SCO Linux FUD Returns From the Dead (zdnet.com) 128
wiredog shares a ZDNet report: I have literally been covering SCO's legal attempts to prove that IBM illegally copied Unix's source code into Linux for over 17 years. I've written well over 500 stories on this lawsuit and its variants. I really thought it was dead, done, and buried. I was wrong. Xinuos, which bought SCO's Unix products and intellectual property (IP) in 2011, like a bad zombie movie, is now suing IBM and Red Hat [for] "illegally Copying Xinuos' software code for its server operating systems." For those of you who haven't been around for this epic IP lawsuit, you can get the full story with "27 eight-by-ten color glossy photographs and circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one" from Groklaw. If you'd rather not spend a couple of weeks going over the cases, here's my shortened version. Back in 2001, SCO, a Unix company, joined forces with Caldera, a Linux company, to form what should have been a major Red Hat rival. Instead, two years later, SCO sued IBM in an all-out legal attack against Linux.
The fact that most of you don't know either company's name gives you an idea of how well that lawsuit went. SCO's Linux lawsuit made no sense and no one at the time gave it much of a chance of succeeding. Over time it was revealed that Microsoft had been using SCO as a sock puppet against Linux. Unfortunately for Microsoft and SCO, it soon became abundantly clear that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux and its allies. SCO lost battle after battle. The fatal blow came in 2007 when SCO was proven to have never owned the copyrights to Unix. So, by 2011, the only thing of value left in SCO, its Unix operating systems, was sold to UnXis. This acquisition, which puzzled most, actually made some sense. SCO's Unix products, OpenServer and Unixware, still had a small, but real market. At the time, UnXis now under the name, Xinuos, stated it had no interest in SCO's worthless lawsuits. In 2016, CEO Sean Synder said, "We are not SCO. We are investors who bought the products. We did not buy the ability to pursue litigation against IBM, and we have absolutely no interest in that." So, what changed? The company appears to have fallen on hard times. As Synder stated: "systems, like our FreeBSD-based OpenServer 10, have been pushed out of the market." Officially, in his statement, Snyder now says, "While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property, it is also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community, and innovation itself."
The fact that most of you don't know either company's name gives you an idea of how well that lawsuit went. SCO's Linux lawsuit made no sense and no one at the time gave it much of a chance of succeeding. Over time it was revealed that Microsoft had been using SCO as a sock puppet against Linux. Unfortunately for Microsoft and SCO, it soon became abundantly clear that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux and its allies. SCO lost battle after battle. The fatal blow came in 2007 when SCO was proven to have never owned the copyrights to Unix. So, by 2011, the only thing of value left in SCO, its Unix operating systems, was sold to UnXis. This acquisition, which puzzled most, actually made some sense. SCO's Unix products, OpenServer and Unixware, still had a small, but real market. At the time, UnXis now under the name, Xinuos, stated it had no interest in SCO's worthless lawsuits. In 2016, CEO Sean Synder said, "We are not SCO. We are investors who bought the products. We did not buy the ability to pursue litigation against IBM, and we have absolutely no interest in that." So, what changed? The company appears to have fallen on hard times. As Synder stated: "systems, like our FreeBSD-based OpenServer 10, have been pushed out of the market." Officially, in his statement, Snyder now says, "While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property, it is also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community, and innovation itself."
Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
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There's a MOUNTAIN of code!
Personally, I think it's an April fools. Lawyers can be pretty dumb [cbsnews.com] but this here has to be a step too far even for an ambulance chaser. Either they get paid up front (can the company afford it?) or they get paid when they win the case (not gonna happen).
Re: Oh no! (Score:3)
Yeah I can't help thinking that at this stage IBM would have a decent case for asking the judge to declare this to be a vexatious litigation and gun for the lawyers license to practice.
NOOOOOOOO! (Score:2)
Fixed that Subject for you, but I'm pretty sure it would have hit the ASCII art blocker if I'd said it here. Also, I'm another vote for an April Fool's story. The last thing I want, and that's after Covid-19 and getting hit by a bus, would be to lose more time listening to SCO's lawyers.
Quasi-related question, but my recent research only confused me. Triggered by a book that claimed Apple's OS is flavor of Linux. I thought they started with the BSD code? Even with a total rewrite (or three?), shouldn't Appl
macOS has precisely zip to do with Linux (Score:2)
It runs on the XNU kernel, based on Mach, with the userland tools pulled from BSD.
I think, but don't quote me on this, macOS or at least Darwin was considered a BSD proper for awhile back in the early aughts, and since then FreeBSD has actually taken some Darwin/XNU code.
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My understanding is that the progression is roughly 4.1 BSD -> aux (an early Unix on Apple hardware, never really taken seriously) -> NextStep (basically Unix with a version of object oriented C that nobody else in the world used) -> aix.
Somewhere along the way, it inherited a lot of Gnu code. and some code from Carnege Mellon. I don't remember if they switched to Mach in the NextStep days or later, but I think it was in NextStep.
As someone who was issued a Macbook at work against my will, I'd lik
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Okay, both replies basically confirm my understanding that Linux isn't in there and the book was wrong to say so.
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OSX is definitely not Linux. It has some things in common with Linux like the BASH shell and other Gnu utilities. But under the covers, it's a completely different animal, made up of bits and pieces of other Unixes, some long dead.
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That should have been OSX not AIX. I get them confused sometimes.
Isn't the original lawsuit still shambling along? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think as of 2018 the original SCO v. IBM lawsuit was remanded back to the circuit court for a decision on damages due from SCO, and I haven't heard about any final decision (since SCO is tied up in bankruptcy and the bankruptcy trustee seems to have no intention of wasting time on a suit that can only cost the estate money). Given IBM's position in that original suit, my guess is Xinuos is about to get a rude wake-up call from Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. All the groundwork's already been done, all CSM has to do is drop the hammer.
don't know if you remember (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:don't know if you remember (Score:5, Informative)
At the time, SCO's allegations irked the open source community especially the Linux community as most of their claims were baseless and factually untrue. So the community provided a large amount information that countered SCO's claims. Helping IBM was a side effect and not the real intent. The real intent was to show how ludicrous SCO's claims were.
As for kicking a dog, the open source community was not the only people SCO irked. Short list: Novell actually owned the copyrights that SCO tried to litigate. When Novell pointed this out, SCO sued them too. SCO tried to sue Daimler Chrysler and AutoZone for not using their products anymore. SCO made unreasonable and untimely discovery requests from Intel then tried to paint Intel as uncooperative to the court which pissed them off. A more apt analogy would be SCO tried to pick fights with a lot of people but had no fighting skills and was crushed every time.
Re: don't know if you remember (Score:2)
I think my favourite part was when they tried to drag Andrew Tabauman in (possibly under the mistaken assumption that he had some sort of grudge against Linux ") AST was *not* impressed, partly because it was very well known that Linux was *not* base off Minix, and partly because if it was, then the entire point of his how-to-write-an-OS book would be full filled. Instead what AST found wax a pretty suspicious campaign by a right wing think tank to try and discredit open source but done so incompetently the
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suspicious campaign by a right wing think tank to try and discredit ... but done so incompetently the only real response was just ridicule
Huh... times haven't changed that much after all.
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Well maybe, but I think the scheme remains the same as it always was, to try to shake down Big Blue for some bucks to make it go away. A new filing is a few hours of a lawyer's time and whatever the filing fee is, and if a judge ultimately throws it out, well, they didn't lose much. It's a gamble with very little risk, unless IBM decides to countersue.
Re:Isn't the original lawsuit still shambling alon (Score:4, Interesting)
That's what SCO and BSF thought when they originally sued. I doubt IBM's going to respond any differently to this, and CSM has all the original material in the files and just needs to resubmit the whole mountain. The way I see it this is like calling someone's bluff after the guy before you called their bluff and found out they weren't bluffing. It goes beyond stupid and into "Do you want to commit corporate suicide?".
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It looks to me like yet another example of idiots buying devalued assets, going "Oh shit, this fucking IP portfolio is worthless. Let's see if we can threaten some really big company into paying us!"
I'd call this return of the zombies, but this is like the return of the return of the return of the zombies.
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This guy's plan is probably the same as Darl McBride's was in SCO. You've got stock in a dying company, how to make cash?
Sue a huge player and make the news! Stock bump and sellsellsell! off as much as you can for $++, then step out the bankrupt company as its failure is hastened like Johnny Depp arriving at the dock at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean.
Nope (Score:1)
Do not trust any press release or article released on April 1st.
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thought was very lame April Fools but... (Score:5, Informative)
sadly, this not April Fools nonsense. What desperate lawyer would take up such a case?
https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-... [xinuos.com]
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Re:thought was very lame April Fools but... (Score:5, Funny)
"What desperate lawyer would take up such a case?"
Any of them really. They get paid by the hour.
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check this company out, and the founders, it is run by some creepy republican types, including the Carlyle Group and GWBs & Dick Cheney's buddies,
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That's why Boies demanded payment up front after the original case. And still got their asses kicked. But hey, what's $30 mil between friends?
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> If I ran a law company, and I got a case where I can get $30 million up front and get my ass kicked, I'd take it
You don't have to. There are a large number of money pools set up to pay lawyers to do this. It's all a percentage game, the returns are so incredible on the one in 100 cases that succeed, that it pays for the other 99 that failed. There's whole hedge funds based on this model, which is why there are so many of these apparently insane cases. Hey, maybe you get an insane judge, right? 1 in 100
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I don't know....$30 million? 1 in 100 odds? How many court cases result in a $3 billion judgement to average it out?
Follow the money (Score:5, Interesting)
The last time this happened there was someone in the background funding it. I suspect that might be the case here as well.
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The last time this happened there was someone in the background funding it. I suspect that might be the case here as well.
Yeah. It was Microsoft, as the summary clearly says.
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I'm sure it is not coincidence that the timing happens to coincide with the campaign to cancel RMS.
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Re: Follow the money (Score:3)
Oi!!!
I was around BEFORE the lawsuit. Back then we had to make our own entertainment. Uphill. Both ways!
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I would say it's time to rise GrokLaw back from the ashes , but this is just too stupid to waste PJs time.
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I was a proud member of the Groklaw crew back then, and was sorry when PJ decided to close in 2013.
The whole case smells, and I think it's going nowhere fast. The only way lawyers are going to work on this is if they get a fat retainer up front -- so someone's stirring things up for the hell of it, because .. there's no case. None.
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I was here when /. had a fetish for freezing Natalie Portman.
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GrokLaw was required reading for a true Penguin back then. Pamala "pj" Jones, a paralegal, and the crew which assisted her, which no doubt included others with legal training or background, thoroughly tested every claim SCO made and supplied overwhelming proof that they were bogus.
Xinuos has 15 employees and an annual revenue of $2.2M. I'm sure that IBM has more than 15 lawyers on its staff and probably pays several of them more that $2.2M per year. There is a HUGE legal precedent established in in SC
Re: Follow the money (Score:2)
Hey, don't leave us 5digit crew out
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"Ahem". I well remember the creation of Groklaw: it was fascinating material, well organized, concerning this and other interesting Internet law cases.
Damn I feel old (Score:2)
I used SCO once a very long time ago before all of this crap started. Hard to believe that the zombie is still around.
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Agreed, I used sco to drive a electrostatic plotter about 30 years ago, and it was crap compared to the Solaris box I worked on
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The thing is, SCO, i.e. Santa Cruz Operation, was a good company. They got in financial trouble and sold their name to a parasite. I never used their version of Unix, but there were many who though highly of it. The company kept going under a different name which I totally forget, so I suspect the new company wasn't successful.
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The TL;DR, in case someone forgot
The original SCO (Santa Cruz Operation), founded in 1979, decided to get out of the Unix business and sold that part of their company to Caldera, somewhere around 1999-2000.
After the sale, the original SCO changed their name to "Tarantella", which was also the name of the new product they were developing.
A couple of years later, Caldera changed their name to "The SCO Group". Nobody paid much attention to the name change at the time because nobody gives two shits about SCO,
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Coincidental to all this, Linux became a viable operating system and dared to grow in installations beyond company-bound Unix installations and perhaps even challenge MS on the desktop (okay, they were being optimistic).
More to the point, Linux distributors became targets for intellectual property lawsuits because A. People were making a lot of money, and B the intellectual property management Unix assets has been sloppy at best
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The thing is, SCO, i.e. Santa Cruz Operation, was a good company. They got in financial trouble and sold their name to a parasite. I never used their version of Unix, but there were many who though highly of it. The company kept going under a different name which I totally forget, so I suspect the new company wasn't successful.
Looks like they got gobbled up by Oracle by way of Sun after selling their Unix and changing their name to Tarantella [wikipedia.org].
Re:Damn I feel old (Score:4, Informative)
yeah, we had SCO (and ESIX) Sys-V boxes back then. In those days before "./configure; make; make install", running code was a royal pain because most good 'free' software (this was before OpenSource was coined as a term) was coded strictly for BSD boxes (usually SunOS 3 and 4). I could get most to run on my DECStation just fine, but the SCOs were a royal pain.
Then as a pro, I got to be around when Solaris 2.0 and SGI's OS both attempted to move to SysV, with varying degrees of compatibility hell for a good year before things finally stabilized.
IBM's AIX was its own nightmare to code on, though I have to admit their SWIT software (and virtual file system) manager was very impressive compared to anything else I'd ever seen, before or since.
Still, this lawsuit is just a pain in the arse...'cause it means it'll be a monthly post on /. for the next 3 years after we'd managed to go without for so long.
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Wasn't that AIX utility called "smit"?
I recall it logged the commands you ran in it so you could use smit once, extract the command from the log, and write your own wrapper script around it so you didn't have to walk through smit's menus again. (Whew, that was back in the days when I worked with an AIX box running an application written in Business Basic [cringe].)
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It used to be crucial for finance companies that wanted UNIX. It was stable, and used to be open source friendly, and used to be a very reliable system for long-term database stability. When you're dealing with 30 year mortgages, this is vital.
Someone should learn system programming, dammit! (Score:2)
No Value Add (Score:1, Redundant)
Why would anyone buy a rebranded FreeBSD at big iron prices?
No Value ADD (Score:2)
Why would anyone buy FreeBSD at big iron prices??
Re: No Value ADD (Score:3)
According to this very summary, they aren't.
Re: No Value ADD (Score:4, Informative)
Why would anyone buy FreeBSD at big iron prices?
Since you asked twice, I'll to ahead and answer.
According to this very summary, they aren't.
According to TFA it's IBM and Red Hat's fault -- this is rich:
Xinuos alleges that the IBM and Red Hat conspiracy has harmed the open-source community and specifically Xinuos' OpenServer 10 product, which is based on FreeBSD, an open-source UNIX-based operating system and alternative to Red Hat's Linux-based open-source operating system, RHEL.
"By dominating the Unix/Linux server operating system market, competing open-source operating systems, like our FreeBSD-based OpenServer 10, have been pushed out of the market," said Snyder. "This prevents developers and consumers from receiving the benefits that these products have to offer."
It's a conspiracy to "prevent consumers" from "receiving the benefits" of their for-pay products -- that could otherwise be gotten directly from FreeBSD for free. I guess it's either that or that their potential customers aren't stupid. Hmm...
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They didn't reply to their own comment. They posted two extremely similar comments less than two minutes apart -- which I thought Slashdot wouldn't allow. But the two comments are both at top level, neither is a reply.
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Yep exactly, I though my first one got lost in the ether, but just had my view slider incorrectly adjusted. Also surprised they both got through.
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And slashdot doesn't let you delete or edit comments. One it's posted, it's posted
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Sure, but looking at Open Server 10, most of the advertised features are 1:1 FreeBSD feature.
It looks like the main purpose is to Virtualize old SCO systems, support for that use case, and technical support during the migration.
The Xinuos Claims (Score:5, Informative)
Groklaw regulars might remember that the question of copyright was resolved when IBM consulted Novell on the question. Novell were able to show that they had a Board Meeting prior to the approval of the sale of the business to "OldSCO", the minutes of which were kept in (IIRC) something that PJ referenced as something like a "Corporate Box" - i.e. it's a central file for corporation-specific and essential documents. In that paper trail it was clearly shown that copyright over all the code was retained by Novell. It's important to note that the original case against IBM was brought by "The SCO Group" (TSG), who were a successor-in-interest and not an original party to the deal. "OldSCO" sold their interest in Unixware to TSG and it was TSG who cooked up this crazy theory to try the shakedown. Part of what made the original case so surreal was the way that "TSG" tried to claim knowledge of what was and wasn't transferred when they weren't even party to the transaction. Well, that and their habit of giving interviews to less-than-diligent technology journalists, making wild claims in the interview, then submitting quotes from the print copy to the court in support of their own arguments. Yes, really. They were totally clutching at straws.
BSF for SCO tried to argue differently, that they *had* obtained the copyrights, but at that point, CSM's lawyers went back to them with, "If SCO obtained full and clear title, as you now claim, how come both "OldSCO" and yourselves have beenrequired on the terms of the contract to act as Novell's "license fee collection agents" and how come they were required to remit (IIRC) 90% of the collected license fees back to Novell, keeping only 10% as an agency fee?"
TSG never had an answer for that.
Unfortunately, IBM then prepared a sufficiently powerful counter-strike, but on the day the motion was due to be heard, SCO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. No doubt they had planned that they would be able to side-step the fatal IBM response, only to re-emerge some time later and continue. What happened instead is that the bankruptcy Judge, one Kevin Gross, decided that SCO's directors weren't really the best at running their company and, oh, wouldn't it make sense to transfer the assets to someone better placed to deal with them, like, say, a retired Judge. And that's pretty much what happened.
The bankruptcy court put everything in the hands of a new legal firm, who, acting as administrators, sucked the corpse dry of the remaining funds [it hadn't truly been bankrupt when it filed, of course] by running up lots of legal expenses... and that's when the original story came to a close.
The key point here being that the question of copyright ownership has already been pretty conclusively settled: SCO had no counter to Novell showing copyrights were retained [to the original SVRX codebase. SCO inherited "Unixware", a later Novell product, along with all the changes they made to that codebase, but not the original on which it was based.
So it isn't clear to me quite what Xinuos think they bought, but it does sound rather like they bought a pig in a poke. Or that they're trying to drum up some interest from an angel investor with a grudge against IBM. Back when this happened the first time, SCO were able to get $50 million from Microsoft for "licensing"... but these days Linux has become too essential to Microsoft's cloud business for them to shoot themselves in the other foot.
Hopefully our response can be, "Nothing to see here. Move along, move along."
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So, isn't it the case that the code that IBM donated really was copyrighted, just that the *actual* owner of the copyright was OK with the donation?
Re:The Xinuos Claims (Score:5, Informative)
You see, part of the problem with the original TSG case against IBM was that TSG never did actually point to any line or lines of code and claim infringement. Instead, they basically pulled out the entirety of the source code and said, "The violations we claim are in there: you find it..."
They did this because they were hoping to keep whatever powder they thought they had dry until they got in a court room in front of a jury. The issue they had with that was IBM's entirely reasonable response, which was [again I paraphrase], "Your Honor, we would be delighted to respond to the plaintiffs claims, when they actually make a claim to which we can respond. They need to tell us the source file they claim we infringed, the line or lines of code they claim we copied, and they need to show where those lines exist in the Linux kernel. Until they do that, it isn't clear to us that they have a case..."
The original trial judge, one Dale A. Kimball, went out of his way to cut TSG as much slack as he reasonably could, but after literally years he had pretty much figured out their entire strategy was a scam. He was sending them a clear message with some of his rulings that things weren't going well for TSG, but at no point did they ever come out and provide the specifics of their claim.
So whilst I'd love to agree with you, it's almost a dangerous step to take, because to this day we don't actually know the specifics of TSG's claims.
This observer concluded that BSF's strategy was to muddle along in motion practice with junior lawyers, but then bring in the man himself - David Boies - for the critical trial days, so he could weave his magic and bamboozle a jury into believing their smoke-and-mirror claims. Fortunately, Judge Kimball saw through the sham, called them on it, set a date for a summary judgement hearing... and on the day TSG folded. They were bidding like they had Aces over Kings but all they had was a busted flush.
Worth noting that if there had been any truth to the claims and if the case was anything like as strong as they claimed, then they would have had the confidence to give IBM a "smackdown". They fact that they didn't - and continued to claim for literally billions in damages - made the outcome inevitable.
For me the worst part was that there were stories PJ (Pamela Jones, Groklaw's Editor) covered about small, non-tech companies that got really nasty cease-and-decist-or-pay-up demands from TSG and were forking out $700 *per server* in "licensing fees", without consulting legal advice. TSG just used that money to fund their litigation. Or how about the creditors listed in their bankruptcy filing - including a local "Mom and Pop" delivery pizza place, which were out a few hundred dollars for an un-paid account. Basically, these folk were true swamp-dwellers.
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OK, that makes more sense. I've used Xenix, SCO UNIX, OpenServer, and SCO UnixWare since the early days and I'm very familiar with the heritage of the two operating system lines. But even so I still find this whole affair around SVR4 and UnixWare very puzzling.
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That entire layer of smoke screen was blown away when Novell showed that SCO didn't have the copyright to any of the code at all. The return or the son of Dracula^WSCO still doesn't have the copyright to any of that code, so anything they might manage to show there is moot.
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The original trial judge, one Dale A. Kimball, went out of his way to cut TSG as much slack as he reasonably could, but after literally years he had pretty much figured out their entire strategy was a scam. He was sending them a clear message with some of his rulings that things weren't going well for TSG, but at no point did they ever come out and provide the specifics of their claim.
So whilst I'd love to agree with you, it's almost a dangerous step to take, because to this day we don't actually know the specifics of TSG's claims.
To which I say, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what code or lines of code or files TSG claimed was copied/infringed upon. The reason it doesn't matter is that TSG never owned the copyrights to be able to make the claim, which was proven in a court of law in the SCO Group Inc, v Novell lawsuit(s). Since SCO never received ownership of the copyrights, TSG could not have purchased them when the bought the SCO assets/properties/holdings, and thus Xinuos could not have bought them from any entity that purc
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They did organize a press conference at the beginning, showing journalists pieces of code from "their" system and from Linux kernel side-by-side. Formatted in a Windings font.
Of course, somebody took photos of the pieces of code and within 24 hours the community organized at Groklaw converted and identified all the code. Some of it was, if I rememb
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So, isn't it the case that the code that IBM donated really was copyrighted, just that the *actual* owner of the copyright was OK with the donation?
Yes, IBM was fine with IBM donating the JFS code.
The SCOundrel's theory was "It went into Linux, so we own the code."
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uh no (Score:1, Troll)
"The fact that most of you don't know either company's name gives you an idea of how well that lawsuit went."
If you don't know the name SCO it tells you that you don't know fuck about shit when it comes to x86 Unix.
If you don't know the name Caldera it tells you that you don't know fuck about shit when it comes to DOS.
If a reader doesn't know either company's name then Slashdot is not for them.
Re:uh no (Score:5, Interesting)
The original "SCO" was the "Santa Cruz Operation". They were probably not the first but certainly one of the more successful companies out there to produce a flavor of Unix that ran on x86 hardware... you have to remember that the original AT&T Unix was not Intel x86 based - in fact it used the Motorola MC68010, complete with a custom MMU, that clocked in at around 10MHz, if I remember correctly.
Basically, Santa Cruz Operation ported Xenix - a variant of early Unix - to what was then something like the Intel 8086 processor. Some time later Xenix was recompiled to run on the Intel 80386 processor (and I'm pretty sure that at that point in time Microsoft even had a financial interest in Xenix, but I don't recall what that was for).
There were various mergers and companies involved through this period. I remember one of them being "Tarantella" and that it was some time later when SCO obtained limited rights to use Unix SVR4 from Novell. Key thing here being that the "SCO" that obtained those rights was most assuredly NOT the same as The SCO Group, trading as TSG, that originally sued IBM. Instead, what happened was that "OldSCO" sold the UnixWare part of the business that they obtained from Novell to Caldera Systems... It was around 2001 or 2002 - 7 years after "OldSCO" licensed the Unix source from Novell - that "Caldera Systems" changed their name to "The SCO Group".
The SCO Group's litigous strategy was master-minded by Darl McBride (in an ironic twist of fate, a former Novell employee...), who joined the company in late 2000 or early 2001. Their campaign against IBM started, IIRC, some time in 2003.
Sorry for the long-winded response to your post. Whilst I think followers of x86 Unix should know a little more of the history, I think you also need to be a bit more precise when you use the term "SCO". And see above concerning the involvement of the Caldera name on the Unix side of the story, too...
Re:uh no (Score:5, Interesting)
No, original AT&T Unix ran on a PDP-7, long before the Motorola 6800 family existed (and even longer before the 68000 family).
SCO didn't port or create Xenix - Microsoft licensed AT&T Unix, ported it to several CPU architectures, including the 8086, and sold it to OEMs under the name Xenix (because they didn't license the name "Unix"). Microsoft partnered with SCO after a few years, and eventually transferred ownership of Xenix to SCO in exchange for an ownership stake in the company.
They have a strong case (Score:2)
I've examined the headers and the source invol... OMG PONIES!!!
Darl Mcbride V2 (Score:2)
https://www.wired.com/2007/ [wired.com]
Re: Darl Mcbride V2 (Score:3)
If anything, you n 2021 Microsoft would be More likely to act in defence of Linux. MS figured out there's more money in hosting Linux in clouds then there is trying to fight it. And it's been profitable indeed. MS ain't going back to the old way I suspect
Blast from past (Score:2)
So I wonder how PJ is doing these days?
Re: Blast from past (Score:2)
Best left in peace. If she wishes to return I'm sure we'll all hear about it. Likely whatever it was that causes her abrupt departure was serious enough she has no intention of a reprisal
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Likely whatever it was that causes her abrupt departure was serious enough she has no intention of a reprisal
No speculation needed. It's literally the last story she posted on Groklaw [groklaw.net]. It had to do with the DOJ's Lavabit overreach in the wake of the Snowden affair
When you can't innovate, (Score:2)
litigate!
Also, TFA says "most of you don't know either company's name". I find it hard to believe that most ZDNet denizens don't at least recognize SCO. Hell, my career has been primarily in analog hardware, and even I knew about them long before I ever heard of Slashdot.
Google v. Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
Because Linux must share header files with Unix, if the Supreme Court sides with Oracle in Google vs Oracle [wikipedia.org] then Linux will be in copyright violation. (Unless the copyright holder has already released those headers under a permissive license.) However, the beneficiary could never be SCO because the Unix copyright was never transferred to them from Novell.
But whoever currently holds Unix copyrights on those header files could be sitting on a gold mine, depending on the verdict. If the copyright holder is a publicly traded company, it would be smart to bet a few hundred on their stock now, because the day after the Supreme Court verdict it could be worth zillions of times more.
So what happened to the Unix copyrights when Novell went defunct in 2014?
And generally, what are good investments if we want to bet on a decision for Oracle? (other than Oracle, of course). There must be lots of companies out there which could cash in on the great header file scam. Which ones?
I have no legal or political influence and the system is so corrupt that reform is impossible. So if some people are making fortunes because Oracle and the Supreme Court are screwing over everyone else, I want to be in on the fortune-getting.
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That some dingus thinks that errno.h is a creative work shows just how much the brain worms are winning.
Re: (Score:2)
Never defunct, Novell was acquired by The Attachmate Group and then Micro Focus International which now owns copyright to the Unix code. Xinuos is contesting IBM's claim, "IBM has represented that a third-party owns all of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights, and that this third-party has waived any infringement claim against IBM."
Guess Xinuous will be taken to school just like SCO was. Xinuos doesn't own Unix, they only licensed the code (as SCO from Novell) and also wrongfully sublicensed it when they had
Re: (Score:2)
Xinuos is contesting IBM's claim, "IBM has represented that a third-party owns all of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights, and that this third-party has waived any infringement claim against IBM."
Actually, a US District Court has RULED that a third party owns all of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights.
Re: Google v. Oracle (Score:4, Interesting)
If Oracle win that case IBM are coming after them, for everything they got for copying SQL. They are as daft as SCO Group for perusing the case as they cannot win, because if they get a bunch of money from Google they will just be paying it all out and more to IBM.
Don't forget... (Score:2)
JFC, I remember back when this was new news. And they were trying to charge a $599/user license for Linux users. And there was that troll account who reminded you of that in the first post of almost every submission. Did anyone ever actually pay them that license fee?
699 (Score:2)
The fact that most of you don't know either company's name gives you an idea of how well that lawsuit went.
Indeed, I do not remember ever hearing of IBM and Microsoft, but I vaguely remember a number... 699 - and the units going with it: $/CPU.
Quick Dismissal (Score:2)
Since a *very* similar lawsuit using, essentially, the same claims was dismissed, IBM shouldn't have much trouble getting this tossed quickly. Unless Xinuous has some sort of new and substantial claim, it's going to get tossed fast. If not, best case scenario for Xinuous is it *just* gets thrown out. Worst case scenario is the judge gets angry at them for filing a frivolous lawsuit, and IBM gets to countersue for attorney's fees and, possibly, treble damages, or 3x the cost of dealing with the lawsuit.
Name and shame (Score:2)
The parasites supporting this lawsuit are enemies of software freedom and worthy of cancellation.
They want money from YOU (indirectly) they've not earned. They want a lifetime revenue stream for being leeches.
It's because of the RH buyout (Score:2)
Xinuos? Funny ... (Score:2)
Xinuos you say?
That is Xinu + OS.
And Xinu stands for the recursive Xinu Is Not Unix [wikipedia.org] since at least 1979 when professor Douglas Comer wrote his book: Operating System Design - The Xinu Approach [purdue.edu].
I bought that book around 1985 ...
Can Comer sue them? Any knowledgeable lawyer willing to take the case pro bono?
SCO and the rise of systemd (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked with SCO (the Santa Cruz Operation) in 89/90 and met one of the founders once, it was a father an son business (Doug Micheals IIRC).
Microsoft was a shareholder in the company from very early on, their name appear when the system booted, it was in the Kernel. Microsoft were were early investors in SCO, but even they were a very different company back then.
I mention this because two of the most useful commands the SCO Xenix and Unix had were "enable" and "disable" which, when you specified a system service, would interact with the init system and turn a service on or off (wait or runonce I think were options IIRC). It was simple and elegant and with a little imagination you could configure the system however you wanted. Much to my surprise Linux didn't have these commands and thus you could not access a huge part of initd's functionality. This is not a systemd vs initd conversation, I think that if you were going to take source code this would have been one of the first things copied.
For a better history lesson than mine here is an interview with Doug Michaels [youtube.com] from a few years back. He wrote and apology letter to the open source Linux community a while back and these are further details about the history of this case. [lwn.net]
SCO history from the founder (Score:2)
Apologies, that previous post was poorly titled.
This brings back fond memories. (Score:2)
Not sure how this plan works (Score:2)
So, their plan to get out of financial difficulty is to voluntarily get into a legal battle with IBM's lawyers?
Good luck with that.
I'd guess they have less than half the money needed to make it through discovery against the Nazgul, and might not even make it past the initial pleadings. IBM has shown zero interest in settling or arbitrating this case. In a best case scenario, trial is years away, appeals taking even longer. .
Let's say that they're suing for $10 billion. I'll guesstimate that, in the event th
new codebase, same nonsense (Score:2)
The Xinuos folks jumped over to a FreeBSD base a couple of years back for their Openserver 10 product, so other than some driver pieces they no doubt wrote, what do they have copyright on to claim damages?
Their biggest problem is that even after claiming they had no interest in further litigation, I can't imagine any company with an ounce of sanity coming anywhere near these people. Their predecessor thoroughly poisoned the well for any future business, and I imagine after this long what few former SCO cus