If you go back up the thread a couple posts I did make it clear what I was talking about.
It's not illegal or abusive to have a website - even if the spammer generates leads for that website by committing abuse. How are you going to get the ISP to nuke the website?
Illegal has nothing to do with it. This is a world governed by contracts and customs, and one the law isn't generally capable of dealing with effectively anyway. It is certainly abusive however. And cutting them off is the only way to really address the spam problem - they can keep getting throw aways and zombie-ing puters to send forever. When you play whack a mole with the sending accounts, you're just wasting your time, 99 times out of 100 they've already been abandoned by the time the first complaints hit anyway. Spammers learned that the accounts they send from will be tracked down and nuked a long time ago, and adapted to that.
In order to put a crimp in the spam problem you have to hit them where it hurts - and that means tracking down how they're making money off the spam, usually a website, and nuking it before they can collect.
Contrary to your statemen that this is impossible, I've gotten plenty of websites nuked. Reputable hosting companies won't host websites that spamvertise, and disreputable ones back off pretty quick when it starts generating problems with their upstream. Even if they pop up two days later at another address, you've caused them considerable expense in terms of time, money, and missed business from prior spam runs. This actually reduces spam. Whacking throw away accounts does nothing.
How do you do it? The same way you get sending accounts canceled, you complain, politely but firmly, you document your case thoroughly, and if you don't get action you escalate upstream until you do.
Best is to set up a system for that purpose alone, one that doesn't handle any real SMTP traffic. Then the operator knows the SMTP traffic to it is suspect - and the operator can do whatever he wants to that traffic secure in the knowledge he is hitting spam and spam alone.
That's a good idea (not a new one, but still a good one.) You still need to be able to use that data to whack their websites, though, or you'll be only a very minor inconvenience to them.
But, as I said already, I'm not talking about sending spam. You can play whack-a-mole forever and they'll just keep getting throw aways, or as is more the style these days, using trojaned computers. The point is whacking the websites where the spammers actually make their money.
That's probably still just "use". Remember, the terms of the GPL are for distribution, not for use.
The terms of the GPL mean nothing if it's revoked. What matters then is straight copyright law. Look it up. You don't have a right to make any copies, outside of one copy for archival purposes only.
The GPL only applies to redistribution, not use. You can use GPL software without accepting the agreement, by law (probably) and by the text of the GPL itself.
Yes you can use it, but you can't copy it. Making a disk image and installing to thousands of machines from a single source would be copying, now wouldn't it?
A user who stays completely within default copyright rules doesn't need the GPL. But this means in particular no duplication, no making copies. This means buying 1 CD from someone who distributes under the GPL and installing to one machine. Want to install on a second machine? You need to buy a second CD. Normally this isn't an issue, of course, because if you need a second machine you can just copy it right on over under the GPL, but if you lose your GPL then you can't legally do that anymore - it would be copyright infringement.
Now you'll notice I've not said for sure they are in that position - just that it seems possible. I'd say you'd need some lawyer time to sit down and go through their paperwork with TSG quite carefully to see whether or not that's the case - but it certainly seems possible. The GPL doesn't allow you avail yourself of it if you cannot legally fulfil all the conditions. A binary-only license from TSG sure sounds to me like something that would be a legal impairment to fulfilling those conditions. If so, then the rest follows. But the license TSG put up publically, if it's the same one that EV1 is now contractually bound to, goes to such incredible lengths to say nothing at all that I wouldn't pretend to know exactly what effect it has, other than giving them a great excuse to sue you if you buy it.
It does not make sense for EV1 to fight SCO. SCO has more in their war chest than EV1 profits in a year. I want to see someone stand up to SCO, but it has to be some one with more resources, such as IBM. Now if some of the warmongers in this thread would contribute the necessary funds for EV1's defense I'd be impressed, but I don't see that happening.
Umm someone already did. Several someones. If they had been sued RedHat would have been first in line, since they are RedHat customers.
No, I will not call TSG SCO. SCO was the Santa Cruz Operation. They weren't the be all and end all of Unix, but they were actually fairly cool. They are not in the same league at all with The SCO Group, and they do still exist, under the name Tarantella. And no one reading this page is going to think I'm referring to The Saber Group, we know who we're talking about, the Canopy company formerly known as Caldera, now calling themselves the SCO Group and fraudulently impersonating the Santa Cruz Operation.
Are you aware of EV1's msft success story so prominently displayed on msft web-site? Seems like an awfully cozy relationship to me.
Yep. They started an all linux site, and MS went way out of their way to make it possible for them to roll out Windows servers as easily as they had been doing with Linux from the get-go. So now they offer both. I don't see anything necessarily sinister in that. There could certainly be some sinister dealings underneath it, but maybe not *shrug* it could just be good business sense on EV1s part, given that MS was willing to go to all that trouble to lower their costs, and that some customers do want Windows servers, why not?
And consider the timing. Scox has a windfall of negative news right now, and earnings come out Wednesday; what convenient timing for this PR hype.
To the best of my knowledge true, and sleazy as hell, but doesn't necessarily mean that EV1 is up to anything wrong themselves.
The guy is CEO of #6 web-hosting company in the USA. Hardly an idiot. Certainly his company has a legal department. Certainly they know about redhat indemnification, certainly they know that scox can't sue their customers, certainly they how laughably weak scox's case is.
Well I've known several high ranking executives over the years that were total morons, so I won't just accept this as a given. It's possible. But I think it's more likely the guy is a well meaning moron, personally.
Oh they can rent out the systems they already have, perfectly legal.
But a good case can be made that accepting this license terminated their GPL rights. And if it did... well they would still be legal if they bought a copy of Linux for every new computer they install it on, but we know for a fact that they use disk images nowadays, right? That's copying not necessarily allowed under default copyright law. Not a problem as long as you have a valid GPL, but if you've given the GPL up by taking another incompatible license to cover any portion of the Linux code... then it's copyright infringement.
It does indeed sound like he did this with the best of intentions.
But no, I'm sorry, no word less strong than 'idiot' could possibly begin to describe the path to hell he just set his company on, with the best of intentions of course.
TSG hadn't the slightest grounds to sue them before. Of course, under the US legal system, you sue first and the court checks if you have any grounds later, so they could have cost him some lawyer time.
But doesn't a company that size pay a retainer already, for just such reasons?
TSG had no grounds to sue them before, no grounds to be involved with them in any way shape or form. Now they've signed a contract. 'Contracts are what you use against people you have a relationship with' as Mr. McBride so eloquently stated.
This contract gives EV1 nothing whatsoever they didn't already have, in the sense of assets, positive things. It does give them plenty of liablilities. It gives TSG a contract that may give them cause for a suit in the future. It may very well be violating their license under the GPL, rendering any new linux installations they undertake copyright infringement, punishable by a statutory fine of $125,000 US per incidence as well. It in no way makes their position any more stable, but rather opens them from attacks from every side that they were completely and utterly proof against before taking this license.
I said it before, in the last article on this story, and I'll say it again, either EV1s attorneys are utterly incompetent, or their management is, or both. Go to Groklaw, read this license. It's a license for nothing, it gives the buyer nothing, it's only possible purpose is to set the buyer up for a lawsuit later. Anyone that would pay a dime for this thing after reading it is just plain stupid. If TSG was offering to pay you $699 per processor, flat rate no bulk discounts, it would still be a bad deal.
I am (happily) not personally involved with them at the moment. If I were I would terminate that relationship immediately. I certainly will not even consider entering any business relationship with them in the future. A company that size that can't afford an hour of a lawyers time to look at such a thing before they sign it has no future in this world, that's just the cold hard facts. EV1 customers - find an alternative. Today. Not to punish these folks - this kind of incredible stupidity is its own punishment, and quite sufficient. But simply to protect yourself. If you make the change now, you can do it with minimal hassle. If you wait until someone summons these bozos into a court, it could be a lot more painful.
I respectfully disagree. It doesn't matter one bit if it's commercial or not. It doesn't matter if I agree with the message or not. The key is it that it's unsolicited and bulk. This is key because once you allow unsolicited bulk emailings, you create a system where there is little to no extra cost to send to extra people, and it makes sense to send to as many as possible, Carry that somewhere near it's logical conclusions. Every business in the US sending one message a year to every email address is enough to destroy email as a useable media. Every nonprofit doing the same would have essentially the same effect. The point is that once you allow the use of email for unsolicited bulk mailing, you create an incentive to send so much email that no one will ever be able to find the messages they actually have their email accounts to receive.
I've been spammed by the Republicans, and the Democrats, by the Libertarians, by the Green Party and the Reform Party and the Socialist Workers Party and even by some group in Portugal whose dispatches I find difficult to decipher.
Some of these groups had my deepest sympathy. I still made sure each and every one felt the pain that comes with spamvertising. Why? Simple. If there isn't a consistent and reliable pain to be anticipated anytime you spam, commercial or not, then there is every incentive to send ads to everyone as often as possible until email becomes completely unusable. But, as long as some of us stand on our right not to be spammed, complain about it and insist politely but forcefully that those who spam us pay the price as outlined in the AUPs they agreed to, then the cost of Spam is not zero and this does not happen.
So no, I don't agree at all. UBE is Spam. Period. I don't care if they're political, commercial, or trying to raise money for crippled orphans. If you allow UBE you create the incentives that end e-mail as a usable system very shortly afterwards.
The trouble when you come to UUnet and Abovenet is that when you complain, they ignore you. Normally that means go to their upstream - well guess what, they have no upstream, for all intents and purposes they're it. If everybody else on the planet got together and blackholed them, it might work, but it would cause the rest of us almost as much pain as them. They're that big. They know it, and so unlike all the other ISPs they don't give a flying f$ck what their customers do, or what you think about it.
Got a solution to that problem? I'd love to hear it.
It's not a slippery slope at all. Spam is email which is both bulk and unsolicited. The email system was never designed to accomodate such, and indeed cannot survive if it is allowed. If your email to me is unsolicited, that's fine - as long as it's not a bulk message being sent to thousands or millions of people at once. If it's a bulk message, that's fine too, as long as it's sent only to those that have solicited it. But when you combine both properties, sending in bulk to folks that have not explicitly requested to be on a mailing list to receive it, then it's spam.
Your numbers are, of course, incorrect. Spam mailers almost never pay for their bandwidth, the fact that you're trying to figure on that shows that you aren't actually familiar with the problem. They steal outgoing bandwidth almost without fail, and that's something pretty well impossible to stop. A spam-friendly ISP isn't one that allows them to send (this is not needed and rarely offered - spammers rely on throw-away accounts and zombied boxes taken over with trojans at no cost,) it's one that continues to host websites that are spam-vertised.
Umm no, it means they can probably no longer legally sell Linux boxes to their new customers, without buying a new CD each time, from someone who still has a valid license under the GPL to make them.
Most likely they'll ignore that nicety completely, counting on the fact that the Linux developers would rather code than waste time suing them, but as long as they did that then they would still be completely legal.
(I know, I know. Spam is such a HUGE waste of time. You know what? Nobody has a gun to your head forcing you to use email. Sorry.)
EXCUSE ME? No one gave you permission to spam my email. It's theft, pure and simple. Theft of resources I've paid for, I own, and you have no rights to.
UUNet and Abovenet have been spammer friendly for ages, this is no news. The fact is they think they're big enough they're above the law, and act accordingly. They think they're too big to black-hole, and unfortunately they're right. If they aren't cut down to size the spammers will all end up at a handful of these huge companies and email will become completely unusable for any purpose. In the long run that will get rid of the spam problem, of course, but the cost is a bit high. Anyone who has a usable plan on how to cut these bastages down to size needs to speak up, and soon.
The internet infrastucture is far too important to allow any single entity to control such a huge chunk of it that they're immune to consequences.
No, they didn't buy it from Novell. TSG (The SCO Group) bought it from SCO (the Santa Cruz Organisation) who had bought it from Novell, and clearly knew what they were getting. If TSG (who keep trying to confuse themselves with SCO, but are actually the Canopy company formerly known as Caldera) got ripped off by anyone, it was the real SCO (now known as Tarantella,) not Novell.
Not three cents a month, but three cents and it's over with, SCO can never bother with that server again.
Regardless of whether your estimate on the money involved is in the ballpark (I tend to think it's high in fact) your final conclusion is wrong. SCO couldn't do anything about the server to begin with. Now they can. The license gives them grounds to sue that were non-existent before. It's made the situation less reliable, not more, and that's the reason that if I were doing business with EV1 (I'm not) I would terminate that relationship ASAP. I don't care if the 'license' was free, or even if SCO paid them $150,000 US to take it for that matter, it's still overpriced. It gives the buyer nothing, and gives SCO a contractual relationship on which a lawsuit could later be based where there was none before. Taking that license at any price indicates severe incompetence on the part of EV1s counsel, or even more severe incompetence on the part of their executives if they did this over the contrary advice of their counsel.
Well that depends. Read the text of the license and you'll see they carefully crafted it to not say anything. But if interpret it, as their press releases and ad copy lead you to, as a license on linux, then accepting it would certainly terminate your rights under the GPL. Remember that this doesn't mean you can't use GPL software anymore, just that you can't copy it, modify it, or distribute it. You can use it freely without a license, under basic copyright law, assuming you legally acquired every copy you are using (from someone who has not terminated their rights under the GPL through such an action.)
No, but anyone that reads that contract can see that it carefully avoids actually defining what you're licensing. Some nebulous 'IP' (a meaningless buzzword, not anything that has legal meaning) that may or may not be present in any particular flavour of linux. I think this is very much a case of caveat emptor. Anyone that would buy this deserves what they get, and any lawyer that can read this without collapsing on the floor laughing, or tells their client that it's anything other than a license for nothing, is incompetent.
TSG (please don't call them SCO, they are not the Santa Cruz Operation, which as bad as it was in some way doesn't deserve to be associated with these morons) has danced around this very carefully. They don't ask their customers to buy the 699 licenses. Only other folks (like Red Hat customers for instance.) And if you read the license they're supposedly selling, it goes through amazing contortions to avoid actually saying what they're licensing to you when you buy it. It doesn't claim to be a license for Linux, or for anything else specific, their FUD campaign to the contrary.
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Illegal has nothing to do with it. This is a world governed by contracts and customs, and one the law isn't generally capable of dealing with effectively anyway. It is certainly abusive however. And cutting them off is the only way to really address the spam problem - they can keep getting throw aways and zombie-ing puters to send forever. When you play whack a mole with the sending accounts, you're just wasting your time, 99 times out of 100 they've already been abandoned by the time the first complaints hit anyway. Spammers learned that the accounts they send from will be tracked down and nuked a long time ago, and adapted to that.
In order to put a crimp in the spam problem you have to hit them where it hurts - and that means tracking down how they're making money off the spam, usually a website, and nuking it before they can collect.
Contrary to your statemen that this is impossible, I've gotten plenty of websites nuked. Reputable hosting companies won't host websites that spamvertise, and disreputable ones back off pretty quick when it starts generating problems with their upstream. Even if they pop up two days later at another address, you've caused them considerable expense in terms of time, money, and missed business from prior spam runs. This actually reduces spam. Whacking throw away accounts does nothing.
How do you do it? The same way you get sending accounts canceled, you complain, politely but firmly, you document your case thoroughly, and if you don't get action you escalate upstream until you do.
That's a good idea (not a new one, but still a good one.) You still need to be able to use that data to whack their websites, though, or you'll be only a very minor inconvenience to them.
But, as I said already, I'm not talking about sending spam. You can play whack-a-mole forever and they'll just keep getting throw aways, or as is more the style these days, using trojaned computers. The point is whacking the websites where the spammers actually make their money.
The terms of the GPL mean nothing if it's revoked. What matters then is straight copyright law. Look it up. You don't have a right to make any copies, outside of one copy for archival purposes only.
Yes you can use it, but you can't copy it. Making a disk image and installing to thousands of machines from a single source would be copying, now wouldn't it?
A user who stays completely within default copyright rules doesn't need the GPL. But this means in particular no duplication, no making copies. This means buying 1 CD from someone who distributes under the GPL and installing to one machine. Want to install on a second machine? You need to buy a second CD. Normally this isn't an issue, of course, because if you need a second machine you can just copy it right on over under the GPL, but if you lose your GPL then you can't legally do that anymore - it would be copyright infringement.
Now you'll notice I've not said for sure they are in that position - just that it seems possible. I'd say you'd need some lawyer time to sit down and go through their paperwork with TSG quite carefully to see whether or not that's the case - but it certainly seems possible. The GPL doesn't allow you avail yourself of it if you cannot legally fulfil all the conditions. A binary-only license from TSG sure sounds to me like something that would be a legal impairment to fulfilling those conditions. If so, then the rest follows. But the license TSG put up publically, if it's the same one that EV1 is now contractually bound to, goes to such incredible lengths to say nothing at all that I wouldn't pretend to know exactly what effect it has, other than giving them a great excuse to sue you if you buy it.
Umm someone already did. Several someones. If they had been sued RedHat would have been first in line, since they are RedHat customers.
No, I will not call TSG SCO. SCO was the Santa Cruz Operation. They weren't the be all and end all of Unix, but they were actually fairly cool. They are not in the same league at all with The SCO Group, and they do still exist, under the name Tarantella. And no one reading this page is going to think I'm referring to The Saber Group, we know who we're talking about, the Canopy company formerly known as Caldera, now calling themselves the SCO Group and fraudulently impersonating the Santa Cruz Operation.
So no, I won't call TSG SCO, thanks anyway.
Yep. They started an all linux site, and MS went way out of their way to make it possible for them to roll out Windows servers as easily as they had been doing with Linux from the get-go. So now they offer both. I don't see anything necessarily sinister in that. There could certainly be some sinister dealings underneath it, but maybe not *shrug* it could just be good business sense on EV1s part, given that MS was willing to go to all that trouble to lower their costs, and that some customers do want Windows servers, why not?
To the best of my knowledge true, and sleazy as hell, but doesn't necessarily mean that EV1 is up to anything wrong themselves.
Well I've known several high ranking executives over the years that were total morons, so I won't just accept this as a given. It's possible. But I think it's more likely the guy is a well meaning moron, personally.
Oh they can rent out the systems they already have, perfectly legal. But a good case can be made that accepting this license terminated their GPL rights. And if it did... well they would still be legal if they bought a copy of Linux for every new computer they install it on, but we know for a fact that they use disk images nowadays, right? That's copying not necessarily allowed under default copyright law. Not a problem as long as you have a valid GPL, but if you've given the GPL up by taking another incompatible license to cover any portion of the Linux code... then it's copyright infringement.
Nope, use and distribution are separate issues. The GPL makes it clear that, as copyright law states, you can use the software without a license.
It does indeed sound like he did this with the best of intentions.
But no, I'm sorry, no word less strong than 'idiot' could possibly begin to describe the path to hell he just set his company on, with the best of intentions of course.
TSG hadn't the slightest grounds to sue them before. Of course, under the US legal system, you sue first and the court checks if you have any grounds later, so they could have cost him some lawyer time.
But doesn't a company that size pay a retainer already, for just such reasons?
TSG had no grounds to sue them before, no grounds to be involved with them in any way shape or form. Now they've signed a contract. 'Contracts are what you use against people you have a relationship with' as Mr. McBride so eloquently stated.
This contract gives EV1 nothing whatsoever they didn't already have, in the sense of assets, positive things. It does give them plenty of liablilities. It gives TSG a contract that may give them cause for a suit in the future. It may very well be violating their license under the GPL, rendering any new linux installations they undertake copyright infringement, punishable by a statutory fine of $125,000 US per incidence as well. It in no way makes their position any more stable, but rather opens them from attacks from every side that they were completely and utterly proof against before taking this license.
I said it before, in the last article on this story, and I'll say it again, either EV1s attorneys are utterly incompetent, or their management is, or both. Go to Groklaw, read this license. It's a license for nothing, it gives the buyer nothing, it's only possible purpose is to set the buyer up for a lawsuit later. Anyone that would pay a dime for this thing after reading it is just plain stupid. If TSG was offering to pay you $699 per processor, flat rate no bulk discounts, it would still be a bad deal.
I am (happily) not personally involved with them at the moment. If I were I would terminate that relationship immediately. I certainly will not even consider entering any business relationship with them in the future. A company that size that can't afford an hour of a lawyers time to look at such a thing before they sign it has no future in this world, that's just the cold hard facts. EV1 customers - find an alternative. Today. Not to punish these folks - this kind of incredible stupidity is its own punishment, and quite sufficient. But simply to protect yourself. If you make the change now, you can do it with minimal hassle. If you wait until someone summons these bozos into a court, it could be a lot more painful.
I respectfully disagree. It doesn't matter one bit if it's commercial or not. It doesn't matter if I agree with the message or not. The key is it that it's unsolicited and bulk. This is key because once you allow unsolicited bulk emailings, you create a system where there is little to no extra cost to send to extra people, and it makes sense to send to as many as possible, Carry that somewhere near it's logical conclusions. Every business in the US sending one message a year to every email address is enough to destroy email as a useable media. Every nonprofit doing the same would have essentially the same effect. The point is that once you allow the use of email for unsolicited bulk mailing, you create an incentive to send so much email that no one will ever be able to find the messages they actually have their email accounts to receive.
I've been spammed by the Republicans, and the Democrats, by the Libertarians, by the Green Party and the Reform Party and the Socialist Workers Party and even by some group in Portugal whose dispatches I find difficult to decipher.
Some of these groups had my deepest sympathy. I still made sure each and every one felt the pain that comes with spamvertising. Why? Simple. If there isn't a consistent and reliable pain to be anticipated anytime you spam, commercial or not, then there is every incentive to send ads to everyone as often as possible until email becomes completely unusable. But, as long as some of us stand on our right not to be spammed, complain about it and insist politely but forcefully that those who spam us pay the price as outlined in the AUPs they agreed to, then the cost of Spam is not zero and this does not happen.
So no, I don't agree at all. UBE is Spam. Period. I don't care if they're political, commercial, or trying to raise money for crippled orphans. If you allow UBE you create the incentives that end e-mail as a usable system very shortly afterwards.
The trouble when you come to UUnet and Abovenet is that when you complain, they ignore you. Normally that means go to their upstream - well guess what, they have no upstream, for all intents and purposes they're it. If everybody else on the planet got together and blackholed them, it might work, but it would cause the rest of us almost as much pain as them. They're that big. They know it, and so unlike all the other ISPs they don't give a flying f$ck what their customers do, or what you think about it.
Got a solution to that problem? I'd love to hear it.
You've got it backwards, that's how much TSG payed them.
It's not a slippery slope at all. Spam is email which is both bulk and unsolicited. The email system was never designed to accomodate such, and indeed cannot survive if it is allowed. If your email to me is unsolicited, that's fine - as long as it's not a bulk message being sent to thousands or millions of people at once. If it's a bulk message, that's fine too, as long as it's sent only to those that have solicited it. But when you combine both properties, sending in bulk to folks that have not explicitly requested to be on a mailing list to receive it, then it's spam.
Your numbers are, of course, incorrect. Spam mailers almost never pay for their bandwidth, the fact that you're trying to figure on that shows that you aren't actually familiar with the problem. They steal outgoing bandwidth almost without fail, and that's something pretty well impossible to stop. A spam-friendly ISP isn't one that allows them to send (this is not needed and rarely offered - spammers rely on throw-away accounts and zombied boxes taken over with trojans at no cost,) it's one that continues to host websites that are spam-vertised.
Umm no, it means they can probably no longer legally sell Linux boxes to their new customers, without buying a new CD each time, from someone who still has a valid license under the GPL to make them. Most likely they'll ignore that nicety completely, counting on the fact that the Linux developers would rather code than waste time suing them, but as long as they did that then they would still be completely legal.
EXCUSE ME? No one gave you permission to spam my email. It's theft, pure and simple. Theft of resources I've paid for, I own, and you have no rights to.
UUNet and Abovenet have been spammer friendly for ages, this is no news. The fact is they think they're big enough they're above the law, and act accordingly. They think they're too big to black-hole, and unfortunately they're right. If they aren't cut down to size the spammers will all end up at a handful of these huge companies and email will become completely unusable for any purpose. In the long run that will get rid of the spam problem, of course, but the cost is a bit high. Anyone who has a usable plan on how to cut these bastages down to size needs to speak up, and soon.
The internet infrastucture is far too important to allow any single entity to control such a huge chunk of it that they're immune to consequences.
Quite right, thanks for the correction.
Precisely.
No, they didn't buy it from Novell. TSG (The SCO Group) bought it from SCO (the Santa Cruz Organisation) who had bought it from Novell, and clearly knew what they were getting. If TSG (who keep trying to confuse themselves with SCO, but are actually the Canopy company formerly known as Caldera) got ripped off by anyone, it was the real SCO (now known as Tarantella,) not Novell.
Regardless of whether your estimate on the money involved is in the ballpark (I tend to think it's high in fact) your final conclusion is wrong. SCO couldn't do anything about the server to begin with. Now they can. The license gives them grounds to sue that were non-existent before. It's made the situation less reliable, not more, and that's the reason that if I were doing business with EV1 (I'm not) I would terminate that relationship ASAP. I don't care if the 'license' was free, or even if SCO paid them $150,000 US to take it for that matter, it's still overpriced. It gives the buyer nothing, and gives SCO a contractual relationship on which a lawsuit could later be based where there was none before. Taking that license at any price indicates severe incompetence on the part of EV1s counsel, or even more severe incompetence on the part of their executives if they did this over the contrary advice of their counsel.
Well that depends. Read the text of the license and you'll see they carefully crafted it to not say anything. But if interpret it, as their press releases and ad copy lead you to, as a license on linux, then accepting it would certainly terminate your rights under the GPL. Remember that this doesn't mean you can't use GPL software anymore, just that you can't copy it, modify it, or distribute it. You can use it freely without a license, under basic copyright law, assuming you legally acquired every copy you are using (from someone who has not terminated their rights under the GPL through such an action.)
No, but anyone that reads that contract can see that it carefully avoids actually defining what you're licensing. Some nebulous 'IP' (a meaningless buzzword, not anything that has legal meaning) that may or may not be present in any particular flavour of linux. I think this is very much a case of caveat emptor. Anyone that would buy this deserves what they get, and any lawyer that can read this without collapsing on the floor laughing, or tells their client that it's anything other than a license for nothing, is incompetent.
They added an advertising clause.
They're being completely accurate, you're the one that isn't. NT is the kernel for every edition of Windows released since ME.
TSG (please don't call them SCO, they are not the Santa Cruz Operation, which as bad as it was in some way doesn't deserve to be associated with these morons) has danced around this very carefully. They don't ask their customers to buy the 699 licenses. Only other folks (like Red Hat customers for instance.) And if you read the license they're supposedly selling, it goes through amazing contortions to avoid actually saying what they're licensing to you when you buy it. It doesn't claim to be a license for Linux, or for anything else specific, their FUD campaign to the contrary.