SCO's McBride Testifies "Linux Is a copy of UNIX"

eldavojohn writes "Here's a short update on the Novell Vs. SCO case we've been following. Our good friend Darl McBride made some interesting comments in court yesterday. He stated (under oath): 'Many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developers... We have evidence System V is in Linux... When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there's books on "How to Program UNIX" but when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist. Linux is a copy of UNIX, there is no difference [between them]." This flies directly in the face of what SCO found in extensive investigations in 2002 and contradicts what SCO Senior Vice President Chris Sontag had just finished testifying earlier that day (testimony that McBride did not hear)."

So if Novell Owns Unix...

[geoffrobinson]

If Novel Owns Unix and if SCO got money for Linux and its relationship to Unix-rights, McBride basically said "we need to pay Novel the money we got."

The only reason I can think he said this:

1) He actually believes it.
2) He is afraid of fraud charges if he says otherwise. Throw lawsuits into this as well.

The awesome part about this

[WindBourne]

is that McBride really COULD go to prison over this for perjury. And if done right, a deal could be offered to him (1 month or year, instead of 20 years), if he will spill the beans about it. That would have to include MS's and Sun's participation in this. I would guess that McBride is enough of a gutless wonder that he would take the deal. But if he confirms that (Gates and/or Balmer) and McNealy were participants to fleece the companies, what could happen to them? I am guessing nothing.

Re:So if Novell Owns Unix...

[SatanicPuppy]

Darl's not a technical guy; for all we know he really does believe it.

I'm not sure which is worse; a mindless zealot, or a flaming hypocrite.

Re:Perjury

[LaminatorX]

The standard for perjury is higher than meerly lying under oath, otherwise every he-said vs she-said case would be followed up with prosecution of the looser. Witnesses lie quite often. Usually all that happens is that opposing counsel trips them up under cross, or introduces evidence that contradicts their testimony. They loose credibility with the judge/jury, but they don't go to jail.

The grand jury rightly refused to indict Clinton because the lie he got caugh in, while crappy and self-serving, wasn't sufficiently germane to the facts of Paula Jones's suite against him. Lying about something that happened years later, in another state, with a different woman had too little bearing on the claims presented in Jones v. Clinton to warrant a perjury charge.

Linux Programming Books

[Anonymous Coward]

The lawyers should send one of their clerks to the local technical book store and have them buy every book that says Linux Programming in the title (Amazon shows plenty) or have them overnighted from Amazon, and bring them in tomorrow.

Re:I figured they would do this

[mlwmohawk]

people seem to think that even trying to work with MS in any shape or form is a pact with Satan himself.

I would like to see an example where a "big" company did business with Microsoft and did not end up selling out or going out of business. Even DEC caved into Microsoft,

Re:This should be good

[glavenoid]

Hence the pedantic name GNU/Linux...

Re:So if Novell Owns Unix...

[mabhatter654]

But the Open Group is responsible for licensing the name "Unix" and setting the compatibility standards, not SCO. Basically SCO and Open Group were shell companies so that AT&T, IBM, HP, SUN, Novell and other Unix licensers would not get in trouble for anti-trust violations by holding the other companies hostage for technology they all shared.

Daryl is a classic case of the low-level lackey trying to be the tail wagging the dog. That's why Novell is so quick to put them in their place with extreme malice. They're supposed to be "holding the money" for the much bigger companies and they got a small amount of coin to do so. They just bit the hands that feed them. We need a law against technology companies in Texas or Utah!

Re:Dear Mr. McBride,

[vux984]

GNU/Linux, unlike products released by Microsoft (Such as OPENXML), tend to have names which are not doublespeak. This practice of not praciticing doublespeak is also adopted by the Free Software Foundation.

What a load. You tell me which products tell you what they do:

Internet Explorer
SQL Server Management Studio
Photoshop
Windows Mail
Windows Live Messenger
Remote Desktop Connection
Adobe Acrobat Reader

or their FOSS equiv's..

Firefox / Konqueror / IceWeasel...
pgAdmin III / FlameRobin ...
gimp
Thunderbird / Evolution
Pidgin / Gaim
TightVNC / FreeNX
Evince ...

I could go on all day. Sure there are plenty of bad proprietary names, and lots of descriptive OSS names, but suggesting that a characteristic of open source projects is good names is utterly laughable.

Re:This should be good

[KillerBob]

Linux is NOT Unix

You're right. It isn't. It is, however, Unix-like. And intended to be POSIX compliant. And an awful lot of Unix utilities and abilities have found their way into Linux, starting with the System V-compatible init. X, BASH (and its variants)... you could go on for hours listing programs and commands that have found their way into Linux from the Unix world. Perhaps the most obvious example aside from BASH would be XFCE, which models its interface after the CDE.

I don't think that's grounds for a lawsuit. If anything, Linux developers have a case against SCO for including Linux code in their products. McBride is a nutter, and a really bad manager who thought that he bought the rights to everything included in it when they bought Caldera. But you'd be naive to think that Linux doesn't behave like Unix.

Re:This should be good

[korbin_dallas]

Doesn't work like you think.

SCO is part of a larger umbrella holding corporation(Canopy). Think of it as a small clique of petty CEOs, and Darl is a member and SCO is just a front company. Even if the company folded, Darl would have a job.

See what would have hit them where it is really painful is if IBM or Novell had gone after Canopy.

Re:Contradiction=bad things

[cyphercell]

There's some confusion going around here on this subject, you seem to understand as well as the gp. Yes it's illegal to commit perjury, but it's extremely difficult to prove almost to the point that it's a worthless item to prosecute on. The story reads like they are actually going to push for perjury, what it actually takes to prosecute someone for this I have no idea. I know people lie every day in court, they change their story here and change it there, people are so dishonest prosecuting for perjury basically, amounts to writing someone a ticket for eating ice cream on Sunday.

Re:So if Novell Owns Unix...

[jc42]

Just because they work the same way doesn't make Linux a copy of UNIX ...

Actually, it's pretty well documented that the original linux was an implementation of the POSIX standard. And POSIX was openly based on Sys/V. So they should work the same way. But is this what "copy" means? If I use a published government standard doc, can I really be charged with "copying" whatever that standard was based on?

Darl's claim does raise an interesting question: Is he claiming that SCO owns everything based on POSIX? If the court supports this, then he has successfully destroyed much of the US system of government standards. Every standard based on previous industrial usage is in immediate danger of being proprietary, and anything based on a US standard can lead to huge royalty payments, if his claim is upheld.

So is it legally safe to use the POSIX standard? Can any actual IP lawyer assure us that we can safely base our work on this or any other US government standard, without fear of retroactive royalties in the future?