The SCO Trial Through A New Lens 362
An anonymous reader writes "On Yahoo! News they've got an article by Paul Murphy entitled, SCO, IBM and Outcomes-Based Circular Reasoning. Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'. He writes, 'By itself this was a straightforward contractual dispute that could, and should, have been settled quickly and easily.' And that, 'Although SCO hasn't formulated its complaint in this way, I believe it could meet these, or similar, requirements quite easily and therefore has every reason to be confident that the court will eventually enforce its stop-use order against IBM.' He also goes on to insult Linux advocates by stating that, 'the position being run up the flagpole by what Stalin famously called "useful idiots" is first that the lawsuit itself is no longer a real issue and secondly that its consequences have been generally positive.'"
Bad argument (Score:5, Insightful)
It appears he doesn't grok (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bad argument (Score:5, Insightful)
As to why he's wrong: 1) Linux doesn't need knowledge from the AT&T SysV code base to become world-class. 2) IBM isn't trying to contribute knowledge or source from the AT&T SysV code base to Linux.
As an aside, reverse engineering was never necessary to understand or duplicate a unix kernel and is therefore his mention of it is a complete red herring.
Regards,
Ross
Congress should protect Open Source (Score:2, Insightful)
What an idiot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mod root Troll -1 (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Could SCO have a chance after all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, no, he's just wrong. Nobody cares if Linux is a "clone" of Unix. SCO sees Linux as a derivative work of Unix because it implements the same interfaces. This view has been repudiated not just by Linux advocates but also by the courts.
And no, so far to my knowledge SCO has presented nothing resembling real evidence. That's the reason they have to keep asking for more discovery and versions of AIX to prove a convoluted "the code is derived from ours but doesn't look anything like it anymore" hypothesis. IBM seems to be taking great glee in pointing out SCO's lack of evidence in their filings.
There was a time when it was reasonable to believe that SCO could have an actual case. That time is long past. Some people are just slow.
If SCO's case were a slam-duno against IBM (Score:2, Insightful)
Surely SCO has enough lawyers, and I bet all of them know more about IP law than Paul "Who the fuck am I, again?" Murphy.
The Author Missed A Point (Score:2, Insightful)
A fundimental misreading of copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
Here is the way established law actually works. I can buy a copyrighted book, change every sentence and chapter in it until there is nothing left of the original work, and then release it as my own. By that point, it is my own. You cannot copyright people's inspiration. It is silly to try.
In breaking news SCO hires a cleaning person. (Score:5, Insightful)
Next week at Playboy on line. The women of SCO.
The suite has been setup by SCO as Linux is evil and belongs to us and we will sue all the users that do no pay us.
There are no Linux advocates involved with the court case it is Freaking IBM that is involved.
Here is what happened.
Someone convinced SCO that Linux could only have gotten so good by stealing SCO's code. SCO was going down fast and grabbed that straw with the hopes that IBM would just buy them to shut them up.
IBM knew that SCO did not have a case so it decided to make an example of them.
SCO trying to get more people to pony up attacked any deep pockets that it could. Autozone and other show the court that SCO had nothing so that backfired.
Frankly at this point I really want to believe that McBride really did believe that IBM had stolen the code. I would like to think that he has just backed himself into a corner and can not see anyway out. The only other answer is he is delusional.
I liked his part about (Score:4, Insightful)
Me, I've read the correspondence filed with the Court on the subject. IBM asked what they were supposed to have done wrong so that they could remedy the problem, SCOX told them they'd see them in court.
Yeah, that's bad faith on IBM's part all right. Here we are more than two years later and IBM is still trying to get the Court to make SCOX tell them what IBM is supposed to have done wrong, so far with no luck.
Re:Congress should protect Open Source (Score:2, Insightful)
The SCO trial through Beer Goggles (Score:4, Insightful)
The man makes wild assumptions based on loose guesses he himself made, where-as 20 minutes with google would have produced facts to write an article that would have had some merit. Most of what he rants on about are flat-out wrong. He knows nothing about linux and I strongly suspect his claims about Unix experience.
I am very interested in how supposedly linux supporters are suddenly claiming that Linux is not unix as he mentions in the article? From what I remember this has been the norm cince 1994 when I started dabbling in it and I bet that if someone looked they would find even earlier evidence of that fact.
that article tarnishes not only the writers reputation but the publication that carried it.
Re:Bad argument (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft never purchased a license to do POSIX on NT4.0, just like they never paid for any of the BSD TCP/IP code they snagged (not that they needed, the former being a standard you don't need to license, the latter being BSD-licensed).
But that's the whole point; linux isn't a UNIX clone, and neither is NT 4.0.
Also note that buying licenses from SCOX doesn't stop them from sueing you, so they would sue Microsoft, if they weren't shills that Microsoft is bankrolling in the first place.
Re:Sorry, no (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bad argument (Score:4, Insightful)
Tannenbaum will be right eventually anyway. (Score:3, Insightful)
Tannenbaum was merely ahead of his time. We're already almost in an age where the operating system overhead is pretty minimal, and the latest advances in microkernels put message passing almost on a par with direct context switching anyway.
What this means is that, at some point in the not too distant future, the monolithic kernel will be seen as a really bad idea on all counts, and with no performance benefit at all. And we all know that loading graphic binary drivers into our kernel images is compromising our uptimes, so the realities of "a bad idea" are with us already.
It was just his 1991 time frame that didn't match up to reality all that well. The substance was good.
Public Relations Spin (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I used to work for this guy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since no one has seen fit to respond to this so far, let me point out emphatically that this post is making an an outrageous and completely unsubstantiated accusation, and it is a lousy, indecent thing to be doing to Paul Murphy. You may or may not like what he says about SCO, but he most certainly does not deserve an anonymous accusation of attempted rape.
I frankly would like to meet the person who wrote this post, so that I could give him solid kick in the ass. I'm not using a figure of speech here. Far from acknowledging any "obvious reasons", Mr. Anonymous Accuser, I say that you are loathsome coward, and you damn well better come back with something more substantial, or shut your filthy mouth.
As for you moderators who modded the post up to 5 Interesting, I submit that you are among the stupidest morons ever to visit Slashdot. If anything deserves a -1 Troll, this is it.
As for the question of whether or not the accusation is true, in the absence of any verifiable evidence there is no reason at all to consider such a possibility. To make any such assumption about Paul Murphy on the basis of an anonymous accusation is so unfair as to be utterly indecent.
I never thought I would attack someone for an anonymous post, because I'm often irritated by all of the pithy sigs about how anonymous posters cannot be believed. In almost all cases, that's a logical fallacy, because the merit of post in a discussion group lies solely in the strength of the evidence and arguments it presents, which usually has nothing at all to do with the identity of the poster. The only situation in which the anonymity of the poster detracts from his credibility is when his identity is one of the issues addressed in his post.
But this is precisely that kind of situation. Someone here is saying that he knows Paul Murphy personally and is accusing him of a crime, but the accuser won't tell us who he is and how he supposedly knows these things. That kind of crap deserves no credibility until the poster comes back and tells us why we should believe anything he says.
I must be getting cynical (Score:3, Insightful)
Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'.
and translated it
Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry', so it's been 20 years since he's done anything but produce fluffy white papers for non-technical management.
Code from minix? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, he used some ideas from Minix (and *nix in general), but I don't see how he could have used actual code. Or am I missing some way that he would have had access to the code?
Re:I used to work for this guy... (Score:2, Insightful)
1. To an incompetent manager, superincompetence is indistinguishable from supercompetence.
2. Since everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence, the managerial staff will eventually be composed entirely of incompent people.
Therefore, at some point superincompetence will always be cause for promotion.