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."
What a joke (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry no more responses allowed after this, or else I'll sue you for non-literal illiterate literation.
karma whoring opportunity! :D (Score:1, Interesting)
This means nothing to me.... who wants to enlighten me and karma whore?
SCOX rampage. (Score:2, Interesting)
This last one hasn't a ghost of a chance but SCO can always fantasize.
Umm.... yeah. (Score:5, Interesting)
Path of least resistance (Score:2, Interesting)
SCO might be making more deals than we know with companies less likely to fight back because they know they will lose the IBM fight... so they're profiting while they can.
In other words, both the critics and the supporters are telling the truth. Their main points don't contradict...
it's basically true -- no point in denying it (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't forget the shareholder (Score:2, Interesting)
When he loses, or if he wins, the downslide in the stock price will probably start off a class action lawsuit - more lawyers getting rich.
The silver lining - McBride gets sued and maybe there's an SEC investigation.
I can dream. Now, I'm going to listen to the Infinite Mind on NPR. Tonight's show is on depression - how appropriate.
Re:What gets me... (Score:4, Interesting)
The only alternative to capitalism is rationing, otherwise known as the government deciding what products you should have, and handing them over.
I've been fascinated by the idea of an economy without money, but even in Communist Russia, there was always money - you just couldn't buy anything with it.
Capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best system we've been able to come up with.
D
Re:What gets me... (Score:5, Interesting)
That doesn't bother me so much - it looks like SCO and Microsoft have determined that it's in their collective best interest to hire this legal team to represent SCO. If it didn't go to the lawyers, it'd just be another lump of cash in Gates' pocket.
As for the IBM legal team, I hope their lawyers trounce on what looks to be this SCO/Microsoft partnership.
And given the details that I know, it looks like IBM will succeed in showing that a SCO/Microsoft partnership is in fact a losing partnership.
The saddest part is some lowly investor who was dupped into buying the stock at more than $1 a share.
Okay (Score:5, Interesting)
Did Darl ever bother to explain under which portions of copyright law, exactly, it is legal or a civil infringement for Linux to be Similar to UNIX?
Just checking.
Sontag and McBride - confused cats (Score:5, Interesting)
Sontag: 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.
The GPL is a license under which copyrighted material can be used by others, it is not an entity to which copyright can be assigned (transferred). Sontag seems to think that the GPL == the FSF, or something along those lines.
It is perfectly possible to "inadvertently" license your copyrighted material to someone else under conditions you don't approve of. The solution is to create a new license to distribute your works under to new people, not to pretend you never did it in the first place.
I also love this part:
Sontag: We feel very covered under the GPL itself, and second, U.S. and international copyright law does not allow for inadvertent assignments of copyrighted material; the copyright holder must make an explicit assignment, typically in writing, in a contract. If that's the strongest argument that's out there that SCO has a big problem here, that's a molehill as far as we're concerned.
This crap is right out of Novell's Motion to Dismiss and Notice of Removal. Novell argues that US Copyright law requires very strict wording to assign copyright, and it does. Unfortunately for this gang of thieves, the GPL is not an entity copyright can be assigned to.
Pierre
Ah lawyers! The next big thing! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, this is an interesting point. 10 or 15 years ago, CS was the hot thing to study in school. The Internet was new, the money was fantastic , now it's changed to law. All the kids will be going to law school, because it is now the hot thing, and the money was fantastic .
Re:What gets me... (Score:4, Interesting)
The only alternative to capitalism is rationing...
That's pretty closed minded. I guess we should rule out just plain old "giving".
Capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best system we've been able to come up with.
So don't even think of looking for or making up something better? There are still some people on the planet that might take issue with your statement, but I'm sure that capitalism IS the best system for some. Most people that believe that are really saying, "It's good to be king."
Re:it's basically true -- no point in denying it (Score:2, Interesting)
In many of those changes, several sub-systems were completely replaced with entire new implementations.
If the system was just a copy, it would simply be a copy of some implementation and it wouldn't had been re-written so many times.
If you look at the Linux system as a whole, you might not notice many innovations: It's just a Unix/Posix implementation, but doesn't everybody keep talking about standards, intereoperability and application portability ?
Posix it's a standard and Linux just adhered to it. In order to be compliant it has to provide the same APIs and thats the reason it doesn't look much innovative at first sight.
However, if you look at the implementation of many subsystems, you will find many innovations and you will continue to see much more as time passes.
Right now Linux is like a laboratory workbench: there are people all over the world researching in operating systems and they are using Linux as their base systems instead of starting from scratch. We don't need to keep reinventing the weel everyday.
I think in the future you will see most innovations appear in Linux first and then get ported to other systems, until Linux finnaly takes over the world.
POSIX! (Score:1, Interesting)
for pete's sake...
sigh
They've always been copy-cats (Score:2, Interesting)
The funny thing is they don't understand the issues well enough to copy correctly. For example, copyright assignment is giving your copyright to another person or company. Copyright licensing (i.e. using the GPL) is providing permission for someone to use your copyright. They are completely separate things. But SCO doesn't understand that and thus they look like idiots in interviews to anyone who pays the least bit of attention.
Re:Rock...Hard Place...Oops (Score:5, Interesting)
Sontag: 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.
End quoth.
I think that what Sontag is saying here is that they inserted their code without the required notice assigning it to the GPL. This would mean that their code is not covered by the GPL (which is counter to their business model) and is still theirs. (Assuming that any code put there actually is theirs).
He says that you "can't contribute inadvertently to Linux" and I think they new that. Their code, according to them, is in Linux, being used by Linux, having never been assigned to the GPL. This means that they deliberatly attempted to "poison" Linux. I can here him saying "Too bad for Linux that they didn't look for the copyright notice."
Re:Sontag and McBride - confused cats (Score:2, Interesting)
Their website still sings their old tune (Score:2, Interesting)
Insider trading at SCO (Score:1, Interesting)
3/03/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Open Market Sale proceeds of $143,276.10
3/03/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $13,261.92
3/03/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Proposed Sale (Form 144) estimated proceeds of $137,237.19
2/04/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Proposed Sale (Form 144) estimated proceeds of $157,958.94
2/04/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Open Market Sale proceeds of $170,510.39
2/04/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $13,261.92
1/26/04 LARRY GASPARRO Divisional Officer 5,259 Open Market Sale proceeds of $81,076.50
1/26/04 LARRY GASPARRO Divisional Officer 5,259 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $47,962.80
1/07/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Open Market Sale proceeds of $210,189.59
1/07/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $13,261.92
Re:What gets me... (Score:2, Interesting)
I am a little confused here? (Score:3, Interesting)
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. This has more to do with sequence, organization, which is copyright-protectable. It's interesting when you go down this path that everyone wants to go to the exact lines of code, but most copyright cases
-- McBride, 2004-4-01
Will this change... (Score:5, Interesting)
By constantly changing what they're saying, does this change the strength (or weakness, as it is) of their case at all? I'm just waiting for some judge to look at this and say, "You guys are full of shit and you can't make up your minds. Case closed, you're ordered to be neutered so that you have no chance of ever reproducing ever again".
Re:What gets me... (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't need to improve capitalism--we need to improve the greedy, amoral practitioners thereof.
We're irrational? McBride says GPL is unconstituti (Score:5, Interesting)
So McBride says that we are all irrational because we do not agree with his side. Traditionally, legal disputes are fought with the admittance that each side is rational - a sort of gentlemen's approach to the fight. Of course, often legal proceedings come down to screaming that the other side is wrong because he's just crazy.
The article mentions SCO's opinions on the GPL, so it may come off redundant that I mention this here, especially since Slashdot rejected it when I submitted it days ago:
SCO's website lists five reasons [sco.com] for choosing SCO over its competitors. The fifth reason; that SCO UNIX is legally unencumbered, contains some inflamatory statements that hint at litigious behavior to come. In an open letter [sco.com] from Darl McBride, SCO has stated that the GPL license violates the US Constitution and current US Copyright and patent laws. From a legal perspective, it seems that SCO is gearing up for a floodgates argument (the weakest kind) that even if Linux doesn't contain SCO code, the GPL license itself is void such that no software can be distributed under the terms of the GPL. This would leave an opening for SCO to attempt to claim ownership of Linux technologies that have not been implicated in SCO's original lawsuit.
Now, McBride is essentially arguing that the Court will find that it is morally wrong for people to develop free software, or software for free since profit is the engine that blah blah blah:
We do so knowing that the voices of thousands of open source developers who believe 'software should be free' cannot prevail against the U.S. Congress and voices of seven U.S. Supreme Court justices who believe that 'the motive of profit is the engine that ensures the progress of science,'" McBride said.
Okay, admit it guys, if there was ever one company you wish Microsoft would just up and swallow, it's this one!
Re:it's basically true -- no point in denying it (Score:2, Interesting)
BSD 4.4 fixed those TCP bugs, became unencumbered of AT&T code in 4.4lite2, and then evolved into the modern *BSDs.
Re:What gets me... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a big one. I think a tendency is to want to regulate executive contracts and pay, but I believe there's another solution. Instead of attacking this symptom directly with hard to enforce laws, attack it at the source.
I'm talking about the role of financial analysts. It's a bit suspicious to me when 30 out of 30 analysts all decide to make the same call on a company in the same day, when there was no activity in the prior three months. I also think that analysts should somehow demonstrate a knowledge of the industry they're following.
I remember awhile back when Merrill finally canned Henry Blodget, the guy who made the self fullfilling call on Amazon. The guy was still recommending buys on stocks that were tanking. Here's an article [upenn.edu] that goes into a bit more detail - the short version being that these jokers recommend 100 buys for every sell.
Rant aside, these CEOs are encouraged into doing short term, risky, and often times very ill-thought out things in the name of their stock price. If analysts would cry foul when they're supposed to, I think you would finally start to see the market correct itself in what might otherwise be ethical or behavorial issues.
Re SCO, I think a group of analysts that a) knew what they were doing, and b) felt they were there to work for the stock buyer (you and me), would have saved the day already. Darl would have seen his stock hitting the floor, been reading the bad press, and stopped his action. I think Enron is another obvious example, with the same conclusion.
Rant over, sorry.
The tragedy of SCO (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What gets me... (Score:1, Interesting)
Well it's not doing a very good job of it, is it? As a matter of fact, it's never done it, has it? "But", you might say, "there's never been pure capitalism!" That, in fact, is exactly the point.
See, "pure capitalism" is just as much a silly fantasy as "pure socialism" because neither of them take in to account very real human motivations, primarily the lust for power.
The reason why the mixed economy has done so well is that the excesses of business and government tend towards mutual regulation. Political economy in a mixed economy is the art of balancing political and economic power to get the least bad social outcome. It's not elegant or ideologically self-consistent. It's sneaky, corrupt and cynical, but so are people.
Utopianism is the worst sort of intellectual masturbation after an unobtainable model. Come join the real world.
Re:What gets me... (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply tax gains and prorate losses based on the holding time of a stock.
In other words, if you make a killing on some sort of quick runup in a security, you take a 99% tax hit if it's the same day, 95% after 7 days, 90% for a 30 day window, on a sliding time scale.
Similarly, if you buy in on a 'hot tip' at 9am, and lose your shirt by afternoon, you can only deduct 1% of your losses. Further out, you can deduct progressively more.
The whole idea is to discourage trading stocks on temporary price, and encourage trading on long term value and real earnings.
Sounds like something worth trying, if you ask me.
Re:What gets me... (Score:4, Interesting)
One point that we must never forget: SCO has produced something very significant in the past year. Prior to their lawsuit, SCOX was hovering around $1. After they released their lawyers, it shot up to $22. IIRC, all the major insiders dumped their shares prior to the current downturn. The travesty of this story isn't the Trial By Fire that Linux/OSS have had to endure and it isn't the FUD that's been generated and weathered. The sad fact, my friends, is that when all is said and done, Darl and his cronies will still have been made obscenely $rich$ by this little pump && dump scheme. And we must not lose sight of this fact. As long as our present system "rewards" slimy execs for this kind of behavior, we will always have another Darl and another Boies waiting for their turn to cash in. The only happy ending for this story could be if Darl and his sychophants are imprisoned for Securities Fraud. That's the only way justice will be served in this case.
Think bigger (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't a tough climb just for the USA, but most of the countries in the world. To directly comment on your statement:
I have studied the events of the early 1900's and came to the conclusion that events like the Great Depression were used as the vehicle to get things like unemployment and social security inserted into our social and economic fabric, but they were certainly not the only means to affect real and substantial recovery.
Darls been reading my comments on GrokLaw (Score:2, Interesting)
Still it took him three weeks to find it.
Re:Europeans are trained from birth... (Score:3, Interesting)
i must have seen the non-US and non-UK history textbooks where it talks about the slavery of various forms in colonies around the world. the massacares in india.. oppression.. but you said you read the US and UK history books. i'm not surprised you didn't see any of that.
"what is history but a fable agreed upon" - Napoleon
"The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down." - Whitney Brown
and
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." - Winston Churchill
read just the bolded parts and you'll get the message.
Re:What gets me... (Score:3, Interesting)
My main point of disagreement is that saying food, shelter, etc. are rights even if you don't work. I think that for someone to collect on those rights, they (if able bodied) should do SOMETHING for the government. But there should ALWAYS be some kind of job available, so no one would be truly unemployed.
Ultimately, the economy and society should exist to bring the maximum quality of life to all of its citizens. What we in the western world tend to forget and ignore is that the quality of life is best when we are doing things we enjoy with other people, and are not frantically running around always busy.
I think an economic system can be built around these ideas that solves most of the problems of capitalism. Give every able-bodied person who works at SOMETHING what he/she needs, and beyond that reward them well when they come up with innovative ideas that society as a whole can benefit from.
I also agree with the automation bit, but don't think I'd go as far as you. The quality of life is better the less boring work we have to do and stupid beauracracy is in the way. If we could find a way to automate most things for the benefit of society, the amount of work people would have to do would plummet, and we would be able to spend more time with friends. That is, after all, what life is about (well, part of it anyway).
Socialism has some of these ideas right, but it got out of hand by putting too much power in the hands of too few corrupt people. Finding a way to fix that solution is absolutely essential before we can dump capitalism.
At the risk of a flamewar, the other area where Communism failed miserably is its banning of religion. Most people want to believe in God, period. Any economic system should allow for religious freedom.
Re:What gets me... (Score:2, Interesting)
It should be possible that everyone can survive without working, but they wouldn't necessarily enjoy it as much as those who work.
As for automation freeing us... it's not automation limiting us, it's our culture. Over the years automation has reduced the difficulty of certain chores. And yet we've just increased the number of chores we do. Case in point, the computer reduces paperwork and makes accounting a breeze. So, we make accounting more difficult, with more options and tax types and places to put the money etc. etc. because now we can. We make more paperwork and we fill out more reports because beforehand it was too much work to process all those reports. Now, it's easy so we do more of them.
You know, in France they have seven-hour work days and 40 holidays a year! They're really relaxed over there; restaurants don't post hours. They open when they feel like it and close when the employees are tired. The question is, why are we choosing to make our workdays longer and longer in North America? I'd much prefer to hang out with friends more... wouldn't you?
As for Communism banning religion. Yeah, I think you're right. However, I would add that the government shouldn't get involved with religion, period. It embarrasing that Dubya ends his speeches with "God bless us". As a person he can be a Christian, but as President he shouldn't throw about his private beliefs. It's downright indecent.