Forum Moderators: bakedjake
In other words, like many religious folk, the Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement are a) convinced of their own righteousness, and b) sure the whole world, including judges, will agree.They should wake up. SCO may not be very good at making a profit by selling software. (Last year the company lost $24.9 million on sales of $64.2 million.) But it is very good at getting what it wants from other companies. And it has a tight circle of friends.
I didn't know the history of SCO, this article was pretty enlightening.
Full Story [forbes.com]
Ps. You won't find any of the emotional rhetoric or ad hominem in the OSI paper such as was cited from the Forbes article in post #1, just the facts.
Jordan
In June, SCO senior vice-president Chris Sontag was quoted as saying the company would either will file a new suit or amend its lawsuit against IBM to target other companies which SCO alleges are illegally appropriating its Unix source code.Today SCO also said it had no current plans to take a commercial Linux customer to court.
SCO never was a real danger, since they never had any valid claims. They were just trying to bullsh*t the rest of the world, and now they figured that didn't work. Unfortunately (for them), they now have to face a massive backlash including several counter suits on their hands.
Whether SCO as a company survives all this or not, the result will stop others from trying similar stunts in the future. I think the OpenSource community will be thankful for this story one day.
Comments like that really inhibit discussions. I have not sought to question your motives for entering this discussion.
Your point about not having the right to get compensated over the parts NOT owned by SCO is valid. It is also obvious.
This is not the issue. The issue is, does SCO have a valid copyright on a portion of the Linux code? If they do, I expect they do have a right to be compensated for the portions of their code covered by a copyright.
When one infringes on a copyright, they can't cure the problem by reworking the verbiage or the code. If the gist or essence of the material remains the same, they continue to infringe.
Now your opinion may be they don't or that my opinion of copyright law is wrong. It’s your opinion and you are entitled to it.
I am commenting on the trade press coverage because the trade press is, in my opinion, presenting their opinion and trying to pass it off as news. As professional journalist they have a special insight of the copywrite law. They deal with that law every time the write something.
The general business press is covering the story very differently. It is a complex copyright issue and they are trying to explain the complexities. They don’t see it as a ‘slam-dunk’ for either side.
Ultimately these issues will be settled in court or through a negotiated settlement. Since the issues are not settled, I see my discussing it as perfectly valid.
I think SCO will have a hard time collecting for code that they them selves have released under the GPL.
Maybe obvious to you and me, but apparently not to the folks at SCO... ;)
[macobserver.com...]
For some reason they are not limiting this damage which makes a lot people believe they want the situation left vague so that they can try and convince people to pay up when they have no need to do so.
The latest news apparently being that they are planning to send out invoices to companies that are using Linux. Ho hum.
The other SCO code snippet Perens walks through had to do with memory allocation functions in Unix System V and Linux. He says there was, in fact, "an error in the Linux developer's process," specifically a programmer at SGI, and he says while the Linux community had the legal right to this code, it didn't belong in Linux and was therefore removed.
By "it didn't belong in Linux" I'd like to explain. That algorithm is really, really bad. Very unefficient, what it does is simply to scan through memory until it founds a free block (I've compared it to finding a parking space driving around the streets). It's a monkey quality algo: no designer would be ever proud of it. That's why it was removed.
Does that mean that code must be good and efficient for it to be copyrighted? I think the taking of a poor quality snippet might show intent. They were taking things willy-nilly and not accidentially including in a snippet here and there.
To really understand this suit, it is important to be more abstract. Some key questions are: 1 Does the code belong to SCO? 2 If it does, how should SCO be compensated and protected from further copyright violations.
Bruce Perens' admission is a smoking gun. It doesn't answer the questions about whether SCO does in fact own the code. If SCO loses on this point the case is over. I don't think there is enough information available now to guess at the outcome of that.
But if that is settled in favor of SCO, it seems to me that SCO should be compensated. Other factors which would be considered is the code Perens is talking about material or was it just an isolated laps. And, of course, is there more SCO code that other have infringed on.
These slides have several C syntax errors and would never compile. So, they don't quite represent any source code in Linux. But we've found the code they refer to. It is included in code copyrighed by AT&T and released as Open Source under the BSD license by Caldera, the company that now calls itself SCO. The Linux developers have a legal right to make use of the code under that license. No violation of SCO's copyright or trade secrets is taking place.
In this case, there was an error in the Linux developer's process (at SGI), and we lucked out that it wasn't worse. It turns out that we have a legal right to use the code in question, but it doesn't belong in Linux and has been removed.
Does that mean that code must be good and efficient for it to be copyrighted?
Ha! in your face! bited :)
The code was 'removed from the Linux source tree on 4 July 2003 because it was “too ugly"'. Notice the date: nobody knew then of the nature of the infringement, ergo it's out of the fight. It was not removed because of copyright issues, as certain Darl would like to make the world think.
The icing of the cake is that SCO attempted to exploit the very removal of the code itself for his own benefit. And I had a bite of it too: nothing is more satisfying than pulling a liner on a troll.
Summary:
A quite interesting read.
I clipped above and below the summary to concentrate on this point. It is important and perhaps the biggest reason SCO has gotten bad press within the Linux community.
As I understand it, SCO asserting two things about the code in question. It is copyrighted and is a Trade Secret.
If it is a Trade Secret then in order to maintain it as a Trade Secret SCO may not publically publish it. So they cannot debate it in detail in any place but in court.
Whether SCO is right or wrong really can't be determined without examining the code. This examinantion must be done by the court.
I have commented before, professional journalist working in the Trade Press are making a big thing out of SCO not showing the infringing code. However, they KNOW that SCO cannot. They are pandering to the Linux community. I think this behavior is unprofessional.
At this moment, I have not idea if SCO is right or wrong about their assertions, neither does Duckula or anyone in the trade press. We'll all have to wait until the case goes to trial.
A Linux distribution that almost by necessity contained all the possibly infringing code has previously been published by SCO themselfes under the GPL. There can't bee any trade secrets involved anymore about any of the code included in that distribution. It also can't be a copyright infringment anymore to republish that code.
So far they didn't even hint at anything that could legally harm Linux. They have received (and not disputed) court orders in several countries, barring them from making those claims again in public without actually proving them.
SCO shot themselfes in the foot. End of story.
bird says:
"SCO shot themselfes in the foot. End of story."
You may be right but the case has not come to trail yet. While the Trade Press is falling all over themselves to say the case is simple and groundless, the Business Press seems to think it is complex and too soon to call.
In due time IBM will have an opportunity to ask that the case be dismissed. Then we'll see if the judge agrees.
I have said a couple of times that not enough of the case is known for me to make a judgement. How you KNOW how this case will be decided is beyond me. Perhaps you should let the editors of Forbes and the Wall Street Journal know.
[forbes.com...]
[computerworld.com...]
