SCO Fires back, Subpoenas Stallman, Torvalds et al 1145
SirFozzie writes "SCO has just, within the past hour, announced that they have fired back against IBM's legal broadside, with one of their own, filing subpoenas against several of the biggest names in Linux. SCO filed subpoenas with the U.S. District Court in Utah, targeting six different individuals or organizations. Those include Novell; Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation; Stewart Cohen, chief executive of the Open Source Development Labs; and John Horsley, general counsel of Transmeta."
Re:WHAT!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Umm, you do realize that a subpoena does not mean those people are being attacked? It merely means that SCO ostensibly thinks they possess information which is relevant to the case, and they are asking that it be turned over. Although the article said nothing at all about exactly what information SCO was after (going by their past performance, I'm guessing it will be overly broad and intended to show a bias in SCO's favour - something like "Give us all information you have that might validate our claims", then when the people can't come up with this they will accuse the linux community of holding back important information), it seems reasonable to me to subpoena the people that ostensibly know the most about the software in question. However, while issuing subpoenas for these people seems reasonable to me, I somehow doubt that the subpoenas themselves will be reasonable.
Re:sad but fun (Score:5, Informative)
Don't worry, European courts have produced plenty of whoppers of their own -- German lawyers going on trademark jihads concerning trademarks they don't even own (Mobilix); British courts making it illegal to tell anyone that some servant saw Prince Charles and another man doing the nasty (whoops, now Slashdot will have to be banned in the UK!); French courts ruling that Google can't let a competitor use the AdWords feature to attach an ad to a search that mentions a competitor's name -- I could go on and on.
Linus (Score:1, Informative)
IANAL, but here's some answers (Score:4, Informative)
1: do as ze Germans did. File an injunction and get it enforced [computerworld.com]
The fine comes nearly three months after a regional court in Munich issued the court order in response to a suit brought by the nonprofit Linux conference organization, LinuxTag e.V., and IT consulting firm Tarent GmbH. The two groups sought the injunction to prevent SCO from making claims about intellectual property violations in Linux without presenting any evidence...
2: do as IBM has done and try to get the facts out. And since we know SCO won't give up the goods, get it from anyone else with their hand in the SCO piggy bank. [forbes.com] "It is time for SCO to produce something meaningful. They have been dragging their feet and it is not clear there is any incentive for SCO to try this in court"
Re:How about an investigation (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Courtroom Drama?? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about Cox? (Score:5, Informative)
Media Coverage of SCO (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Oh dear (Score:1, Informative)
Imagine if you will:
Lawyer: do you believe all software should be given away for free?
RMS: If by "free" you mean, everyone should be able to use, modify, and redistribute software without fear of breaking the law, then yes.
Lawyer: do you believe that SCO's software should be given away for free?
RMS: copyright law allows SCO to be as generous or hoarding with their software as they choose. The free software community would like to see all software made free, voluntarily.
Lawyer: but if you had access to SCO's source code, wouldn't you want to put it on the internet, you know, to make it "free"?
RMS: I'm not allowed to do that. That's why I and others in the free software community write our own software and make it free.
Lawyer: do you feel satisfaction when someone else steals source code and places it on the internet?
RMS: No.
Lawyer: but it would make more software "free", that's good right?
RMS: No, because it's not free in the sense I'm talking about. It's still under a proprietary license, which is being violated. Free software must be set free by the copyright holder, not by someone else. that's why the FSF makes sure that we hold the copyright on all software we release, which is assigned to us through legal means.
Lawyer: c'mon you bearded hippy, CRACK!! CRACK DAMN IT!!!!
Re:I don't THINK so (Score:3, Informative)
You think he may have gotten a chance to brush up on his public speaking skills over the last quarter century?
I do (Score:3, Informative)
SEC Filings are public.
For some reason this reminds me of the scenario from the first Godfather movie, where they figure out where the meeting will be because the Police Chief has to let his station know where he'll be at all times
Re:Oh dear (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the GPL was penned by Eben Moglen, not RMS. RMS came up with the idea, and Eben made it legally sound and defensible in court.
Re:WHAT!!! (Score:2, Informative)
Subpoena != Court Appearance (Score:5, Informative)
I mention this because a number of posts speculate on "the GPL finally going to trial" or some such as a consequence of this. That may very well happen, but not as an immediate result of this. So those of you awaiting the "GPL Final Combat" should probably sheathe the swords for a little while longer...
Re:sad but fun (Score:3, Informative)
They've released lots of info (Score:5, Informative)
SCO doesn't know the difference between what they once called "Ancient Unix" (which the AT&T vs. Berkeley judge said AT&T lost to the public domain) and the System V code they actually own some rights to, despite the fact that they rereleased that code themselves under the old BSD license.
SCO doesn't know the difference between original BSD code (like the packet filter code they claimed as their own) and their System V code, despite the fact that they are legally required to retain the copyright notices on the BSD parts.
SCO can't tell the difference between a legal, original reimplementation of a detailed published standard (like that BPF example, and probably like much of the POSIX, Unix9x, BSD, etc. compatibility in Linux) and an obfuscated copy of the original implementation.
More recently, SCO has "responded" to IBM's interrogatories not with specific claims of wrongdoing, but with the output of "egrep -il (smp|rcu|numa)" and a disclaimer that they're not stating that the output includes some infringement.
If they have an actual case, why are they pubishing these embarrassments instead, still keeping their case secret in court where they might piss off a judge instead of just a bunch of Linux users?
Services for UNIX, maybe? (Score:2, Informative)
Ever heard about it? [microsoft.com]
Re:Oh dear (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh dear (Score:3, Informative)
IBM will also depose RMS and LT (Score:2, Informative)
SCO doesn't really want these two standard bearers of Open Source to set the court straight, which IBM will surely make happen.
Open Source is the life blood of these two men, they live and beleive it. They will both be well prepared and be SCO's worst nightmare come to life.