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SCO's Next Target: SGI? 338

Posted by michael from the we-know-you-missed-your-dose-of-SCO dept.
FatRatBastard writes "ZDNet News is speculating that SCO's next target in its legal actions against Linux may be SGI. According to the article its legal strategy will be to claim that XFS is a Unix derivative and therefore under SCO control, much like they claim JFS is in their suit with IBM. One fact not mentioned in the article that would support SGI being the next target is the malloc code they claimed was infringing at this years SCOForum was copyrighted SGI."
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SCO's Next Target: SGI? More

SCO's Next Target: SGI?

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  • A link to ZDNet speculation about what might be SCO's next target. Slow news day? Needed another SCO fix?

    • Re:What a useful article (Score:5, Funny)

      by MikeCapone ( 693319 ) <skelterhell @ y a hoo.com> on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:09PM (#6884076) Homepage Journal
      We should complain to SCO, they haven't been giving us our daily laugh as consistently lately...

    • Re:What a useful article (Score:5, Funny)

      by EdgeShadow ( 665410 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:09PM (#6884077)
      I suppose you don't call your self "Overly Critical Guy" for nothin'...

    • Re:What a useful article (Score:5, Funny)

      by Chris Sontag ( 684398 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:44PM (#6884309) Homepage
      Actually ZDNet have it all wrong. Our actual next target is God himself. As you know, God is responsible for all life on earth, including "trees". The way trees recursively divide their branches is a blatant copy of the hierarchical file system present in Unix. We plan to file suit in the next week or so.

      • Re:What a useful article (Score:5, Funny)

        by Mr. Darl McBride ( 704524 ) * on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:50PM (#6884340)
        Chris, I hate to interrupt you during one of your magical tirades... but the drugs are kicking in, Chris. Chris, the drugs are kicking in, and I've just noticed something new: These Linux boys seem to be using a lot of semicolons. A lot of semicolons, Chris.

        Why don't you head back on down to the community college and see what our "MIT" boys think of that. Have we got another pattern here, Chris? Is this another pattern, Chris?

        I think of you when I'm naked, Christopher.

        • When someone finally snaps and takes that sniper shot at McBride or turns the SCO headquarters into a fireball, will they be considered a murderer, an assassin, or a hero?

          Or will the world just shrug and be glad someone finally hired an exterminator?

          After all, between SCO and the wrist-slaps Microsoft has been given, it's clear the US legal system is nothing but a toothless sham for sale to the highest bidder. Given SCO's real value, the bid isn't even that high.

    • Yes and why now? After all the FUD and hysteria around SCO saying it is going to send out invoices to companies using Linux - now why is this rumour being floated?

      Well they are not stupid enough to start sending out invoices, they know that it would invite criminal charges and that this could wreck their sophisticated (e.g. Vultus purchase) pump and dump scheme with a lot of FUD production paid for by the MS "license" millions.

      What they will need is a new big news press release item to keep the momentum

    • Re:What a useful article (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MuParadigm ( 687680 ) <jgabriel66@yahoo.com> on Friday September 05, 2003 @09:28PM (#6884833) Homepage Journal

      I've been wondering about this myself. SGI does seem to be a likely target for SCO, given SCO's rhetoric. But SGI doesn't have much, if any, money. So it seems unlikely from that point of view.

      Another thing that bothered me in the ZD Net article is that they don't mention the other file systems. Let's face it, JFS and XFS are not the most popular journaling file systems for Linux; they're mostly used by companies that have legacy file systems they need to support. ReiserFS, Ext3, and Ext2, are the most popular file systems. If Linux lost the ability to support XFS and JFS, all it would do is make migration to Linux more difficult for some companies. It probably wouldn't much affect adoption rates.

      Anyway, I suspect that SGI should start talking to Red Hat about accessing some of that Open Source Now! fund. Just in case.

      • Re:What a useful article (Score:5, Informative)

        by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @01:22AM (#6885788) Homepage Journal
        Let's face it, JFS and XFS are not the most popular journaling file systems for Linux; they're mostly used by companies that have legacy file systems they need to support. ReiserFS, Ext3, and Ext2, are the most popular file systems.


        XFS is not a legacy file system -- it's a pretty new high performance file system, replacing SGI's EFS, which is what you might have thought of?
        XFS is becoming increasingly popular for Linux users, not the least because it's usually the fastest file system you can run. The price you pay for this is that it commits to disk less often than other file systems, and for small temporary files, it may not even touch the disk between file creation and deletion. For large file streaming, it supports "real time" subpartitions, where you can run the file system in GRIO (guaranteed rate IO) mode. It also supports posix access control lists (ACL), which gives much more fine grained access control than standard unix protection bits. The advantages of XFS are good enough that it's rapidly becoming one of the most popular file systems -- a direct competitor to ReiserFS.

        Ext2, now that's legacy, and ext3 is just ext2 with journalling on top -- it saves you the fsck at boot, but you pay a slight performance penalty for it.

        Regards,
        --
        *Art

  • If I were SCO (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:08PM (#6884067)
    I'd sue Slashdot for all the stories about SCO. They're clearly trying to profit by SCO's active legal work.

  • Enough Speculation (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mr. Darl McBride ( 704524 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:08PM (#6884069)
    While ZDNet is speculating, I thought you might like to hear of the situation from the horse's mouth. Hi, I'm Darl McBride. You might know me from lawsuits such as "IBM is spying on our children" and "you bastards used the whole alphabet for ls options too!"

    Now, we can all agree that XFS is based on our own filesystem, famous for the stability and reliability that give you excellent uptimes when fsck time is included in that uptime measure. You don't get that kind of techonolgy for free, and it doesn't simply <fingerquote> evoooollllve </fingerquote> on its own. That SGI stole and released this is not up for debate. But that piece of invaluable IP isn't the issue here, really.

    Where SGI has really chuffed our muffins is in having the gall to steal our valuable "long-run" technology. By only executing on outdated hardware, we've been able to keep system procurement prices down while effortlessly sustaining the user's reading and coffee time. In an attempt to muscle in on our territory however, SGI have chosen to stay the course with MIPS CPUs and confusingly outdated IRIX. Now, I know that the R5000 was once state of the art and all that, but the damned things are shipping in Playstation 2s. This, while SGI have the gall to tell customers that these are usable for graphics workstations.

    Be the judge and jury on this one, my friends. Why would SGI opt to use this kind of dated processor and leaden IRX OS unless they too were trying to implement our patented "long-run" technology? How long before SGI manages to extend itself into the Linux culture; to prevent system upgrades and encourage ass backward architectures there as well? Soon, our "long-run" technology will be in use by customers the world over, and they will not be paying SCO's investors one penny, your honour.

    Your honour -- Not One Penny.

    Join the good fight. The good fight is the right fight. God has given me a mission, and my investors call me to it. God talks to me nightly. We are talking about my second home here, and I'll be damned if SGI is going to take that away. We are talking about stockholder value, precariously balanced atop press releases, IP confusion, lottery players, and the belief each buyer shares that there will be one more fool beyond him. We are talking about SCO's God-given right to go where no man has gone before, your honour.

    One to beam up, Scotty.

  • WIll sco sue itself too? (Score:5, Funny)

    by crea5e ( 590098 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:08PM (#6884072)
    Don't they sell Linux too ?

    SCO VS SCO
    ultimate deathmatch!

  • SCO has SGI on the run too it seems (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:09PM (#6884082)
    SCO said sometime ago that "their" NUMA code found in Linux, has come from SGI engineers working in the Linux kernel.
    http://www.byte.com/documents/s=8276/byt1 055784622 054/0616_marshall.html
    So, it is more than "speculation".
  • In for a dime, in for dollar...or a Trazillion dollars...how much are they asking for again?

  • SCO, the mother of all operating systems (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:11PM (#6884091)
    {sarcasm: semi-lame} It is true! SCO, she is the mother of all OSes, EVEN the ones that were invented before her! A temporal rift created an anti-time anomaly, sending SCO back before its creation to introduce lines of code in earlier OSes... {/sarcasm} bleh...

    • Re:SCO, the mother of all operating systems (Score:5, Funny)

      by Mr. Darl McBride ( 704524 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:23PM (#6884185)
      Sir, if you do not believe we intend to use the temporal rift theory, one of many such weapons in our powerful legal arsenal, you are not a well man.

      That we've lost the leader of our legal team is conjecture and fallacy -- David Boies has been sent back to battle the first offender. The very first thief of SCO's mighty library of intellectual property. The next suit, and first in the new time line, will be filed against none other than Charles Babbage, your honour. Charles Babbage and his fabulous counting machines will fall like so many loose gears in the cuckoo clock that is the world of SCO IP.

  • They're going right to the source after that... (Score:5, Funny)

    by adrianbaugh ( 696007 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:11PM (#6884093) Homepage Journal
    When they're done with SGI they'll probably track down Ken Thompson and try to claim that he somehow infringed their IP by writing UNIX in the first place. After all, anything and everything to do with UNIX is clearly SCO's by god-given right.

    Morons.

    • Re:They're going right to the source after that... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @10:01PM (#6884969) Homepage
      When they're done with SGI they'll probably track down Ken Thompson and try to claim that he somehow infringed their IP by writing UNIX in the first place.

      Actually, that brings up a question about one of SCO's strategies: they have suggested that owning the copyright to some old Unix code automatically confers ownership of improved new code, as a "derivative work." I think that's BS, but let's pretend they win it: is there something out there that would make SCOs crufty old code a "derivative" work? In other words, if they establish as case-law that new code is owned by some old copyright holder, then can we lay claim to their old code with something even older? It'd be fun to use their own ruling against them.

      Of course, they'll never get that ruling, this is just a "what if?"

  • I suppose it would be too much to hope (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RLiegh ( 247921 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:13PM (#6884107) Homepage Journal
    that we'd see RICO (racketeer influenced corrupt organisation) charges brought against SCO (some corrupt organisation).

    *sigh* A man can dream...

  • SGI's official response (Score:5, Funny)

    by zBoD ( 86938 ) <BoD@JRAF.org> on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:14PM (#6884110) Homepage Journal
    is here [sgi.com].
  • Well good to hear SGI is still with us. I thought they were goners...

  • Shameless blatant self promotion (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:15PM (#6884122)
    We Love the SCO Information Minister [welovethes...nister.org] is proud to now offer T-shirts and mugs [cafeshops.com] through Cafe Press [cafepress.com]. Any proceeds will be split between our bandwidth costs and free software legal defense funds. Someone order something quick so we can find out if we need to provide alternate artwork :)
  • In the original IBM lawsuit it occurred to me that it isn't SCO that's going to be using the Chewbacca defence after all, but IBM. After all, isn't it wookies that rip people's arms off if they lose? ;-)

  • SCO's Business Model (tm) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by travisbecker ( 104621 ) <travis_a_becker@ ... om minus painter> on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:16PM (#6884127)
    Personally I think SCO has chosen to craft their business model after an urban legend. [snopes.com]

    Travis

  • SCO vs RIAA (Score:5, Funny)

    by Neppy ( 673459 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:18PM (#6884149)
    How long until SCO sues the RIAA for infringing on its patented process of public relations?

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rock_climbing_guy ( 630276 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:18PM (#6884152) Journal
    Jeff Bezos will be suing SCO for violating Amazon.com's patent on frivolous litigation. However, it looks like the patent might be rescended because their is too much prior art.

  • SCO's 2nd next target: *BSD (Score:3, Funny)

    by Jeff Breker ( 681514 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:19PM (#6884161)
    I can't wait for SCO to accuse *BSD of infringing SCO's IP (or whatever SCO is calling it these days)...
    • I can't wait for SCO to accuse *BSD of infringing SCO's IP

      Din't they already hint [byte.com]at it? See the comment: ""But what about BSD?" I asked. Sontag responded that there "could be issues with the [BSD] settlement agreement," adding that Berkeley may not have lived up to all of its commitments under the settlement."

  • SCO's Property Laws (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nighttime ( 231023 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:20PM (#6884164) Homepage Journal
    These are the toddler's property laws, but could equally apply to SCO.

    If I like it - it's mine.

    If it's in my hand - it's mine.

    If I can take it from you - it's mine.

    It I had it a little while ago - it's mine.

    If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.

    If I'm doing or building something - all the pieces are mine.

    If it looks just like mine - it is mine.

    If I saw it first - it's mine.

    If you are playing with something and you put it down -

    it automatically becomes mine.

    If it's broken - it's yours!

  • AAARGGHH (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LS ( 57954 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:21PM (#6884174) Homepage
    Jesus Christ Fuck! When is someone going to lob a mortar into the SCO offices and put an end to this fucking insanity?!!??!
    • Anyone in the area?

      The SCO Group
      355 South 520 West
      Suite 100
      Lindon, Utah 84042 USA

    • Re:AAARGGHH (Score:2, Funny)

      by killmenow ( 184444 )
      In the spirit of open source, I would point out that you have the ability to do this yourself. That's one of the benefits of open source over closed source: in the closed source world, you bitch and moan about things, but can do little else; whereas, in the open source world, you can bitch and moan about things, and people will tell you to STFU and do it yourself if you want it so bad.

      Welcome to the revolution.

  • Jeff Spicoli Uinveristy (Score:3, Funny)

    by niko9 ( 315647 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:24PM (#6884199)
    Reminds me of a scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont high, where Jeff Spicoli has a pizza pie delivered to class. When the professor fumes at why he's disrupting his class time, Spicolli retorts "If, like, I'm here, and like, you're here, does'nt that make that our time?"

    With SCO's asshat logic, McBide must be and alumin of that same school or a long lost relative of Spicolli.

    P.S. The professor agrees with his obtuse student, and proceeds to hand a out a piece of the pie to all the students. ;)

  • SGI had their eyes open... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LinuxParanoid ( 64467 ) * on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:25PM (#6884205) Homepage Journal
    I wrote a paper on the subject of SGI donating XFS after interviewing someone there at the time they made their announcement (~May 20, 1999). I just looked up the paper and found the following quote:

    "Currently, SGI is clearing the source code of any legal restrictions; it expects to be able to make the code openly available by the end of the summer. "

    Ensuring they were free-and-clear to donate XFS under an open source license was *not* an afterthought for SGI. There was concern among all the major UNIX vendors of IP entanglement with Linux, and SGI was the first to openly pledge to donate a chunk of their core UNIX technology. (IBM donated some non-core stuff earlier, and core stuff like JFS later.)

    SCO's claim that XFS or JFS are derivative works of SVR4/5 remains, to me, highly dubious.

    Too bad for SGI, the last thing they need these days is lawsuits. SCO can't hope for a lot of money, but maybe they're hoping for weaker resistance?

    --LP

    • Further confirmation SGI had IP concerns re: XFS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LinuxParanoid ( 64467 ) * on Friday September 05, 2003 @08:29PM (#6884561) Homepage Journal
      Six months after its announcement it would release XFS, IP issues were still a concern. A Slashdot thread [slashdot.org] refers to comments made by Dave McAllister, SGI's Directory of Technical Strategy in a (now-linkdead) article, saying:

      "SGI will devolve elements of its proprietary software and operating system Irix, such as its XFS journalling file system,to Linux as soon as it clears the legal roadblocks surrounding the intellectual property. ... 'As the code is cleaned, we will release it,' [McAllister] said."

      That said, I'm at a loss to explain how SGI stuffed things like that ancient malloc.c into Linux. Perhaps things got sloppy or it was never noticed because someone had previously removed copyright notices? (Apparently this has been a problem at SCO as well, removing BSD license notices internally...)

      You know, the ironic thing about this whole SCO uproar is that people have long bitched that the GPL was so viral... well look how viral the closed source SVR4/5 license apparently was!

      --LP

      P.S. A short history of XFS and Linux, Slashdot-style:

      Here's a LinuxToday [linuxtoday.com] article and the original Slashdot thread [slashdot.org] covering that May 20, 1999 announcement.

      Three months later, in August 1999, Slashdot covered that the XFS donation would be GPL [slashdot.org] (not just 'open source')

      A year after that, the XFS beta arrived [slashdot.org] on Slashdot (September 2000), and

      After two more years, XFS was merged into the Linux 2.5 kernel [slashdot.org] September 2002.

      • I suspect that we are witnessing the beggining of the standard attacks that will be taking place soon. MS has done their shared source approach which basically says that ppl can look, but do not touch or steal. If any of that code ends up in Linux, it would enable MS to start a law suit against Linux.
        I think that we need to start doing some proactive type action against this.

  • Not to be excessively paranoid.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cmowire ( 254489 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:26PM (#6884210) Homepage
    Not to be excessively paranoid, but SGI makes a great strategic choice for SCO to sue.

    They, unlike IBM, don't have buckets of cash in the bank to throw at a legal defense. If SCO can force SGI to do their bidding and potentially spit out some documentation that makes IBM's case look bad, they will be at a better position to take on IBM.
    • SGI will likely just ask for a postponement until the IBM case is settled, or, that failing, use stalling tactics until IBM is done eviscerating SCO. Notice how SCO has yet to see the light of a courtroom, lotsa talk, not much walk. SGI may not have buckets of cash but they're still a 10x bigger fish than SCO.

    • But SGI can't afford SCO (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kludge ( 13653 )
      Everyone, even SCO concedes that one of the prime reason for suing IBM is to get bought out. SGI probably doesn't have that sort of cash, especially now that SCO's stock has jumped.

  • This almost makes me think MS is behind all this. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JessLeah ( 625838 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:40PM (#6884287)
    I have always been somewhat suspicious that there is a significant SCO-Microsoft connection, but the possibility that SGI is next on their hit-list just increases my worry.

    SGI is a company that MS has every reason in the world to want to crush. They have traditionally been a major Unix vendor, they produce high-end graphics workstations that compete directly with popular Wintel solutions, and at one point they spurned Microsoft by dropping an ill-fated line of x86 workstations. And, making matters even worse (for SGI; better for MS), SGI is already suffering financially. This would be a great time for MS to crush them under their heel.

    It is entirely possible that MS is pulling some strings here. SGI's target market and SCO's are wholly different, and I really don't see any reason why they (as opposed to HP/Digital/Compaq or any other Unix vendor) would be a real target. It just seems odd. SGI builds graphics workstations, and SCO provides general-purpose workhorse Unix OSes to businesses. Unless MS were involved, why would SCO pick on SGI in particular?

    • It's not MS targetting SGI, it really *is* SCO (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LinuxParanoid ( 64467 ) * on Friday September 05, 2003 @09:10PM (#6884758) Homepage Journal
      You are right, but MS has already crushed SGI.

      MS has obtained a cross-license to all SGI's graphics patents, and OpenGL is no longer a threat. A mild concern perhaps. MS buried their joint "Farenheit" high-level graphics API effort with SGI, killing it. MS has announced dropping support of OpenGL on future OSes. Development of OpenGL 2.0 is really the baby of 3Dlabs (or whoever bought them out; I forget), not SGI, which shows you how behind the curve SGI is on pushing OpenGL these days. OpenGL's survival depends more on John Carmack pushing IHVs to keep using it than SGI, and other than OpenGL, SGI has not presented MS with a platform threat.

      MS may want to crush Linux and/or IBM, but SGI? Not even in the same ballpark.

      The reason SCO is picking on SGI is because of NUMA.

      SGI has been dumping their NUMA scalability crown jewels into Linux (unlike all other conventional Unix vendors who are keeping that stuff in their high-end proprietary OS+hardware combos) and this is a significant impediment to selling UnixWare as "the premier scalable x86 Unix". Off the shelf UnixWare supports up to 8 processors today and SCO made a stab at doing NUMA stuff once upon a time, but SGI's NUMA-Linux has tons more R&D behind it and is going 64-way.

      Three or four years ago, UnixWare was actually functionally superior to Linux (I know, I know, hard to believe but it's true.) But any margin of superiority then has greatly diminished or been overtaken. This is a real problem if SCO can't keep up with the R&D dumped into Linux by the open source community plus IBM plus SGI, etc. So SCO has gone legal. It's a rational move for them. Their vacillating arguments and tenuously-novel notion of derivative works don't bode well for their long term success however.

      --LP

      • Re:It's not MS targetting SGI, it really *is* SCO (Score:5, Informative)

        by killmenow ( 184444 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @10:39PM (#6885115)
        Three or four years ago, UnixWare was actually functionally superior to Linux
        I will concede you may know better than I do; but, I used Linux three (and four) years ago and I disagree. It is highly subjective whether UnixWare was functionally superior to Linux. Is a hammer functionally superior to a screwdriver? It depends entirely on what function you are after.
        It's a rational move for them.
        It appears to me their entire case hinges on how "derivative work" is defined. The SCO position, however, does not appear rational.

        The contract language as I read it (IANAL) would indicate a derivative work is the *entirety* of an OS based on the SVR4 source. Thus, IRIX, or AIX in its entirety must be treated the same as the SVR4 source...and therefore cannot be released publicly or GPL-ed in its entirety.

        But JFS, XFS, NUMA, RCU, et. al. are not the entire derivative work that is AIX, IRIX, and/or Dynix/ptx. They are components. Components designed and developed by their respective copyright holders...not SCO.

        I find it irrational that SCO would believe they stand a chance of convincing any competent judge that the contract language defines components like file systems, and what essentially amounts to drivers (imho) as derivative works.

        SCO's conviction may be they will not meet a competent judge.
        • But JFS, XFS, NUMA, RCU, et. al. are not the entire derivative work that is AIX, IRIX, and/or Dynix/ptx. They are components. Components designed and developed by their respective copyright holders...not SCO.

          They aren't by any stretch of the imagination defined as derivative works... since they implement things for which there was no equivalent in the previous work. They are ADDITIONS... not derivatives... especially in light of the additions that came from other OS's... i.e. OS/2. That's like saying
    • That seems a bit silly. What threat does SGI pose to Microsoft whatsoever? Don't you think they have bigger things they're concentrating on, like the countries converting to open source and the image of insecurity places like Slashdot are giving them? What purpose would crushing SGI serve? They don't care about that market.
    • Don't believe M$ is behind it? Then you didn't read a previous post which pointed to this article [weblogs.com] which points out the string of holding corporations pointing to Mrs Gates.

  • BSD Settlement ultimate target (Score:5, Interesting)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:46PM (#6884317) Journal
    If SCO can invalidate [byte.com]the BSD settlement, then SCO can potentially claim ownership of much of the BSD-derived code in the kernel. Now that would present problems!

    The only counter argument to this is that SCO has already "blessed" much of the BSD-derived code by stating that the 2.2 kernel series are clean.
    • If they can gain the control they pretend to have over every technology ever implemented in Unix by any Unix licencee, that in itself is humongous.With that control, I think every OS vendor in existance would have to pay them licence fees, including Microsoft and Apple.

      However, the chances that SCO will be awarded control over billion upon billions of valuable technology from almost every major computing company, not produced by themselves at all, is none. Quite simply

  • Something is Terribly Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NJVil ( 154697 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:50PM (#6884341)
    A change in Darl's approach might be needed soon.

    Even with the latest announcement threatening to litigate, SCO's stock price is not up. Perhaps investors are finally wising up now that Darl and his fellow execs have already dumped most of their stock.

    Hey, it's possible!

    • Re:Something is Terribly Wrong (Score:4, Informative)

      by Discopete ( 316823 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @08:59PM (#6884703) Homepage
      They've already dumped some of their common stock. However, these sales were "Planned" as in a 10b5-1 program that allows Insiders and Directors (holders of 10%+ of total outstanding common stock) to sell without violating SEC regs. If you look at the Form 4's filed with the SEC [sec.gov] and visible here [sec.gov] you'll see that the majority of the sales were for blocks of 5,000 shares.

      SCO's CFO stated in a conference call [yahoo.com] that the total shares that the executives sold was 117,000. Which is less than 1.5% of the stock owned by insiders and that the majority of that was sold to cover taxes on "Restricted Stock Grants" that the company made to them.

      There is a huge difference between common and restricted stock. The main one being that normally the holder of restricted stock cannot sell it for a set period of time, normally anywhere from 1 to 10 years thus locking in the share-holder and effectively basing their rewards upon the success or failure of the company.
      The reason for the need to pay taxes on the restricted shares is that the IRS views them as "Income" when granted and thus taxes them accordingly.
  • a dead horse trying to ride a dead horse?

    I'm mean SGI is not doing that well themselves, just look at the number of people they laid off. They're hanging in there, but I doubt they have loads of cash. At most SCO could get IRIX, and who buys IRIX new these days?

  • How moderate... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by greppling ( 601175 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @07:56PM (#6884371)
    From the article:

    The company has shown a recent preference for more moderate courses of action, such as sending invoices to Linux users rather than taking them to court.

    Wow. How bad must you behave until sending out invoices to end users, without backing up your claims by any substantial public explanations, is considered a "moderate course of action"???

  • So many lawsuits... (Score:5, Funny)

    by IbmSockPuppet ( 700756 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @08:00PM (#6884402)
    so little time. How will they fit in time to dump their stock? Priorities and all that.

  • RICO and SCO Group (Score:3, Interesting)

    by linuxislandsucks ( 461335 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @08:10PM (#6884455) Homepage Journal
    Seems SCO Group's new false invoice issuance for linux users and dsitributors make sit an ideal candidate for a RICO suit..

    Is this OPneSource's next legal strategy?
    • Isn't it strange that SCO constantly threatens to issue their bogus "invoices" yet no one who contacts SCO can get a straight answer about obtaining said license.

      I contacted scoinfo@scosales.com asking (nicely) about the licenses and proof of infringement. All I got was a link to SCO's lie-ridden March 6 press release and a threat to be BILLED for asking so many questions. They also wanted to know if I wanted to buy SCO Unix. They answered NO questions about Linux licenses.

  • Yuk Yuk - Bring 'em on! (Former SGI guy speaks) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05, 2003 @09:13PM (#6884768)
    Hehe, bring 'em on. If you're going to pick a F/S to attack, XFS is a perfect choice for SCO. It was developed independently, and I'd love to see SCO find one shread of old unix F/S tech besides the word 'vnode' in there. You go SCO! [Disclaimer, I only worked with the project back when it was an SGI-only system, who knows what happened during the Linux port].

    I think someone at SCO noticed that SGI had a SysV license (the later versions of SGI's IRIX had a good hunk of licensed SysV in there - same goes for the Solaris folks, I think everyone moved to SysV in the early 90's when it looked like 'the thing' to do).

    It'll be a good stretch for SCO to claim that XFS is a derived work in any real form. The only overlapping code would be the vnode entry points and some things related to the buffer cache, and those you really have no choice but to implement the SysV interfaces and that's easy to prove (maybe .1% or less of the FS code involved). The rest of XFS is a huge original undertaking. There's nothing quite like it (B-trees everywhere).

  • From Wired Sept 2003 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Felinoid ( 16872 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @10:03PM (#6884974) Homepage Journal
    First I admit keeping this copy in my backpack becouse of the really ummm cool artwork on the front with the lady clad in diamonds.
    (Drool)

    Ok... anyway
    Wired: Sept 2003 page 80 bottom half artical title "Will This Man Kill Linux"

    Darl McBride says (while anwering a question)
    "It's really interesting to see what happends when people see the code, when they see how blatant the copying is."

    What is intresting is that so far only McBrides experts appear to be able to find this code. Well that and people who can't actually read source code seam able to find them.
    I find it intresting that the experts can't be located. I find it intresting that much of the code in question can be found elsewhere. I find it intresting that the features in question are property of other companys.

    To date:
    The features in question make Linux an enterprise class system, Came from IBM, are primaraly for SGI hardware & Have something to do with 20 to 30 year old public domain code.

    To me it appears blairingly obveous SCO is just suing anyone they have balls enough to sue.

    Hay good thing they aren't suing the little guys becouse I really like Lunix [sourceforge.net].

  • Darl Bin Laden (Score:5, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @10:37PM (#6885099)
    In other news, international terrorist Osama McBride threatened to cause death and destruction that exceeds in every way the deaths caused by every war in the world since the beginning of time.

    A spokesperson for SCO said, "By leveraging innovative death and destruction technologies, content providers streamline compelling digital rights management solutions." In other words, dead men violate no copyrights.

  • Actually, I don't think I'm joking anymore. The only thing SCO seems to understand is threats to the wallet. So far they've been doing all the threatening, which is actually sort of reasonable since their wallets are so close to close to empty. However, the small bit of real cash in their wallets came from their few customers, and SCO is "proud" to list McDonalds as one of their major accounts.

    How many Slashdotters eat at McDonalds? A boycott might be a serious threat!
  • Since SCO seems to be claiming all "derivative works" from original Unix, why don't they go after Apple and the FSF (for OS X and the Hurd respectively)?

    Even through they are not derived from Unix Sys V sources, there were certainly "inspired" from Unix and use "Unix concepts and methods.". Mind you, SCO has no patents on any these methods. But why limit themselves to traditional Unix when you have all the other 'nixs out there.

    Has SCO even thought of the fact that the Unix interfaces themselves were

  • malloc ?? xfs ?? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tuomoks ( 246421 )
    #define malloc(X) getmain(X) - seriously, what are they smoking ?? xfs - is just an ( nice ) implementation of journaling file systems ( existed long before there was any Unix ) made by SGI, are they trying to own all the journaling file systems or are they claiming the name?? Journaling file systems existed long before Unix both in theory and in implementation. Malloc is just a name for a memory allocation procedure/macro - can/has been implemented n ways, even I did those before you can say Unix existed

  • SCO, SGI, BSD (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jdhouse4 ( 14603 ) * on Saturday September 06, 2003 @01:33AM (#6885824) Homepage

    The longer this has gone on, the more SCO seems to reach out to Unix vendors, the gladder I am that Bill Joy created the core of the Unix I use, BSD.

    I do wonder, muse really, sometimes. Is SCO working for Apple? Linux, though IBM, and SGI's Unix OS are being threatened and it seems that the one real winner, at least a bit in the Unix arena, is Apple whose Unix OS is based on BSD and is according to Bill Joy immune from SCO's actions. Personally, I doubt SCO has a case. But this is exactly the sort of stuff that companies and their proxies do to throw the competition off balance and create market growth opportunity.

    Like most OS X users, I can afford to just sit back and watch the fun as those companies wanting "free" Linux distributions now have to content with the risk (and that isn't a joke) of an SCO victory that would cost the free Linux community money. Meanwhile, Apple advances its OS X strategy by readying Panther with not a whisper of a threat from SCO.

    Is Jobs behind this?

    Yes, I'm joking. But the stakes are very high. At worst, Linux is no longer free which ruins its business model. With companies looking for alternatives to MS, and with Linux no longer free, and with other Unix OS's falling to SCO, wouldn't Apple be the real winner?

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