More on SCO Code Snippets 339
anoopsinha writes "A story in linuxworld reports that SCO itself has no idea what the history of a particular snippet of code might be - even a high profile snippet like the one SCO highlighted at SCO Forum. Having no idea if its claims have merit has not stopped SCO so far, so we can expect more from SCO along the lines of big claims with no merit."
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
I invision that building being a bunch of yes men and raid attack lawers who have the combigned morals of Stalin, Goering, and Ghengis Kahn all rolled up into one.
Oh, you said greek! Well, what I said still holds true.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
Finally. I invoke Godwin's Law. Now we can dispense with the SCO stories since no useful further debate is possible.
Godwin's Law has ben invoked, please stand by... (Score:4, Informative)
Please mod parent up, this is the most significant development in the fiaSCO so far.
For those who aren't familiar with the legend of Godwin's Law, cheack out How to post about Nazis and get away with it - the Godwin's Law FAQ [faqs.org]. Although Godwin's Law is technically a USENET thing, it is frequently mentioned in regards to long /. threads, topics, and the like.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:3, Funny)
The Oracle Speaks (fp?) (Score:5, Insightful)
Mr. Nauvek [linuxworld.com] isn't kidding,
SCO's press releases are just echoing back what Perens, or what that Groklaw guys say in
twisted words.
Let's just not talk about SCO anymore. We're just giving them ideas for press releases that pump up their stock price.
Re:The Oracle Speaks (fp?) (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that SCOX was a penny stock before this lawsuit... Well, do the math.
SCO has no care about winning their suit. A weakness of the US legal system is they can make their claims based on the virtue that they HAVE sued.
Unless the trial judge is Lewis Kaplan of DECSS fame, I can't see SCO winning.
Re:The Oracle Speaks (fp?) (Score:2, Funny)
Now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Now... (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd be Broke (Score:5, Insightful)
They're around $18 right now. In May they were in the $3s.
Feast your eyes on this lovely chart [pcquote.com].
SCO is doing what Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and so many other companies have done. They do absolutely anything, legal or not, ethical or not, to pump that stock. And keep in mind that for the stock to trade higher and higher means that people have been standing in line to buy it. Those asses share some of the blame. It's just a bunch of people trading, overall, lots of the world's time, energy, and money, for a little personal gain.
Fuck them.
Fuck McBride [caldera.com]. His method of improving SCO's business here brings into serious question the supposed successes he ha d at other companies.
Speaking of the snake, does anyone have personal information on him? It would be a real shame if he personally were to receive indications of the world's negative feelings about him...
Re:You'd be Broke (Score:3, Interesting)
What, you mean like
Re:You'd be Broke (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You'd be Broke (Score:5, Insightful)
SCO is doing what Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and so many other companies have done. They do absolutely anything, legal or not, ethical or not, to pump that stock.
That's an important point there.
And keep in mind that for the stock to trade higher and higher means that people have been standing in line to buy it. Those asses share some of the blame.
Oh, I imagine there are probably a few investors or wannabe investors really banking on SCO's chances of a big payout, but most are not.
SCOX stock is shorted to the hilt. It's shorted so hard, a lot of people are having trouble finding shares to short. That means a lot of investors are fully confident that SCO will go down in flames. The only reason SCOX stock is rising is because of some pretty flagrant stock manipulation. SCOX is a small-cap, tight-float stock that started this affair as a penny stock in danger of delisting. For those unfamiliar with the stock market, the practical upshot of that is that SCOX stock is very easy to manipulate.
Who's manipulating it? My guess is, SCO's the chief manipulator (with other parties serving as accomplices), though I can't be certain. This isn't the first time this company's tried it; if you look back in the days when they were still Caldera, you'll find an old (unresolved?) class-action lawsuit hanging around:
(See legalcasedocs.com. See legalcasedocs.com get slashdotted. Gee, I sure am sorry about that!) [legalcasedocs.com]
If you want to see the current manipulation in action, just grab yourself a copy of LinuxTrade [0catch.com], get yourself a free real-time account, and watch the trading happen in real-time. (The LinuxTrade docs will give you hints as to where to get free real-time accounts; I refuse to have a nameless, innocent, and very generous brokerage slashdotted on my account). You'll see miniscule volume, mystery entities bidding up the ask on the smallest lots possible, and end-of-day tape painting to get the stock to close higher. Lately whoever's yanking the stock around seems to have a fetish for targetting close to exact dollar amounts like $17.00 and $18.00, so I'm betting the yanking duties have recently been consigned to a bot.
C'mon Now (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I think he's as much of a prick as anyone else and that he and his cohorts deserve, to some degree, a horrible and painful fate, but I will NOT resort to lowering the bar and hitting below the belt. And furthermore, I'd urge you to do the same. The guy has a family. Leave them out of it. Let him suffer his due when this ends and he's in jail.
Shorting stocks... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.fool.com/FoolFAQ/FoolFAQ0033.htm [fool.com]
Re:Now... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Now... (Score:2)
No Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I could tell after reading the whole article, they did not actually admit anything. The writer of the article is just coming to that conclusion via other evidence.
Re:No Idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure how McBride and co. hope to keep their ill-gotten gains after the shareholder lawsuit that's bound to arise from this. Maybe they're shuffling the money into numbered offshore accounts. I suppose it's expecting too much to imagine reprisals from the SEC or criminal fraud charges, given how Enron, Worldcom, et al turned out. <sarcasm>Yep, the potential for false reporting and stock market manipulation has really decreased and a return of investor confidence will happen real soon now.</sarcasm>
Re:No Idea (Score:2, Insightful)
D
Re:No Idea (Score:2)
It does change its relevance to a lawsuit that claims IBM introduced code in violation of its contracts with SCO. If SCO didn't verify the origin of the code in Linux, then it's also unlikely that they verified which O/S had the code first. It looks like they did a pattern match and assumed any positives were copied by IBM from SCO to Linux. The AT&T/BSD lawsuit gives ample precedent t
WTF is SCO using for version control? (Score:4, Insightful)
Which makes me wonder... what the fuck is SCO using for version control if they can't look at the history of their own code?
And if SCO does submit changelogs (or is forced to divulge them during the discovery process), is there any way that IBM will be able to determine whether those changelogs were forged or not?
Given the recent history of SCO making demonstrably false statements in the press, I'm beginning to think that they might well do the same when it gest to the courtroom - except with non-demonstrably false statements.
If they do it, it's called perjury. But if they forge a set of CVS or RCS changelogs, how the hell do you prove it?
Summary of SCO IP claims (Score:5, Funny)
What threw me (Score:5, Insightful)
- SCO shows code snippets to stockholders and says "here are infringing code snippets"
- People actually look at code snippets, point out they are non-infringing
- SCO says "Well, THAT was not an example of an INFRINGING code snippet. It was just an example of a code snippet. We haven't shown you the REAL infringing code snippets yet, but they're doozies."
- There are no ill effects to SCO whatsoever from the fact they showed non-infringing code snippets to their investors and to the press and presented them as infringing code snippets whatsoever, SCOs investors remain unaware of this, and little to no-one in the "mainstream" (non-geek) press covers this.
WTF????Re:What threw me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What threw me (Score:2)
I guess that most investors just gamble.
Re:What threw me (Score:2)
It's commonly thought [yahoo.com] that the only reason SCOX stock is rising is because somebody with deep pockets is manipulating it.
Re:What threw me (Score:2)
Come to think of it, I wonder what sort of press release they'll be having when they declare bankcruptcy? They'll probably say stupid Linux stole their IP and made them go bust. I look forward to Linus saying, "have a nice death" or something politically inccorect. Although, the execs will certainly be having it nice, if they get away with it.
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not use linguists? (Score:5, Interesting)
The world is full of systematic biologists which uncover relationships (natural history) between organisms every day. The may use DNA, anatomy or even ethology. Why not have a group of them analysing the raw data. Their methods have now been adopted by several linguists.
But, the linguists problems differ from that of most biologists, there is much infiltration of words from various languages into one language, therewith obscuring the true relationship between languages.
Maybe these guys can use an "objective method" to deduce the origins of various code snippets.
Why not use BLAST? (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be interesting to do something like take all the whitespace out from the source tree and tar all the files together and use it as a "genome" to BLAST snippits of (likewise "compressed") code snippits.
Normal (DNA) BLAST results return with a similarity ratio and go on to show where they are/aren't homologous. I'm not sure how it would deal with expanding the relatively small nucleotide "alphabet" to that of source code.
Hmmm..
Re:Why not use BLAST? (Score:4, Informative)
BLAST is designed to deal with a specific set of optimal string alignment problems, namely the matching of nucleotide to nucleotide or amino acid to amino acid. (Actually it's even narrower than that. It's really good at finding a match of a small sequence against a database of millions because of the way it idexes the database... but you can read the paper [pubmed.org] describing it if you really want to know.) It acts on the assumption that any change is as valid as any other change (ignoring secondary, tertiary and quatenary structure.) Because of this, it's not well suited to determining distances between two code bases where what the code says actually has testable meaning.
In this case, we're pretty much stuck to wandering through the code samples by hand with judicious use of grep and diff.
Re:Why not use BLAST? (Score:4, Informative)
It may be possible to devise a similarly minded algorithm that describes the evolution of computer code (using, perhaps, the CVS trees of large projects) but such a project would be a massive undertaking.
Don't use BLAST or SHRED. Better methods exist! (Score:5, Informative)
No, BLAST won't work. ESR's SHRED won't work. These are, at heart, text matching algorithms, which are easily defeated and of little relevance. Let me explain.
Any simple code obfuscation techniques (changing variable names, adding/removing comments, inserting newlines, changing for loops to while loops, etc.) will totally defeat SHRED and will likely give BLAST a hard time, if not break it entirely.
Why? SHRED searches for lines with identical MD5 sums. If every/most line of purloined code has been changed, even slightly, SHRED fails. BLAST works by finding "seed" regions of identity and then growing those regions out to "near matches." Unfortunately, the idea of a "near match" is a lot more clear cut in DNA/protein than in code, and the initial seeding breaks if the code has been obfuscated at all.
SCO would (wisely) never accept a negative SHRED or BLAST result as proof for just these reasons.
What is necessary is a comparison of the code structure, NOT the simple text of the code. Stanford's, for example (and many other) CS department detects cheating by chewing through source files and turning them into an intermediate representation (think: parse tree) which describe directly the STRUCTURE and FUNCTION of a bit of code in a way that is completely divorced from the text of that code. To find out if people cheated, they compare the parse trees from their code -- not the text of the code.
In this way, they can easily detect (with a surprisingly low false positive rate) when two pieces of textually different code actually stemmed from the same source (but one was then obfuscated to cover up the cheating.)
This is the way to compare code fragments. Not borrowing text-matching (or near-matching) from unrelated disciplines.
Re:Why not use linguists? (Score:3, Insightful)
If the problem were text comparison, I'd call for someone from the English department who makes critical editions, as it's the most similar to the human processes working on text, not independent words or natural forces working anything.
But I don't think that's the problem. What they need is a computer science historian (aka a long-bearded Unix geek), and copies of every Unix source released. Given that, it shouldn't be hard to find all the copies of that mal
Re:Why not use linguists? (Score:5, Funny)
There may be some good countersuits soon (Score:5, Interesting)
Darl reads Slashdot! (Score:5, Interesting)
> would sue Darly McB individually, in his personal capacity, as well
> as SCO.
Darl bashing is even more fun now that we know he actually reads Slashdot! The Linuxworld piece links to a Computer World Interview [computerworld.com] with McBride. In the last question, Darl admits that he reads our rants on Slashdot and it hurts his feelings:
So Darl, if you are reading this: fuck you! We know your evidence is bogus, we are on to your stock scams (e.g. the Vultus "acquisition"), and we laugh at your suggestions that we cooperate to "monetize Linux". Give it up now, before we finally convince the SEC to launch an official investigation.
-Fyodor
Concerned about your network security? Try the free Nmap Security Scanner [insecure.org]
Re:There may be some good countersuits soon (Score:2)
Re:There may be some good countersuits soon (Score:4, Interesting)
But the content and adressee (Canopy, not SCO) really are the only sign what IBM seems to be up to. And I interpret it as they are going to make it ugly - as ugly as they can.
If I were someone at Canopy, I'd be very scared by the thought that this might be only the first manouver from IBM, and wonder what I'm in for next.
The possibilites are endless, maybe Canopy's most important companies (besides SCO, lol) are in for some patent problem talks at some point in the future.
Re:There may be some good countersuits soon (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, IBM has made it clear with the Canopy subpoena that they intend to "pierce the corporate veil" between Canopy and SCO. Ralph Yarrow may want to take the precaution of deeding his house over to a trusted family member, just to make sure he'll have a place to live when this is all over.
Bit full of ourselves aren't we? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a rather daft assumption. The junior programmer doesn't need to know the history of the code. Simply that the code is the same. Then all he needs to do is compare it with BSD and any other publically available kernels to eliminate any that may have had a common ancestry. The rest of the work could be left to someone who's good at researching in books,
And there's no reason that SCO couldn't hire someone with "depth of historical knowledge to know where to look". Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond aren't the only people with this knowledge. We don't know what SCO are doing, or what they're planning. Their public statements may be misleading simply because they don't want to show their hand. The code they did show may have been a gamble that didn't pay off. There may still be many lines of code that were stolen from SCO Unix.
Re:Bit full of ourselves aren't we? (Score:2)
There may also be:
1. My butt
2. Pigs
3. Pigs that fly out of my butt
SCO's claims fall under #3.
The REAL story (Score:3, Funny)
I always knew it wasn't just Darl who was smoking the stone here. I knew the lawyers had to be suffering from paranoia and cocaine psychosis as well.
My theory is that this whole law suit came about following one particularly heavy night hitting the pipe. When McBride, Sontag, Boies etc. began to get that familiar disturbing feeling of having maggots burrowing beneath their skin, one of them proposed that the running the GNU debugger might be the best way to
Re:Bit full of ourselves aren't we? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bit full of ourselves aren't we? (Score:5, Informative)
>There may still be many lines of code that were stolen from SCO Unix.
For the zillionth but I'm sure not the last time, according to the US Supreme Court, copyright infringement is not theft. [netjus.org]
Re:Bit full of ourselves aren't we? (Score:3, Informative)
Do we really know? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only way people will trust open source is to trust the open source developers. As more and more people are warming up to the idea that "free software isn't junk" the last thing needed is for consumers and companies to think that it was all done using someone else's code.
Surprise (Score:2, Funny)
You have GOT to be shitting me.
Hope and wishful thinking (Score:2)
History Repeated (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a lawyer' dream retirement project...at least until SCO runs out of cash. Since this is a public company the Feds and State can get involved and end this non-sense er I mean string it out for years with no meaningful outcome.
Those that do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. [umich.edu]
Its funny (Score:4, Interesting)
Code Snippets are a Red Herring (Score:4, Insightful)
But the real crux of their argument is that *every* modern OS violates their "Intellectual Property" (bad phrase) rights stemming from SysV Unix.
That includes the BSD's.
That includes Windows.
Every OS that does basically what you could with SysV Unix is in violation, whether there's code sharing or not. It's a very disturbing concept, and the implications are chilling. It is absolutely imperitive that SCO lose this case.
Re:Code Snippets are a Red Herring (Score:2, Insightful)
The only problem is the only people who care about the whole SCO crack-smoking-binge... is us bunch of geeks.
I tried explaining to my mom the other day as well as to my sister and I eventually gave up. Not that I couldn't explain it, but it's just too much to explain about GPL and Open Source and IP and company claims and Linus and "open letters" and everything...
Had to just throw my figurative hands in the air and say,
Baghdad McBride does it again. (Score:5, Funny)
The question of code history is one I asked a *long* time ago; probably the first I heard of this SCO bs. I believe they wrote a little C program that crawls the source tree and looks for similar lines of code. Hell, I could write a program like that, make it compare two source trees that make up 10,000 lines of code, and have it print out that 1,000,000 of those 10,000 lines are identical. Just like the ad for PC-Lint in the programming magazines.
Darl McBride's silly little company is acting just like the idiot who was sitting in a cafe one day. When the waitress came to take his order, the man asked her to sign and date some official documents certifying that he had been in that cafe at that time and date, with records of what he ordered, how long he stayed, etc. The waitress was confused about this, but the man claimed that he was very paranoid of someday being framed of a crime, and therefore wanted a written alibi for every waking moment of his life. He shows the waitress a calendar book with exact notations of every step he had ever taken. Suddenly, the police storms into the establishment and asks the gentleman if he goes by such and such a name. He answers affirmatively. They asked him if he had been involved in a jewelry store robbery which took place at 1221 East West Street several nights prior, at 12:31 AM. As he had proof of everything he had ever done, he opened his book, flipped to the day and hour in question, and read aloud from his book, "Jewelry store robbery at 1221 East West Street, 12:31 AM." Before he realized what a stupid error he had made, the police snatched him and he was off to jail.
With that in mind, here is an open letter to SCO CEO Darl McBride:
Dear Darl,
I do not believe any of your company's claims. In fact, I believe quite the opposite: I believe that SCO's software is composed 100% of code your company deliberately stole from other companies. Because your company stole code from the Linux kernel, you later found that code and wrongly believe that the theft occured in the other direction. Further, I strongly believe that with your company's shoddy record keeping, you cannot prove the origin of your code, so it is therefore impossible to prove your false claims of its being misappropriated into Linux. I further believe that even if your company could produce such proof, the effects of doing so would be adverse for you, as the records would clearly indicate the thefts that SCO deliberately performed.
Oh yeah, and one other thing: In your poorly written, grammatically incorrect, misspelled "open letter" to the free software community, you deliberately took some quotes out of context. This was silly because the misquoted documents are readily available for all to see your blatent and stupid attempt. To demonstrate the effect of misquoting, I offer the following text, quoted directly from your letter:
How does that feel, Darl?Sincerely,
rice burners suck
Chief Karma Whore
Slashdot
Re:Baghdad McBride does it again. (Score:2, Funny)
Thank you for providing the exhibit A352: "An incoherrent, vaguely threatening letter from a mentally disturbed open source advocate".
Re:Baghdad McBride does it again. (Score:2)
Objection, your honour.
This exhibit is irrelevant and has no bearing on the case.
Re:Baghdad McBride does it again. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Baghdad McBride does it again. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Baghdad McBride does it again. (Score:4, Funny)
Pot, meet... aw fuck it, who cares...
Time for the Internet Death Penalty (Score:2, Flamebait)
The IDP, a total voluntary boycotting of all and any news surrounding SCO, implemented in as many online journals and newssites as possible, extended to newsgroups, emails, and any other source of discussion.
SCO were kinda amusing when there was no other news this summer, but like a playground bully, they are feeding off all the attention they get, and so I vote for the IDP.
For a start, I'd be mighty grateful if there was a SCO top
Re:Time for the Internet Death Penalty (Score:5, Insightful)
It does not matter how much slashdot, groklaw, memepool, kuro5hin or metafilter or whoever cover the SCO nonsense. Ignoring it, or covering it until it's blue in the face, will not help or hurt SCO's case.
The one and only thing that matters is: Are investment news sites, and the sites read by executives and people who buy stock, covering it?
Since these sites will *do* things like take press releases and reprint them without investigating the veracity of their content, yes, they are, and will no matter what we do. If all SCO-unfriendly (i would call this "is aware of the facts of the situation") news sites dropped their SCO coverage, press-release-friendly/sco-friendly news sources-- the ones executives and stockholders read-- would continue to run their stories. This would mean that the people who are causing SCO's stock to be pumped up would still be getting the constant source of PR (lies?) from SCO, but it would mean that there would be no dissenting voices elsewhere in the media.
Dissenting voices elsewhere in the media, if they *exist*, however, may eventually have the effect, eventually, somehow, of effecting the stock-news sites. Once this begins to happen, and the stock-news sites begin to report on the actual situation rather than SCO's single (imaginary?) side of the story, SCO's stock will be toast.
In the long run all that matters is getting SCO's stock price to drop, becuase all that matters to those fueling SCO's nonsense is getting it to rise...
There is such a thing as bad publicity.
Re:Time for the Internet Death Penalty (Score:2)
But the Internet Death Penalty has a critical flaw in it.
If you are going to impose it, then how can you follow it?
People on the internet are chat happy anyways. Best that the IDP could possibly achieve is a bunch of people talking about why imposing the IDP against SCO was such a good thing. And why soandso violating the IDP against SCO was a bad thing.
By the time you are done a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about SCO
Re:Time for the Internet Death Penalty (Score:2)
I smell rule 11 sanctions (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just that, IBM can go after SCO for intentional interference, abuse of process, and malicious prosecution.
Maybe SCO Knows What They're Doing (Score:5, Insightful)
So while the community is thinking everything is just fine because SCO doesn't have jack, they are sitting on one or two really excellent examples of IP ownership they haven't released yet. This way when the code is released we will all be caught with our jaws gaping open and our feet stuffed into them. They are just down the street from me, I know some of these guys. They are slippery. The best way to kill a fox is not by chasing it.
Now maybe what they do have is small and can be replaced simply. That doesn't matter because on the phsycological front the open source / free software camp just took a hit. Unfortunatly it's too late to do anything about it.
I think a good approch is the "show us the code" approch. Not the "you must be an idiot smoking crack" approch. Hubris is a good thing when hacking code, but not when dealing with a bunch of lawyers. I urge a level headed course of action rather than a kick SCO's butt becuase there is no way we can be wrong action. Use caution - I promise there is an "Ace" up their sleave. Or at least a "Queen of Hearts".
Re:Maybe SCO Knows What They're Doing (Score:5, Insightful)
Now this is exactly what we should stay at. They claim "linux" stole their code? Well, when anybody makes a difficult to believe affirmation, the only sensible answer is "I may believe you, but only if I see a proof". And considering they took their position publicly, the proof must also be shown publicly: No NDA stuff or so. The german ruling is perfect here, stating "Show the offending code or shut up until you're in a courtroom". This is the exact sentence they should get served at every attempt to speak about the case.
They can have Bruce or Eric (Score:5, Insightful)
And to have all those people claiming it's pump and dump of SCO stock, think of this: Some execs have call options (right to buy at a certain price) that can't be exercised till somewhere in 2004. That means they have to keep the SCO stock price up till they can exercise the options. With a case like this, I wonder if that's possible: sooner or later the 'regular joe' catches on, and the stock will end up in a free-fall, and if printed on paper, making geek toilet paper (But that might make the demand among us geeks so high the price gets back up). Next to that, they sold quite some stock, but so far it's been in 5000 - 10000 chunks, While they own 10 - 20 times that much each. If they really wanted to get rich, they would dump it as fast as they could, and leave the country.
My guess is they started seriously believing they have a case, but now continue in order not to lose their face. I think McBride and his servants have lost a lot of sleep over this case by now, and will have a lot of sleepless nights in he near future.
Re:They can have Bruce or Eric (Score:5, Interesting)
Canopy has a history of taking a lot of influence in the companies they have a majority stake in, so that in effect, the company is managed from inside Canopy.
I think they wanted to use the threat of a SCO kamikaze against IBM, in order to maximise their returns for a dying company by extorting some money from them and getting some money out of the stock market.
Now that IBM apparently doesn't want to play this game, they are solely taking the stock market route - notice how the number of (absurd) press releases per week went considerably up after it was clear the IBM wouldn't cave in.
On IBM's POV, I think they know quite well what's going on, they know their real "enemies" are part of canopy, as can be seen by the content of their subpoena.
Now we can speculate even more:
Maybe Canopy underestimated something when setting up that plot. This whole IP/Copyright "weakness" of linux they are capitalizing on is of an enormous strategical importance for IBM.
IBM must make sure that no one else will ever get the idea to do what Canopy/SCO are doing now.
And, if I interpret IBM's subpoena correcty, this is what they are doing now. They are beginning to show the world that there is no secure way of playing the game that canopy is playing now. And they (IBM) have to make sure that everyone gets this message.
So I don't expect this mess to resolve quietly, I expect Canopy to come out of this seriously hurt.
A Slow Song and Dance (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean isn't it pretty apparent to everyone that these are some last rites? These are just theatrics as a last dying attempt in vengeance against their bane. I mean this makes SCO look really really awful as they writhe in agony, striking out as spitefully as they can at the IBM/Linux partnership.
I don't think anyone can take this whole charade seriously. I hope this abuse of the court system doesn't go unpunished. Has anyone ever considered how quickly things move along and get developed in the techological world? Does anyone see how grossly slow and inadequate the traditional court system is at handling things of this nature? With legal battles, appeals, loopholes, etc. by the time anyone wins a case they're looking at technology that older than dirt.
SCO stock goes up on bad news (Score:5, Interesting)
But no. The stock price went up, up and away, on blocks of very small shares.
It's clearly being heavily manipulated. But why? The best theory I've seen is that amateur investors are encouraged to sell this stock short, on the assumption that it's going to zero one way or another. Good assumption, but naive investment strategy. What happens then is that the price is manipulated way up. Eventually the short sellers are forced to buy at the higher market price to stop their losses. Who do they buy from? Why, the insiders and stock manipulators, who then laugh all the way to the bank.
Go and have a look on the Yahoo finance forums. The scam is so obvious, it's unbelievable that the mainstream media aren't picking up on it.
Re:SCO stock goes up on bad news (Score:3, Interesting)
THEN sell it to the mainstream media.
Unconvincing (Score:5, Insightful)
"In this Q&A, CEO McBride states, 'Well, at SCO Forum, there were some folks that came out and basically sniffed out some of the [disputed System V] code we were showing and [concluded] that it emanated from SGI.' That this code "emanated" from SGI was news to SCO."
I don't see how you can get from Darl's quote to the conclusion that the source being SGI was news to him. All he says is that people outside of SCO worked out where the code came from, which is why he's commenting on it publicly. Nothing there implies either way whether he knew about it before.
Once you remove this strange interpretation of his quote there doesn't seem to be anything left to base the article on.
There are plenty of legitimate flaws in SCO's case. This doesn't seem to be one of them.
SCO's Carelessness (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the linux code [kernel.org] clearly states
* Copyright (C) 1992 - 1997, 2000-2002 Silicon Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved.
I hope they know how Silicon Graphics Inc. relates to SGI
Um, is it remotely possible (Score:3, Interesting)
That some clueless noob at SCO was tasked with finding way to sploit their copy rights, discovered the OpenLinux SRPMS [sco.com] on their ftp server, decided that must mean that SCO owns all that source, and then declared the same source in the linux kernel as being infringing? 'Cause, you know, some clueless noob at IBM must have put it there, or something.
It sounds crazy, but it makes more sense than starting from the assumption that SCO really aren't disclosing the source simply so that we can't "launder [ofb.biz]" the kernel before SCO can get it to court.
This was a rehersal (Score:5, Insightful)
They can either learn a process or learn things about specific pieces of code this way. If they learn about pieces of code, they present code at trial that stood up to public scruitiny in their practice runs before the trial. If they learned a process, then they hire people to do the same sorts of reasoning the public used to debunk their practice runs, and by that means find a better chunk of code to demonstrate at trial.
It would seem rational for them to do a few more rehersals before show time.
It would also seem rational for the open source community to refuse to play this game by not giving them further accurate information about the validity of their public claims before the trial. But since the open source community has no central control, there's no way to make that happen.
The REAL plot and intention (Score:4, Interesting)
But that any code IBM wrote for AIX (under the SCO liccens) is SCOs property as AIX uses SCOs intelectual property as a code base.
In public SCO clames the issue is purely a matter of SCO property in Linux. Then SCO uses this and related FUD to frighten everyone into NOT suing SCO when SCO dose things like sell Linux binarys or bill Linux users for SCOs intelectual property. Things SCO has no legal right to do.
SCO basicly acts like they own Linux when they have no legal clame to it and use public clames and FUD to frighen anyone who might challange SCOs ownership clame into sillence.
The key is that SCO must win this lawsute against IBM.
What SCO is clamming is that any code writen for Unix while under liccens from SCO is automaticly SCOs property. I sereously doupt there is any language in SCOs liccens to back up this clame as IBM would not sign a contract with such an extream clame. IBM knows better. I think SCO is using the case of "implied ownership" and you probably won't find that term or anything like that term in legal text becouse I don't think implied ownership is recognised.
Microsoft attempted to pull something similar to what SCO is pulling way back. The part when SCO clames that SOME of SCO code is in Linux makes ALL of Linux now SCOs property.
Microsoft worked with IBM to improve OS/2. Microsoft then released Microsoft OS/2. The corts rulling is relevent to this in many ways.
First it clames that IBM retains ownership of the name OS/2 and the code IBM wrote for OS/2.
But it also clames that any code Microsoft added to OS/2 Microsoft may use any way Microsoft fits. They however do not have any right to code IBM wrote.
So basicly IBM did not give Microsoft the rights to IBMs code or OS/2 trademark. The Linux community did not give SCO rights to the Linux code or Linux trademark outside of the terms of the GPL liccens.
Microsoft did give IBM code so IBM can use it in OS/2 but Microsoft may also use that same code anyplace else Microsoft wants. IBM did put code in IBMs flavor of Unix and didn't actually give it to SCO so it's not clear if SCO can do ANYTHING with the code. But IBM still retains ownership of that code should IBM use it in Linux, OS/2 or any other IBM product.
Finally IBM clames to have not extracted any code from AIX for Linux to prevent contaminating Linux with someone elses intelectual property.
Becouse the infringment is supposidly between AIX and Linux not Unixware and Linux it's quite likely in my opinion that SCO dosen't actually have the code in question to make any compairisons with and instead SCO is using a compleatly diffrent approch by using behavure as the metric. But as any good programmer will know you can arrive at the same behavure with diffrent code.
IBM could shread AIX and Linux and post the results...
Your semi-daily stock ticker (Score:5, Insightful)
Last Trade: 17.75
Trade Time: Sep 12
Change: Up 0.24 (1.33%)
Posting to Slashdot on SCO's balderdash is preaching to the choir. Try chatting up your local investment firm manager. Bring your same verve for debunking SCO's house of cards to a financial investment manager. Got a 401K? An RRSP? Call your broker/advisor/coin tosser and tell them to drop SCO from YOUR portfolio. And explain to them why they should. Yeah, I know, who's going to listen to one complaint? Slashdot has more than a few readers, and I imagine some of them have investments. SCO stepped on your turf. So take the fight back to theirs.
Re:Your semi-daily stock ticker (Score:3, Insightful)
As a community of semi-intelligent geeks, lets put some more serious effort into sharing our knowledge of 'reality' in our geek worlds with those with the power to change things.
This goes for the RIAA story too
SCO hurting Court Case? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:SCO hurting Court Case? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure they do, notably in the case filed by Redhat
The IBM case is a little more focued around what constitute "Derived Code" so maybe less so there.
That being said the 10'th claim [lwn.net]in IBM's response states that SCO is not intitled to any relief since they didn't do anything to mitigate damages. The latter is an affirmative defense, and the fact thay took the time and effort to release press release after press release yet did nothing to mitigate the all
HOW TO: make $350K+/- in less than 1 month! (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at this page http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=SCOX , add *only* the transactions dated from Aug 19 (note: There are others he has made cashing in on this stock) to the proceeds from stock sale Sept 7 (filed 9th) (another $90K worth) http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1102542/
My prediction: The real reason Open Source and Linux will fail is because it cannot provide income like this...
SCO targeting the GPL? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Q&A with McBride in Computer world contains one of the first clear (re)statements of SCO's (current) intent. In the interview, McBride's tone towards Linux is carefully conciliatory, conveying an attitude of "We accept that Linux will be around for a while, so let's find a way to work things out."
The 'problem' with Linux that needs to be resolved, he says, is the GPL. Or, as McBride puts it:
"If we're going into a new business environment around Linux, well, let's ask the question right upfront: Does the free business model work? Everything we've looked at, whether it's free Internet, free telecom, free music, all of these things tend to, for one reason or another, not work over an extended period of time. Clearly, the free model just about killed our company, and I would argue that it's going to kill a lot of other software companies if the GPL [General Public License] is able to gain a foothold and run rampant throughout the industry."
This statement first trots out the old "free software means free as in beer" misinformation and then proceeds with the explicit mud slinging about how the GPL will "kill" alot of companies if it is permitted to "gain a foothold" and "run rampant." Yikes! Scary stuff, if it were true. This bit of FUD is well formulated to push the fear buttons of your friendly neighborhood PHB.
And it raises many more questions. Like:
(1) Will the mainstream media eventually bite this SCO spin and spread the slander against the GPL?
(2) Will a significant portion of the open source community one day buy into this characterization of the problem, and allow the thin edge of the wedge that McBride has presented to fracture the community?
(3) Is Microsoft behind this FUD campaign against the GPL, which, at minimum, they must find exceptionally agreeable?
(4) Even if Microsoft and SCO aren't coordinating their attacks against the GPL and the open source community, do the similarities in their attacks indicate a fundamental hostility that we can expect capitalists to hold against the free software model?
Book a day off for when the case starts (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, that might be a little extreme, but I'm quite sure that SCO's first act when the case starts will be to publish absolutely everything they can extract from their computers, right down to the soothingly infinite ramblings of /dev/random.
It's a little similar to pre-war Iraq - they are threatened, told to provide detailed information of whatever armaments they have, or else. Their tactic is to release so much information that it was actually damaging for the US that they had to spend so much time analysing it, and making very vague press statements when they still weren't sure what was going on. (note: I'd really rather this didn't become a rambling political discussion - I can't remember correctly enough to be sure that the above was perfectly accurate, I was just using it illustratively)
It's fairly important that what gets debunked gets debunked soundly and quickly. Maybe then the stock would finally start to slump. Then again, I don't know if the would-be evidence will even be made public, I'm not familliar with the American court system, nor any other for that matter. Does any one know if the full claims are going to be available to the average geek?
The author of the article needs to read (Score:3, Informative)
They don't flat out state it, but from their comments it seems likely they've been in negotiations with SGI on this matter for quite some time. Given that some of this code was from XFS, they'd have to be complete idiots not to know that it likely came from SGI.
Microsoft statement on SCO lawsuit (Score:4, Interesting)
-
The third issue is licensing. Linux people don't believe in Intellectual Property Rights. This is the biggest problem in the Linux world. How can one be sure that the code of software that has been contributed by programmers across the world to create this Linux software is unique and is not lifted from somewhere else? This is a big legal concern.
That's a published example of FUD being deliberately spread by an official Microsoft representative. Until now, it's been hard to definitively tie Microsoft into this. But this statement provides clear evidence that Microsoft is behind it all.That is what the latest SCO-Linux lawsuit is all about. Now SCO is suing every single user of Linux because they believe parts of their UNIX code is being used in Linux. As a matter of fact, the Gartner Group came with a recommendation that every customer should stay away from Linux until this problem is sorted out. This is a serious issue. The model is broken basically.
Re:Microsoft statement on SCO lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF? Moderators..? (Score:5, Informative)
SCO is giving the open source community a look at the problems in the code
This is a flat-out lie.
the time has come to actually step up and figure out what's going on.
"The open source community" has TRIED, time and time again, to figure out what is going on. SCO will not *tell* anyone. The Linux developers community WANTS to have the copyright issues resolved. However, they cannot read SCO's mind! There is a clear and documented method of dealing with copyright infringements in the linux kernel; the time and source of all contributions is logged, and if at any point someone identifies infringing code it can be noted as such and removed. HOWEVER: The linux community cannot remove SCO's code unless they know what it is!!! SCO ardently refuses to give any indication what this mystery code is.
The fact they seem intent on preventing the linux developers from gaining the information of what to remove to fix the infringement has led some to believe this code does not exist.
the people that leech off the hard work of others
Who do you refer to here?
Re:WTF? Moderators..? (Score:2, Insightful)
With proprietary software, you don't see the code. If you steal code, you have a better chance of getting away with it AND you can be more competitive.
With open source software everyone gets to see what you've done! That's the rule! There is mo
Re:WTF? Moderators..? (Score:3, Informative)
In what possible universe is this appropriate? Firstly, given the fact that SCO's suit is one in which they are claiming their IP is breached, it would be impossible for open source developers to look at the code under an NDA without then laying themselves open to other similar suits from SCO. Therefore SCO know that no serious Open Source
Re:WTF? Moderators..? (Score:3, Informative)
IANAL, but I understand that if someone distributes to you a copyrighted item with a false copyright notice, the law says this is protection against legal action until you are informed the copyright notice is false. In particular, the SGI copyright notice on that memory allocation routine would absolve others of blame for its past distribution, even if SCO did have the rights to that code.
Re:Everyone is a Hypocrite (Torvalds, SCO, Slashdo (Score:2)
What's odd about asking where the infringing code is and trying to figure out what SCO is talking about? I don't think there is anything odd about saying to your accuser what is it that I have done. If SCO is telling the truth the simple fact is they can still receive damages. So not only will the infringing and stolen code be removed from the kernel but they will also receive damages from the person(s) who put it there.
We aren't hypocrites,
Re:Everyone is a Hypocrite (Torvalds, SCO, Slashdo (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Where have the SCO programmers gone ? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Logic... (Score:4, Interesting)
However, SCO clearly knew that the malloc code snippet "emanated" from SGI, because SGI's copyrights were in it. SCO has been hinting at problems with SGI for months, so this isn't even really news. The story would have been better, and rested on a stronger foundation, had they used the BPF code to underlie their thesis. I think SCO was honestly shocked to find that the B in BPF stood for Berkely.