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13-Year-Old Linux Dispute Returns As SCO Files New Appeal (theinquirer.net) 233

Posted by BeauHD from the never-ending-dispute dept.
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.
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13-Year-Old Linux Dispute Returns As SCO Files New Appeal More

13-Year-Old Linux Dispute Returns As SCO Files New Appeal

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  • Zombie (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @05:32AM (#51813123) Journal

    Can't someone kill this zombie process

    • Re:Zombie (Score:5, Funny)

      by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @05:35AM (#51813137) Journal

      Can't someone kill this zombie process

      No, it's maintained by systemd now.

      • 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?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        Looks like a shotgun wedding.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They tried and that's why SCO filed the appeal, apparently they own the rights to 'kill', 'killall' and derivatives.

    • 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)

        by mikael ( 484 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @06:53AM (#51813307)

        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.

        • 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

      • 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

        • 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.

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mlts ( 1038732 )

          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)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @10:13AM (#51814075) Journal

        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.

      • Well that's convenient - our legal system could really use a reboot anyway, maybe it will even remain a justice system for a while.

    • while ps -ef | grep sco | grep -v grep
      do
      pkill -9 sco
      done
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      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)

        by Ixokai ( 443555 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @08:53AM (#51813681)

        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.

        • Actually, the lawyers don't want to do anything. They signed a contract to get paid up front through the end of the case. They have been working on their own dime for years now. What I want to know is who in the bankruptcy court authorized them to spend money to file the paperwork?

      • 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.

        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)

        by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @09:59AM (#51814007)

        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?

      • So, what the hell is the point? I really can't think of a good reason for them to be even bothering with this

        It really is simple:

        Greedy douchebags convinced they own something and seeking to capitalize on it.

        Actually, shouldn't they be dead in the water already? Who is paying for the lawyers?

        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

      • At this point, I'll give SCO $500 just to go away.

        That's $199 short.
            Signed,
            Darl.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        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.

    • Can't someone kill this zombie process

      I wonder if wooden stakes and holy water would work?

    • Can't someone kill this zombie process

      Not for a while, SCO just got signed as a character on The Walking Dead.

    • while ps -ef | grep darlmcbride | grep -v grep
      do
      pkill -9 darlmcbride
      done

  • 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)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @09:45AM (#51813933) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • 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?

    • It's like a bad sequel. Who'd want to watch "Jaws 17" ? .. they just don't get the hint, it's game over.

  • March 31 (Score:5, Funny)

    by ChunderDownunder ( 709234 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @05:47AM (#51813173)

    A bit early to be publishing these April 1 Zombie Apocalypse stories, no?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bug1 ( 96678 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Teun ( 17872 )
        The licensing was taken care of, Miscrosoft purchased legal protection from SCO for their UNIX tool-kit for windows,.

      • Re:March 31 (Score:4, Informative)

        by silentcoder ( 1241496 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @08:11AM (#51813537)

        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.

  • Follow the money (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31, 2016 @05:52AM (#51813181)

    Who is funding the appeals at this point?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      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.

    • Who is funding the appeals at this point?

      Probably a certain NBA team.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by StormReaver ( 59959 )

      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.

    • 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.

      • 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.

  • At this point they are probably just trying to prevent SCO's former shareholders from suing McBride and his cronies for professional negligence.
  • "Why won't you DIE?"

  • The Turd That Won't Flush (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31, 2016 @06:47AM (#51813291)

    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)

    by some old guy ( 674482 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @07:23AM (#51813365)

    If it doesn't get summarily dismissed (highly likely) and becomes as entertaining as Caldera v. IBM, I wonder if pj will resurrect Groklaw.

  • Surely. Has to be. Hasn't it?
  • Now I am glad I paid my $699 license fee to SCO.

  • 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.

  • Can anybody tell me what - after adjusting for inflation - the current value of a cock-smoking teabagger is?

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