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Progress Is Not Proprietary
Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 09:04 AM EST

There are several articles I know you will enjoy knowing about. You may not agree with every word, but there are some interesting ideas to consider. First, an economist explains why Linux code has a big advantage over Microsoft's -- it is written for love instead of for money. The article is entitled "Why Linux is Wealthier Than Microsoft," and I expect "the always fair and balanced" Rob Enderle will upchuck his breakfast when he reads it, because it is the definitive answer to his anti-Linux FUD about Microsoft being the only font of innovation.

As it happens, software is one of those things that, like barn-building, may work better sharing instead of competing, according to Russ Roberts, the author. Roberts teaches economics and is the J. Fish & Lillian F. Smith Distinguished Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., so I'm thinking he knows more than Enderle about innovation and the economy.

His view is that innovation flourishes in disorganization, not in top-down control environments:

"Microsoft uses money to motivate. And no doubt about it, that's a powerful incentive. But others exist. The community of Linux users and developers is held together by pride and the thrill of working toward a common goal of a universal, free (or at least relatively inexpensive), elegant, bug-free or bug-resistant alternative to Windows, the world's dominant computer operating system.

"Can the volunteers who work on improving Linux outperform employees dreaming of stock options? . . . With some causes, passion and pride can outperform money.   Designing software may be such a cause. . . . Even if money trumps idealism as a motivator, Torvalds has a bigger team -- the millions who use Linux and continue to tinker with it. Potentially, he has more brainpower on his team.

"Torvalds has another advantage. His organization is less organized than Microsoft. It's really a disorganization. . . . But remember the problem that every organization's leader faces: The team's smartest member, even if he or she is nominally in control, is vastly more ignorant than the entire network of people who compose the organization. . . .

"Being disorganized can actually leverage that knowledge more effectively than a command-and-control hierarchy. Innovation must rely on creativity generated by the mass of folks underneath. In a dynamic system, trial and error is a powerful force for change. A bottom-up system with a gatekeeper can be more innovative than the hierarchical system over which Gates reigns. It can generate a lot more trials, and a good gatekeeper can throw out the errors."

Then you might be interested in this interview Darl gave to VARBusiness just after his keynote speech. Actually, I think IBM might be interested in it too, not to mention the judge at the conference on discovery, because it shows SCO admitting they have a motive not to hurry the case along and are mighty happy to let the clock tick away without any progress in the case:

"McBride: Going forward we have three dials. The core business, we think that's bottomed out and there's upside now with new products coming. We haven't had a new product in our OpenServer base in years and years.

"The second dial is the 2.5 million Linux servers out there today that are paired with our intellectual property in them. We have a licensed product $699, $1,399. Chris [Sontag] is driving that and that's another multi-billion-dollar revenue opportunity.

"The third bucket has to do with the IBM settlement. We filed that at $3 billion. Every day they don't resolve this, the AIX meter is still ticking....

"That's in a Utah courtroom 18 months out. That's a down the road revenue opportunity but the first two dials are going right now, and today's announcement today with Boies will really help move the second dial along.

"VARBusiness : Have you seen any movement on IBM's part to cease additional AIX development.

"McBride : Right now, we're talking about the Linux base. We're a little company we have to choose our battles. Our goal is to take the Linux thing and get that tightened down and then swing back around on AIX. We're sort of fine to let the AIX thing tick, because the longer it goes, when we actually end up in courtroom, we can go back to June 13, 2003, and add damages. We're sort of fine to let that one run. I don't sense they've stopped shipping AIX and both sides right now are kind of on the Linux battlefront.

"VARBusiness: What's the issue here?

"McBride : It's that they've taken a substantial amount of our code is what creates the battleground. It's interesting to hear Red Hat speak at financial conference yesterday and their comment is, 'We're really scaling Linux up. Linux is really growing up.' If you take IBM out of the equation, Linux would not be growing up, it would not be SMP-enabled, it would not be multi processing, scaling up to hundreds of servers. It is IBM that is enabling that."

Not even a million dollars and 400,000 shares is enough to cork this guy's mouth. You'd need 24/7 legal aid, travelling with him everywhere, like PR handlers do, holding his hand and screening the questions and telling him what not to answer. SCO just submitted court papers saying they never accused IBM in public. Duh, Darl. And this: "We haven't had a new product in our OpenServer base in years and years." But Linux couldn't scale without stealing their code? Exhibit C: Darl on what his goal is -- and could anyone put it more baldly than this?:

"Our belief is that SCO has great opportunity in the future to let Linux keep going, not to put it on its back but for us to get a transaction fee every time it's sold. That's really our goal."

Yoo Hoo! Red Hat! IBM! Are you taking notes?

Chris Sontag was in the interview too, and he demonstrates, once again, how much he doesn't grok the GPL:

"CRN : HP I believe is the only vendor who's talked about indemnifying customers, if you guys sue an HP customer, what happens?

"Chris Sontag : Well. HP put a lot of provisos in place [to qualify for indemnification.] You have to be an HP customer on HP hardware. You have to have a support agreement with HP which very few of their customers have. And you can't modify the code which may not be a huge issue because a very small number of commercial end users have wanted to modify the code anyway.

"If I were a commercial end user independent of anything else, given the nature of the GPL I would avoid modifying the code, I would avoid doing anything that could be considered a distribution of my application. If I'm Merrill Lynch and have a trading application proprietary to Merrill Lynch and deploy it across all my trading desks, if that deployment occurred where the Linux OS and app are distributed togetherm [sic] there are arguments that Merrill would have to provide their proprietary trading application in source form to everyone. That's a problem. I'm sure all of Merrill's competitors would love to get that but it's hard for a company to be financially viable when all of the basises [sic] are shared.

"One of the economic issues in general with Linux under the GPL is there's no ability to carve out and contribute some things and hold back stuff I consider valuable."

To these guys with their heads stuck in the proprietary fog, modifying the code is the same as distributing it. Can you believe it? Wouldn't it be funny if this whole problem arose because those swashbuckling pirates in Utah misunderstood the GPL and brought all this misery on the IT world to protect themselves from a misunderstanding that exists only in their little heads? Well, actually, that wouldn't be so funny. In any case, it's more likely he is just making FUD pies here. He probably knows perfectly well that you can modify GPL code all you want and keep it all to yourself and as long as you don't distribute, which is a separate act from modification, you don't need to GPL your proprietary code. Merrill Lynch isn't in the software business, so they are in no danger.

Here's why Sontag says they won't show any more code to the Linux community: " . . .if we keep showing it, they'll just take that out and say 'no harm no foul.'" Well, any damages just went down, Chris. Sheesh, guys. You paid all that money. You should ask your new partner to give you a class in IP law. We know you have PowerPoint, so he could break it down in pictures. Oh. I forgot. That's not Boies' specialty, is it? Sontag says something else I hope the SEC notes:

"In the last year we've gone from almost no cash to more than $60 million in cash. Core operations are financially profitable."

Core operations? What core would that be? The only part of their operation that is profitable is their IP licenses and the stock story, no? If those are their "core operations" then I'd say the alleged Novell non-compete doesn't apply for sure. Novell isn't in the lawsuit business, so they aren't competing with SCO's core operations, according to my reading of this interview.

Then there is this tidbit about Microsoft:

"McBride: The funny part is we didn't even talk to Microsoft about this outside the normal public interest level things... when we talk to them it's about what's happening in the marketplace."

"When we talk to them" not "when we talked to them"? So, while Boies said he never had any conversations with Microsoft, and no one at his firm, so far as he knew, had either, does it sound like McBride is having ongoing discussions, or does it not? Of course, when they talk about what is happening in the marketplace, the subject of Linux and the lawsuit wouldn't enter into the conversation, because that has nothing to do with the marketplace.

McBride tells us one more interesting detail. He describes the legal battle with IBM as David and Goliath, and says this about Boies:

"The legal stone is clearly coming from David. He used to be with Cravath. It is an epic battle. The guy at Cravath supporting IBM used to work for David. [He's] Evan Chessler. So now you've got that sub-plot of the Grasshopper and Master thing."

I don't know about you, but there isn't a boss I've ever worked for I couldn't outmaneuver, because the underling always knows more about the boss than the boss knows about the employee. That's basic math. The underling has to study the boss to keep the job. The reverse isn't true, so lacking the motivation, they hardly ever know much about the people working for them, or what they could do without all the restrictions they place on them. I am sure not one of my ex-bosses would ever have predicted Groklaw, for example, as being in my skill set. Bosses never let you do half of the things you could do, if they only knew. I therefore expect that Chessler will outthink and outplay Boies on everything where private knowledge will play any role in this battle. McBride also says SCO will start going on the offensive now that they've got the money thing taken care of. That sentence is funny enough without any embellishment from me.

Here is the actual explanation of what this is all about, speaking of FUD. It's all about money and not wanting to drop a dying business model and adopt the new one, a la IBM:

"The SCO Group Inc.'s Chief Executive Officer, Darl McBride, enlisted the help of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to bolster his arguments against the open source GPL (GNU General Public License) and Linux during a keynote address at the CD Expo conference here in Las Vegas.

"Citing WIPO data, McBride said that the value of the worldwide software market would approach $229 billion by 2007, and that it was being threatened by the ideas behind the Free Software Foundation's GPL, the software license that governs Linux.

"'The world, especially here in America, is shifting to one that is an information society,' McBride said. 'In the future, is that $229 billion in software still going to be there? Or in the case of the Free Software Foundation's goal, is proprietary software going to go away?'"

Finally, News.com has an article, "Can a Subpoena Stop a Movement," by Peter Skarzynski and Pierre Loewe. The short answer is No. They say they don't think SCO realizes what an opportunity it has handed IBM. And here's why they say that:

"While the market's initial reaction to the SCO announcement boosted its share price, it's not at all clear that SCO understands what it's up against--or the opening it's giving industry titan IBM to line up as the defender of the little guy.

"Start with the fact that Linux isn't as much product as it is a movement. As the emblem of open source and brainchild of Linus Torvalds, Linux stands for the notion that progress is not proprietary. . . . In the Linux contest, the battle lines are clear: It's SCO's legal scolds papering the IT industry with cease-and-desist e-mails, versus IBM and the Red Hats of the world looking for ways to make Linux even more limber for a variety of commercial applications."

The authors are CEO and a founding director of Strategos, which is hardly a zealot Linux company. In fact, if you read their web site, you find out that they show companies how to reinvent themself and to strategize to "put competitors at continual disadvantage and create new wealth for shareholders." That's not GNU/Linux language. If folks like this, who are all about the bottom line, say SCO will find itself "on the wrong side of history" and that it's time to take sides, I think the tide must be going out for SCO, maybe dragging Enderle out with it. With all the money and effort that has gone into the SCO/MS FUD, it wasn't enough to win the PR battle. Isn't that simply amazing? Even the headline writers are starting to get the news. The Forbes headline on the story about the SCO teleconference is: "Boies Joins SCO Shakedown." So I guess it's true. Money can't buy everything. That's the real David and Goliath story.


  


Progress Is Not Proprietary | 192 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Progress Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: brenda banks on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 09:41 AM EST
PJ i cant keep up anymore
i am constantly behind on the news stories
how do you ever get any rest?
the tide is swinging and going out on sco
they are about to be left high and dry
this will be a fun site to see .of course it cant happen fast enough but then we
might get lazy if it wasnt for sco keeping us on out toes and alert


---
br3n

[ Reply to This | # ]

Consider the source
Authored by: overshoot on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 09:42 AM EST
As it were.

Notice that all of the really scathing commentary on SCOX is coming from "outside" -- besides the geeks, we're getting more and more comments from economists, law professors, etc. All of them are dismissing SCO as not so much wrong as irrelevent, and that message is going to soak in gradually.

IMHO, in a sick and backward sort of way, this whole mess has been good for Linux and FOSS in general.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Darl's Alternate Reality
Authored by: Thomas Downing on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 09:43 AM EST
Thanks for the line up of articles.

I had just read a bunch of op-ed pieces written by Enderle at his own website, www.enderlegroup.com, when I then read the Darl interview on Internet Week. There is in both the common thread that either they just don't get it, or that the desperately don't want others to get it.

My bigest reaction to the Darl interview was nausea. But after I got past that, two others predominated.

First, criticism of non-technical press on technical issues must be careful to keep in mind that the author is non technical. That does not apply to interviews conducted by a technical journal. The Darl interview was little more than the interviewer serving up big, fat slow pitches for Darl to hit out of his own little fantasy ballpark. Where were questions such as "how would you answer the contention by the open source community that their analysis of the list of files you gave to IBM contain notable weaknesses, such as essentially empty header files?"

The second impression I got was that Darl is loosing touch with reality. In one answer he states that the GPL is invalid. Shortly there after, he states that the GPL is what puts end users at risk. And that's just one of the many rather incomprehensible, if not bizarre, things he said.

As always, hats off, PJ!

---
Thomas Downing
Principal Member Technical Staff
IPC Information Systems, Inc.

[ Reply to This | # ]

GET SOME SLEEP!
Authored by: Tsu Dho Nimh on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 09:44 AM EST
PJ -
We love the stories, but you don't seem to be sleeping much.

Go take a nap, please.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Great quote
Authored by: haro on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 09:51 AM EST
From the News.com article: SCO's lawsuit is a little like locking the door on Martin Luther King Jr.'s jail cell and expecting to stop the civil rights movement.

This is going downhill for SCO, and fast. Perhaps too fast to get the GPL tested in court.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Progress Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: BoredByPolitics on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 09:59 AM EST
Another great article PJ, and I like your style of writing too, with it's just enough touch of cynacism ;-)

However, I now have a question. If SCO submit papers to the court claiming they have not accused IBM, and then at a later date accuse IBM contrary to their previous submission, have they actually done anything wrong?

The papers would have been correct at the time of submission, or so they claim. Do they have a responsibility to submit an amendment if they change the facts presented previously themselves?

--
Pete

[ Reply to This | # ]

The criminal masterminds behind all of this
Authored by: Cal on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 10:00 AM EST
The Register has figured it all out.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Progress Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: James on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 10:07 AM EST
The core business, we think that's bottomed out and there's upside now with new products coming. We haven't had a new product in our OpenServer base in years and years.

Then...

Core operations are financially profitable.

Aren't these two statements mutually exclusive? How can something bottom out and still be profitable? Isn't bottomed out a negative term?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Gotta repost this...
Authored by: Clifton Hyatt on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 10:16 AM EST

McBride: The funny part is we didn't even talk to Microsoft about this outside the normal public interest level things... when we talk to them it's about what's happening in the marketplace.

what does that mean?? so he is saying they did talk with MS about public interest level things and what's happening in the marketplace?? a little more than "do we need a license?", "yes you do that will be $50 million" ?

and it's when they talk to them, present tense, indicating an ongoing dialog. an whats the dialog about? why public interest level things and what's happening in the marketplace, but there is no collusion, silly rabbitts.

that is what is refered to as "a tell", subconciously/inadvertantly "telling" the truth.

McBride is a very sloppy speaker.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Progress Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: maxhrk on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 10:27 AM EST
http://www.theinquirer.net/?art icle=12776 go further down and you will see the story about SCO.

---

Sincerely,
Richard M.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Merrill Lynch not in software?
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 10:28 AM EST
I'm in the same business as Merrill, and I close to 100% they do software
development. But next to that I am also close to 100% sure they don't intend to
distribute anything they develop, and most of their own software is to no use to
any of us (except maybe their direct competitors)

[ Reply to This | # ]

Progress Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: Thorsten on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 10:42 AM EST

"Progress Is Not Proprietary" - exactly. I wonder where computer science would be now if algorithms were not freely published.

Heise.de has an article on McBride's performance at the CDXPO.

According to McBride, SCO
- owns all Unix SysV code,
- owns all pertaining IP,
- owns all license agreements regarding licenses for SysV,
- controls all derivatives of SysV,
- owns all claims resulting from copyright infringement.
Furthermore, the GPL is illegal since it is in antinomy to the DCMA because it is illegal to use intellectual property without the owner's permission. (I'm not making this up, I'm just translating)

For the first lawsuit re Linux licenses, they will target one of about a dozen companies from the Fortune 1000/Global 500 list, which already got a letter from them in spring.

McBride predicted:
- the GPL will not survive in its current form (see the Cisco-Linksys lawsuit),
- Linux will not be free (as in beer) anymore (Red Hat and Novell themselves will see to it),
- Unix on Intel will become standard for business critical applications in Fortune 1000 companies,
- SCO will win against IBM (the financial requisites are in place),
- there will be a peaceful but competitive coexistence of Unix and Linux.

Finally, everyone in the audience got a WIPO (world intellectual property organisation) booklet. Title: Intellectual Property -- A Power Tool for Economic Growth.

(I couldn't post this earlier, I had to stop laughing first...)

[ Reply to This | # ]

If a man can get away with cutting off another's head...
Authored by: renef on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 10:54 AM EST
...then SCO is still a possible winner in some sick, twisted way. Money and
Lawyers have a very wierd way of distorting reality.

...but then again, that guy was tried in Texas.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Progress Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: zjimward on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 11:11 AM EST

[soapbox on]

I have always told my employers that money was never the issue. Except when it
comes down that I put in hard work in solving issues. The company goes from four
people to thirty, the owner is driving a Ferrari and the company goes from
making one hundered thousand a year to making forty million a year. Then told
that I just wasn't working hard enough to get a raise. I never ask for a fancy
car, instead I asked that I could work flexible hours, part from home and part
from the office. The answer was no. I asked if I could work thirty hours instead
of forty. Again the answer was no. It was then I figured that employers want a
slave, some thing that is their property. It's that attitude that makes
companies like Microsoft and SCO believe that they are losing intellectual
property. A few algorithms is all they have protecting their profits. Then when
XYZ figures out how to do it, then they got it illegally, not that they have
bright people. Heaven forbid these companies think of a better way to do some
thing. How often have we heard, "Why isn't there a standard way to do
this?" The answer is, because companies are to competitive to work
together to acheive one common goal. Rather I should say to greedy. Open Source
will help change this close, proprietary concept. My hope that it will bring
fresh, innovative ideas.
[soapbox off]

Thanks. [ I have considerable more, but won't take this space or bore people
with it. :) ]

[ Reply to This | # ]

  • Slavery - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 04:05 PM EST
    • Slavery - Authored by: zjimward on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 08:01 PM EST
GPL dodgeing the bullet
Authored by: haro on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 11:24 AM EST
GPL dodged the bullet and it succeed. >:)

I don't think the GPL needs to dodge any bullet.

Think of the SCO case as an infection. The important thing is strengthening the imune-system and make future infections less likely to cause any serious damage. It is pure luck that this time the virus (SCO) is so weak, next time - who knows.

If the GPL is used in court this time, arguments about it beeing unconstitutional will be even sillier.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Year 2000 story on SCO Copying out of LINUX
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 11:32 AM EST
Hello, I could not find the email form to email PJ but I think Newyen found a
story in which SCO admits to copying lines out of Linux:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/12733.html

---

Origional post at Yahoo Financial by Newyen:

http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=1600684464&a
mp;tid=cald&sid=1600684464&mid=63666

"At the session, SCO officials said that the the environment amounts to
around 40,000 lines of code, plus around 2m drawn from the real Linux kernel
tree. "

Article dated: 08/22/2000
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/12733.html

[ Reply to This | # ]

Progress Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: Beyonder on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 11:45 AM EST
My favorite quote has to be this one:

"In the last year we've gone from almost no cash to more than $60 million
in cash. Core operations are financially profitable."

uhm, didn't they get like a total of $100 million ??
$50 million from Microsoft and the other I forget where from.

So if they have "more than $60 million" what happened to the other
$40 million? Or maybe SCO just can't do simple addition... "uh, let's
see $50 million plus $50 million is uh... oh damn I can't count that high, just
make it 'more than $60 million'"... too funny

And I love the other comment made about the contradictory statements about their
"core business" which everyone knows is just only about litigations
now.

[ Reply to This | # ]

SCO & Microsoft contract info
Authored by: stinkbomb on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 12:01 PM EST
Digging through Microsoft's site turns up the following:

http://www. microsoft.com/presspass/press/1997/nov97/scopr.asp

Very wierd stuff.

[ Reply to This | # ]

How SCO will sue end-users
Authored by: mflaster on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 12:02 PM EST
I've been pretty baffled how SCO could even file a suit against end users without getting laughed out of court.

But then Stowell says:

If I were a commercial end user independent of anything else, given the nature of the GPL I would avoid modifying the code, I would avoid doing anything that could be considered a distribution of my application.

They don't have patent claims, only copyright. Copyright doesn't restrict use, it only restricts distribution. So, if they go after end users, they have to go after them for distributing Linux, even if it's only inhouse. I imagine they would argue something like "They downloaded/purchased 1 copy of Linux, but then used that to install it on 10 machines. So they made 9 copies, which are each copyright violations."

Am I correct? Even if you stipulate everything SCO says, can't they only go after people that copy Linux?

Mike

[ Reply to This | # ]

Comments from Gartner
Authored by: tcranbrook on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 12:02 PM EST
SCO's Legal Fees Could Jeopardize Its Software Business, an advisory from Gartner, has some interesting recomendations.

* Keep a low profile and do not divulge details on Linux deployments.

* Until a judgment in a case would unequivocally warrant it, Linux users should not pay SCO the license fees it has asked for to settle its allegations of infringement of intellectual property rights.

* Do not permit SCO to audit your premises without legal authorization.

and finally:

* For customers of SCO Open Server and UnixWare, an unfavorable judgment could cause SCO to cease operations or sell itself. That could harm future support and maintenance. Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years.

[ Reply to This | # ]

GROKLAW Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 12:09 PM EST
"Groklaw is a sterling example of Internet interdisciplinary cooperation between experts and concerned parties. The discussions are impassioned but controlled, and documenting arguments is the order of the day. Heavily spiced with links and excerpts from many sources, the rule is -- if you don't understand, ask. If you know something of import, tell.

When this whole sorry affair is over and BB King can get on with writing the Ballard Of Black Dog McBride, Groklaw will stand as a monument to how a community under threat can gather its resources and calmly set about restoring sanity in a hurricane of bluster. If anyone can find a way to bottle this, it may even all have been worth it."
says Rupert Goodwins from ZDNet UK here.

Enjoy!

[ Reply to This | # ]

It's not even 11/21 yet, much less 12/5
Authored by: Thomas Frayne on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 12:16 PM EST
Clearly SCO is going down the tubes, and the court dates of 11/21 and 12/5 are
still in the future. Further, eventually the judge in the RH case will have to
rule on SCO's motion to dismiss. Finally, I hope Novell will put the final
nail in the coffin by suing SCO for a declaratory judgment.

Meanwhile, Linux is starting to win the server battle, and all the countries
adopting Linux for desktops will soon make a dent in Microsoft's Windows
monopoly. Economists have debunked SCO's mistatements that innovation requires
proprietary code.

Bad news for SCO on all fronts, and more coming.

[ Reply to This | # ]

CNet article 3 months old?
Authored by: Dominic Jackson on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 01:21 PM EST
The date on the CNet article is given as 12th August?! It doesn't look current as although the article title mentions subpoenas, the body text doesn't mention the ACO subpoena to Linus Torvalds, for example. How come we missed this one for nearly 3 months?

[ Reply to This | # ]

CNet article 3 months old?
Authored by: Dominic Jackson on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 01:22 PM EST
The date on the CNet article is given as 12th August?! It doesn't look current as although the article title mentions subpoenas, the body text doesn't mention the SCO subpoena to Linus Torvalds, for example. How come we missed this one for nearly 3 months?

[ Reply to This | # ]

SCO related docs on www.microsoft.com
Authored by: geoff lane on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 01:28 PM EST

The following pair are transcripts of depositions taken by Boies. The first is from R ON RASMUSSEN of SCO. The second is from W AYNE BERGLAND of SCO

There are a lot more mentioning SCO if anybody wants to go digging.

[ Reply to This | # ]

you'd have to have a heart of stone...
Authored by: chrism on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 01:33 PM EST
to listen to SCO's cries for justice without laughing.

With apologies to Mr. Wilde.

Chris Marshall

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Progress Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: Peter Simpson on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 02:14 PM EST
One small detail has always bothered me. TSG is claiming that their IP has been
stolen. Aside from the Unix sources, the claim that "methods, practices
and techniques" (or similar phraseology) have been stolen, and used to
write AIX, RCU, SMP, NUMA, Linux kernel, (etc) code.

What bothers me about this claim, is that TSG never wrote any of the code they
claim uses any of this secret, proprietary knowledge. So, how do they own this
knowledge? Trade secrets are either resident in employees heads, or written
down in lab notebooks, or whatever. TSG doesn't have any of this. Correct me
if I'm wrong here, but all they got from Novell, was a source code tape and a
list of licensees. I seriously doubt that anyone at TSG could explain how the
product they claim to own, works.

It's going to be interesting when this goes to court, and IBM's lawyer asks
them to explain exactly which secret techniques used in writing all this
"derivative" code could not have been learned in four years in any
Computer Science program worth its name.

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Gartner recommends NOT paying SCO
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 02:37 PM EST
Gartener research note by George Weiss

Recommendation from the research paper:
Until a judgment in a case would unequivocally warrant it, Linux users should not pay SCO the license fees it has asked for to settle its allegations of infringement of intellectual property rights.

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Progress Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 02:47 PM EST
If a code can be run on more than one platform, the GPL specifically excludes
it. So a Unix/Linux program that can be compiled to run on either platform is
not "contaminated" by the license. It is not difficult to write
proprietory code that can be perfectly legally run on, and distributed for, a
GPL OS. It is even possible to legally embed proprietory code within a GPL OS
and distribute the result without being required to GPL the proprietory code.
Simply make an LGPL "shim" for the GPL OS through which the
proprietory code calls the GPL OS functionality and then implement another such
"shim" for e.g. windows with the same interface to the proprietory
code such that the proprietory code can be simply recompiled and linked to run
on windows. Voila, the code is independent of the GPL OS and hence does not have
to be GPL licensed.

This is all a convoluted way of say that SCO suggestions that developing and
application on Linux forces you to give it away is pure rubbish.

Also, if you only use the code internally to your organization, the GPL imposes
to oblications at all. Another reason the SCOfud is nonsense.

Colin

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OT: More kudos for Groklaw
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 03:28 PM EST
A very nice nod to Groklaw. Read the second page.

http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/rupertgoodwins/0,39020691,39118030,00.htm

(his URL for Groklaw is wrong, though. sigh.)

kbq

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Significance of "new new products in OpenServer" overstated
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 04:37 PM EST
OpenServer is the original "Xenix" type code. Stuff that
SCO always had.

The SVR4 that old SCO aquired from Novell is UnixWare.

The Xenix stuff was pretty poor and just about reached
SVR3.2 standard. SCO was struggling to make it competitive
when they did the deal with Novell which solved the
problem by giving them a whole new product base.

SVR4 was a more of a "merge" of BSD (via Sun) and AT&T's
and was a significant improvment over SVR3.2 - more like a
SystemVI!

For a long time, SCO's strategy has been to put the nasty
Xenix stuff in maintenance mode - and migrate users over
to the more advanced SVR4 (UnixWare) stuff.

So what he seems to be saying is that they want to do
something with the really old code. This isn't the stuff
that they are alleging IBM has stolen and placed in Linux.
That is UnixWare.

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OT: New Roadshow for HP (Linux this time)
Authored by: BC on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 04:42 PM EST
FWIW, HP is sponsering a new roadshow. This time it's with Novell about Linux.

From the Novell release:
Novell and HP Linux Road Show
HP, Novell, SAP, Oracle, and BEA join forces in a 23 country Linux solutions roadshow. From Brussels to Istanbul, from Oslo to Capetown, and from Paris to Moscow., the CxO audience will hear from the market leaders how Linux based solutions contribute to their bottom line. Register today!


http://www.hplinuxroadshow.com/

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This could all be over pretty soon
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 05:03 PM EST
It may sound crazy, but I think the SCO-IBM case could be over pretty soon.

To start, SCO is claiming that IBM illegally put code in Linux from three
sources: UnixWare, original SVR4, and so-called deriviative code. IBM is
refusing to hand over any derivative code in discovery, and so it is forcing the
court to look at Amendment X and the clarification letter (can Judge Wells rule
on this or would Judge Kimball have to?). What is almost certainly going to
happen is that the court will throw out the derivative code charges.

That leaves UnixWare and SVR4 code, and here SCO is claiming it discovered that
this code is in Linux through a several-month code analysis by three teams. But
now it claims it doesn't know what the specific lines of code are, and it only
handed over to IBM a list of files apparently generated in a few hours by a
simple grep.

This leaves many concluding that SCO never did the analysis, and if that is
true, then SCO apparently has no evidence that there is any UnixWare or SVR4
code in Linux.

Now IBM's lawyers are certainly aware of all this, and they are going to hammer
away at it in the oral arguments next month. If SCO in fact never did the
analysis, it is going to come out, and then the judge is likely to approve a
motion by IBM to dismiss SCO's case.

It also means the judge would likely issue a summary judgement in favor of
IBM's countersuit charges that SCO made false claims to the public that damaged
IBM's business. So nothing would be left but IBM's countersuit charges that
SCO violated the GPL and also 4 of IBM's patents. At this point, SCO would be
in such a bad legal position that I imagine it would settle on whatever terms
IBM demanded.


I think SCO realizes all this, and that is why it has been making all these
desperate new threats.

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Ransom Love interview
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 05:28 PM EST
Lot of interesting quotes--Novell, Linux, the lawsuit:

link

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Applications can be proprietary as the Linux GPL applies to Kernel only!
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 05:29 PM EST
SCOspeak is wrong about the user application and Linux replationship! Linus
says so here per this:

Linus Torvalds quote from Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution,
1st Edition January 1999, The Linux Edge, by Linus Torvalds,
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/linus.html :

"We ended up deciding (or maybe I ended up decreeing) that system calls
would not be considered to be linking against the kernel. That is, any program
running on top of Linux would not be considered covered by the GPL. This
decision was made very early on and I even added a special read-me file (see
Appendix B) to make sure everyone knew about it. Because of this commercial
vendors can write programs for Linux without having to worry about the
GPL". [end quote]

Here from the appendix B of the book is the reading of the Linux GPL preamble
(found at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appb.html ):

"NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
services by normal system calls--this is merely considered normal use of the
kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work."
Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but
the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me
and others who actually wrote it.

Linus Torvalds " [end quote]

SCO not knowing about the actual relationship between the application and kernel
where the Linux GPL applies... is, a prime example of their ignorance (or if
they do know, how much the folks at SCO love to lie)!


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7 Corks for 7 McBrides
Authored by: JMonroy on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 06:15 PM EST
PJ stated:

"Not even a million dollars and 400,000 shares is enough to cork this guy's mouth."

ROTFL!!! If it wasn't for remarks like this, the internet wouldn't be half as entertaining as it is now. This one is destined to be a classic.

---
SCOvsIBM
Res ipsa loquitur

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SCO Administrators Hiring Body Guards
Authored by: prmills@earthlin on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 06:23 PM EST
The LA Times is reporting that SCO administrators are hiring body
guards over there fear of attack from the anti-SCO forces. Sounds like
they are becoming increasingly paranoid.

Maybe wise old King Solomon was right when he stated, "The wicked
man flees though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a
lion." (Pro 28:1).

I haven't heard that PJ is hiring body guards, yet. She seems pretty bold.

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SCO trying to depress Novell stock price? And other McBride nastiness
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 06:30 PM EST


Other nastiness:

In one of yesterday's article McBride complains that Novell sent SCO a letter
that was CC'd to IBM (it was related to his Chicago 7 ravings).

I'd like to point out that Novell, Original SCO, and IBM have a three way
contract, and Novell clearly have retained interests in Sys V and older
licensees (like IBM). It would seem me improper and not good faith, if Novell
had NOT CC'd IBM.

Something I think important and needs more emphasis. Novell acted entirely
properly regarding those letters, and SCO are complaining about that!



Main point:

I suspect SCO may be trying to depress Novell's stock price, presumably with
the intention of making it more difficult for Novell's leadership to continue
on their current path, or just to retaliate

1. I think the the attack on Novell-SuSE is part of that strategy.

2. I also think you will see in broader ways in the press.

Check this article:
http://money.cnn.com/2003/11/20/technology/techinvestor/lamonica/

Now the first thing I noted is it says that Novell's stock is over-valed
because of P/E of 30 (n.b. compare SCO!) and because of going up 50% (n.b.
compare SCO!)

Now the next thing is it contains that SCO holds patents on UNIX crud.

But the give away that I think this is briefed by SCO, is the sub headline,
"Linux moves by the former owner of WordPerfect should help it fight MSFT,
but stock is overvalued.".

Now is Novell being, years ago the former owner of WordPerfect of any
significance to the story at all???? Of course not. There are at least a dozen
things (networking giant/pioneer, etc. etc.) you could identify Novell by, being
"former owner of WordPerfect" is REALLY far down the list.
Especially since WordPerfect is not at all relevant to the main theme of the
story.

So ask yourself who would think of Novell as a "former WordPerfect
owner"?

Answer:

People who were involved in WordPerfect

Say for example Dan Campbell (CFO of WordPerfect at the time that Novell
acquired them), or R.Duff Thompson (General Counsel of WordPerfect at that
time).

Now by an INCREDIBLY AMAZING COINCIDENCE - Dan Campbell _and_ R.Duff Thompson
are both on SCO's board.

So, maybe it's just me, but I suspect that the journalist who wrote this
article has been briefed by SCO, probably one of these two guys.

Suggestion: The journalist in question is Paul R. La Monica. I suspect he is an
honest good journalist who has been lead astray. So, if anybody is interested
enough, he might be a guy with contacting (his email address is in the article
by line) and talking to nicely, firstly to find out who briefed him, and
secondly to provide him with a larger picture.


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Progress Is Not Proprietary
Authored by: maxhrk on Thursday, November 20 2003 @ 06:54 PM EST
http://news.c om.com/2008-7344-5110019.html?tag=nefd_gutspro

Okay i will let my girlish secondary personality kick in... Ransom Love looks and his attitude are better than Darl.

Don't ask me why i have secondary personality.

---

Sincerely,
Richard M.

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Now we're violating the DMCA
Authored by: Scott_Lazar on Friday, November 21 2003 @ 08:04 PM EST
Interesting that even Eweek would start guffawing at Darl:

"SCO's Linux Case: Is Winning Everything?"

Scott

---
LINUX - Visibly superior!

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