SCO Changes Tune, Again: Linux Now Just a Riff on Unix 573
dr3vil writes "eWeek publishes an interview with SCO's Darl McBride and Chris Sontag about the IBM lawsuit. SCO now claim that Linux is a 'nonliteral implementation' of Unix, and compare their claim to those involving Harry Potter rip-offs and Vanilla Ice versus David Bowie and Queen." And ronaldb64 writes "Yahoo Business has a nice summary of the last couple of months of stock movement of SCO, and the reasons why. It contains quotes from business analysts ('Win or lose, the outcome is at least a couple of years away' - 'In the interim, we know the company is going to burn through its cash balance.'), the lack of interest in SCO licenses, the effect the license purchase of EveryOne Ltd. had, and its continuing battle with Novell. The explanation given by pro- and contra-SCO activists is interesting: the pro-SCO group (in the form of SCO CFO Robert Bench) says it is because SCO has been laying low lately, the contra-SCO group (in the form of Eben Moglen) says it is because investors are beginning to understand how weak SCO's case is."
Re:karma whoring opportunity! :D (Score:2, Informative)
the above riff starts david bowie + queen's "under pressure". it was also used by "singer" vanilla ice in his song "ice, ice, baby". hearing the first 5 or so seconds of the song, you cannot distinguish which song it is that is playing (which forces you turn off the radio, for fear of hearing vanilla ice).
joe_bruin
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i'm not an anonymous coward, but i play one on slashdot
Follow the money (Score:5, Informative)
Happy Trails!
Erick
eWeek clarifies - Linus replies re: "tainting" (Score:5, Informative)
"In other words," Torvalds said, "there is no code taint that I'd be afraid of, since no such tainted code exists in the kernel. There is only the issue of SCO's NDA. And, at least back then, Darl was aware of the issue, so this is not a question of misunderstanding. It's a question of Darl knowingly misrepresenting the truth."
like his code, his words are to the point and clear.
Fuck Darl, he's a kockbite.
Re:McBride on record as opposing the GPL in busine (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Backpedaling faster != going back in time (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What gets me... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:it's basically true -- no point in denying it (Score:5, Informative)
No, OS X is NeXTSTeP with updated BSD. NeXT already was a BSD userspace on top of Mach. OS X just updates it from 4.2BSD (or 4.3, i dont remember exactly which 4.x) to FreeBSD (4?). The major changes were in the addition of the MacOS compat layer (Cocoa?) and much work on refining the UI - but its still essentially, IIUC, display postscript (oops, updated to display PDF, iirc) graphics engine with the OpenSTeP API (oops, called carbon now isnt it?). I dont know if OS X uses Objective C as its primary language of choice for its APIs as OpenSTeP did though (but judging by the docs on apple.com, ObjC bindings are supported).
Re:SCO gives MS and other vendors more time (Score:3, Informative)
Check your facts! (Score:1, Informative)
So although Microsoft may have not directly hired anyone that SCO has hired, it's simply not true that Microsoft has nothing to do with SCO's case.
Check your facts before you post your claims. You'll look smarter.
Re:McBride on record as opposing the GPL in busine (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What gets me... (Score:4, Informative)
Do you have parents or grandparents that are retired and have social security?
These are socialist ideas, a purely capitalistic society would not provide anything for anyone without pay. If you can't pay for that heart surgery, you die. Speak to the Ayn Rand cultists if you are interested in such a society.
Heavy trading in SCOX today (Score:3, Informative)
We may be seeing SCO's announced "stock buyback" program in action. Each day, for the last week or so, there's been a big buy in the hour before the close, which tended to stem the day's decline. (Except for Tuesday, when the stock finished about where it started.) Look at the stock volume charts, and notice the late-day peak. Yesterday, there was a really big transaction just before the close, which pushed the stock up to about where it was at the beginning of the week.
Today, trading volume was way up. Unclear how much of this is the buyback. But until the buyback program was announced, the stock had been sliding down steadily, almost linearly, for weeks.
Re:it's basically true -- no point in denying it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What gets me... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Non-Literal Implementation ... (Score:3, Informative)
Elcorton notes that SCO's First Amended Complaint against AutoZone, section 19, asserts, "The Copyrighted Materials include protected expression of code, structure, sequence and/or organization in many categories of UNIX System V functionality ..."
Elcorton writes, "The phrase 'structure, sequence and/or organization' comes from the opinion of the Third Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in the 1986 case Whelan Associates v Jaslow Dental Laboratory, in which the court held that some non-literal elements in the design of software could be protected by copyright. This precedent was cited in a number of cases for the next several years. But in 1992, the Second Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, ruling in the case Computer Associates v Altai, [bitlaw.com] rejected Whelan, and imposed its own much more stringent test for determining whether a software copyright is infringed."
A former CA employee went to work for Altai, taking code from the disputed program with him. Unbeknownst to his employers at Altai, he copied CA's code line for line into a utility being developed by Altai.
After CA brought suit against Altai, the programmer confessed that he had copied code wholesale from the CA program into the Altai product.
Altai executives commenced a "clean room" rewrite of their utility, locking away the tainted code and excluding the offending programmer from the rewrite.
The Second Circuit found in favor of CA on the literal copying, but found against CA on its assertion that the rewritten program also violated its copyrights.
Re:Extremely week argument (Score:2, Informative)
In this case there are only a handful of ways an operating system can in fact be built.
Re:What gets me... (Score:4, Informative)
Pure capitalism doesn't prohibit others from paying the cost (perhaps the doctor would work without pay, or many other possibilities that can and do happen today without government involvement).
Pure capitalism prohibits the government from forcibly seizing one persons property to transfer to another person.
Sontag lies (Score:3, Informative)
b) The required notice is the GPL. Everything in the kernel is covered by that statement and licence. SCO distributed the kernel with the GPL.
Don't trust SCO. Read the GPL yourself.
Linus has a reply... (Score:2, Informative)
Just to let people know that it's not all one-sided.
OS X is NeXTSTEP (Score:1, Informative)
It is indeed NeXTSTEP. Just prettied up a little bit to be "like a Mac OS" (like the desktop icons, menu bar on top, Finder, etc.)
The BSD stuff is now synced with FreeBSD 5. The Mach-based kernel is called XNU. It is either a nod to the GNU project ("X is Not Unix!") or it's a reference to the NuKernel of Rhapsody. Maybe someone else knows.
The entire "pure BSD" system, including kernel, boot and init stuff, along with user tools and other UNIX stuff is called Darwin. Darwin is a complete UNIX operating system in its own right. Has been ported to x86, and the IOKit for drivers is kickin' rad
Carbon is the C-based layer that older programs can be recompiled to use. I *think*
Cocoa is Apple's implementation of the OpenSTEP API. It is based on Objective-C, which is a fantastic language. ObjC is a true superset of C, so you can mix your C, C++, and ObjC code all you want, and GCC is fine with it. What's cool is that a lot of ordinary OpenSTEP compliant ObjC code can build against it. There are programs written for GNUStep that will build against the Cocoa framework.
The graphics server is DisplayPDF, exported as OpenGL textures. This is what Quartz Extreme does, allowing all kinds of cool GUI tricks.
The pretty blue gel-cap widgets, along with the nice icons, layout and spacing ideas, general interface guidelines, is called Aqua. Aqua is more of a design model than any actual code.
Re:What gets me... (Score:5, Informative)
And the other side of that coin is that it doesn't save the sick and the old from being beggars whose survival depends on the mercy of others. That pretty much brings us full circle to the original poster's complaint. Without some flavor of socialized health care, if you can't afford the medicine, you are left for dead -- Oh, unless you beg appropriately or someone takes pity on you.
The rich stay healthy and the sick stay poor. Capitalism will never adjust that situation.
The World According to Darl (Score:5, Informative)
Mr McBride asserts that there is line-by-line code copied into the Linux Kernel
"When you look in the code base and you see line-by-line copy of our Unix System V code... you see that everything is taken straight across. Everything is exactly the same except they have stripped off the copyright notices and pretended it was just Linux code. There could not be a more straightforward case on the Linux side." - Darl McBride, 6/27/2003
Darl is confident that the SCO case is just and good. It couldn't be any more straightforward. The line-by-line copying is so blatant that SCO will win.
"To date, we claim that more than one million lines of UNIX System V protected code have been contributed to Linux through this model. The flaws inherent in the Linux process must be openly addressed and fixed." - Darl McBride, 9/9/2003
Millions, and millions lines of code have been copied right into the Linux kernel!
"A lot of code that you'll be seeing coming on in these copyright cases is not going to be line-by-line code. It will be more along the lines of nonliteral copying, which has more to do with infringement." - Darl McBride, 4/1/2004
Darl.. what happened? For the last year there has been line-by-line copying from UNIX V to Linux. Now "when the rubber hit's the road" that line-by-line thing isn't happening. It is more along the lines of infringement? I'm so disappointed.
Re:What gets me... (Score:4, Informative)
We don't have to knock out the GPL for us to succeed on the copyright issue. The GPL itself supports, in a lot of ways, our positions. Section 0 of the GPL states that the legit copyright holder has to place a notice assigning the copyright over to the GPL.
All these contributions of our IP did not have an assignment by SCO saying here, 'We assign these copyrights to the GPL.' The fact that we participated with Linux does not mean that we inadvertently contributed our code to the GPL. You can't contribute inadvertently to Linux. We feel we have a very strong position based on the GPL.
Sorry, but you don't assign copyrights to the GPL. The GPL is a licence. A licence is not a potental copyright holder. You don't need to assign the copyright to anyone in order to licence your work under the terms of this licence.
Even better, lets look at section 0 of the GPL to see what it really says.
0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains
a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
under the terms of this General Public License.
Where does it talk about copyright assignment here? Where?
Re:What gets me... (Score:4, Informative)
I've given a fair amount of thought to economic systems. The first step is to admit that capitalism is flawed. It is not the end all and be all system that gives us exactly what we want. It does tend to work better than the other systems tried so far, but it is a poor substitute for what we as a society seem to really want. (What sicko is really happy that people are unemployed as opposed to accepting it as an unavoidable problem in capitalism)?
At the same time, the various other isms seem to fall apart rather quickly in most cases. They certainly do not seem to work.
Socialism sort of solves the unemployment problem, but produces a situation where the workers almost wish they WERE unemployed. Productivity tends to become nearly non-existant. Nobody tends to get what they want, only the bare necessities are met (just)
Most of the other isms are little more than a scheme to allow a small class to live in luxury while the masses struggle for subsistance.
Capitalism suffers the perverse problem of like attracting like. It's expensive to be poor, but the more money you have, the easier it is to make more. If you have $10,000 to deposit, you get free checking with interest. If you have no money to deposit, you get to pay 5% of your (tiny) income to a check casher and pay for money orders. Poor people lose deposits and flush rent down the drain. Wealthier people build equity. It's cheaper to own a home than to rent, but you can't own a home if you don't have a down payment.
While socialism holds a gun to your head (perhaps literally), capitalism is no less coercive. Starvation and homelessness is a powerful motivator. That is a coercian so pervasive that it goes unnoticed (until you become unemployed).
Clearly, in capitalism, the path to freedom is business ownership. However, that requires money and a skillset that only some people have. Society needs people with that skillset, but also needs doctors, engineers, carpenters, etc.
I don't have a fully developed alternative to capitalism that works, but I do have a few ideas.
One direction is pervasive automation. Not just automated production lines and welding robots, but robots that make and repair robots. The cost of anything in a healthy capitalist market is driven towards the marginal cost of production. If sufficient automation is in place, it is entirely concievable (though not yet realizable) that the entire chain of production could be automated. That includes gathering raw materials, energy production, transportation, and maintainance of all of the machines. At that point, the real marginal cost is zero. The only obstacle is that someone will own those machines and won't allow them to run for free even though they could. The problem is that starting from a capitalist system, we will never reach the automated ideal. During the transition, most people would end up unemployed, and the cost of things will never quite reach zero.
One possability is a hybrid system. For that, we start with the idea that food, clothing, shelter, medical care, transportation, communication and education are rights. Recieving those from the state is not a form of societal charity, it is simply the recognition of those rights.
That is not as unreasonable as a capitalist might think at first glance. After all, simply being born obligates an individual to obey the law and potentially to serve in the millitary, and all but obligates the person to participate in the economy, so it is only reasonable that society in turn has an obligation to the individual.
So far, it sounds like socialism. The capitalist part is that while those basics are rights other posessions must be paid for just like now in the U.S.
I maintain that such a system will actually encourage capitalism. MOST people actually can't stand to just do nothing and live off of the state if given a choice. Sure, a lot of people might lay around the house for a while given the chance, but eventually, boredom will drive them to hobbies, and ho
Re:What gets me... (Score:3, Informative)
The thing is, as things like automation and such take over, that simply means the workforce needs to re-educate itself to take new jobs. Robots might replace workers on the assembly-line, but humans have to build, design, and maintain those robots as well as draw up the design for the cars.
Using a human mind capable of re-educating itself to do more skilled work as a mindless machine is a huge waste of a valuable resource. In addition, currently that process of re-education is made needlessly painful by the economic threat that unemployment brings.
It's great that you were able to hold out for the job you wanted, but many (most) workers out there simply don't have that option. They have rent or mortgage to pay, children to feed and clothe, etc, and no savings to speak of.
You should go visit a former company town sometime. While some have recovered, others remain economic disasters decades later.
Employment is fairly easy in the U.S. Employment in a decent job making a living wage is somewhat harder for most. Employment in a truly fulfilling job that provides a comfortable living is sufficiently hard that most people end up settling for less.
Consider the number of people who, in the face of being granted their current annual income for life would choose to go to work anyway because it's what they want to do.
Compare that to the number of people who would keep doing the same sort of thing that they do for work, but in their own time and on their own terms.
I maintain that any system that does not allow the latter condition for everyone is necessarily flawed. That doesn't mean I have a ready solution to all of the problems, but it does mean that we aren't done thinking about the problem yet. Our current implementation of Capitalism may be better than the other isms that have been tried, but that doesn't mean it's GOOD, just that its the least BAD.
Consider the various jobs available to people today. If you can't imagine a significant number of people who would do it by choice given that a decent living is free for the taking, it's a great cantidate for automation as soon as it's technically feasible.
You are quite right that someone has to design all of these things. There are plenty of people who enjoy designing things, and if they had nothing but free time and no financial worries, would do it just for the sake of doing it.
Consider operating systems. Windows represents the approach of doing as little as necessary to make as much as possible. MacOS represents competition on quality, and Linux and *BSD represent doing it for the sake of doing it.