SCO Sues IBM for Sharing Secrets with Unix and Linux

bstadil writes "The information is still sparse but the expected lawsuits from SCO over Unix/Linux patent infringements has been filed." SCO is asking for a billion dollars. News.com and Forbes are also covering the story.

IN OTHER NEWS...

[YOU ARE SO FIRED!]

... Dr. Evil hired as president of SCO.

First post when posting is disabled?

heh

[Spruce Moose]

first lawsuit!

My earlier plea for sanity

[mosch]

During the previous article I made a call for peace. I suggested that it was too early to condemn SCO for they had done nothing vicious, and we had no way to tell precisely what was planned.

Clearly I was a fucking retard. They're fucking evil. Ban them. Send them emails which politely, yet firmly state that they smell like a llama's anus. Sick the Channel 7 ProblemSolvers on them.

Seriously, there's just no excuse. As a nation, we must rise up against this evil, and destroy it once and for all.

in other sco related news..

[Anonymous Coward]

today sco also announced they are moving their centre of operations to a hollowed out volcano, and branching out to the lucrative area of 'fricken sharks with fricken laser beams on their fricken heads'

*pinky finger to mouth*

Re:This should do wonders for United Linux sales..

[Fedhax]

If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em. What a wonderful philosophy.

Yeah, Amazon is planning to file suit against SCO for violating its patent covering the process of suing someone for patent violations.

Re:My earlier plea for sanity

[alfredo]

Yes.

How does he know how a LLama's anus smells?

Re:IN OTHER NEWS...

[slickwillie]

Santa Cruz Operation moved to Lindon, Utah?

That's gotta hurt.

Re:Everyone Jumping On the Bandwagon

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard she can't smoke out of that hole anymore!

Re:Best quote ever, same old from SCO

[buffer-overflowed]

That would give me laugh out loud for days, especially considering BSD came into being because AT&T were being irrational. Not a scrap of unix code in it.

Even the thought of it is making little tears of joy run down my face.

Re:The solution is very very simple.

[refactored]

And that must be inflated like hell. I have worked with SCO servers and hated every jiffy of it.

It's the lawyers I tell you, find the lawyers irresponsible for this and and and and and send them to be human shields in Iraq.

Re:My earlier plea for sanity

[Tailhook]

"During the previous article I made a call for peace. I suggested that it was too early to condemn SCO for they had done nothing vicious, and we had no way to tell precisely what was planned."

We need to give the inspectors more time. War is wrong. Bush just wants the oil.

Oh... sorry. Wrong cause.

Re:IBM

[buffer-overflowed]

Sueing IBM for patent infringement is like playing russian roulette with a semi-auto gun..... and going first, and second, and third... etc.

Re:Takeover

[cgleba]

Great question that I was wondering myself. At this point SCO (Caldera) may be cheaper then even the cost of a lawsuit.

Perhaps that was SCO's intention after all when they decided to go after IBM fisrt . . .

Open request to IBM

[BJH]

Dear IBM,

Please spend the $US25.68 million it would require to buy out SCO, and then fire every single member of their management and legal department.

Thank you,

A Linux user.

Dr SCO!

[babbage]

61 INT. DR. SCO'S VOLCANO LAIR - MAIN ROOM Dr. SCO at his table with Frau, Scott, and Number Two.

DR. SCO Get me the President of the IBM.

The PRESIDENT appears on Dr. SCO's video screen with his BOARD MEMBERS behind him.

62 INT. OVAL OFFICE (SPLIT SCREEN)

PRESIDENT Dr. SCO, what do you want?

DR. SCO Not what I want Mr. President, but I will receive. In 12 hours I will destroy your industry with a giant patent.

Dr. SCO reveals a giant patent. Minix-me is humping it like a dog.

DR. SCO OK, Minix-me, why don't you and the patent get a frickin' room. Honestly. [ to President ] I will destroy another major distribution every hour- that is, unless you pay me- [ SNAP ZOOM ] One hundred billion dollars!

The President and his advisors LAUGH.

PRESIDENT Dr. SCO that's more than the entire US economy for 2002.

DR. SCO Don't play games with me. Your UNIX will disappear if I don't receive [ SNAP ZOOM ] One hundred billion dollars!

His advisors LAUGH.

PRESIDENT That much money simply doesn't exist. I don't think 100 billion is even a number. It's like saying I want a kajillion bajillion dollars. [ His advisors LAUGH. ]

DR. SCO Come on, Mr. President... [ SNAP ZOOM ] "Show me the money!"

Dr. SCO looks around smugly. No one laughs.

PRESIDENT What?

[ SNAP ZOOM ]

DR. SCO "Show me the money!"

He looks around again, expectantly.

PRESIDENT I'm sorry, I don't understand.

DR. SCO You know, kwan? Show me the money? No? Nothing?

SCOTT It's 2003. That movie stopped being a cultural buzzword 30 years ago, ass. They don't know what you're talking about.

DR. SCO Right. OK, see if you understand this: give me the money or I'm going to blow you to frickin' bits, OK?

The President and his advisors MURMUR.

PRESIDENT But-

DR. SCO [ making 'stop' gesture ] Talk to the hand!

Dr. SCO signs off.

with thanks to whoever posted this script [ntlworld.com], and with great annoyance at whoever decided that Slashdot posts with low average line lengths are a bad thing, and so need to be offset by pointless filler like this to bring up the average -- apologies while I pad this just a little more, and please feel free to disregard this last paragraph so that the average line count goes above, apparently, 30. Two things you can apparently never include in this news for nerds sites: program code (you can talk about open source, but you can't share it here!) and, apparently, movie scripts. Go figure.... Anyway, this should be enough padding, pretend this whole last paragraph is wrapped in a <!-- sorry --> block :-)

Sue IBM for patent infringement?

[TheLink]

This is going to be fun to watch:

Single Camouflaged Operative vs International Battle Marines.

Do a search on the USPTO for International Business Machines as assignee, and file as title, and you get 300+ hits. This is out of their 32000+ patents.

Re:Takeover

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly, but they would then be left with a huge problem: They would own SCO.

That is a fate far, far worse than years of litigation. Especially when the years of litigation could end in a countersuit neatly paying for your legal fees.

Re:The Lawsuit

[mobets]

A <br> or two in that might have been nice. I might have read it.

Re:This is the end of SCO, for sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

The obvious first step that would occurr to any of us would be to shun SCO - not to do business with them, not to recommend them in our jobs, etc.

Dang, since I thought SCO went out of business YEARS ago I was already doing this.

Illuminati???

[Pig Hogger]

"It's a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company," said Jonathan Eunice, an Illuminata analyst.

I thought it was the illuminati???

Re:lego flashbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

"it's pretty damned hard to unlearn technics"

So I'm not the only one with weird Lego flashbacks?

Re:McDonalds Coffee

[fuzdout]

First off, don't put cups of coffee near your genitals and you won't burn them. Um, I would expect to get burned pretty badly by hot coffee or tea spilling in my lap. Also do note that being an older gal she would have more tender skin than a young adult (old skin burns easier as it's thinner)

Also think of it like this: Lets say she made her own coffee in her coffee-maker at home (you know the kind where you don't get a choice how how hot it is made. Say simply "on" or "off") or even if she say made some tea (don't know about you, but when I make tea I *boil* the water first) and puts it in a cup with a lid and goes in her car (depending on who's version of the story you believe she is either the passenger or the driver -doesn't matter) and does the same thing as the McDonald's incident what is she going to do then? Sue the coffe-maker company? Or if it's the tea version then what? Oh, she'll sue the company that makes her stove for being able to boil water!
More than likely though, she wouldn't have been suing anybody if she made it herself despite it possibly being the same or close to the same temperature as the McDonalds coffee.

mouse-that-roared move by SCO/Boies...

[rkhalloran]

(a) sue the Linux company with the deepest pockets. Those Red Hat guys are barely making any money, let's go after Big Blue with their $1B Linux budget.

(b) IBM unchains the Lawyer Horde, buckles on their Patent Shield (c) and proceeds to lay the legal smackdown on SCO

(c) then buys up the smoking ruins of SCO for even less than they're worth now

WHICH IS STILL A BETTER DEAL FOR THE SCO PEOPLE THAN RIDING THEIR PITIFUL IP HOLDINGS INTO OBLIVION

Boycott SCO...

[fanatic]

...oh, wait, we already are. Nevermind.

Re:Illuminata Analyst should be ashamed

[zurab]

If IBM lacked it, which I doubt, I guess ...

Wait a second... IBM lacked the knowledge of operating systems and hardware architecture which is, to this day, still called IBM-compatible?

SCO: "Yes, your honor, they invented the sewing machine, but they don't know how to thread the needle."
Judge (to IBM): "Do you guys know how to thread the needle?"
IBM: "You betcha."
Judge: "Cased dismissed."
Bailiff: "Next case is: MPAA vs. SCO."
SCO: "WTF?"
Judge: "Order in the courtroom!"
MPAA: "Your honor, we hereby declare that SCO used and engaged in unlicensed and illegal performance of our copyrighted content."
SCO: "WTF?"
Judge: "Order!"
MPAA: "They made fools of themselves, and then they asked $1 billion in ransom from the biggest software corporation - all this while arguing about some software invented in 1970s; you see, your honor, this directly violates our copyright for unauthorized public performance from our recent Austin Powers movie..."
Judge: "Hahahaha! I loved that part..."
Judge (turning to SCO): "Why did you guys do this?"
SCO: "WTF?"
Judge: "OK, I've had enough of this. I hereby order that all intellectual property of SCO be put into public domain effective immediately. I also order that MPAA send me the special feature DVDs of all Austin Powers movies so I can further review the evidence. We'll reconvene in 4 weeks."

On a more serious note, if SCO (then Caldera) themselves distributed Linux and thereby accepted the GPL terms, how can they claim patent rights to any GPLed code? If they did have some patent issues they should have pointed those out then, without agreeing to GPL. On the other hand, if they did not agree to GPL, then they are in gross violation of copyright law and can probably be sued out of existence by copyright holders. EFF not interested?

Re:Everyone Jumping On the Bandwagon

[fuzdout]

Probably :)

There for all McDonalds would insteads have to install special harnesses that would lift and hold people with a crane-like mechanism just inches above said toilet so nobody's fat butt lands on the seat and brakes it [g]

Providing multi-faceted computing solutions...

[sulli]

Did they get their Buzzword Bingo set in the bargain bin? Those descriptions are just pathetic. Then again, wasn't Ray Noorda the guy who ran Novell into the ground?

Dear Darl McBride – President, CEO of SCO

[Stonent1]

What is it going to feel like having your ass handed to you on a cracker by the x86 *nix community??

Signed,
Slashdotters

SCO feedback page

[Anonymous Coward]

Flame them [sco.com]. I just did. It's very theraputic.

In other news.......

[Nemus]

Onlookers were stunned today when it was found that the headquarters of the company SCO had been replaced by a giant smoking crater, which completly obliterated any trace of the company's phsyical prescence. The only clue to this occurence was a large amount of paper floating around the area, all of which seemed to be a copy of an IBM patent.

In other news, the world's largest catapult has recently been constructed on the rooftop of IBM's world headquarters. What it is being used for no one knows, but it now seems to be pointed at Redmond, with a sign on the front which says "Try that shit again, foolios, and see what happens."

the Hurd

[Anonymous Coward]

damn, the Hurd is (at the moment) mach based...dies that mean theyre gonna try and sue te Hurd community...1 billion is hell of a lot for 3 developers!

Darl McBride is an ass.

[x136]

From the eWeek article: [eweek.com]

"SCO is in the enviable position of owning the UNIX operating system," said Darl McBride, president and CEO of SCO, before accidentally knocking over the podium with his enormous ego.

Okay, so it didn't say all of that. But it could have.

Re:Biting off more than they can chew

[stefanb]

Of course, just as I post my story submission to slashdot on this, no sooner than I reload the page after submitting it when the story appears from someone else.

Don't worry, the time for your submission will come.

Re:the Hurd

[mikeee]

Nah, the coprights to UNIX will have expired by the time HURD 1.0 ships.

Re:This is the end of SCO, for sure.

[Trailer Trash]

The obvious first step that would occurr to any of us would be to shun SCO - not to do business with them, not to recommend them in our jobs, etc.

Gee, I dunno, Bruce, that's a tough one.

About the lawyer

[dizzl]

"Caldera and SCO Group are being represented by David Boies's law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner."

This is a supposedly "heavy" guy, who prosecuted Microsoft, defended Napster against RIAA and defended Gore in his vote-counting-trial.

Question: Didn't he lose all of these?!

dizzl
--
Be the change that you want to see in the world -- Gandhi

Re:This is the end of SCO, for sure.

[efflux]

Canopy group, eh?
Why don't they just call themselves the "Umbrella Corporation" ;)