13-Year-Old Linux Dispute Returns As SCO Files New Appeal (theinquirer.net) 233
An anonymous reader quotes a report from THE INQUIRER: Now-defunct Unix vendor, which claimed that Linux infringed its intellectual property and sought as much as $5 billion in compensation from IBM, has filed notice of yet another appeal in the 13-year-old dispute. The appeal comes after a ruling at the end of February when SCO's arguments claiming intellectual property ownership over parts of Unix were rejected by a U.S. district court. That judgment noted that SCO had minimal resources to defend counter-claims filed by IBM due to SCO's bankruptcy.
"It is ordered and adjudged that pursuant to the orders of the court entered on July 10, 2013, February 5, 2016, and February 8, 2016, judgement is entered in favor of the defendant and plaintiff's causes of action are dismissed with prejudice," stated the document. Now, though, SCO has filed yet again to appeal that judgement, although the precise grounds it is claiming haven't yet been disclosed.
Zombie (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't someone kill this zombie process
Re:Zombie (Score:5, Funny)
Can't someone kill this zombie process
No, it's maintained by systemd now.
Re:Zombie (the "d" in systemd) (Score:3)
The d in systemd stands for defunct, as originally intended.
The court case will determine if it stands for "die, already"
The planets are in alignment. Slashdot will be forced to print a dupe of a 13 year old story, on April Fool's Day no less, which triggers a fresh 13-year cycle of dupes that really aren't. And we have SCO to thank. Whodathunkit?
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Looks like a shotgun wedding.
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kill -1 1
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It's not 1995 any more. You can just load it up in HTOP and use a mouse!
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You have been assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Actually, a good idea. Can't some judge just rule that they don't have enough to pay the legal expenses and order the company forfeited to IBM lock, stock, and barrel?
IBM can start by firing the SCO people and handing them lead parachutes instead of the usual golden ones. Along with termination terms that forbid ever getting involved with any Unix-like product ever again.
Then it can grind up the rest of the company into a fine power and distribute it over Chernobyl.
And just for good measure, destroy all rec
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Better yet, give them blindfolds and cigarettes and tell them to line up over by that big brick wall...
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And just for good measure, destroy all records that SCO ever had back to the Beginning of Time.
We should probably find everyone who has ever been involved, move them to another planet, erase their timeline, remove every atoms interaction with the universe then nuke them from orbit, just to be sure.
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Let's leave Chernobyl out of it - I'm pretty sure SCO evolved from some sort of parasitic pond scum, so grinding it up is unlikely to kill it, and I'd hate to see what it mutates into with all that radiation at its disposal.
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They tried and that's why SCO filed the appeal, apparently they own the rights to 'kill', 'killall' and derivatives.
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So use the systemd halt service.
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Sometimes a process gets so zombied it actually cannot die anymore. Do not remember the details, but happened to me once. Only a reboot will fix these.
Re:Zombie (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen it happen a lot on servers. It usually happens because the process is already suspended while waiting for a resource to be freed. Like trying to get an exclusive lock on a network shared file after the connection is lost. As it is waiting for a response from the network, it's put in a suspended state. But since there is no connection, there's never going to be a reply. So it just waits and waits.
Sending a kill signal might nudge it closer to the afterlife and get local resource freed, but when remote resources on network servers are tried to be released, it locks up.
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I've seen it happen a lot on servers. It usually happens because the process is already suspended while waiting for a resource to be freed. Like trying to get an exclusive lock on a network shared file after the connection is lost. As it is waiting for a response from the network, it's put in a suspended state. But since there is no connection, there's never going to be a reply. So it just waits and waits.
Sending a kill signal might nudge it closer to the afterlife and get local resource freed, but when remote resources on network servers are tried to be released, it locks up.
IMHO, there's a special place in Hell for Developers that write code that waits for a handshake, but then don't put some sort of a reasonable timeout in the code. Really, even if we're talking about waiting for something to respond through a Dialup connection, if that resource isn't available in a couple of hours, it probably is safe to assume it ain't comin' back.
So, unless you're writing code to collect data from outer space, there's absolutely no reason to "wait forever" (and even then, "forever" is to
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What about server whose job it is to sit and wait for clients to connect? Does that need a timeout?
You don't read so well, do you?
I specifically limited that hypothetical "special place in Hell" to those Devs. who were writing code that waited for a HANDSHAKE.
If you don't know the difference between that scenario and "waiting for a login", (which, BTW, is NOT what a "Server" "sits and waits for"), then you obviously shouldn't be commenting on my Post in the first place.
D state, waiting for kernel (often blocking io) (Score:2)
Those will show D state in ps, indicating that the process is waiting on the kernel. Frequently it's waiting for blocking io - it has asked the kernel for some disk block and won't do anything else until the kernel wakes it up when the data is available. The program code itself isn't running on the cpu at this point, the kernel code is (and the kernel thread may be deadlocked).
I helped fix such an issue related to LVM on top of RAID1, where it was possible for LVM the lvm layer to be waiting on the raid la
PS use killable IO and locks to prevent this (Score:2)
One way to prevent this is to use KILLABLE system calls instead of blocking ones. The _killable versions block just like blocking mode, but they allow kill -9 to work. The userspace program doesn't have to worry about handling half-completed io, because it dies without passing go.
Fun. mdadm indeed (Score:2)
> I was recently using Intel software raid (isw, aka fakeraid) to mirror my root flash drives. Big mistake! The dmraid package ...
Indeed. I tried out all the different kinds of RAID and settled on mdadm. Hardware RAID is handy if you're using a CPU from 1999 and also don't need any flexibility. LVM mirrors are a handy way to make a one-time copy of data.
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I've never seen that on Linux. In fact I've hardly ever seen it on a modern Unix. The one where I saw it a *lot* was HPUX. A zombie process on at least some HPUX versions was basically unkillable, it just flat-out ignored a -9.
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I saw it on early versions of Solaris 2, back in the mid to late 1990s, where there would be a ton of zombie processes, they would laugh at a -9, and the only way to deal with them was a reboot, and even then, there almost certainly would be a NFS hang, preventing the machine from completely shutting down, so most likely a reset would be needed (which meant a force fsck of all drives because back then, journaling filesystems were not common.)
It makes me glad that operating systems eventually almost have sol
Re:Zombie (Score:5, Informative)
basically no process can die on its own.
once exit() is called its the job of parent to read the exist status. If the parent process does not do it then the process remains a zombie.
Usually the fix for the leak is to kill the parent. Doing so allows init to read the parents exit status, and the now orphaned children are then adopted by init which will read their status and clean them up.
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Well that's convenient - our legal system could really use a reboot anyway, maybe it will even remain a justice system for a while.
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do
pkill -9 sco
done
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FTFY
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SCO is unreliably, deniably dead (Score:2)
I know, didn't we just have a funeral for these clowns?
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/03/01/154214/sco-is-undeniably-reliably-dead [slashdot.org]
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Some of the people here, some of the ones I communicate with off-list, have had in my home, and have visited in my travels - some of them, have children that are younger than these shenanigans from SCO.
At this point, I'll give SCO $500 just to go away. I don't want them getting any money but I'll give it to them if they promise to go away and never return. The suit certainly is no longer about being backed by Microsoft in order to discredit Linux or open source. That horse has already left the barn and Micr
Re:Zombie (Score:5, Interesting)
It hasn't really been about "them" getting anything for awhile now, is my perspective. There's a certain pile of cash and the lawyers want it and they'll get it (ahead of other creditors) by actively perusing lawsuit.
I just thought the pile ran out, but if that lawfirm filed again, clearly there's money somewhere they can grab.
This stopped being about anything but billable hours... years ago.
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My oldest son was born in the same year that the SCO-IBM lawsuit began - albeit five months later. He's having his Bar Mitzvah later this year. My youngest son is turning 9 in a couple of months and was born in the thick of the SCO-IBM/SCO-Novell /SCO-Everyone muck.
Re:Zombie (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll give SCO $500 just to go away.
Well, it's a good thing it's not up to you then. That's precisely what IBM is refusing to do, because that gives these slimes a precedent and an opportunity to go after potentially softer targets. Good on IBM for not taking the easy way out.
You're over-thinking this. This is absolutely still about money. It's just lawyers on contingent (meaning no one is paying them) just putting in a minimal amount of effort and expenses to file a few more court documents, hoping for a big miracle payday. Sure, the odds are low, but when the potential payout is massive, why not?
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Since we're apparently being pedantic here, they're not going to go away for $500 either.
The point I'm making is that it's not a good idea to settle, because that just encourages more of the same behavior.
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It really is simple:
Greedy douchebags convinced they own something and seeking to capitalize on it.
My guess, somewhere along the line the "property" SCO claims got transferred to some consortium of lawyers (wikipedia [wikipedia.org] tells me the latest name is "TSG Operations, Inc.") and other bottom feeding assholes convinced they
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That's $199 short.
Signed,
Darl.
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I'm wondering why not just revoke their charter at this point. They're out of cash, and long ago got rid of anyone needed to do any sort of economically productive work. There is zero chance the company will ever return to any economic activity that is even vaguely in the public interest.
At BEST, this is about a lawyer wanting to bill against a small pile of cash that should have been handed over to creditors by now anyway.
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Can't someone kill this zombie process
I wonder if wooden stakes and holy water would work?
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Can't someone kill this zombie process
Not for a while, SCO just got signed as a character on The Walking Dead.
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while ps -ef | grep darlmcbride | grep -v grep
do
pkill -9 darlmcbride
done
Its a blast from the past (Score:2)
I can't wait.
Garlick and wooden stakes needed ... (Score:3)
to prevent this blood sucking vampire from rising again. Can we ship some to the IBM lawyers ?
Re:Garlick and wooden stakes needed ... (Score:4, Interesting)
The first point here is to figure out the individuals behind this and who's sponsoring them. Then publish who they are and see if they still are interested in pursuing the matter.
snowdon, detective, groklaw... (Score:2)
The first point here is to figure out the individuals behind this and who's sponsoring them. Then publish who they are and see if they still are interested in pursuing the matter.
Does Snowdon not have any files on this entity? Next bet it we sponsor the EFF to hire a private detective to do an investigation to the finances of flow of money to this entity? Also wondering whether this will be story enough to revive Groklaw?
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Maybe what's needed is an exorcist.
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More like an Exocet.
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The lawsuit was dismissed "with prejudice", and the lawyers still filed an appeal. Apparently the only thing these lawyers understand is physical violence. Wooden stakes might help.
I would be very much amused if they're held in-contempt and thrown in jail for a couple of months.
You know, just long enough to have some moderate real-world consequences.
March 31 (Score:5, Funny)
A bit early to be publishing these April 1 Zombie Apocalypse stories, no?
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No, i look forward to SCO suing microsoft as well, because they might have ported linux kernel code into windows as the screenshots of Microsoft/GNU/Linux BASH show.
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No, i look forward to SCO suing microsoft as well, because they might have ported linux kernel code into windows as the screenshots of Microsoft/GNU/Linux BASH show.
Microsoft is one of SCO's shareholders, they have been funding SCO since the 80's. SCO is a proxy, so that the press is SCO vs IBM and I haven't seen anything that suggests Microsoft has exited the SCO board.
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Sorry, you get a failing grade in History, but an A+ in dumbassery.
Maybe I can get some pointers from you in Assholery, it looks like you topped that class.
The company currently calling itself SCO is an imposter that has only existed since 2001.
The Santa Cruz Operation (the original SCO) was founded in 1979 and then sold its UNIX business to Caldera in 2001. After that sale, SCO changed its name to Tarantella and Caldera then changed its name to The SCO Group.
Caldera, now calling itself SCO, began pretending to be the original SCO. For example, in 2004 proclaiming "our 25th anniversary" despite the fact that Caldera was only founded on 1994.
Ok, so who's on the board then?
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Re:March 31 (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft was basically the only company to buy a "unix license for linux" from SCO back in the day (mostly to keep the fight going and undermine their competition) so suing them now would be idiotic even by SCO standards. Don't bite the hand that fed you and all that.
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Nothing is idiotic on April fools day, apparently
Follow the money (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is funding the appeals at this point?
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The lawyers are on autopilot due to their agreement to continue to proceed long after reason and/ior the death of SCO. Their paralegals are working overtime during coffee breaks to file these appeals.
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Probably a certain NBA team.
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The sleezy law firm representing SCO and Oracle contracted with SCO to represent them through all appeals for the up-front payment of $20M that SCO paid.
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Came here to ask this question. Trial lawyers don't work for free. Somebody has to be paying them to keep working on this. My guess is that it's a long con. SCO figures that Linux is EVERYWHERE and will reach even further with IoT so if they can win a court case, they can go after license fees till the cows come home.
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1. Lawyers have been paid up front, including appeals.
2. None of the remaining claims affect Linux, they are contract claims against IBM. At this point, even if IBM lost, SCO could not get license fees for Linux usage.
Covering Asses (Score:2)
Freddy Kreuger to SCO (Score:2)
Court document on groklaw.net (Score:3)
This seems to be the Notice of Appeal [groklaw.net]
The Turd That Won't Flush (Score:3, Funny)
SCO is like a turd that won't flush. No matter how many times you bury it in paperwork, just when you think it's finally gone ... then it comes bubbling up again.
Here we go again! (Score:3)
If it doesn't get summarily dismissed (highly likely) and becomes as entertaining as Caldera v. IBM, I wonder if pj will resurrect Groklaw.
April Fool! (Score:2)
Whew... (Score:2)
13 Years Later, we find out What SCO Really Means (Score:2)
SCOuting for money
de-defunct
It happens to be April 1 somewhere where SCO's lawyers are hiding; we're reading tomorrow's news for nerds today.
Inflation (Score:2)
Can anybody tell me what - after adjusting for inflation - the current value of a cock-smoking teabagger is?
Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here (Score:5, Funny)
Nice to know that Darl still reads Slashdot.
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Yes yes, SGI sent in some 32v memory code, which was quickly tossed out.
The joke being that 32v is free now, so it doesn't even matter.
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Apart from the fact that SCO NEVER owened the code they showed you're doing fine. Novel PROVED that they owened it and even got a judgement to show it.
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The source code they pointed to was header files. You know POSIX API interface header files. Besides most of the claims they made had been shot down beforehand in the BSD/Unix lawsuit decades prior.
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Of course the uncopyrightable nature of API's have irked many a corporation before, and seems to particularly irk them when Linux is involved in any way. Just look at the current Oracle/Google case over Java vs Dalvik.
The sad reality is that crime and lawsuits are, by a massive margine, the largest profit centers there are - so pretty much every corporation ends up doing lots of both. Just making products customers want to buy will make you rich... but it won't make you THE RICHEST - and nothing less will d
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I see you haven't been following the Oracle vs Google case, since it's my understanding that the latest ruling on the matter determined exactly the opposite.
Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting take on reality.
This might give you some pointers on what they did show, why they didn't own it, and why trying to claim copyright on POSIX APIs is a daft thing to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO/Linux_controversies#SVRx_code_allegedly_in_Linux
However code was (allegedly) found that had been illegally copied into SCO's Unix products from Linux as part of it's Linux Kernel Personality feature.
Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here (Score:5, Informative)
If I remember correctly, you are talking absolute non-sense Mr. Daryl McBride.
The few infringing lines of code that they claimed and showed were actually UNIX header files and some API's. Novell clarified that UNIX header files and API's are in the public domain having been transferred to UNIX Sys Labs. SCO showed code from 'Berkeley Packet Filter' which then was shown to be under the BSD license. Then they went to show some macro definitions for silly things like MAX, MIN. When it got clarified by Torvalds that there were very very few ways to implement those silly macros in the *right* way, SCO just went mum. SCO refused to show anymore infringing source code and went about selling legal protection from "we want tell you" product. Intel, IBM and a few other companies pooled some money and told small and medium companies that the pooled money would help them defend against the stupid cases SCO was threatening to file against them if they did not pay their legal protection fees. Miscrosoft on the contrary went ahead and purchased legal protection from SCO for their UNIX tool-kit for windows, in order to help fund SCO in their legal litigation and there by undermine Linux.
Basically SCO lacked the ability to innovate and tried to become a troll.
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Darl. DARL. His name is Darl, not Daryl. Jeeze.
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You wouldn't be saying such nonsense if you actually understood what source code is.
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https://yro.slashdot.org/story/03/12/22/2356243/linus-blasts-scos-header-claims
They claimed basic header files.
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It just so happens that I have a copy of the Linux kernel right here in front of me - oddly enough. As in, it's open in a folder and I've been looking at it. What, specifically, are these lines of code so that I might verify this for myself?
OT, sorry (Score:2)
Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here (Score:5, Informative)
Eventually the court give SCO a third and final deadline. Dec 22, 2005. Disclose ALL allegedly misused materials in Linux by then.
What did we get? A lot of hand waving and nonsense. Nothing substantial.
After months more arguing, the court tossed out 2/3 of that. Of the remaining 1/3, the magistrate judge (Wells) was quite skeptical. But technically it wasn't crazy enough to throw out with the other 2/3, so SCO could keep it, although they probably wouldn't get anything out of it.
A side show in this matter was that SCO did not own any copyright in Unix in the first place. Years later, by 2007, the court finally concluded that SCO didn't even own any copyright in Unix. So they have no standing to sue in the first place. (eg, I can't sue you for stealing Jane's tires. Only Jane has standing to sue you for that.)
There are many more facets to this entire fiaSCO. And none of them are good for the SCOundrels.
On the Friday before SCO's scheduled trial to start on Monday in Sept 2007, where after years of saying they wanted to get their day in court, SCO declared bankruptcy. On the eve of the trial that would give them their supposed victory. And SCO was still financially solvent.
Everything about this entire farce stinks to high heaven.
Re:SCO actually got a bad deal here (Score:4, Interesting)
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Wow a wildly inappropriate comment and a wildly inappropriate reply.
Couldn't you just have said, "stop being a bigot" and move on?
Re: SCO actually got a bad deal here (Score:2)
We cant mock bigots anymore ?
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It was funded by various other OS vendors to create FUD to slow down the adoption of Linux.
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This case is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the US justice system. If anyone needs any more evidence that it's time to just completely start again, the fact that this utter crap has been allowed to drag on for something like 13-odd years is it.
I followed the case for a while and I was quite shocked by the complete corruption and incompetence of the various federal judges involved. Over and over again they allowed SCO to play ridiculous games in order to keep their case alive.
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Some of the little boys who were born on the day this case was filed have had their first wet dreams by now - and still it drags on.
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no.
SCO, Santa Cruz Operation, was an UNIX vendor. They bought XENIX from Microsoft and rebranded it as SCO Unix.
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SCO, Santa Cruz Operation, was an UNIX vendor. They bought XENIX from Microsoft and rebranded it as SCO Unix.
No. SCO, Santa Cruz Operation, was a UNIX vendor. They bought XENIX from Microsoft and rebranded it as SCO XENIX. They maintained this product line separately from their UNIX line. It did less, and they sold it for less money. It would, however, run on a 286. I used to have a 286-6 with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB Seizegate RLL disk running Xenix 2.3.2 as a UUCP node.
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Remember "Embrace , Extend, Extinguish" and "Developers, Developers, Developers".
Microsoft just needs to pull off those developers with new ideas from Linux to Windows.
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Then SCO can provide some evidence that IBM did infringe on code that they own, which they have failed to do to date. And should they be able to show that code is infringing, the Linux community will alter the code so that it no longer infringes. But like I said, SCO first needs to show that code was copied, and that it was copied from them (the last time they provided code that was BSD licensed).
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The joke is that the original claims from Caldera had some truth. It's just that someone went insane and thought they could sick up IBM for money.
If you go back to the very beginning you'll find that what was happening was that some unscrupulous consultants were porting applications from SCO UNIX to Linux by copying the SCO shared libraries to Linux systems without a license. Somehow, by a convoluted system of chinese whispers this got misunderstood as "Linux contains UNIX code", and some crazy person at
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Other way around. Caldera/SCO was copying Linux code into Unix for their Linux Kernel Personality project. This was their "smoking gun" that got dropped like a hot potato.
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No, TSCOG is still TSCOG, bankrupt.
They sold SCO UNIX and UnixWare to Xinuos.
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