OSCON Panel: SCO Lawsuit About the Money

viewstyle writes "Just when you had heard enough, the ongoing controversy about SCO vs. Linux has popped up over at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). According to Eweek's story, the panelists agreed that SCO is targeting companies like IBM in an attempt to raise cash. Most importantly: "if a company is not after money, suing is not the way to go.""

About money? But

It's all about money? I thought it was about the cool evening wear of the mascot.

Re:About money? But

Wow, you can't get anything past these OSCON guys.

Re:About money? But

whoa whoa whoa, let me get this right? You think this about the money? You my friend, are an idiot! Why SCO obviously has an inherent right to everything on this planet, DARL C. MCBRIDE SAYS SO! We all owe him 3 billion dollars for existing, he says he has solid proof that he will share any day now, that gods creation of the Universe was based of off SCO IP. Infact many parts of our own double helix is a direct copy of secret proprietary code (he just won't tell us which yet). Oh my god, I just figured out the missing link in mans evolution! It was SCO source code injected into human DNA by the evil IBM! Nobel prize, here I come.

If you mod me -1 flamebait, you my friend, have no sense of humor.

How is SCO's Lawsuit affecting sales of Linux?

If I were a CIO or CTO debating the TCO of *nix vs. Win2K3 to a CEO, would IBM vs. SCO be the TKO that stops the CEO from approving A/P to pay my PO for RH's LGX?

FWIW, even if OSS is FAIB, if the DOJ considers *nix IP with a TM, then it basically become's SCO's LIC, meaning our OSS becomes a CSS OS, which would RSTBO.

AIBO going w/ an ASP that manages our OS? BTA, we might end up w/ a BOFH giving us ZA, which WWAD PMS.

AFAIK, INMP if SCO wants to be ITM by enforcing its supposed IPR - *nix IP should be PD or GNU, like BSD just on GP, IYKWIM. I keep asking myself in this situation - WWLD?

Oh, BTW - IITYWIMWYBMAD?

Re:How is SCO's Lawsuit affecting sales of Linux?

If I were a CIO or CTO debating the TCO of *nix vs. Win2K3 to a CEO, would IBM vs. SCO be the TKO that stops the CEO from approving A/P to pay my PO for RH's LGX?

FWIW, even if OSS is FAIB, if the DOJ considers *nix IP with a TM, then it basically become's SCO's LIC, meaning our OSS becomes a CSS OS, which would RSTBO.

AIBO going w/ an ASP that manages our OS? BTA, we might end up w/ a BOFH giving us ZA, which WWAD PMS.

AFAIK, INMP if SCO wants to be ITM by enforcing its supposed IPR - *nix IP should be PD or GNU, like BSD just on GP, IYKWIM. I keep asking myself in this situation - WWLD?

Oh, BTW - IITYWIMWYBMAD?

WTF???

Bingo!

I got a diagonal Buzzword-Bingo on CTO, TCO, BSD and ASP. What did I win?

Re:Translation please?

This post is an AC's ripoff ot the original here. [slashdot.org]
Translation [slashdot.org] also appeared in that thread.

SCO Lawsuit About the Money

In other news, it was discovered that the Earth is round and fire is hot. Film at 11.

Re:SCO Lawsuit About the Money

In other news, it was discovered that the Earth is round and fire is hot. Film at 11.

I thought it was "Cellophane factory burns. No film at 11!"

DUH

There are only two reasons you sue-- for injunctive relief of some kind, or to receive damages.

And there is one reason for profit corporations exist-- to make money. This is a surprise why?

You missed the opportunity

And there is one reason for profit corporations exist-- to make money. This is a surprise why?

The real quote would be: And there is one reason for Courts to exist-- to help corporations make money. This is a surprise why?

Third reason: sock puppet license fees

Those are the classical two reasons to sue. SCO has developed an innovative third reason.

Look at SCO's revenue and income for the past quarter. They recorded $13 million from sales of products and services and $8 million from SCO Source. SCO Source has two customers: one is Microsoft, and the other is an unnamed large Unix company (I think it's likely to be Sun).

On the income side, SCO lost money on products and services, but made up for it by making money from SCO Source.

SCO has found a way to monetize anti-Linux FUD. This is not just a sideline. It's the only profitable activity The SCO Group has ever had in its corporate existence.

SCO doesn't need to win the lawsuit. They just need throw enough FUD so that Microsoft keeps cutting them checks. I think it's important that open source people understand this business model.

Umm..

You mean Chris Sontag isn't serious about wanting Linux to grow and prosper? That greedy son of a bitch!

It's just a consequence of a natural process

When an animal dies its sphincter loosens up and a smelly mess is created. Ditto SCO.

So I guess I'm the only one...

who thinks the point of the lawsuit is to bleed money
out of Caldera/SCO. Create a pointless lawsuit, and have the company
pay a ton of money in legal bills to a lawfirm that the
CEO is a part of. A nice way to bleed a company dry.
When all done, McBride will move onto the next company
with too much money and suck that one dry also.

Well, yes

Corporate lawsuits often are--although in this case I would say there's a large, genuine streak of pseudo-evil vindictiveness behind the suit as well, just judging from all the public comments SCO has made thus far. They certainly have a bee in their bonnet about something, and god's death, they may even sincerely believe they're right (even if their claims are based on the wind).

It's all about money?

Oh dear! I just thought it was righteous outrage at teft of SCO's GPL'ed IP.

Well, no kidding.

When are people going to realize that first, parties with a vested interest in the matter, such as OSCON, will hold this or a biased opinion. Secondly, the only opinion that matters is that of a judge or a jury. It doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. Finally, a judge or jury is unlikely to render an opinion on the matter for another two to three years so, the constant rehashing of some OSS member's take is completely pointless.

Give it a rest. People need to focus on the positive aspects of Open Source and stop dwelling on this lawsuit. Regardless of the outcome, having this "news" constantly at the forefront is only going to damage Linux and Open Source due to the FUD factor.

Re:Well, no kidding.

but it is definately non-trival to linux advocates who are trying to damage control the SCO anti-linux fears

Not really too helpful for damage control either I'm afraid. As the parent post stated, people with a vested interest(Linux advocates) will have a biased opinion or, at the very least, an opinion that is regarded by outsiders as being biased. In order for the "damage control" to be of value, such statements would need to come from those who do not have a vested interest in Linux and Open Source. This would be people like closed source software companies, lawyers, business analysts, and the dreaded consulting analysts like Gartner/IDC et al.

By the way, for those that have chosen to ignore them, the analysts like Gartner/IDC et al, are recommending that businesses be very careful in choosing Linux. Or they are recommending that businesses avoid Linux all together. Whose opinion is going to be valued by the PHBs, OSCON or Gartner?

Use protection

People in the open-source community should also not accept software under the Microsoft Shared Source license as they could become "contaminated"

That just sounds vaguely nasty.

Remember kids, don't share unprotected source with Microsoft, or you risk litigiously tramsmitted diseases.

Obligatory Profit

1. Profit!

And all along I had thought it was more complicated than that.

corporate ethics

based on all the sarcasm so far it looks like most people buy into the idea that companies can do whatever they want to make money, they shouldn't be judged in the same way we judge people. Obviously there are limits as we wouldn't condone a company that murdered people (or would we? look at all the defense companies that sell to just about anyone) and people start to grumble about companies like ENRON and Martha Stewart and Nike and other companies using child labor, etc. Why are corporate criminals are rarely punished? Is this attitude a result of the increasing difficulty in achieving the American dream? Are there people we might consider ethical who convince themselves that it's OK to keep working for Nike or SCO or Microsoft or whomever because they're just a cog and aren't responsible for the company's actions? Obviously it's not always a black-and-white call for someone to make but I think a lot of people are in major denial. Companies don't only exist to make money. They also provide some goods or services, provide employment, conduct research that eventually benefits the public, etc. All of the focus on profit is harmful and shouldn't be accepted by people inside or outside the company.

sean

Re:corporate ethics

Part of the problems is that people that work for these companies are inside the problem. They themselves may not go out and hire child labor - they just call a company in Malaysia or wherever and make some enquiries about production cost and machine equipment, etc. It's very likely that the though never even crosses their mind that the company may hire child labor. This goes on day after day all over the country. The other side of this is that the company in Malaysia or wherever doesn't perceive it as wrong and so the issue of the age of employees never comes up.

I think the people in charge of businesses, as a general rule, try to be ethical and honest and all of that, but they do not have absolute control at all levels of production. Then you have a couple of bad characters who spoil it for the whole bunch. Enron was one such example. Most of the Enron employees probably had no idea what was going on at the time. They did their jobs, got their paychecks and all was right with the world. Then Fastow and Lay come along and screw the gig for everyone. It's easy to claim "well, they should have known!" but it's also very naive. It's even entirely possible that Enron execs were within specific laws because sometimes there's not one law that says "thou shalt not do X-and-such".

At any rate, I agree that absolute focus on profit and nothing else is not right, but there's no law against it. And ultimately, that is all we have to work with. Until our canon of laws is so firmly embedded in our psyche that we become aware of any potential action that might break any law, then we will not be able to get past this problem. Or until someone makes it illegal not to think of the surrounding community, then we're stuck.

Some of that even comes down to varying definitions of community. As an example, I do not feel a particular sense of community with anyone here at at /. simply because I've never met them. Now, I would have to really think about to come up with a way to directly harm /. and the community, but at the same time, how do I know that an action I committed earlier in the day hasn't harmed them in some way?

It's not shades of gray - it's not even a color.

Your daily insider update

Our friends Charles Broughton [sec.gov] (Sr VP Int'l Sales), Robert Bench [sec.gov] (CFO) and Jeff Hunsaker [sec.gov] (VP, Worldwide Marketing) are selling [sec.gov], selling [sec.gov] and.. wait for it... selling [sec.gov].

Tin foil hats on, please...

From the article:

"[Microsoft's recent Unix license deal with SCO] proves that Microsoft and proprietary software vendors have a great deal to fear from intellectual property held by others. Maybe Microsoft felt it had something in its software to fear, and perhaps that's maybe why it took out that license."

Or perhaps, maybe, dare I suggest, that Microsoft's public endorsement of SCO's products are meant to reward its loyalty in dealing OSS in general such a blow.

MS leaked an internal memo a while ago that reported on some consumer focus groups they'd conducted to find which arguments against Linux were most effective. People largely ignored philosophical appeals about the nature of OSS, and they didn't really care about the so-called "viral nature of the GPL." The only thing that really worked was MS's suggestion that they could be legally liable for using OSS if -- unbeknownst to them -- it had been tainted by copyright infringement. That result was documented, and MS is well aware that legally-inspired terror is their best weapon against OSS.

Lo and behold, a puppet dances onto the stage and engages in an outrageously publicized lawsuit against a company backing Linux. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe there's no connection, maybe SCO really is just in it for the money. Nevertheless, I think I'm catching glimpses of a four-color butterfly pulling SCO's strings.

More SCO News

Here is another story [com.com] on SCO, from CNET, focusing on their recent licensing deals and the impact on its earnings.

Also, in this story [cnet.com] our "favorite" CEO claimed he was in Japan not to invade the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum [cnet.com] but instead "just" to get more Japanese firms to license code from SCO.

By the way, when is that code you always talk about going to show up in court? I'm still waiting to see something, anything... yeah...

Ransom Love's Linuxworld 2000 Keynote Speech

The SCO Group is currently suing IBM for breach of contract for apparently putting Unixware/Monterey "technology" in Linux. SCO/Caldera's complaint depends critically on certain historical and technical assertions which are materially false and (apparently quite intentionally) misleading [opensource.org].

The SCO group, and both Old SCO and Caldera before it, directly acknowledged and assisted IBM with the scalablity of Linux [weblogs.com]

In August 2000, just days after Caldera purchased the Old SCO server division, the then CEO of Caldera, Ransom Love, made a keynote speech at LinuxWorld 2000. A RealPlayer video stream of the event can be found at DrDobbs Journal's Technetcast [ddj.com]

In the question and answer session at the end of the keynote, Love was asked about the possible conflict over Monterey and Linux IA-64 [iwethey.org]

A mp3 capture [iwethey.org] of the following transcribed portion

Q: What happens about Project Monterey, because that conflicts with the AI-64 Linux, 64-bit Linux?

Love: OK. I don't -- if we do our job right in making Linux scale over like UnixWare to the degree that everybody, that we know we can... May I ask, some people have said, "Well, people have tried this in the past, but they haven't been that successful," may I suggest: we don't have any ulterior motives for not making it successful. Technologically has not been the reason why it hasn't done it before. There's always some other motive, right? And so to talk about Monterey, clearly we want to make sure we have the same level of Linux integration on Monterey that we would have in our Unixware product. Now, we don't control, I mean, we have a great relationship... it's a joint development relationship with IBM which we intend to preserve ... but they have similar interests and so this is really a very synergistic, uh, this transaction is great for all of the major partners as they have already wanted to embrace Linux moving forward.

Now, let me address one other aspect of your question, which is that the Monterey Project is in conflict with the IA-64 Linux Project. I don't believe it's in conflict at all. Now, clearly, we have tremendous vested interest in the IA-64 Linux Project and with the acquisition of SCO, they've been doing a lot, so you combine those, and we've got one of the more comprehensive offerings, I believe, on the IA-64 Linux. So that's clearly an area that we're very committed to. But like Unixware, there's elements of the Monterey kernel that are more scalable, OK? Now, on the IA-64 platform, I don't know how long of window that is, but today, it's a little bit more robust and more scalable than the IA-64 Linux is today. Now, I'm not saying that over time that won't change.

But, and let me address one other thing. Sorry, (laughs) you're getting all of it through one question. But clearly we are going to add components back to the Linux kernel on both IA-32 and IA-64 platforms. We'll work with Linus and everyone in order to make that available. That will take some time. And as I mentioned earlier, I don't know that over time you can have a single kernel -- in fact I know you can't -- that will scale, you know, the breadth of IT technology needs. So I think we're looking, in the Linux community, at having multiple kernels, so...

Q: Multiple Linux kernels? Or multiple UNIX kernels?

Love: Multiple Linux kernels as well, over time.

Q: Thank you.

Love: You bet.

I am not a lawyer, but even I can see that The SCO Group has put itself into an intractable situation, any judge will listen to evidence from the above and laugh the SCO group out of court.

It's about time to reexamine

GNU Beach

The Free Software Foundation has never sued anyone who was in beach of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as it simply wants them to come into compliance with the license.

I have never heard of this beach before. Where can I find it? Is it a GNUde beach?

Sun seems to be making alot of money too.

According to this they not only are the 2nd licensee from SCO but they also received a warrent to buy 210,000 shares of SCOX at 1.83 per share!

http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1024633.html?tag =f d_top

Bastards.

Time to Buy a New One...

Darn! The replies to this article burned out my Sarcasm Meter.

You should warn a fella before posting something like this...

It's all about the money

Step 1. Run company into ground
Step 2. File frivolous lawsuits that enrage the entire computing community (even mac users).
Step 3. ...
Step 4. Profit!

Poison Pill Scenario

This quotation from the article:

The FSF's Kuhn advised free software writers to register their copyrights in the United States, even if they do not reside in the country.

But Eric Raymond, co-founder and president of the OSI, cautioned that the industry should not respond to the SCO matter by trying to further regulate the open-source code and contribution process.

The volume and quality of contributions to open source are very sensitive to the "overheads of submission and increasing these overheads to the development process could do long-term damage to the industry," he said.

got me to thinking. Has anybody considered a poison pill scenario?

Bad Company wants to slow down Linux, the GPL, open source software, etc. Bad Company uses Bad Agent to take secret, closed-source code owned by Bad Company and "contribute" it to Linux. Bad Company then waits six months, a year, two years....

Bad Agent vanishes (with his $ millions....)

Bad Company then asserts its copyright claims. "OMG! It seems our former employee, (Bad) Agent, contributed some of our copyrighted, closed-source (and for that matter, trade secret) code to Linux two years ago, and we didn't know about it! Everybody has to rip out the code... and pay us....

While I understand Raymond's concerns, I think Kuhn is right. I'm not sure he goes far enough.

What's SCO?

I read slashdot all the time, and I have no idea what this is about. I wish they could provide some context with these articles.

to anyone versed in logic

if a company is not after money, suing is not the way to go.

I'm not sure how many people out there are versed in logic but essentially:

IF HYPOTHESIS THEN CONCLUSION is logically equivalent to IF NOT CONCLUSION THEN NOT HYPOTHESIS. (you're examining the contrapostive of the original statement)

Anyways, if you apply this transformation to the original statement (if a company is not after money then suing is not the way to go) you get:

Suing is the way to go if a company is after money

Food for thought ;)

Shock and awe

"panelists agreed that SCO is targeting companies like IBM in an attempt to raise cash." ... in stark contrast to every other corporation in the world that is in existence to better humanity.

SCO not like Linux..

The way I see it, Unix is like a bicycle, while Linux is more like a luxury car. Bicycles were invented before we had the technology to make luxury cars like Linux. Now that we have Linux we really don't need Unix anymore. Linux is open.. lots of people can get inside Linux and it's comfortable. Unix only has one occupant, and he's not very comfortable. IBM is like a huge truck. If a huge truck like IBM runs over a little bike like Unix then people become more careful about who they piss off in the future.