SCO's Next Target: SGI?

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."

SCO has SGI on the run too it seems

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:Something is Terribly Wrong

[Discopete]

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.

Re:Apparently they keep an eye on /.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pam-krb5 [sourceforge.net]

The license is GPL. The developer(s) should sue SCO right now and demand to see all the source.

The passivity of the Linux community in the face of this SCO bullshit astonishes me. Why hasn't Linus sued SCO? Alan?

Amazing.

Re:Apparently they keep an eye on /.

[cdrudge]

They may be able to change the the present and the future, but they can't change the past. The Wayback Machine [archive.org] captured the original page [archive.org]...or at least the original image.

Re:It's not MS targetting SGI, it really *is* SCO

[killmenow]

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.

Hit 'em in the wallet! Boycott McDonalds!

[shanen]

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!

Re:Apparently they keep an eye on /.

[cdrudge]

The SCO page never had a red hat. It was always blackened out. Here [plesk.com] is an example of the real image with the red hat in it.

Re:Apparently they keep an eye on /.

[MuParadigm]

Looks like SCO (or maybe Center 7) is just pulling its images from other sites. Wouldn't it be great if SCO got sued by Corbis of one of the other photo banks for stealing their intellectual property? Irony, thy name is SCO.

BTW, here is a quote from Novell's legal page [novell.com]:

"Design/Layout

The design or layout of the Novell.com website or any other Novell owned, operated, licensed or controlled site is the property of Novell, Inc. Elements of Novell websites are protected by copyright, trade dress and other laws and may not be copied or imitated in whole or in part. No logo, graphic, sound or image from any Novell website may be copied or retransmitted unless expressly permitted by Novell. Please report any such instances of use to [e-mail]."

If anyone at Novell is reading this, PLEASE direct notice of this violation [sco.com] of your image [novell.com] to your legal department. I honestly find it hard to believe that anyone at Novell would give SCO permission to use *anything* Novell is in a position to deny.

Re:What a useful article

[arth1]

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