SCO: FSF Reply To GPL Claims, Conference Sponsors Back Off? 580
bkuhn writes "Last week's Wall Street Journal (and other news outlets) carried statements by SCO's Mark Heise challenging the "legality" of FSF's GPL.
FSF has
issued a response to this baseless claim." Also, mcgroarty points out that Intel and HP seem to be backing swiftly away from their sponsorship of SCO's in-progress Las Vegas conference (a EWeek article suggests that "Intel Corp. was recently billed as one of the lead sponsors of SCO's Forum 2003 conference here this week, but then suddenly disappeared from all marketing and press material for the forum. It appears that Hewlett-Packard Co. also got cold feet. As late as last week, SCO was telling attendees that HP would be giving a partner keynote at the forum on Tuesday morning. But on Sunday the schedule of events given to attendees when they registered makes no mention of an HP keynote...") M adds: Now we've got a few stories from the conference: News.com.com and Eweek. Despite some bad headline writing at News.com, SCO simply continues to employ the Chewbacca defense, showing no code to back up their claims. Amusingly, Darl McBride started his rant about copyright infringement by copying some footage from a James Bond movie. Bravo!
stock (Score:1, Insightful)
Bravo, indeed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully these companies are seeing SCO's actions for what they are; an outright attempt to hijack the work of thousands of developers by fallacious statements, spin, and, at best, a tiny toehold on the body of work Linux constitutes.
Despite SCO's spin to the contrary, this isn't about the GPL model versus the proprietary software model; it's about unethical versus ethical business practices, and SCO is on the wrong side of the fence.
Would any reputable company now risk involvement with SCO on any level? Look at it this way. SCO made, in essence, a business deal. They distributed their software under the GPL, in an attempt to receive the benefits that the GPL approach can offer, much like Red Hat did. Now, they want to renege on the deal because they think they've got something more profitable. For them to now claim that they somehow didn't understand, or were somehow unaware of, their own business decisions is just completely disingenuous. What company would now sign any kind of business deal with them, knowing that given their history, they're likely to try to cry "do-over!" at some point and redefine their contract, making all sorts of legal threats and spurious statements in the process, and perhaps just decide that your IP is theirs by whatever stretch of the contract wording they can muster?
This is what's bad for business, not the GPL.
On a related note, I'd like to suggest that any companies out there contemplating paying SCO's extortion fees, even if the price is not a concern to them, refuse to pay it on principle. One good argument for not paying the Mafia, is that if you do, they are going to get bigger, and "lean" on you even more. And... I really must apologize to the Mafia for the analogy, as most of their profits derive from "consensual-crime" activity, rather than outright attempts to steal the property of individuals, in direct violation of the spirit and letter of the law. The Mafia has a higher percentage of legitimate business activites than SCO does.
SCO's activities are to the benefit of no one, except themselves. HP and Intel, by contrast, benefit themselves largely through developing products and services to benefit their customers, something SCO has apparently lost the capacity to do. Even the companies which have products in direct competition to Linux would have a hollow victory if SCO's legal challenge to the GPL resulted in an invalidation of the fundamental notion of copyright upon which the GPL rests, and the discretion it gives to the work's creator, for-profit, for-humanity, or both. The sooner this is recognized by everyone, as these two companies are taking the lead toward, the better.
Re:The Bond Clips (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahhhh, but the esteemed counsel that SCO has sought out stated previously, that copyright law allows for one and only one copy to be made, for backup purposes only, so MGM better make damn sure they were using the original footage, with their fingers on the fast forward/rewind buttons, or even they are not in compliance with the SCO version of law.
Re:SCO to sell Samba product... (Score:5, Insightful)
the right to buy a second home??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Miscounted, somewhere? (Score:3, Insightful)
"[SCO] said, for example, that more than 829,000 lines of SMP code had been duplicated in Linux."
829,000 lines for symmetrical multiprocessing code in Linux? I don't have the stats to hand but I seriously doubt that.
Seems a key point (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget the zealotry of we are right and they are wrong, why not look at the code they now show to be infringing and just get rid of (or change) it?
Legal precedent is on the side of this action being the correct one (from my somewhat foggy memories)
Stupidity? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end, what SCO is doing isn't illegal, and it won't get any of them in hotwater unless somebody can proove that they filed the suit only to get the stock up, knowing full well it was a baseless lawsuit. Their claims hold just enough water to keep them safe even if they won't stand up in court.
This is a great demonstration of what is wrong with the focus on creating short term profits in corporate america. The SCO execs are not only sniking the future of their company, but potentially the future of other companies. They are doing so, blindly, for the quick buck.
Re:Boycott SCO? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:On being deserted by Intel and HP. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bravo, indeed... (Score:2, Insightful)
Demanding a promise from SCO to return the money if they lose in court is not good enough. SCO will most likely declare bankruptcy and all your money will be gone.
Re:Seems a key point (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The End is Near (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We are up to a million lines of code! (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does this sound as if somebody just ran the whole directory tree for each of these areas through wc and recited the total number of lines?
Re:We are up to a million lines of code! (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be a nice trick, since SysV didn't have NUMA.
SCO is so full of shit it's not even funny.
They're already specific about the code (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to see their evidence, you'll need to start reading their contracts, not their source code. Any attempt to compare binaries will be hampered by the fact that SCO thinks they own code that they've never even seen, much less compiled.
Chutzpa (Score:3, Insightful)
Without presenting any evidence, or even quasi-evidence, just claims and lawsuits and a magical waving of the arms, they have managed to bring SCO from the verge of being de-listed by NASDAQ (share price under $1.00) to becoming a Wall Street darling, because the share price is now over $10.00.
I'll bet the actual IP of RCU, etc. has already been covered in Operating Systems Courses at dozens of Universities.
Re:Irony - please contact your employer (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They shoot horses, don't they? (Score:5, Insightful)
SCO must be crushed, the open source community and its allies (namely, those who enjoy free development from some really smart folks) must make an example out of this little maggot so that other companies are afraid to follow in SCO's footsteps in the near future.
SCO is a blessing: they're an easy example.
"Fire at will, commander."
Re:They shoot horses, don't they? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stupidity? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hrm. In the sense of the common law, it *is* illegal to bring frivolous cases to court. Tortious interference is illegal, as is trade libel, and so forth. So I wouldn't be so sure about labeling what they are doing "not illegal," if I were you.
C//
Re:Irony - please contact your employer (Score:5, Insightful)
But this is completely in keeping with the way American capitalism works. For instance the Department of the Interior sells leases to ranchers to put cattle on (often overgrazed land). But groups like the Sierra Club have been refused those leases, even though high bidder, because they planned on leaving the land fallow.
The rule seems to be "you must profit by your rights or your rights don't count".
The US isn't alone. How about this story [colbycosh.com] about a Canadian city that won't give a place a liquor license unless they server liquor (they want it so patrons can smoke tobacco).
Ain't humanity wonderfully silly?
Re:The Bond Clips (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, according to SCO any work derived or made for an original is owned by the first inventor/holder. I hope they paid Ian Fleming in full for writing James Bond at first. Or whomever first wrote a spy novel. Or Boccaccio who wrote the first novel. And the Lumiere brothers for making movies possible. And...
I guess you get the idea. If any and all derivative works are considered the property of the original inventor/creator, there would be no inventions, because everything comes from something else...
Hey, we could probably find a sumerian mummy and bring it in court to file a suit against SCO for use of the written language.
Actually, at this point, I'm expecting SCO to sue God or something like that, since his "creation" incorporates works derivative of Unix.
Re:They showed some code (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to sound like RMS here... Don't hate me. (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, there was a time, not too long ago many of us disliked IBM and their tactics. In fact, that may one day happen again. If we set a precident now where you can revoke a GPL'd license just because you don't like someone, where does it stop?
Free software is FREE. SCO is hanging themselves by it and here's why:
Let them use GCC. Let them use Samba. LET THEM! ANY market acceptance of these free products is good PR for these projects on ANY platform - free or otherwise. This is because any platform in competition can then say, "Our version of Linux running Samba 3.x offers the same benefits as SCO's Openserver, except ours costs half the price."
I know we're all in agreement here about how we feel about Darl(ing) McBride and his band of merry lawyers. But they will get what is coming to them if we stick to the GPL. It's worked so far and this long because there's no fighting it when the playfield is even. SCO can't say they didn't agree to the terms of the GPL when they, to this day, continue to release code under it. Sometimes the best offense is a good defense.
And RMS, if you're listening out there, you can tell all your detractors for me to STFU. At least there's still someone alive that sticks to their principles and I respect that.
Lanham Act (Score:3, Insightful)
In IBM's case you have SCO's press release claiming that they pulled the AIX license when in fact Novell contractually forbade SCO from doing any such thing.