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Unix Operating Systems Software GNU is Not Unix Your Rights Online

Do You Know UNIX Secrets? 392

Posted by timothy from the tell-esr-the-truth dept.
ESR writes "You can help stop the SCO attack on IBM and the Linux community. I'm looking for ways to prove that Unix trade secrets have been legally nullified. I want to know if you have ever had read access to proprietary Unix source code (not just binaries and documentation) under circumstances where either no non-disclosure agreement was required or whatever non-disclosure agreement you had was not enforced. To help out, see my No Secrets page."
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Do You Know UNIX Secrets? More

Do You Know UNIX Secrets?

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  • I'd tell you (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:29PM (#6036210)
    But then I'd have to kill -9 you.

  • Klink? (Score:3, Funny)

    by shibbydude ( 622591 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:31PM (#6036225) Homepage Journal
    "I know nothing... nothing!"

    • Re:Klink? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "I know nothing... nothing!"

      Actually, that was Schultz, not Klink.

  • Start with Lion's Unix Source Code commentary (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:32PM (#6036228)
    This is the book which shows the roots of Unix: Lion's Commentary on UNIX 6th Ed. with source code [ercb.com]
  • I wonder what can be gained from having access to propietary Unix source. It seems that doing this would be illegal on its own.

    • RTFA (Score:2)

      by bstadil ( 7110 )
      RTFA [catb.org]

      The legal portion is precisely to answer your question.

    • No.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:46PM (#6036322)
      The point is, it's been basically otu in the open for decades already... so yes, you can't take it and make a product with it... copyright prevents it.
      But the source code to various versions of unix has been widely available to anyone who wanted it, and none of the previous copyright holders of it even really cared.

      SCO cannot claim trade secret violations for somethign that has been common knowledge for well over 10 years.

      Yes, 2 wrongs don't make a right, and merely taking something and publishing it doesn't make trade secret invalid.. but if I publish your trade secret stuff, and it gets re published for a full DECADE, you can't come in 10 years later and claim your "secrets" have been leaked.. it's not a secret anymore.

      • Re:No.... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by TeraCo ( 410407 )
        So, RMS is giving big corporations this message:

        If you let us look at your stuff for free, and don't persecute us if we tell others about it, we will turn around and stab you in the back to get all your stuff turned into the public domain.

        Yeah, I bet he will be the first to complain when YAMC [Yet another massive corporation] locks down their IP rights on ,

        • Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @07:53PM (#6037800)
          Where did you get that.

          Nobody is saying that you can steal... there is a difference between trade secret stuff and just "How we did that thing".

          SCO is not "locking down their IP rights". THey are trying to assert IP rights they do NOT have.

          You CANNOT claim to have a "trade secret" if everyone and his pet duck has had virtually unfettered access to it for TEN years. SCO did not have anything that EVERYONE did not already know, was taught in universities, etcetera.. that's the point.

          This has nothing to do with RMS.

          This is about asking if anyone in the past has had access, legally, to the unix source in any form where they did not have to sign NDAS, or where the NDAS were consciously overlooked by the rightsholder in the first place. Why? So they can help show that SCO is making baseless claims (which any idiot can see that they are)

  • Sun... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by psyconaut ( 228947 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:36PM (#6036252)
    When Sun gave away Solaris source code way back...did that maybe justify the cause?

    -psy
  • What bothers me, is just as happened with the DMCA, there was some outrage after the fact. Very little antagonism on our part, and viola DMCA is now mandate.

    If someone can stop SCO from forcing me to download OBSD, I would be eternally grateful
  • It's good to see someone with a NAME (like him or hate him, he's a well-known character) gets things in gear. I hope something comes out of this so this FUD stuff (& the whole lawsuit of course) dies a quiet death like it should. Just point out the f$#^*ing code (if any), and write around it.
  • Will it help IBM if someone comes forward and claim they have gotten access to AIX source-code without an NDA in place? I can understand that if SCO have been sloppy with NDA's that that can help the case but if IBM, SUN or any of the other licensees have leaked trade secrets/source would that not rather help SCO?
    • No. Read ESR's page on the legal issues. Trade secret law is like trademark law; if AT&T, Novell, and SCO have been sufficiently lax for sufficiently long about enforcing the NDAs, then it's too late to start now---they've already given up their trade secrets.

  • probably IBM (Score:2, Interesting)

    by molnarcs ( 675885 )
    The "who" might be IBM. According to an article on The Inquirer, he might be employed by IBM:
    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9536

    I also think that this might be the fastest way to win the case. Even while SCO's claims are ridiculous, they can pile up thousands of lines of code they would consider 'stolen' - answering those allegiations one by one can lead to a possibly endless debate (especially with their 'obsfucating to make it look like it wasn't stolen' line argument). What ESR does is to cut the r

  • I know a few (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hayzeus ( 596826 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:44PM (#6036304) Homepage
    In 1973, UNIX had a secret affair with MULTIX. The resulting child was put up for adoption, and the whole thing was hushed up.

  • Er... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:44PM (#6036306)
    So let's get this... ESR wants to know where the NDA wasn't enforced. So he's looking for someone who's copied code from the Unix source tree into something else and got away with it. Isn't that what's called admitting your culpabilty? And when SCO serves papers on ESR for that information which he has garnered? Oh, you too can have your day in court. Woohoo.

    • Re:Er... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Gunfighter ( 1944 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @12:02AM (#6038835)
      Actually, I'm sure his lawyer-type wife (as well as any other lawyer or person versed in trade secret law) can tell you why he's doing it. You see, there's this little precedent set in regards to trade secrets. If they've failed to enforce their NDA before, then they might not be able to make a claim against someone else who didn't uphold it.

      I learned this when I left an employer and they realized I had worked there for ohhhhhh... about 3 years without signing their non-compete (duh!). The only thing they could sick a lawyer on me for was to protect their precious "trade secrets".

      Their trade secrets were the following:

      1) Their "best practices" methods of engineering, installing, and maintaining networks. Luckily, TCP/IP networking is pretty much common knowledge. The "best practices" are easily attainable from the Cisco and Microsoft websites (I helped them compile their best practices from those two websites). No way they could be considered a trade secret. This is analogous to the SCO fraudulent case as follows: They claim that the Linux OS couldn't have advanced without the inside knowledge attainable only from the UNIX source code. Unfortunately for SCO, if the "Enterprise kernel features HOWTO" is out there somewhere, SCO is screwed on this point.

      2) Their special configuration and wiring of a modem to be used for a special out-of-band management device. Unfortunately, they had released the information to one of our suppliers. The supplier, in turn, posted it on their website. Doh! In the trade secret world, if one person can take a bit of information public, you can't make another person _not_ take it public. For example, BSD code is public, so they can't attack IBM for releasing a version of the same code. They tried to and LOST the case against BSD years ago. No enforcement against BSD == no enforcement against IBM.

      3) Their last "trade secret" was supposedly their customer list. This one stumped me at first, because I (obviously) had knowledge about their customers. I knew who they were, their administrator/root passwords, their contact information, etc. etc. I even had a job offer or two from them. To use this information to my financial advantage _must_ be considered inappropriate use of a trade secret, right? WRONG! Their customer list is printed right on the back of one of their marketing brochures ("Look who we've done work for!"). Company name in hand, the phone book/Internet provided me with all of the contact information I wanted. As far as the customers' network layouts and passwords, those are proprietary information of the customers, not my former employers. Granted, it was a partial customer list and quite old. That didn't matter to me. The information I needed to get started was there. That was two and a half years ago. I've been stealing business from them ever since (not hard since they no longer provide the services I offered to their customers). This is much like SCO's earlier release of an old version of the UNIX source code. That earlier release could be enough to fry their case. Even though they are accusing IBM of raping their more recent versions, if the code in question is anywhere _near_ present in the old version, SCO is screwed.

      Personally, I think SCO's case is going to fall... hard. If they had a real case, they would have shown the code long ago. Not just shown the code, but PROVED that they had it first and not the other way around. After all, Linux had many enterprise features before SCO's various *NIX flavors. Perhaps we should be sueing them for violation of the GPL?

      -- S
  • <insert Matrix "I know Kung Foo" joke here>

  • Back in the day, you had to avoid the source (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The issue was contamination. If you had ever had access to the source, your work was potentially contaminated.

    In the early-mid-late 80's, this was a very big deal (and partly why RMS is such a visionary). Even if it is hard to imagine in these daze of Linux..

  • It seems we are of a technical nature (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Oriumpor ( 446718 ) * on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:50PM (#6036343) Homepage Journal
    If the claim is that the system needs to be stricken of all SCO *owned* code. Isn't the first argument: What code do you really own, what happened in the AT&T Case (open the court files) show us what needs to be changed BEFORE a lawsuit ever took place.

    The technical community is VERY good at solving these sorts of problems. Even if we are talking 6-18 months time to rewrite all the sources they are claiming are in violation. That's much shorter than this court case with IBM is going to be.

    Besides, even if they are not *really* in violation. And there are claims for both sides, if they were re-written, SCO loses their lawyer money, and we can go back to ragging on M$-Wintel-DMCA and the US court system.

  • dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)

    by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:03PM (#6036399)
    The only case in which access to source code would be of interest would be if SCO or its predecessors made the code available themselves, without requiring an NDA. That could be accidental (putting it up for FTP on a public site) or deliberate (publication in a book, sending it to a university research group).

    In all other cases, access to it would probably be in breach of either NDAs or computer crime laws. For example, if you had access to SCO source code through your employer, you are covered through their NDA. If you made your own copy of it, you and your employer might be in a lot of trouble. If SCO or someone else accidentally left open an NFS mount with the source tree (as has happened in the past), you'd probably be guilty of computer hacking if you tried to access it. So, be careful of what you admit to.

    Overall, I think people should just ignore SCO and go about their business until SCO comes forward with concrete claims. There is no need to spin our wheels or waste any amount of time on this right now. After SCO makes concrete claims, any reasonable judge should give the open source community ample time to respond, and SCO's secretiveness and unwillingness to let people fix whatever they are complaining about probably only hurts their case.

  • Not even a half-baked idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:04PM (#6036406)

    There are three problems here.

    "under circumstances where either no non-disclosure agreement was required or whatever non-disclosure agreement you had was not enforced."

    Problem #1: Just because it wasn't enforced at one time, doesn't mean the NDA is null and void- in fact, many/most NDAs specifically say "lack of enforcement does not nullify this agreement".

    I'm looking for ways to prove that Unix trade secrets have been legally nullified

    Problem #2: Disproving "trade secret" status is pointless(not to mention, unlikely to happen). It's still copyright SOMEONE ELSE, and YOU CAN'T USE IT unless they let you!

    Problem #3: It's been said time+time again, there is no proprietary code that belongs to SCO in the Linux kernel. This project, therefore, is entirely moot, at least in regards to the SCO lawsuit...and it can only, in fact, cause damage, because you're implying there IS code that belongs to SCO that "we" need to find a way to justify its presence in the kernel...when in fact no such code exists.

    By the way, why are people wasting time "helping" IBM? They don't need it, nor do they deserve it- they're "into" Linux because it makes them money, not because they wanna be friends, or they think it's "cool"...and with legal "help" like this, who needs SCO? Dispute the claims intelligently, boycott SCO, whatever- just leave the legal arguments to the lawyers, or you just might end up helping SCO...and IBM won't be the only loser if that happens.

    I can hear the SCO execs and lawyers now: "See? They DID steal our code, now they're trying to find a loophole!"

    • Yep, nothing to do with the lawsuit... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:16PM (#6036461) Journal
      This project, therefore, is entirely moot, at least in regards to the SCO lawsuit...

      I think you understand the most literal level, but I think you're missing the logic. I think you're right, this doesn't have anything to do with the lawsuit. I think this is punitive . I think this is a side-project, to punish SCO for violating community standards, no matter what happens to the lawsuit.

      As such the rest of your concerns are irrelevant, since as you yourself say this has nothing to do with the lawsuit.

      This is a long-term project, to establish the danger of messing with the UNIX community, to make anybody else in the future who thinks they can milk money from the community, or that a lawyer-spasm is preferable to simply going out of business, think twice because they can expect the community to lash out not just in rhetoric, but with legal manuevers of their own. Textbook deterrence [m-w.com].

      I'm not ESR and I don't know. But that's how I read this, and I think it's a great idea. May not go anywhere but if it works it's very poetic and appropriate payback.
    • Problem #1: Just because it wasn't enforced at one time, doesn't mean the NDA is null and void- in fact, many/most NDAs specifically say "lack of enforcement does not nullify this agreement".

      I may not be a lawyer (be prepared for an uninformed opinion here), but I think the "lack of enforcement" point can in fact be a pretty convincing argument in the court. Countless companies and individuals have lost rights to copyrights and trademarks due to various circumstances. The obvious example that comes to

    • You missed the point really... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @04:07PM (#6036690) Homepage
      Problem #1: Just because it wasn't enforced at one time, doesn't mean the NDA is null and void

      No, it doesn't. But if you can prove that the Unix-company in charge of those NDAs actually did not protect their trade secrets, that is very nice. If they released it into the public by neglect of their own NDA, they are at fault. Now if the signer of that NDA did anything wrong (regardless of sloppy enforcement or not), that would be another matter...

      Problem #2: Disproving "trade secret" status is pointless(not to mention, unlikely to happen). It's still copyright SOMEONE ELSE, and YOU CAN'T USE IT unless they let you!

      No, but you can write your own implementation of anything copyrighted (it's not a patent), something you could not legally do with a trade secret you have knowledge of. Now if SCO is claiming that IBM went copy-paste, you would be right. But last I heard they were throwing around FUD like "stealing ideas from proprietary SCO code and incorporating into Linux". To gather all information that was, is and has been publicly available, you show that there was in fact not a trade secret and so, nothing could have been stolen.

      Problem #3: It's been said time+time again, there is no proprietary code that belongs to SCO in the Linux kernel.

      So you say. SCO says otherwise. Which is why we're going to court, isn't it? Where the hell do you get the divine knowledge to know that noone anywhere ever fell for the temptation to copy-paste a little? Oh, right you've been listening to 10,000 posts to slashdot on how that *can't* be the case. Nevermind...

      By the way, why are people wasting time "helping" IBM? (...) and with legal "help" like this, who needs SCO? Dispute the claims intelligently, boycott SCO, whatever- just leave the legal arguments to the lawyers, or you just might end up helping SCO...and IBM won't be the only loser if that happens.

      SCO has threatened to sue Everybody(tm) right down to your favorite Linux distro, and if you're a Linux user, you too. If you want to pretend IBM is the only one that could get hurt here, think again. The SCO execs and lawyers are going "Damn. They're calling our bluff. Again. Better send out a troll to slashdot to keep them from counting the cards."

      Kjella
    • You clearly are missing the point here. Obviously, showing that trade secrets were not kept secret does not obviate the potential for copyright infringement. Luckily, as you point out in problem 3, we are fairly confident that there was no copyright infringement - and if there was, it is fairly straightforward to remedy it.

      The point is that if we knock out the possibility of a cogent trade secret argument being made against IBM/Linux, that forces SCO to prove copyright infringement and make a case aroun

      • For SCO to have fair claim of a trade secret violation would require that someone who knew SCO's trade secrets used them in Linux. If it was independently reinvented, then trade secret violation does not apply, no matter how similar they are. The secrets SCO is trying to protect by not divulging where the offending code is will not be trade secrets anymore by the time the case is over anyways (since if they continue to allow their use in Linux after the case, they forfeit trade seecret status, and if they

    • Just because it wasn't enforced at one time, doesn't mean the NDA is null and void- in fact, many/most NDAs specifically say "lack of enforcement does not nullify this agreement".

      And just because someone inserts some term into a contract doesn't mean it's legally binding. In many jurisdictions you cannot, for example, sign away your basic human rights, nor can you agree to do something which is illegal. Those parts of the contract will be null and void. A clause stating that "lack of enforcement does no

  • Nice try SCO! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Flat5 ( 207129 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:07PM (#6036420)
    Posing as ESR to try to get people to incriminate themselves is a pretty nice trick. But we're not falling for it!

    Flat5

  • Bad Idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:13PM (#6036446) Homepage Journal
    This would serve only to HELP SCO's case that people are running around with 'improper' code that they signed non-disclosure agreements that they have disclosed....

    Exactly what the case is based on..

    Don't give them MORE ammunition people.. its going to get ugly before its all over.... and download what code you can now.. for soon it may be gone... between this, DMCA, DRM, and patriot act.. OSS just may become extinct...

    • for soon it may be gone... between this, DMCA, DRM, and patriot act.. OSS just may become extinct...
      DRM has nothing to do with OSS, you can actually have DRM within OSS. Regarding DMCA and PATRIOT act, maybe your conclusion should be changed to OSS just may become extinct in USA
      • Remember the WTO?, others will eventually be required to follow suit with similar laws...

        My comment about DRM killing OSS is the prediction that DRM will be required for all software and hardware to be legally released, and it will be a expensive process to have your product 'qualified'.. squeezing out all but the biggest corporations, and effectively killing OSS, as a by-product.

        Sort of like ISO9000 type certifications are now in the manufacturing markets..

        I hope I'm wrong, but just in case, im stocking

  • I'd love to respond, but ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by SmoothTom ( 455688 ) <Tomas@TiJiL.org> on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:14PM (#6036455) Homepage
    Back in the mid '80's, when I was working for U S WEST, the Amdahl machine I and a bunch of other engineers had logins on had the /src files all open (read only).

    I used my access to the source of that version of UNIX (UTS) source a lot to help me with the Xenix system I was running at home.

    Thing is, my racall of this is flakey enough that I cannot provide actual dates that the source on the "PN1" machine was open (about a one year window, after we moved from an IBM to an Amdahl mainframe, probably around 1985-86).

    I don't think that's good enough, though, to have any effect on the SCO v IBM case.

    (I wonder if the fact that U S WEST used to be a part of the Bell System - I went to U S WEST from Bell Labs, Holmdel - possibly made us feel a "part of the UNIX family" so we didn't seem to be as strict about holding the source inviolate. I dunno.)
  • If Unix is in the public domain, perhaps Linux is merely a derivative work and shouldn't be eligible for copyright protection. I realize I'm mixing trade secrets with copyright, but who knows what effect this "fairness" argument could have on a judge if someone were sued for violating the Linux GPL.
    • Derivative works of public domain works are still elligible for copyright protection. West Side Story was a derivative work of Romeo and Julliet, does that make it any less copyright-able? What about the new translations of older books (Beowulf, etc.)?

  • This makes no sense. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mark-t ( 151149 )
    The request being made here appears to generalize to the following request: "Tell me something that you thought was secret that everyone else actually knows anyways". Why in the world would anyone think something was secret if they had never been told to keep it a secret? And if they *had* been told to keep it a secret, then they couldn't tell it anyways without breaking an NDA. If they had never been told to keep it a secret, and they knew that everyone else knew about it, what reason would one have fo

    • Re:This makes no sense. (Score:3, Informative)

      by jcast ( 461910 )
      No. The request is `tell me something I know everybody knows, and you know everybody knows, but SCO thinks is a secret.' The goal is to prove that everyone knows it.

  • Unix source code access (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nero4wolfe ( 671100 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:17PM (#6036468)
    During the times I was involved with actual Unix source code (mid 1970's to mid 1980's) for three different employers (UCLA, SDC, Tektronix) there was nothing similar to a nda. The school or company just agreed to not give source code access to non-"employees", and "employees" agreed not to give access to others who hadn't agreed to the Bell license.
    Within those terms, there was a lot of access. At the yearly conferences (which later became USENIX) there was a typically conference distribution tape. That tape was a mixture of "new" things, and modifications to the Unix kernel or Unix commands. To assure that everybody was "licensed", when you first became a member you submitted a copy of the signature page of the license.
    During that time we went from V6 Unix, PWB Unix, V7 Unix, to 2BSD (pdp11) and 4BSD (vax).
    Sharing went both ways of course. A number of changes/new cmds from other groups became part of the Official Bell release.
    That sharing was a factor in the settlement of the USL vs UCBerkeley lawsuit, that ended in the free availability of the 386bsd work.

  • USC (Score:5, Informative)

    by One Louder ( 595430 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:23PM (#6036491)
    The University of Southern California had a project in 1981-1982 to port UNIX from a VAX 780 to the Data General MV8000 (from "The Soul of a New Machine") using about 20 grad students. To my knowledge, none of the students (including me) had to sign anything to work on the project, and we certainly had access to the full source. One of the other guys was Fred Cohen, who has been widely credited with coining the term " computer virus".

    • Re:USC (Score:3, Interesting)

      by puzzled ( 12525 )

      I just sent a note to Fred Cohen about this ... perhaps he'll be one of the multitude to step up on this issue.

      I didn't realize I worked with such bigshots :-)

  • I thought that only one that owned the Unix trademark and its secrets was Open Group..whereas SCO only owns copyrights to their own unix code..that happens to be recognized as Unix with and R because it passed Open Groups certifications..

    it would not make sense for each certified vendor under the Unix trademark name to have its own trade secret rights that overlapped another unix vendor!
  • If it is true that Unix code is in Linux, why are you trying to find legal loopholes to skirt justice? Linux is not going to die over this. You might instead use your efforts to track down people who have contributed Unix cod eto Linux so that the offending code, if it exists, can be rewritten, and we all can move on.

  • Will this help ESR ? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:41PM (#6036565)
    The official history of Unix [bgu.ac.il].

  • I'm confused... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by josepha48 ( 13953 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @04:37PM (#6036835) Journal
    .. we still don't know a few things..
    1) What is UNIX anyway? I thought it was trademarked by the open group, and a set of standards. If this is the case then can't ANYONE create their own UNIX, that abide by those standards?
    2) X does not make up UNIX does it? I did not think the GNU tools did either, nor gcc. So this leaves out the GUI and anything attached to it. It also leaves out the 'UNIX-like' commands. So what is left? The kernel.

    What parts or parts of the kernel does SCO think Linux is infringing? should be the first question. Then the second is where is the proof?

    The same thing happened with BSD - USL/ATT/Novell years ago.

    SCO's president and 85% shareholder is playing a dangerous game of winner takes all! His company is worth about the same price as a roll of toilet paper, and he knows it. It is going down. If he wins, and Linux is proved to be infringing, it may not be a case of just rewrite parts of the kernel, it may be a case of move all the drivers to the GNU Hurd or something. If he looses UNIX then may become an open standard that SCO losses all their license to. If IBM pays up then they are admitting that SCO is right and could loose AIX and SCO could get AIX AND Linux.

    He has nothing to loose. I think the end result could be that people say screw UNIX like apple did and move to BSD.

    • Where do you get the idea that by suing IBM, Caldera/SCO/Yaddah-yaddah can "get control over" anything?

      IANAL, but if IBM did engage in trade secret violations by putting SCO IP into the Linux kernel, they get to pay a fine, and the offending code has to be removed.

      If IBM did lose, they might decide to sign the rights for AIX over to SCO as part of that fine, but that wouldn't be an automatic thing.

      As far as I know, SCO hasn't sued Linus (the owner of the Linux trademark), nor the Free Software Foundat

      • I never said he gets it, no if ands or buts, I said, it MAY be a case of more than just rewriting parts of the code. If you read SCo's claims, they say large portions of linux code, infringe. He probably thinks it is the whole thing. I think he's a f'kn idiot!

        I also said they could get AIX. They have an injunction that IBM must stop all AIX stuff as of June 28th. They could clain AIX is there code and win. In which case they would get it. I doubt this very much.

        People should really go to the opengro

  • All that's needed is that:

    1. The information had the quality of confidence attaching to it.
    2. The information was disclosed in circumstances importing an obligation of confidence.

    UNIX source code has been used to teach university classes in operating system theory, but if the course materials made it clear that the information is confidential, then the circumstances import an obligation of confidence.

    All most NDAs do is restate the legal principles of confidential information, and make it more clear that th

  • Get a fucking lawyer (Score:2, Insightful)

    by NineNine ( 235196 )
    ESR needs to get a fucking lawyer. Going around asking people in a public forum if they had access to proprietary code years ago that they're not legally allowed to disclose is juvenile at best. This is another lame stunt that if the press hears about it, will make the Linux proponents look like even bigger jackasses than they already look like now. This is *not* how you go about working on a legal case. Even if he found some special code, IBM's lawyers aren't going to care. They're doing their own res
    • Heh.

      For some bizarre reason I went looking through my "freaks" list--the list of people who have marked me as foes. Most of them, I found, were people that I'd have disagreements with online but fundamentally and philosophically agreed with.

      You are one such poster. I can't remember what we got on opposite ends over at some point, but nearly every time I see your posts, I agree with them. This is one such case.

      ESR has done many things within the open source community, but every time he pokes his nose into
    • ESR is married to a fiesty red-headed IP lawyer named Cathy. Maybe you should get a clue before trashing ESR and this strategy. I am sure that this will all make sense soon.

      Things are seldom as they seem.

    • Re:Get a fucking lawyer (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cduffy ( 652 )
      Actually, no, this is a pretty valid thing. Thing is, trade secrets are only valid if they're genuinely secrets, and if they're released to folks under a set of circumstances which is, at minimum, a subset of those ESR describes, they may well cease to be trade secrets any more at all. He's not looking for "special code", he's looking for trade secret violations -- and if you can think of a better way to do that than asking around to find people who may have been witnesses to them, yer a better man than me.
  • I'm not sure what you're trying to do here, and I'm even less sure that you can necessarily help IBM. Even if you're successful in finding some people who had 'unrestricted' access to SCO's so-called trade secrets, this may not be dispositive of SCO's claims against IBM. Reason: IBM may have agreed (i.e., promised) to treat certain matter as trade secret matter pursuant to some contract that it entered into with SCO (or its predecessor, etc.). In such case, if IBM failed to respect the confidential natu

  • solaris source (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (Posted anonymously for obvious reasons.)

    I'm sitting at a workstation here in my CS department computer lab reading parts of the Solaris source (a recent version). I didn't sign anything to be able to do this, I just happened to find it in a remote, out-of-the-way part of the filesystem. The permissions are such that anyone with an account can read it, although I doubt they were intented to be that way. I'm not sure if this includes the code for every piece of Solaris; I see just about all of the user-spac

  • What if SCO contains Linux code? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Vip ( 11172 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @06:03PM (#6037242)
    What if SCO programmers looked at Linux code, put some of it into SCO code, line for line.
    Now someone else goes back and looks and goes, "Hey, there's SCO code in Linux!! Time for a lawsuit!"
    How to say if this type of thing is happening?

    Vip

    • Once it is known what line(s) of code are involved, then it's a matter of tracing back to who wrote it or contributed it. Testimony by the author may help. Proof of release dates may help. There are ways once the specifics are known. SCO is trying to prevent anyone from having time to research this by hiding facts until they actually have to show them during the legal proceedings.

      And if in fact it turns out to be genuine SCO code that got in there, somehow, it should be possible to figure out the path

      • Unfortunatly Linus refuses to use CVS or any other developer managment system. If he like a piece of code he gets from email he just patches it to the source and its forgoten.

        That is the problem.

        Having Linus try to remember who put it in will not cut it without some record. Kernel.org will show when the offending code was added but not by who. The BSD groups have cvs so in a future lawsuit they can trace it to which user added the transaction adding the offending code.

        What is interesting is at caldera's

  • File this under "Really Bad Idea" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by idiotnot ( 302133 ) * <sean@757.org> on Sunday May 25, 2003 @06:21PM (#6037332) Homepage Journal
    I'll begin with a question....

    Is ESR your wife, shrink, attorney, or priest?

    (I think that covers all the exemptions from being compelled to testify) If the answer is "no" on all accounts, don't talk to him. He can in no way guarantee that you won't be compelled to testify at trial, or that you, yourself, will be safe from prosecution. This is just doing discovery for SCO's attorneys, pointing out individuals with names of people who could have tainted the Linux source. I'm of the opinion that they have absolutely no proof of this, why assist them in finding it?

    I understand the community wants to do something here. There is, however, little we can do to help, other than keep our mouths shut. Want to help? Convert an AIX or SCO Unix machine to Linux. We don't want to show support for SCO in any way.

    Then let the folks who sign their correspondance "Esquire" figure this out.

  • TIme to EXPOSE Novell - Another smoking gun (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NZheretic ( 23872 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @08:06PM (#6037882) Homepage Journal
    In 1993, Novell bought USL. USL and Univel became the Novell UNIX Systems Group. Novell transferred the UNIX trademark to X/Open (later to become The Open Group). In 1993, Novell bought AT&T's stake in USL. In 1995, Novell sold the UnixWare business to old SCO

    BUT IN 1994 Novell who then fully owned UnixWare...From the Usenet Archives [google.com]

    Novell Brewing a New 32-Bit GUI Environment (PC Week)

    From PC Week for April 25, 1994 by PC Week Staff

    Novell Inc. is developing a low-cost, 32-bit multitasking operating environment based on a "freeware" version of Unix that sources said will run Windows, DOS, NetWare, and Unix applications.

    Novell is expected to demonstrate the software -- which it is developing under tight security at an off-site warehouse -- to a few select users at next week's NetWorld+Interop trade show, said sources close to the Provo, Utah, company.

    The new system, code-named Expose, is not a derivative of Novell's own UnixWare; it is based on Linux, a full-featured Unix clone for PCs that is distributed under a free GNU Public License, sources said. Linux 1.0, which shipped in March, runs on 386- and 486-based ISA and EISA computers.

    Expose will be based on a graphical X Window System environment called Looking Glass, which Novell licensed from Visix Software Inc., of Reston, Va. It is expected to use an advanced 3-D desktop metaphor to allow users to easily navigate through it, sources said.

    Expose "is not as much an applications environment as it is a front end to many environments, [including] NetWare, Unix, and Windows applications," said a source who has been briefed on the project. Users also will be able to run Expose as a front end to the Internet, possibly through the Mosaic GUI, sources said.

    However, one source said development is in the early stages, and given Novell's track record, the project could be abandoned if it does not show strong promise.

    Another source said Novell has already demonstrated Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite of Windows applications running on Expose. The source claimed the applications were running without a Windows emulator, even though Linux does not fully support Windows applications.

    Novell's goal, sources said, is to quickly bring to market a graphical operating environment that would give PC users a lower-cost alternative to Windows. The environment would likely be priced below UnixWare's $249 price and possibly even lower than the $149.95 retail price asked for Windows.

    "Ray [Noorda] would give it away if he could," said a source knowledgeable about the project.

    The GNU license allows developers to use and modify the Linux code and sell it for any price the market will bear -- with the caveat that they must also distribute the Linux source code with their derivative products.

    Some corporate NetWare users questioned the sagacity of Novell developing yet another graphical 32-bit operating system. "I'd hate to see them spend a whole lot of research resources on one more operating system," said Jim Queen, director of enterprise networking for Enron Corp., a Houston-based energy company with a large NetWare network. "If they have a vision for this thing, they'd better share it."

    Another IS manager said he is still trying to get his company's current set of desktop operating systems to work together on a LAN. But although he doesn't want to deal with yet another contender, "I'll keep an open mind," said Lee Roth, LAN manager for Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Co. "If [Expose] gives me some new functionality, I'll consider it."

    Did Novell, who at that time owned the Unixware source, put some of the code into GPL'ed Linux to remain compatable with UNIX binaries?

    Time to dig up those old copies of Byte and PC Weekly.

  • This SCO Fud (Score:4, Interesting)

    by digitaltraveller ( 167469 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @08:21PM (#6037968) Homepage
    Dennis Ritchie has put up some of the court papers from the previous SCO (nee USL) vs University of California lawsuit [bell-labs.com] that tried to destory BSD. One of the documents is an affidavit from Kirk McKusick stating that a source code audit found only 65 "infringing lines" out of around 250 000 in NET2.
    It makes the Copyright statement from the terminfo file that ESR maintains seem oddly prescient. The statement is accessible on my RH8 system with
    head -255 /etc/termcap | tail -19
    (2nd line, last paragraph).
    What's next? I predict Microsoft will sue Sun for Copyright infringement of /bin/clear on Solaris. :)

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