this, SCO is going to get bitch-slapped by the courts. However, it's likely that MS and/or Sun (or other parties) are using SCO to slow down Linux and are happy to sacrifice the company to that end.
It is critical that this be recognized for what it is. We are hard core into step 3. 1. First they ignore you 2. Then they laugh at you 3. Then they fight you 4. Then you win.
My number #1 wish list item is parrot. You mentioned Perl, Python, and Ruby as successful projects. I see them as fragmented and this is why Parrot is my #1 wish list item. Imagine the power of merging class libraries from all three of these communities. Throw in javascript and PHP too. Additionally, I think we could start to expect apps to build in scripting using parrot. If javascript can be implemented in parrot, then Mozilla could easily adopt it and life would get very sweet.
Mozilla is my number #2 item, apart from the above (supporting parrot instead of just javascript). I'd like to see SVG integrated in (as in no-plugin) and I'd like to see the new XForms integrated in as well. The individual components need to be separated, and more apps and 3rd party tools written to leverage the "mozilla platform".
Office suites are my number #3 item. The Open Office formats are great. Other apps need to adopt them. Gnumeric and Abiword need to adopt them. People need to write utitities and XSLT transformations to work with them.
Java is my #4 item. I want pure GPL compilers and JVM's that fully implement ALL of java, including SWING. GCJ needs to be made to rock.
OS Configuration is my #5 item. The LSB goes a long way to standardizing the filesystem -- this needs to expand to configuration. I'd like to see configuration of everything move to an XML standard, and this should be coupled with flexible visual tools.
Documentation is my # 6 item. There are many good Linux howtos that are somewhat stale. It seems like documentation is fragmenting. I hate typing "man " and being told to use the info command. There are other sources of docs too. Documentation does me no good if its fragmented and/or old.
User Interface polish is my # 7. We've come a long way here. We need to keep polishing everything. Drag and drop need to always do the obvious thing. Eye candy matters. Commands and configuration should be in the obvious place.
Mozilla is a bloated pig because it can be used for so many different things.
You are about right, it comes with: Browser, HTML Editor, EMAIL, NNTP, Chat. However, soon we'll see these apps packaged individually. I think you'll also start to see more apps using the "mozilla as a platform" technologies.
I would say that besides Dijkstra's "goto considered harmful", the model-view-controller design pattern is THE next most important programming insight in existance. You are probably the first person I've heard openly question it in the last five years. You should go out and buy a copy of the gang of four book and read it cover to cover three times -- it would do you well.
I have on many, many occasions seen completely unmaintainable systems choke and break on each minor change because somebody in distant years earlier violated this rule. I probably wouldn't hire a programmer these days that couldn't give me five examples from personal experience where their project paid dearly for breaking this design pattern.
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I knew something good would come out of SCO suing IBM. Darl McBride better look out now.
I would hope that the Berkeley Regents would not stand idly by when their IP is pirated like that. Hopefully they will sue SCO for copyright infringement.
You don't want a balanced story. You want a rabid rant supporting your view.
I want the facts. I want the truth. Let the chips fall where they may.
If the balanced story is a rabid rant supporting my view, then yes, that is what I want. As a journalist you have a duty to independently check the factual allegations that news-worthy people are making. If you conclude that the facts are profoundly inconsistent with allegations and that there is no reasonable way that they could believe otherwise, then report what you find out about the facts.
SCOs allegations and try to represent them to the best of my ability.
That is fine. But you also have a duty to try to independently verify factual assertions they make and report what you find. Even on matters of law, you can independently verify things like "the legal standard for showing cause of action A is to show X, Y, and Z".
We should just report the facts and let you make the judgements.
My complaint is that "journalists" are NOT doing this.
SCO has now made allegations about RCU, NUMA, JFS, SMP, malloc, and netfilter. How about reporting the facts, then? Who did write these pieces of code as found in the Linux kernel? When SCO claims that they own these, are there ANY facts that you can independently verify that support their position?
Take the malloc code. Ask yourself as a journalist this questions: what facts can I gather that would be relevent to identifying if Linux can use the code in question. Then report those facts. If the conclusion is "SCO is smoking crack", by which I really mean "SCO's assertions about reality are verifiably false", then report that.
Yes, stealing is illegal. What does that have to do with "keeping" secrets?
You ought to read the Bartnicki v Vopper case from the Supreme Court if you think the First Amendment has nothing to do with it.
Even if Bruce got it from someone who was NDA'd, Bruce wouldn't be liable unless he knowingly colluded the person (say by funding him) to violate the NDA. The California DVD-CCA case is a good one to prove this point. Of course, the guy who did have the NDA could be sued for breach. It's hard to see any damages that might have occured however.
I wish someone would analyze the IBM patent claims. Unlike SCO, IBM has named specific patents. It should be rather easy for someone familiar with SCO's products to assess whether these are hair-brain patents or real-deal patents.
I understand people don't like software patents (I don't either), but given that the law is otherwise, I'm interested in how credible IBM's counterclaims are going to be.
Well, they are smoking crack.
The funny thing about this whole mess is that it just doesn't seem to matter how clear it becomes that SCO is just completely insane -- people in the press still put on a game face and act like they are serious. That is truly, truly sad.
I want to see an article from a non-open source advocate called "SCO is Smoking Crack". Maybe the judge will hold as much.
Have you ever heard of the First Amendment?
Do you understand that you have to AGREE to keep a secret before somebody has a claim against you for not keeping it?
Just post the NDA Bruce signed, and then you'll have a point.
Perhaps Linux could simply get rid of all the BSD code. That would avoid this kind of crap in the future. Not that SCO has a point, but it just seems like Linux ought to be it's own purebred thing.
Have you read the IBM reply and counterclaims. Four separate patent claims nicely covering all of SCO's products, trademark, copyright, breach of contract, deceptive trade practices, and a few others I've never heard of.
Don't worry, SCO is dead.
I honestly have no idea how such lunatics could get to run a company. "Don't get involved in a land war in Asia" probably is 2nd to "Don't get involved in litigation with IBM".
The only possible rational I can think of for what SCO is doing is that MS subversively decided to send them running into the machine guns to "slow down Linux".
More precisely, IBM cannot GPL SCO's code. However, SCO can certainly GPL SCO's code, and since the GPL requires distributors to independently GPL the whole, this is exactly what happened.
Moreover, what exactly are the real damages to SCO. "Your honor, we give this code away for free, but damn them, they do too, under the same terms we use."
I've been in a similar situation: contractor (military, no less) wrongly accused, had to leave the site, wasn't sure if I'd have a job, etc...
The advice I can give you is:
1) Cooperate fully. Be honest. Be forthcoming.
2) Deny clearly, forcefully, politely wrongdoing
3) Remind them that the world is full of black hat hackers, some of whom have tremendous skill.
4) Ask them how to clear your name and how you can help achieve that.
5) Remind them of your benefit to the organziation -- acomplishments etc.
6) Tell them you understand this needs a full investigation. Tell them you have confidence in them to gather the evidence that will clear you.
7) Remind them that a false positive might be them next time.
Some advice on your specific question:
1) Do you know what you were doing at that particular time? Where you in a meeting? On the phone? Using another machine? Find proof: coworkers at the same meeting, phone records. Look at file timestamps. If one of the offending timestamps occurs in a period where you can prove you weren't using the computer, you are cleared.
2) Ask for network logs connecting to your machine. If this is a normal PC, there should be any from strange places. If there are, that was the bad guy, not you. If they don't have such logs, point out that keeping logs is critical for clearing the innocent and exposing the criminal.
3) If you are on a Unix box, ask that chkrootkit be run to identify if you've been hacked and had a rootkit installed. Hackers often install rootkits to avoid detection and this program finds them.
I think it's even more simple than that. MS goes behind the scenes and maybe drops $20 million to send SCO off to battle knowing full well they will be crushed. If the net effect is that Linux is slowed down by say 1 fiscal quarter, then they probably make their $20 million back several times over.
Sue them for what, exactly ? This is not a frivilous question.
... ... aN + aY
Copyright infringement, based on unlicenced distribution of the linux kernel, a derivitive of copyrighted elements of their original expression.
Suppose there are N total contributors to the linux kernel, not counting you, IBM and SCO. Suppose you are contributor N.
a1 = copyrighted work of the 1st kernel contributor (kc1 = Linus)
a2 = copyrighted work of the 2nd kernel contributor (kc2)
aN = copyright work of Nth kernel contributor (kcN)
aY = your copyrighted work contributed to the kernel
A = a1 + a2 +
B = supposed IBM lifting of unix code
C = A + B
SCO is distributing C, by 17 USC 106, they need a licence from all authors from which C is derivied. Since C is a derivitive of A and A is a derivitive of aY, C is a derivitive of aY.
It is irrelevent that IBM created C. The copyright act provides a separate cause of action for infringing distribution than for infringing derivitive creation. If SCO turns out to be right, you could sue IBM too, although you might choose to look at all the positive contributions they've made and pass on doing so. It's up to you.
Since you wrote aY, that means you have a cause of action against SCO for copyright infringement unless you have given your authority to them via a licence. SCO claims C is not under the GPL, as it is derived from B which is not under the GPL.
So unless SCO has another licence from you to distribute a derivite of aY, they owe you actual damages, including profits derived from the infringement. Their distribution of C is clearly willful -- it is the basis of their business, so they probably owe you statutory damages as well.
A) SCO is a toad about to face a steamroller.
Agreed. The lawsuits are piling up. Red Hat, a 1 Billion dollar company that is 7 times large than SCO has filed a wholely separate lawsuit from IBM.
Anyone out there who contributed any code that shipped in kernel 2.4.19 should consider taking up Red Hat's litigation fund offer and sue SCO. Hell even if you represent yourself, SCO simply isn't going to have the bandwidth to respond.
B) The Linux community needs exactly this kind of 'inoculation' as the OS moves from a hobbyist platform to a real business tool.
Not really. Linux completed the move from a hobbyist platform to a real business tool 2 to 4 years ago. That's old news.
What perhaps is valueable is to demonstrate a point to the world: sham litigation against open source interests is a suicidal strategy with zero chance of success.
Many people do not realize the corporate force supporting open source and a demonstration of this fact by public immolation of an "old guard" tech company will be both entertaining and educational to the general public.
In fact, the best result here would be an early injucntion ruling in favor of either Red Hat or IBM, coinciding with a pouring on of half a dozen more lawsuits from other parties, followed by a stock selloff by SCO holders, followed by a complete collapse from within by SCO, perhaps accompanied by a few stock holder lawsuits against the execs and an SEC investigation.
IBM and Red Hat disagree that this case is not about the GPL, each having raised the GPL issue in their court filings.
What do you mean "the" developer? Are you talking about SCO? IBM? Linux Torvalds? Alan Cox? etc...
The case absolutely will test the GPL, because both IBM and Red Hat have raised GPL license issues. SCO distributed GPL'd code (even if they assert it was a mix of GPL'd code with their own code) and the legal question is what legal rights did they agree to waive by doing so.
The Boise plan is
1. Find a company that is litigation happy
2. Sue everybody in the world, including 800 pound gorrila IBM
3. ???
4. Send legal invoices to SCO
Your argument is summed up when you stated "the main effect of the new format is that you cannot use the traditional Unix tools anymore".
Well, if existing unix command line tools don't deal with it well, then obviously we need some new command line tools. XML is not going away, so this is a good idea regardless.
Torvalds can't sue SCO until SCO actually *distributes* linux under something more restrictive than the GPL.
Which they've already done. They have filed suit claiming to hold trade secret rights to part of Linux. And I guess you've been sleeping, since they are asking for a sub-licence for their IP. Both actions, as well as their "Section 0" disavowel crap violate the GPL.
Your post makes me sick. But not at SCO. SCO is achieving what it set out to achieve. I'm disgusted by the lack of fight on the pro-Linux side. We have plenty of whining, but what is needed here is aggressive counter litigation. Several weeks ago I posted that unless kernel contributors (companies and/or individuals) sue SCO for violating their copyrights (which they are in about as blatent a way as possible), unfair competition, patent infringement, and anything and everything else that they can, that Linux would suffer serious damage.
Finally, at least Red Hat has taken action. Better late than never. Still, other stakeholders must take actions. SCO does not have the bandwidth to fight even the existing lawsuits (they've already non-responded in Germany).
At the end of this, SCO is going to get bitch-slapped by the courts. However, it's likely that MS and/or Sun (or other parties) are using SCO to slow down Linux and are happy to sacrifice the company to that end.
It is critical that this be recognized for what it is. We are hard core into step 3.
1. First they ignore you
2. Then they laugh at you
3. Then they fight you
4. Then you win.
My number #1 wish list item is parrot. You mentioned Perl, Python, and Ruby as successful projects. I see them as fragmented and this is why Parrot is my #1 wish list item. Imagine the power of merging class libraries from all three of these communities. Throw in javascript and PHP too.
Additionally, I think we could start to expect apps to build in scripting using parrot. If javascript can be implemented in parrot, then Mozilla could easily adopt it and life would get very sweet.
Mozilla is my number #2 item, apart from the above (supporting parrot instead of just javascript). I'd like to see SVG integrated in (as in no-plugin) and I'd like to see the new XForms integrated in as well. The individual components need to be separated, and more apps and 3rd party tools written to leverage the "mozilla platform".
Office suites are my number #3 item. The Open Office formats are great. Other apps need to adopt them. Gnumeric and Abiword need to adopt them. People need to write utitities and XSLT transformations to work with them.
Java is my #4 item. I want pure GPL compilers and JVM's that fully implement ALL of java, including SWING. GCJ needs to be made to rock.
OS Configuration is my #5 item. The LSB goes a long way to standardizing the filesystem -- this needs to expand to configuration. I'd like to see configuration of everything move to an XML standard, and this should be coupled with flexible visual tools.
Documentation is my # 6 item. There are many good Linux howtos that are somewhat stale. It seems like documentation is fragmenting. I hate typing "man " and being told to use the info command. There are other sources of docs too. Documentation does me no good if its fragmented and/or old.
User Interface polish is my # 7. We've come a long way here. We need to keep polishing everything. Drag and drop need to always do the obvious thing. Eye candy matters. Commands and configuration should be in the obvious place.
OK, my 2 cents has expired...
Mozilla is a bloated pig because it can be used for so many different things.
You are about right, it comes with: Browser, HTML Editor, EMAIL, NNTP, Chat. However, soon we'll see these apps packaged individually. I think you'll also start to see more apps using the "mozilla as a platform" technologies.
How much simpler could this be?
How about "click the Desktop 2 icon in the panel"?
Was this one of the tasks the 60 users had to do in each windowing system? It's too bad it wasn't, maybe KDE would have surged into the lead.
Wow -- you are way WAY offbase.
I would say that besides Dijkstra's "goto considered harmful", the model-view-controller design pattern is THE next most important programming insight in existance. You are probably the first person I've heard openly question it in the last five years. You should go out and buy a copy of the gang of four book and read it cover to cover three times -- it would do you well.
I have on many, many occasions seen completely unmaintainable systems choke and break on each minor change because somebody in distant years earlier violated this rule. I probably wouldn't hire a programmer these days that couldn't give me five examples from personal experience where their project paid dearly for breaking this design pattern.
Speaking of which, what happened to the LinuxTag suit against SCO?