SCO Derides GPL, Will Revoke SGI's UNIX License 681
larry2k writes "PR newswire has an open letter from SCO to IBM.
From the letter: 'SCO believes that the GPL -- created by the Free Software Foundation to supplant current U.S. copyright laws -- is a shaky foundation on which to build a legal case.'" The release is also carried by NewsForge. Among other things, SCO says "By so strongly defending the controversial GPL, IBM is also defending a questionable licensing scheme through which it can avoid providing software indemnification for its customers."
Doesn't supplant mean "replace"? That's not what the GPL does.
And if you're wondering why you have not received an invoice from SCO for any Linux-based OS you may be running, benploni writes "From Groklaw: In this Detroit News story Blake Stowell explains why no one has received an invoice: 'SCO in August said Linux users could avoid lawsuits by paying a one-time fee of $699. The fee will rise to $1,399 on Oct. 15. Since the response to its appeal was adequate, SCO didn't send bills to thousands of Linux users, company spokesman Blake Stowell said.' [emphasis added]. We all knew there was no way they'd risk actually sending out invoices, and here's the proof."
Stock? (Score:5, Insightful)
How much did their stock go up by announcing
this? Why is everyone so "blind" to this?
Fantastic News! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Penguin just gets bigger and bigger.
Open Letters (Score:5, Insightful)
License Fee (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM is pretty savy for adopting an open source project as one of their main OS offerings, largely because it does provide them with a certain level of insulation from OS problems, but also because it provides them with considerable developement power at minimal cost.
Let us not forget that Apple has pretty much put their entire future into an open source OS as well, for pretty much the same reasons I think.
It just makes sense to me to build your OS upon a common open source framework. More compatable, more developers, more solutions to problems.
Ya, there are hoards of problems with that approach as well, but I think they can be succesfully managed.
Re:Stock? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Stock? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'd love an invoice. (Score:5, Insightful)
-Craig
Re:Relax (Score:5, Insightful)
Pro-Linux Conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:fp NIGGERS (Score:1, Insightful)
no incoices.. translation (Score:2, Insightful)
Translation-
"Since we made enough money off the dumb suckers who actually paid us, SCO didn't send bills to thousands of users who might be smart enough to sue us," company spokesman Blake Stowell said.
Not recognizing GPL is bad for SCO (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Indemnification DDOS (Score:5, Insightful)
My bet is they have a legal DDOS already planned to sue every single one of IBM's customers. By IBM providing indeminification, they would be swamped responding to the individual claims. It may be hard to take out a 800lb gorilla with a slingshot, but half a million mosquitoes will suck one dry.
I don't think so. To do this, SCO would have to pay to file and prosecute all of those lawsuits. Such a move might make sense in a situation where the DDOSer has vastly more resources than the recipient, but that is obviously not the case here.
No, I think the plan here is what has already been mentioned many times: If SCO can get all of the major Linux players offering indemnification then they can really cramp the growth and development of the operating system. Why? Because all commercial users will feel obligated to obtain indemnification. That's a little bit bad because it would mean that only large Linux providers can sell to businesses, but the real kicker is that it would limit commercial users' ability to modify and enhance the software.
That may seem like a non-sequiteur, but it's not. Look at HP's indemnification scheme: you only get indemnity if you run an unmodified version, unless you go through an as-yet-undefined (and probably expensive) process to get HP to cover your modified version. Why is HP limiting their indemnity this way? Because they have to. There's absolutely no way they can give blanket indemnity, because their customers could do things like tossing a bunch of, say, SCO Unixware code into Linux and then expect HP to take the heat.
IBM and any other company that offered indemnity would also have to limit the applicability of their guarantees, which would therefore limit the usage and development of Linux. That might give Unixware a better chance to compete, but I suspect the real reason is that it would work towards Microsoft's goal of slowing, FUDding and generally interfering with Linux.
Re:Relax (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be counter to IBM's whole Linux strategy. IBM is making money off of services related to Linux because businesses want Linux so they aren't locked into a proprietary software choice. IBM owning Linux would make it proprietary and aside from stability, not a very convincing argument from the other champion of proprietary solutions, that being Microsoft. IBM already has a proprietary (version of Unix)solution of their own, and that is AIX.
validity of GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, SCO is saying, "We believe we have no legal right to distribute a huge amount of the software that we are in fact distributing." Which member of their legal brain trust thought that one up?
This is much different from simply encumbering the Linux kernel, which is what would happen if there really were one million billion gazillion lines of modern copyrighted SysV code copied directly into Linux. They want to sell UNIX(R), so killing the kernel would be fine to them. But a lot of their business depends on GPLed code. They can't kill the GPL and have a surviving product line. The only way to get around this is to claim that all GPLed code has really been put in the public domain (against the specific written intent of the copyright holders). This is a legal theory almost too bizarre to put into words.
I am happy to entertain any explanation of SCO's behavior as something other than fraudulent stock manipulation, but I haven't heard any that can explain their actions.
Re:Is it only me (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot does seem to be grouping it all under Caldera. That gives you the ability to filter it out. Even if you don't it is so easy to scroll down the screen and bypass the things you don't want to read.
The fact that you did read it, opened this thread and then actually took the time to post.....well let's just say that it gives the appearance of "just trolling."
"pioneered the LAN"? (Score:2, Insightful)
That is utter nonsense. LAN and most of the infrastructure we take for granted on LANs didn't come from Novell. It didn't even come out of the PC world or the Mac world either. Commercially, LANs consisting of desktop machines and servers were popularized by workstation vendors, both UNIX workstation vendors like Sun, and non-UNIX workstation vendors like Symbolics. But they were actually pioneered by places like MIT, Berkeley, DEC, Bell Labs, and Xerox PARC.
All Novell did was what PC vendors have always done: take successful ideas out of the non-PC world and repackage them, poorly.
Re:Stock? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think a stock pump-n-dump to illegaly make money is "the most vile of sin"s then i think you need to watch the evening news a bit more......It's a crime and should be punished, but just today we have a story of a lady leaving a 2-year old in her apartment for days while she was in jail, never mentioned to the cops that a child was left home alone! That's VILE!
So Naieve (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stupid SCO (Score:2, Insightful)
If you are referring to the SCO Linux offering...well, then, yeah. That makes some sense. But SCO Unix is/should be 100% propriety and no GPL'd code.
Note I say should. Companies have a tendency to ignore that, but legally they should not be using GPL's code in Unix.
SCO vs. The World (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, I hope they take away all the Unix licences of everyone that has contributed to Linux. But pick on one 800lb gorilla, you might have a case. If you go after a flock of them, you look like a raving madman. Which is why I think this is all talk. They'll spread more FUD, but not actually sue SGI or revoke their licence. They'll say that they could, but are busy dealing with IBM and collect damages from SGI later (in a more FUDified way, of course).
Kjella
open source cavemen (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:this may be a stupid question, but I'm curious (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, if SCO was stupid enough to send anyone a "bill" for Linux licensing, and was further stupid enough to do it through the mail, then they'd be subject to US laws regarding mail fraud.
If you simply pay them money for "indemnification" without having been billed for it there's all of jack you can do. You gave them money. Did you have to? No. So why the hell did you?
If they send you a receipt for having paid for the "protection" then you might have a case, but I doubt it. IANAL. If you really want an answer, pay the money to SCO and then go get legal consul. Or do so beforehand, although you'll pay far more than $700 for legal consultation and research.
Since it would constitute Mail Fraud, ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:this may be a stupid question, but I'm curious (Score:3, Insightful)
Depending on how the license you buy from SCO is phrased, probably not.
If you buy a license from SCO, you are, in effect, placing a $700.00 bet on a roulette wheel that:
You might be able to sue them for fraudulently misrepresenting what they had to sell you. But since the license contract is the final description of what they're selling you, such a suit probably won't succeed.
As always, talk to a real lawyer first.
Schwab
SCO's strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect SCO's strategy was much like what the new guy in prison is supposed to do: Go nuts and beat somebody up your first day, and people will treat you with respect. They want to wring licensing fees out of people, so they need to get a big, powerful company to bow down to their threats. For some strange reason they chose IBM, a company not exactly known for their reluctance to litigate (unlike Microsoft, IBM actually defended itself against antitrust claims from the government and won).
It's clear now that the strategy isn't working; IBM isn't having any of it, and while it certainly has generated some concern and doubt in the business community, SCO isn't going to be collecting any significant royalties anytime soon (in fact they're not even prepared to yet). But when your cards are on the table and you've only got the road ahead of you, I suppose you have to see it through, even if you realize you have a bad hand.
I wonder if SCO will even exist as a distinct company five years from now. I suspect not.
Re:this may be a stupid question, but I'm curious (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, when this case finally gets to trial, and SCO loses (God willing), could the company turn around and sue for extortion/other illegality, since it has been proven in court that SCO has no legal basis to enforce/collect licensing fees?
Definatly a possibility, but also unlikely to ammount to anything; I do not expect SCO to have any assets left after the IBM and Red Hat trials, and if that is the case, you would be unable to recoup your costs. Better to simply not pay.
The real reason you are not receiving an invoice (Score:1, Insightful)
For the above to work, you will have to send a letter asking them to show you their proof of ownership. Once they respond with nothing of substance, you can then proceed with the harassment suit.
Since harasmment is criminal, I think you could get to see a courtroom before IBM... and hopefully stop this FUD campaign before Darl can cash in.
SGI response (Score:2, Insightful)
"SCO's references to XFS are completely misplaced. XFS is an innovative SGI- created work. It is not a derivative work of System V in any sense, and SGI has full rights to license it to whomever we choose and to contribute it to open source. It may be that SCO is taking the position that merely because XFS is also distributed along with IRIX it is somehow subject to the System V license. But if so, this is an absurd position, with no basis either in the license or in common sense. In fact, our UNIX license clearly provides that SGI retains ownership and all rights as to all code that was not part of AT&Ts UNIX System V."
Will SCO pay contributors $$$s for reviewing code? (Score:2, Insightful)
My question is - if SCO manages to get into court - how can they justify their integration of uncompensated works submitted to Linux under the GPL? Would it be considered plagarism - or corporate hijacking of source code submitted by this army of unpaid programmers?
Re:So Naieve (Score:3, Insightful)
In a word, no!
It is to IBM's interest to be Number One.
In a world with very strong and healthy numbers 2,3,4,...
So much better than being number one in a game nobody else wants to play.
With strong and healthy competition, IBM is a very safe bet. Without the competition, Information Technology is something you want less of, not more of.
Outcome a Repeat of History? (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking of "predict", I reckon the Closed Source vs Open Source arena we have, today, is much like the Closed Architecture vs the Open Architecture hardware arena of the past (ironic that IBM started this, then tried to re-neg -- remember the Charlie Chaplin ads?).
Back then, we didn't have the World Wide Web, so one had to read about the goings on of that market battle in the trade papers. But I bet history is, once again, repeating itself. This time it's about software, not hardware, of course. Makes sense that it's taken longer to get the software battle under way because hardware, well, just has to come first -- no hardware, no software possible.
But the past is interesting to me because of my (strange?) belief that we can probably predict the ultimate outcome and peer into the future a bit, by looking into the past. But, I can't remember how the last battle went (I was too young to care much, fresh out of college).
BTW, I really like how things turned out. At the time I was a real Motorola fan -- wished that the most ubiquitous desktop hardware hadn't gone little-endian and had shared stack/heap/program space (what a pain it was/is to write firmware for Intel chips vs Motorola!!!). However, what I like, now is paying next to nothing for seemingly endless increases in power!
So, what about the past? Anyone remember the hardware "Open Architecture" battles that went on? Are we closely repeating our technology history? Did anyone get as bent out of shape (as I feel over SCO) toward the "wrong side" at the time? Did we win?
Correct me if I am wrong, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright law does not stipulate what conditions must be established in order for permission from the copyright holder to be recognized. These conditions are entirely at the discretion of the holder of the copyright.
The GPL outlines the terms and conditions that person must agree to in order to have legally recognized permission from the copyright holder to distribute a GPL'd work.
People who do not agree to the terms of the GPL and still distribute the work are therefore in violation of plain old ordinary copyright law.
What SCO doesn't seem to "get" is that the GPL does not force derivative work contributers to fork over their copyrights - they still own those. What it *DOES* do is force derivative work contributes to do is not be able to distribute derivative works without subjecting it to the terms of the GPL. This is possible because in a derivative work, some or all of the code copyrighted by someone else and released under the terms of the GPL is usually still included in the final package. If a person were to disagree with the terms of the GPL, yet still distribute their derived works, they would also be distributing some or all of the original author's work without recognized permission (the upshot of this is that if a derived work no longer happens to contain any code that was originally released under the GPL by someone else, then the GPL does not actually have to apply to the derived work). Ultimately, it appears that the only *possible* reason to feel like the GPL's terms and conditions are unfair is if one's primary form of code reuse is "copy/paste" (which can carry copyright ramifications anyways, if you are copying code you didn't write).
Re: Stock? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now go out and join a protest. Protest something, anything, and do it with a lot of people. You won't feel like a fool. You'll feel powerful, different, and you'll tend to do things you don't normally do. I guarantee it. Then come back and tell me that a collection of humans is the same as a bunch of individual thinkers. The whole is not the same as the sum of the parts.
Individuals are smart. Groups of people are stupid. Every fireman, cop, EMT and politician in the world knows this. Nature defies logic. Science is counter-intuitive. And sometimes the truth is stupid.
revoking licenses.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Dante ["the most vile of sin"] (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think a stock pump-n-dump to illegaly make money is "the most vile of sin"s then i think you need to watch the evening news a bit more......It's a crime and should be punished
Dante's heirarchy of hell [pentaone.com] defines the worst level of sinners, those frozen with Satan in Hell's ninth and deepest layer, to be those who betray or kill country, kin, and benefactor.
SCO/Caldera would fit this definition, having produced a sustained attack for eight months now attempting to destroy, for its own shallow gain, the linux community from which the SCO group was born-- the community which produced the thing (linux) which allowed Caldera to gain all of its current status and wealth, including the wealth it used to buy SCO and the UNIX copyrights that give Caldera the pretenses for its suit. By Dante's heirarchy, this would put them in the same circle as the lady you mentioned, though slightly further from the center.
If you think that my definition of "betrayal against kin" is too loose, well, okay, we can free SCO of that allegation-- which has them doing a little bit better than the woman who left her 2-year old surviving for days on uncooked pasta it found-- but it should be noted that all that does is rise the SCO group up one layer to level 8, the level for fraudulence and malice, which dante apparently considered a worse sin than murder and violence (level 7).
Putting 2 and 2 together (Score:1, Insightful)
Why would they really need any more time? They say they have already identified over 1M lines of code that infringe--should be enough. And "add parties"?! Who else are they going to add??? They have already said that basically the whole world owes them royalties/licensing fees, so what's next--posthumous lawsuits? I hope the eventual SEC investigation will notice little correlations like this delaying of the trial to coincide with Darl McBride's incentive bonus for keeping SCO profitable for 4 quarters. The longer he can hold out the crash, the better off he is.
Re:Stock? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Relax (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the photocopiers! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah. Exactly. Nasty kiddie stuff. Just what we need when the rest of the community is trying to show that the open source movement is mature and responsible and can be trusted by business.
But off you go and order your pizzas.
Re:Stock? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure the stock is garbage, and its probably being pumped, but that doesn't mean it will go up further before the crash.
if you shorted the
Re:Open letter from SGI (Score:3, Insightful)
So, either there is a stack of code in SysV that SGI doesn't have access to, or there is no actionable similarity between Linux and SysV and SCO is full of crap. Take your pick.