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]
Other of their articles, "The limitations of Linux", has a few lovely quotes, like "You run into problems when you try to do something that it's not designed to do" (I mean, be grateful it even works :)) or "...these include a lack of mature development tools" (What do you mean? The GNU toolchain is the most mature development tool in town).
The point to take seriously, though, is the reputation of SCO for playing dirty.
That's what stood out when I read the article. They seem quite used to playing hardball. The point you make about Forbes not being the best at understanding the software industry can apply to judges too which is why I think SCO, right or wrong, has the advantage when this goes into litigation.
They're going to be arguing infringement, which the judge understands. "Beyond reasonable doubt" is much different than "beyond all doubt" and a lot of the Linux people I talk to seem to think that it's quite reasonable to find some code in Linux that has been "appropriated". Whether the code was taken with or without knowledge of infringement won't matter.
At any rate, I don't expect to see any quick settlements.
Wait until the countersuits start rolling in, but by then all the exec's stock options will be quietly sold.
The key to SCO's case against IBM appears to be an expansive notion of derivative works.But this is just the part of SCO's argument that doesn't make any sense. IBM's original license from AT&T contains an amendment to the effect that any derivative works developed by IBM belong to IBM. This is a direct quote from the letter of amendment (Exhibit C in SCO's complaint filed with the court):
Regarding Section 2.01, we [AT&T] agree that modifications and derivative works prepared by or for you [IBM] are owned by you.
The later agreement between IBM, SCO, and Novell specifies that, after a one-time payment from IBM to SCO, IBM has a fully paid-up, permanent, and irrevocable license.
Here's my take on what's going on here. I had a look at SCO's 10-Q filing with the SEC. It seems they are being sued over alleged securities fraud in connection with their IPO. I also noted from the Form 4 filings (insider transactions) that several of the senior people have been selling the stock in the last couple of months. I think this "litigation by press release" is all about trying to pump up the stock so the rats can get off the sinking ship.
(BTW, if you want to look at the agreements, they're on SCO's Web site [sco.com...] )
Comes from a comment by richg74, on this page:
[linuxjournal.com...]
which is a nice article on the topic by someone who went to SCO, signed their NDA and got a look at some of their evidence.
When it [SCO] used Linux in software it released, SCO - like everyone else - had to agree to Linux's "copyleft" licenses. In doing so, SCO arguably gave up prior rights: "Copyleft" licenses, as noted above, gave everyone the right to copy code freely, and to make improvements on it.
[pbs.org...]
I am not wise enough to have any clue as to how this will turn out, but I hope Linux remains untouched.
[bayarea.com...]
I thought this would get ugly
It will. Count on it. (just not for me :) )
BTW, look at how the insiders are dumping the stock:
[biz.yahoo.com...]
This has to be the most creative exit strategy in history.
...SCO will attack the GPL...
Let's give it a view.
GPL's provisions allowing unlimited copying and modification are not compatible with US copyright law, which allows software buyers to make only a single copy
This was beaten to death on /. with the argument "the GPL is for practical ends a contract, and the owner of a copyright has the right to allow to make any number of copies to anybody he/she likes through a contract". Clearly, if that provision is not allowed, anybody duplicating books, records, etc. for the distribution houses is breaking copyright law.
"At issue here is more than just SCO and Red Hat," McBride said. "What is at issue here is whether intellectual property rights will have any value in the age of the Internet."
To which I respond, *my* intellectual property rights (if you want to call them that way) have a quite good value by the agreement I have made myself, as a current developer, through that license.
Dennis Ritchie, one of two original authors of Unix, has posted a plethora of ancient legal material [cm.bell-labs.com].
Here USL, at the time the owner of a predecessor of the intellectual property now controlled by SCO, sued BSD Incorporated. The University of California was added to the suit soon after it began.
One weekly magazine recently looked at a single snippet of critical code and declared that it out easily have been written by someone that had not seen the original code. Nonsense, how do you create something that interacts with hundreds of thousands of lines of code in a vacuum?
They also looked at a snippet that has been rewritten in the current release and proposed that the solution was to simply rewrite any questionable code.
Professional journalist should know that paraphasing copyrighted material does not invalidate the underling copyright. They also failed to deal with the historical claims for danages. These would be the copyright infringement damages before they paraphased enough to overcome the copyright.
The trade press did a lousy job of reporting the Microsoft suit and the SCO suit is following this same path. Propaganda is not news, it is editorial content and should be labelled as such.
1:2 - 2:6 - 3:12 - 4:20 - 5:30 - 6:42 - 7:56 - 8:72 - ...
This sequence was generated by a function F(x), your task is to duplicate this function. You don't have my code for this function, but it is easy enough to look at the input and output, and duplicate:
F(x) = x * (x + 1)
but then, that's not my function, I used:
F(x) = x * x + x
So long as you know the input and the output, its easy to duplicate any function previously written. It may not be line-for-line identical, but when the system manual pages tell you exactly what the function is supposed to do and how it is supposed to do it, its hard to go wrong.
This method is how the BPF code was rewritten for Linux, how the IBM BIOS was duplicated for clones, and how a good deal of other software is written. You just pick up a manual, take a piece of code that requires the API described by the manual, and hack-hack-hack until you've got something that works.
Nonsense, how do you create something that interacts with hundreds of thousands of lines of code in a vacuum?
Are you aware of what POSIX means?
What is POSIX? [pasc.org]
It is an standard to which both Linux and UNIX comply to (more or less: UNIX was first, then POSIX was created for compatibility). I could rephrase the question as, "How do you create a web page that is readable by both IE and Mozilla without knowing IE's source code?"
<edit> Well, it's more like "How do you make Konqueror to be able of reading pages 'standard for IE' (which are not) without knowing Microsoft's trade secrets?". The CS principles to, in this case, allocate memory are not UNIX exclusive, they're actually very common knowledge.</edit>
And preemping the question, "Why are then the snippets of code so similar?", the code published by the magazine is so trivial it's proven (by the Knuth definition of 'prove') it's impossible to implement the requeriment (allocate n units by a first-fit algorithm and return a pointer to the block) on an algorithmically different way - any attempt would converge to this, or to some symmetry or permutation.
That works!
That doesn't get over the copyright issue. You may not take my story, change Dick and Jane to Bob and Pam, run the verbs through a Thesaurus and replace them with synonyms and thwart my copyright. This seems to me to be the crux of the SCO complaint.
Copyright problems are very hard to prove when one isolates it to a single sentence and the blackbox defense works fairly well with single sentences. It begins to fall apart when the constructs get larger, when paragraphs and chapters begin to show the same intellectual product paraphrased. It is clearer that it is a derived work.
If one took a logical group of code, studied it and reproduced it from scratch (its plot or storyline equivalent) one may have violated a copyright.
Scores of blackbox recoding that paraphrase an intellectual property does not create new intellectual property. This, I feel, is the crux of the SCO suit. I have no idea of the merit of that suit, but I do take issue with trained journalists that understand copyrights not explaining the ins and out of copyright issues.
In the original article the issue was masked by presenting the blackbox equivalent while knowing full well that the code must stand the test of a much broader context.
You may not take my story, change Dick and Jane to Bob and Pam, run the verbs through a Thesaurus and replace them with synonyms and thwart my copyright.
But your story is not the *only* way to perform an action. That's the trap almost everyone falls in on the software patents case (shameless plug: August 27, Brussels: protest against silly patents [petition.eurolinux.org]).
An algorithm is not an story. An story cannot be guessed; the author can not say "I want Hamlet to go crazy" and find the best, optimal story that will allow Hamlet go crazy. A good author will try to get his character crazy, but will never find a perfect, absolute solution that everbody will agree on; every author will give the madness a particular spin and the story will be different, and if two stories by different authors match one can suspect immediately of plagiarism.
The algorithm is a very different issue. It can be proved optimal, and this is very important because of one thing: there is a very clear target. While the book author has to deal with chasing a chimaera, the coder of determinist algorithms has a definite objective. For the same problem will always exist the *same* optimal answer, and John Smith on U.S.A or Li Lian Jie on China, given enough time, will always get to that result.
The problem of "copyright" here is that the information industry is inherently different from the art world, but the legal system thinks it is the same thing. Of course it would be bad to allow parasitism, but it is bad too to expect that, because one person came to an algorithm, nobody else is allowed to rediscover it. It is really the only way, and, if forced, it will eventually be rediscovered. No way around it.
The real danger comes from patents. If there are UNIX licensees that have patents on things they've contributed and are unable to license those patents for use in non-UNIX operating systems, then that may negatively affect the performance and features of Linux and other non-UNIX OSes. It all depends on the contracts and how they're interpreted in court.
I think you are wrong with this. What SCO is looking for is compensation for the use of the code. That means that every copy of Linux might have to pay a fee to SCO. It would mean that Linux would no longer be free and would lose that cometitive advantage to some extent.
Further you can not cure a copyright infringement by just paraphasing the code. That was my earlier point. You would need to take sections of the code and re-develop it a different way. That would take time and that process could be the subject of further litigation.
The SCO suit could seriously impact the future of Linux. When Microsoft was faced with the same problem for using SCO's code in the Windows system, Microsoft choose to pay the fees. That gives an indication that SCO is not just blowing smoke.
Now after the IBM suit was underway, Linux advocates have said that Microsoft only paid so that it would somehow influence SCO to sue. As far as I know, IBM had been approached with the same issues before Microsoft settled.
The real issues in this suit are difficult to understand because the trade press is editorializing rather than reporting the news. The business press seems to understand that a copyright suit must be taken seriously. The trade press has rendered its verdict even before the discovery phase of the suit has been completed. One would expect that they have the knowledge to present the underlining issues factually as part of the news not to write pander pieces.
When the suit is tried we'll know whether SCO has 'fizzled out' or not. I don't know enough to guess at the merits of the SCO suit either way and I am fairly sure the fizzle out author doesn't either.
What SCO is looking for is compensation for the use of the code. That means that every copy of Linux might have to pay a fee to SCO. It would mean that Linux would no longer be free and would lose that cometitive advantage to some extent.
SCO has no rights over the portions they don't allegate property over. Hey, right now (before a trial) they don't even have rights over the code they claim. "That means that every copy of Linux might have to pay a fee to SCO"... This argument is quite old. Let's see... pay full price for a product they allegate they didn't fully wrote?
About the rewrite. SCO haves the duty to report the infricting parts first, and then we'll see if rewriting is so hard. Anyway no court would be so crazy as to rule a rewrite of a known algorithm as a "copy" of the original code. That'd be as complaining of finding every reimplementation of fast fourier transforms (James W. Cooley and John W. Tukey, "An algorithm for the machine calculation of complex Fourier series," Math. Comput. 19, 297-301 (1965)) being too similar. See my comment above, and please start taking into account comments that don't fit in your mindset.
