SCO: Code Proof Analyzed, Linus Interviewed 890
Arker writes "Bruce Perens has now obtained a copy of the entire slide show from which the recently scrutinized SCO-related Linux code excerpts came, and has analyzed the remainder of the 'evidence' they presented there. Their other code exhibit turns out to have been the venerable Berkeley Packet Filter(!), and their revised line-counts are consistent with simply adding together all the lines of code that have been contributed by Unix licensees." Also, Iphtashu Fitz writes "A new interview with Linus Torvalds has been posted on eWeek.com. In it he slams SCO over the recently leaked source code. Among other things, he points out in the interview that some of the code in question has been removed from the 2.6 kernel ['because developers complained about how "ugly" it was'] before SCO even started complaining."
Please! (Score:5, Interesting)
Ummm, isn't Bruce setting himself up? (Score:0, Interesting)
Likewise, if I were to republish confidential documents from someone like Cisco Systems, couldn't I be sued for damages?
Re:Please! (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile SCOX will plumment and leave a lot of angry investors.
I doubt the SEC will get involve though, as this is looking less and less like a stock "pump and dump" scheme and more and more like an average case of sheer corporate idiocy.
Classic Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
Torvalds: "They are smoking crack"
---
You gotta love Linus. It's not just that he speaks his mind, it's that he's just cavalier about what he says.
On a serious note, I'd like to see some the guys involved with SMP or JFS or NUMA get together and *sue SCO.* Tell them they want a cut of any license they collect on unless they can PROVE they aren't claiming ownership of parts of their GPL/BSD contributed code.
A couple of things left out (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually mentioned this in my submission, but it got cut out.
The 'SCO' slide of their 'own' code shows the Berkley Packet Filter. The Linux code they showed, they claim is an 'obfuscated copy' but it is in fact a well documented clean implementation written from the published spec. The interesting issue is that SCO seems to be under the misapprehension that the BFP is their own code to begin with - that seems to imply that they illegally stripped a copyright notice somewhere along the way.
Criminal prosecution (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems frivolous and an abuse of the justice system.
Drawing it out... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then they went on extortion trips to Japan and around the U.S. Neither panned out, with major companies like Oracle, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi and H-P calling their bluff. Accusations without proof are meaningless.
They showed code snippets under super-tight NDAs, mostly to non-geeks, who promptly said "yep, they look the same". Of COURSE they looked the same! Would SCO show code that doesn't match? The fact that it was all out of context didn't seem to matter.
When THAT didn't convince anyone, they started showing bits of code without an NDA -- and the rest of the world found out why IBM, Oracle, Fujitsu, et. al. isn't afraid and why SCO was so reluctant to show the code in the first place.
SCO is clueless. They have no idea what they own and what they don't. They don't know what they, as Caldera and SCO, gave away and what they "borrowed" from others for their own. They simply assume that any
Somebody just did a "diff" between the SCO source and a Linux kernel and went off from there.
Just watching them escalate the claims day after day gives a clue. First it is dozens of lines, then hundreds, then thousands, and now MILLIONS!
The truth is SCO probably had NO intention of this getting to the discovery phase -- they were hoping for a settlement or buyout before all this came to light.
They are quite desparate now.
Damn! I wish I bought SCOX back in November.
Danger: Stupid, Tech Ignorant Judge. (Score:5, Interesting)
It may be one heck of a long shot for them, but dumber rulings have been made before.
Suddenly SCO not only owns Linux, but that could also qualify them as owning BSD as well as anything that even closely resembles UNIX in one way or another. They might even be able to lay claim to parts of every operating system out there so long as that OS borrowed concepts from UNIX (or BSD, Linux, etc.) Doesn't Windows have code copied from BSD too? Or maybe that is what Microsoft "lisenced" already...
FSF disagrees with Parens (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Get rid of the BSD Code (Score:5, Interesting)
Whatever for?
If it's to help develop a competing approach to solving a problem, I'm all for it: whichever one winds up proving to be best at solving the problem should be the one adopted, even if it's the other camp's solution.
But dumping the BSD code just to be "unique" is silly.
With respect to this SCO nonsense, the only thing I care about is whether or not the origins of the contributed code can be traced. If a piece of code winds up in, say, FreeBSD, I expect they have checked its source as thoroughly as the Linux maintainers would for any code contributed directly to Linux. In short, I see little reason to discriminate between the two.
Finally, if a piece of code winds up in either distribution that shouldn't, then it's a moderately simple matter of pulling the code and rewriting it if necessary if it's found that the contributer who donated the code did so without proper authorization. One would hope that a court would find the action of such removal and rewriting in the face of accidental infringement to be sufficient remedial action once the infringing code is revealed. But this is the U.S. legal system we're talking about here, and it seems to be so screwed up that I can't dismiss the possibility that it would rule heavily against an accidental infringer. In fact, things seem bad enough that I have to consider such a situation to be likely.
Sigh...
Tarnished his reputation... (Score:1, Interesting)
First amendment is irrelevant (Score:3, Interesting)
That's actually not true. If I steal something from them, I'm culpable. Having free speech does not relieve you of the consequences of what you say, or the concepts of libel and slander wouldn't exist. This is a civil matter, not a criminal one, and the first amendment is irrelevant here.
That said, Bruce got the thing from a guy who was, himself, non-NDA'd. So he's not liable.
I was getting worried... (Score:2, Interesting)
But after reading the Perens analysis (ya I know, against the rules to read the article) I can't possibly believe SCO has a case based on code infringement.
Now, it seems SCO's case will be an attack on software engineering itself. Any original code added to SCO's Unix code becomes the property of SCO? I am not a computer scientist (IANACS), but is it me or does this statement violate the entire known history of software development and licencing, including SCO's own corporate behavior?
I think Linus is right, they are smoking crack.
Not exactly... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What's that I hear? (Score:2, Interesting)
You and I wish. I've been following it for weeks, and it just refuse to drop. Too little volyme! None sane wants to touch this one, which makes it easy for insiders and others to manipulate it. See for instance all the tape-painting at the end of the day. Small lots someone is basically selling to himself just to push the stock up before closing, giving it a "nice" start-end value, not representative of the day as a whole.
And I say unto SCO ... ha ha! (Score:4, Interesting)
They had installed a UniBasic system which ran the company database, written for the TeleVidio terminal family which was being emulated by Wyse-30's. Naturally I found this intolerable so I modified the UniBasic code and inserted VT100 escape sequences to fix the most important screens so that we could telnet to the SCO box instead of using the Wyse-30's which were blowing up and not being replaced.
That was until I dumped the entire UniBasic system. I wrote a terminal macro to repeat a sequence of keypresses and logged the session to a text file. Then I wrote an awk script to parse the text file into a bunch of smaller files. Then I prepended and html-ized these little files, and finally I indexed them with Glimpse.
Man it rocked. You could do a glimpse search and get exactly the same info that you would have gotten by using the Unibasic from the Wyse-30 right from your web browser.
Right after I did this ( I was a temp ), the parent company completely shut down our company and moved it to Massachussets, firing everybody at my factory. Unfortunately, they still haven't figured out how to connect the SCO box back up and make it work again. Eh? Fixed IP what the hell is that!?! Hahahahah you dumb asses!
SCO is so ass-backwards I can see how this whole thing came about. They must have fired anybody with brains decades ago, and they are just milking their cash cow until it dies.
Re:Ummm, isn't Bruce setting himself up? (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems to be consistant with their level of legal ineptitude.
Re:Call the FTC! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Linus Pulls no Punches (Score:2, Interesting)
I said if SCO showed the code we'd be able to track down who really wrote it.
I said there's a good chance Linus will recognise his own handywork.
and it's not that I'm the amazing Mandrake or anything. It's just so damed obveous it hurts. SCO stold Linux code and they know it and then try to play like we're the crooks.
I hear stories of this sort of thing happening all the time in the public domain world. I didn't know if it was true or myth so I wouldn't say anything but the rummors sure as hell frightend the typical public domain author.
But this is liccensed GPL code, We have a whole community to defend and SCO's over charging for it all.
Re:"treated .. as" (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is the subject of either the "side-agreement" or "letter of understanding" that IBM received from (I believe) AT&T.
If it was a side-agreement, then IBM should be in the clear regarding any derived works, but any Sequent code may have a problem (assuming the judge agrees with SCO's interpretation of this clause).
If it was a letter of understanding, then a letter of understanding would apply to all licensees, IBM and Sequent, and SCO wouldn't have any leg to stand on.
But IANAL, so what the hell do I know.
Linux PPC Question? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not as if SCO ever had anything (ever) to do with it.....
Hmm, IBM invented it, and SCO UNIX don't run on PPC...
Can anyone shed any light on this for me?
Re:Please! (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux isn't monolithic, after all... (Score:5, Interesting)
Like in response to a SCO letter: "Our 'Linux' is a non-infringing custom build. Goodbye."
The burden of proof lies with them, doesn't it? How would they go about proving otherwise, assuming there's even anything there to prove?
Re:A couple of things left out (Score:5, Interesting)
With the information given, it's quite plausible that AT&T originally copied BPF into sysv (sans copyright notice), and never bothered to put it back after the UC Berkeley settlement. Then SCO inherited the sysv mess.
They still deserve to burn, especially after Darl's fervent claims that "we are not talking about BSD code"! Talk about willful ignorance..
Re:IBM (Score:1, Interesting)
What about IBM hard drives? The later versions of those sucked.
Re:Classic Linus (Score:4, Interesting)
IBM obviously didnt do anything with OSF/1, as AIX is not based on it, its some kind of bastardisation of SysVr2 or 3. HP I dont think did anything with OSF/1 either, as HP-UX is a BSD4. derivative, IIRC.
Tru-64 though would be completely in the clear. (though Tru-64 does have a SysVr4 compatibility layer, licenced from AT&T / USL).
There's a unix family tree somewhere on the net that details it all, its.....
HP-UX - SysVr4
AIX - SysVr2
IRIX - BSD4.2
(hmm.. but i thought they switched with IRIX6 to SysV?)
Tru-64 - Mach (which tends to be more BSDish)
geneology's a fascinating thing.
Re:Weird Linus behavior? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:IBM (Score:5, Interesting)
Umm, remember this story [theregister.co.uk] from the start of the year?.
We had a number of IBM boards fritz with deformed, malfunctioning capacitors.
Having said that IBM were very professional in coming out quickly and changing the boards free of charge.
Your point is valid but your example spectacularly poor.
Re:How to handle SCO (Score:5, Interesting)
A company by the name of Head Games Publishing had downloaded a couple hundred Quake levels that had been created by a number of gamers, stripped their copyright notices, burned up a bunch of CDs with the levels and sold it as their own. The question that the lawyers kept asking me was "How much money did you lose as a result of their violating your copyright?" Because my primary objective in enforcing my copyright was to insure that anyone could download and enjoy my levels free of charge, I couldn't really name a dollar amount.
This apparently made it difficult to sue. I had $10,000 of my own money that I was willing to spend on this, and I could not convince the attorneys at Lane Powell Spears Luberski in Seattle to take the case. The impression that I came away with was that because of the lack of money involved with keeping the intellectual property "free", they didn't think that I (or they) would get anything out of winning the suit, and they weren't willing to take my paltry 10 grand to demonstrate that to me, which I guess I appreciate.
The situation that I was in may be similar to the SCO/JFS situation. Individual copyright owners of the JFS could have as much difficulty suing SCO as I had trying to enforce copyright ownership of intellectual property that I wanted to make freely available under a particular license.
Re:How legit is this? (Score:3, Interesting)
And the fact is that's the best case for SCO on the examples that have been shown. It's probably worse for them. One example, the architecture specific file for a few old SGI machines, was contributed to SGI and if SCOs allegations are true then they are guilty of something here, if only not preserving a mandatory copyright notice. But even that isn't proven by what SCO has shown - they just showed that a comment had survived after all, and comments are not code.
The other example is even worse - SCO claimed a clean reimplementation in linux was an 'obfuscated copy' but since the origin of the linux code is well documented all they've done is demonstrate that they can't tell the difference, as we suspected, and on top of that the code they presented as their own actually comes from Carnegie-Mellon and Stanford, by way of Berkley, and isn't owned by SCO at all! It's apparently in their Unix code in violation of license on exactly the same grounds that the SGI code in linux they claimed is!
You're right, this was just supposed to be Kool-aid for their troops, it got leaked because they screwed up and let someone with a brain into their conference, and then being as stupid as they are they went ahead and leaked the rest of the stuff thinking it would make things better. But instead, they've shown pretty conclusively that just as we suspected they can't tell the difference between the stuff they own and the stuff they are using under license from Berkley.
nice work. (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed Bruce aludes to this:
I was able to determine the origin of BPF after a few minutes of web searches on google.com . Why couldn't a "pattern-recognition team" do the same? It's difficult to believe they simply didn't bother to check. It's also likely that SCO dropped attribution of the Lab's copyright from the System V copy of the BPF source code, or the team would have known.
Great stuff. It's hard to tell what happened to the attribution. SCO is careless, dishonest or both. In general, dishonest people only think they are smarter than those around them.
Old SuSE VP of IB with SCO? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Blepp, a former VP of International Business at SuSE, brings to SCO a wealth of experience in marketing and business management from time at Network Associates and Computer Associates. Blepp's appointment is taking place at SCOForum in Las Vegas this week where he is being introduced to SCO partners and resellers."
Slide show misrepresents the legal case (Score:5, Interesting)
Slides 3, 4, and 5 document SCO's contract with Novell to acquire Unix IP. I don't see anything funny there.
The funny part is on slides 6 and 7. Slide 6 contains excerpts of the AT&T License Agreement with IBM. Slide 7 contains more excerpts from the AT&T License Agreement with IBM, except that "AT&T" is changed to SCO in one place.
However, this is just the Licensing Agreement. This just the contract that allows IBM to use AT&T Unix within its organization.
Beyond this contract, IBM also has a Sub-Licensing Agreement. The sub-licensing agreement allows IBM to sell Unix products to its customers. SCO's presentation does not talk about the sub-licensing agreement at all, but this agreement is one of the contracts filed with the Court.
To draw an analogy: the License Agreement is like the agreement that lets you run Windows on your PC. The Sub-License Agreement is like the contract that lets Dell sell Windows to other people. SCO's presentation quotes the License Agreement, and says that license prohibits IBM from distributing code. But SCO's presentation ignores the Sub-License Agreement, which allows IBM to sell UNIX to its customers.
On top of that, IBM has a third agreement with AT&T which grants IBM additional rights on top of the Sub-Licensing Agreement. The third agreement explicitly states:
2. Regarding section 2.01, we agree that modifications and derivative works prepared by or for you are owned by you.
7.06(a) Nothing in this agreement shall prevent LICENSEE from developing or marketing products or services employing ideas, concepts, know-how or techniques related to data processing embodied in SOFTWARE PRODUTCS subject to this Agreement, provided that LICENSEE shall not copy any code from such SOFTWARE PRODUCTS into any such product or in connection with any such service and employees of LICENSEE shall not refer to the physical documents and materials comprising SOFTWARE PRODUCTS subject to this Agreement when they are developing any such products or service or providing any such service.
You can read the contracts for yourself. They are Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and Exhibit C at SCO Lawsuit Documents [sco.com].
So IBM has an explicit right for their engineers who have worked on the UNIX source code use ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques in other IBM products. IBM paid good money for this right from the lawful copyright holders. (This may explain why SCO is attacking the Sequent contributions, because Sequent doesn't have as much rights in its contract as IBM has in theirs).
This brings us to Slide #22, where an IBM engineer posts information about his experience with scalability in AIX. Under section 7.06(a) above, IBM has the explicit right to disseminate such information about Unix (let alone IBM's rights to talk about property which is purely theirs, such as JFS).
SCO knows this. SCO filed these contracts with the Court (accessible through Pacer) and SCO also published these contracts on their web site.
I would love for reporters to dig into the actual exhibits and ask questions based on the exhibits. Just hit the SCO Lawsuit Documents link above and read the exhibits.
Emotional Suffering (Score:2, Interesting)
eWEEK asked:
Who is going to compensate us the users of Linux for all the stress we have suffered over SCO's fraudulent [sltrib.com] stock [computerworld.com] manipulation [zdnet.co.uk] scam? Are they going to pay the entire Linux community all the profits they have made from their artificial inflations of their stock plus punitive damages?Better yet: How about a class action suit against Canopy Group? They have made millions during the course of this scam while threatening busnesses and everyone's freedom. People of the World v. Canopy Group sounds nice. They should pay for our anguish with a multiple of the profit they made by these actions.
Let everyone know! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I think we speak for all of us: (Score:5, Interesting)
Multi-processor capabilities requires extremely high fault tolerances. Multi-processor memories requires "locking" at a fraction of a millisecond. These developments, among others, could not have been accomplished in a compressed time period without direct access to 25 years of UNIX development expertise and use of state-of-the-art Unix development labs.
They're saying that the jump from 2.2 to 2.6 an "Improbable Linux Development Path". For me, a non-kernel hacker, can someone explain why this particular point isn't true? Or do you have to pull from many examples in order to prove otherwise?
counter-NDA (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:See The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate (Score:5, Interesting)
Also Tanebaum wrote a book and Linus bought it and asked him to sign it about a decade after the debate broke out. He refused and was still angy with him! Linus was dumbfounded.
Linus is not an angry or ego driven person. Its not in his personality. He even decided to get involved in the drm debate only after he was forced to take a stand. His stand was, I don't care and will not impose my views on anyone else. To do so would destroy the spirit of Linux itself. If anyone wants drm let them add it as a kernel module. Its their choice.
RMS even called Linus only an engineer and not an advocate.
Only one time I have ever seen him angry. That was from someone demanding again and again to add his patch to the kernel. He finally got angry and told the reasons why he would not accept the patch and he would ignore this person further unless the patch was accepted by more distro's and users.
My guess is he hates nonesense and wants this nightmare to end. Also his job could be on the line if SCO files an injunction to close kernel.org. If Linus can't share his tree then OSDL will have nothing for him to do and will probably can him.
Using SCO:s arguments against them? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:How to handle SCO (Score:4, Interesting)
Process should go like this.
Send a cease and desist letter explaining that you have Copyright to code that is being shipped by SCO and that given they have publically violated the terms of this license and that you demand them to stop shipping any further products. Lift the wording directly off pertinent parts of their own legal documents against IBM.
a) Don't explain what the violating code is. (that comes in a subsequent letter - if it ever gets there.) Make sure however that they HAVE shipped any product with your code.
b) Request damages. Take the working directly off pertinent parts of their public demands on companies using Linux products. Don't justify it but make it so you could argue in front of a Judge with a straight face. (remeber that RIAA is suing downloaders minimum $750 for $1 songs and up to $150,000 PER SONG so you don't need to dilly dally too much to justify 6 or 7 digit figures - or even 9 digit figues if you take their own example against IBM.)
c) Place a time frame in which they must respond by and make it very clear what you think they must do (stop shipping all products - because they all infringe by .. (give them the exact same time frame they gave IBM - to the day).
Cite relevant copyright law.
Make the letter as official looking as possible. If you have a brother in law who's an attourny, see if you could somehow have it sent by that office, just to add some pepper.
Send it FedEx next day air and have it signed for.
Wait the appropriate time.
2 thing could happen -
1) they may (likely) not respond at all. If this happens you should send another letter indicating that their lack of response now forces you to take legal action and that they now have xx days to respond before you WILL take steps for legal action and that you will also be suing for costs and injunctive relief.
2) They do respond. It will likely be a brush off. "We own yadda yadda ..", that's fine, they just gave you evidence for your court hearing. They acknowledged they got your letter, they dismiss all claims against them which you can now in turn use against them in exactly the same way as they used against Linux - ooh spooky. At this time you send another letter refuting all their claims (especially any asking for evidence unless they sign a really onerous NDA) and threaten to subpoena all their code to validate your claim.
Now is where you give them some breathing room. Tell them if they are prepared to:
Remove the company officers ... maybe
Renounce all this nonsense they have said.
That you would be prepared to negotiate a nominal settlement. Basically you need to seem to be preparing a case making it look like you're a reasonable person. You really DONT want to file legal action just yet. The response (if any) you get from this letter will be more ammo for you case.
NOW you're ready to file.
For starters, this is where you really need to talk to an attorney and do lots and lots of research. Talk to a number of attorneys, take the letter with you. Most attorneys would love to spend a few minutes chewing the fat on somthing like this. Go to a legal library, find relevant cases etc and file the papers yourself. If their smart, the first thing that SCO will do is ask to settle because legally you are right. But since smart cells are in short supply at SCO nowadays you may find youself dragged into a nasty counter-suit. If you and 1000 others actually get this far you can consider that you have already won. There is NO way a company like SCO would ever be able to pay the costs of dealing with so many legal actions - most of which they are likely to loose. However, you may be the only guy doing this so you might find yourself in hot water - but you may actually win.
.... This is how to handle SCO.
Re:See The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate (Score:2, Interesting)
I had not heard about the book-signing incident, and find it somewhat hard to believe to be honest (not saying you're lying, just that I'm surprised). I only know Tanenbaum in passing, but he always struck me as a nice, if somewhat odd, person.
Re:I think we speak for all of us: (Score:5, Interesting)
Because Alan Cox is, frankly, rather brighter than Darl McBride. Yes, I know, as others have posted, IBM and others have contributed to Linux' multi-processing code. But it worked extremely well before they did - I know, I was running a dual processor Pentium Pro with dual RAID5 arrays in late 1996 or early 1997, and that was running on Alan Cox's SMP patch to the 2.2 kernel (might even have been a 2.0 kernel).
Re:surely they have a case (Score:5, Interesting)
"Your claims are nonsense because you don't own this code, and here is evidence of where the code was made freely available before your company even existed. Oh, and the code sucks so much that you're the only ones who even want to use it. Shouldn't you be spending more on developers and less on incompetent lawyers?"
Re:I think we speak for all of us: (Score:3, Interesting)
It should be easy to convince any non-runners of this. Have you ever run a 100 meter in 10 seconds? Do you know any who have?
In the Linux case, see for yourself: check out the traffic on the kernel mailing list. Is has been summarized on the kernel-traffic page.
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/archives.html
(KT is "published" every few weeks, so its not something Zack Brown made up after the SCO case)
Try searching for say, SMP. You won't find one post from IBM saying: Hey, just use out UNIX code but don't tell SCO.
Instead you will see some very smart people working very hard on improving the Linux kernel. That is how it happened.
BTW: SCO is mentioned on KT:
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20000911
Re:Classic Linus (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been toying with the idea of making t-shirts just like that and sell them to pay for costs. What do you think?
Re:I think we speak for all of us: (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a hardware jock that has worked on 4 different commercial unix systems (from the development point of view.) All were multi-processors and I was doing this in 1982.
The first machine two machines I saw the work performed on was BSD! The last machines were Sys V plus Berkeley enhancements. These were in the mid 80's. So we're talking between 15 and 20 years ago. Not one of these companies was SCO by the way
In any case- I've seen several different engineers with the requisite skill set do this, and it worked quite well thank you very much.
At the same time, it took on the average of 1-2 years for a couple of programmers to add the multi-processing features to the OS. Hmmm, and consider that Linux was multiprocessing on a more primitive level by 2.4 kernel (or was it 2.2?) In any case for at LEAST 2 years and actually more like 5 years. They have just been improving it!
Not Rocket science.
that's easy to do. (Score:3, Interesting)
A very superficial examination is enough to raise suspision. Microsoft is funding them and they are saying all the same things Microsoft used to. There's always more when you are dealing with liars, but the superficial details should be enough. If it stinks, don't put it in your mouth.
Microsoft is the only member of the technical community to pay SCO's Linux extortion. This comes despite the fact that Microsoft has no Linux software and publically states that they have no plans for any either. Microsoft has used BSD code forever and that was sufficient, until recently, for their Unix products. SCO has one other corporate custormer that they refuse to identify. I imagine that they have suffered a devistating DLoP (Distributed Lack of Purchasing) attack that makes their former poor sales look great. Without Micfosoft's money, SCO would be bankrupt by now. They will go that way, a great tragedy for all those employed there who made the great Caldera Linux packages and other good software.
All the things that SCO is now saying sound exactly like the FUD that M$ used to put out about the GPL and free software. They insinuate that free software is dishonest and stollen as if only commercial software writers ever have a novel idea or are able to read computer science texts. They claim irresposisble tracking of contributions because free software developers can't look at the code comercial software vendors keep hidden, and claim this creates liabilities for users of free software. All of this, of course, is the kind of double talk that's been comming out of Bill Gates mouth from the beninning of his career, pay up you thieves, or you will have no quality software [blinkenlights.com]. The treat was bullshit then and it is bullshit now. People can and did co-operate to build software that's both superior to comercial software and honestly free. People realize that, and Microsoft understood that thier anti-GPL campaign, calling the GPL a cancer, unAmerican hippy ware and all that, had backfired. SCO is now saying all the same things under Microsoft's pay.
Microsoft thinks it's getting their money's worth out of SCO investment, but they are wrong. Their scheeming is transparent, easy to explain and will blow up in their faces. Thier other missdeeds and poor performance proved they were an evil company. Security problems convinced me not to use their software for networking. Their anti-GPL campaign convinced me to avoid their software and vocally oppose them. This SCO shit makes me want to throw rocks at them. Here, I am, Microsoft free, and still I have to worry about their nonsense. It should convince everyone that there is no escaping Microsoft's influence and misdeeds until they are out of business.
Re:Since SCOX is up... again, (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. It's a day-trader's delight: small amount of stock, low priced, and the subject of 2 legal actions, so it's extremely volatile and cheap to play with.
Looking at today's action so far (look at the 1-day view Cdl chart, and remember that dark blue means trading for that period closed lower than it opened), it looks like some large "Sell at market" order or orders got executed right at the opening, which can leave the short-sellers scrambling to buy shares to cover their shorts (in more ways than one) and drives the price up quickly. There was a 60,000 share flurry at a bit after 10AM ... overall they closed higher, but it might be the latest bunch of fools arriving to buy form the last set.
Re:Call the FTC! (Score:3, Interesting)
That wasn't a good idea. Now you've entered conspiracy-theory land, where the authorities simply stop listening to you. There is absolutely no proof whatsoever that MS is behind this, and you just sound like another drooling paranoid anti-MS zealot when you go around repeating stuff like this. I violently dislike MS too, but give credit where credit's due. SCO is probably doing all of this on their own for the profit of their own executives.
All MS did was license some UNIX stuff early on, right after the case got started. That's circumstantial evidence at best -- correlation, not causation. You're not going to win any friends among prosecutors if you make unfounded accusations like that.