http://www.nwfusion.co m/news/2003/0825scoatta.html

Ya gotta read the posted responses all over the place to this one... classic from NewsForge reader:

"Desparate excuses.... by Anonymous Reader on 2003.08.22 11:20 (#66062)

::booming voice from bullhorn:: "Step away from the crack pipe"

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annon, nice quote. =)

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The reply will be the same.

FREE SOFTWARE LEADERS STAND TOGETHER

http://www.perens.com/A rticles/StandTogether.html

SIIA Responds to Microsoft Statement on Open Source

http://www.siia. net/sharedcontent/press/2001/5-3-01.html

And the fight and same arguments will be refuted

Why Linux will conquer the world

http://forums.com.com/group/zd.New s.Talkback/zdnn/tb.tpt/@thread@113878@forward@1@D-,D@ALL/@article@113878?EXP=ALL E113873E113859E114006E113839&VWM=hr&ROS=&PAGETP=2100&NODEID=1104&SHOST=zdnet.com .com

Here is my refuting where Ardian gets a pasting

http://forums.com.com/group/zd.New s.Talkback/zdnn/tb.tpt/@thread@114569@forward@1@D-,D@ALL/@article@114569?EXP=ALL E113873E113859E114006E113839&VWM=hr&ROS=&PAGETP=2100&NODEID=1104&SHOST=zdnet.com .com

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http://tinyurl.com/kv76

Ain't that better? Just a tip for future postings.

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http://tinyurl.com/kv76

Ain't that better? Just a tip for future postings.

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http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/urltrurl?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise . de%2Fct%2Faktuell%2Fmeldung%2F39599&lp=de_en&tt=url

(left it long so someone could trace it back to the German and do some human translation)

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Great work here PJ and everyone. I read it daily.

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To do so, type your URL like this:

<A HREF=" REALLY LONG URL GOES HERE ">click here</A>

You'll get a result that looks like this:

click here

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Brad Smith is a Microsoft Vice President, and their General Counsel (a lawyer). He worked out the licensing deal with SCOX. While earning that six-figure plus salary he must have learned:

1. That the Open Group owns the trademarks "Unix" and "Unixware". 2. That Novell and Tarentella kept the revenue streams from their patents according to their own SEC filings. 3. That SCOX didn't have any Unix copyrights registered with the US government (at that time). 4. That BSD and the ancient Unix sources could be used under four-point BSD or BSD-style licenses.

Despite all of that, and his fiduciary obligations, he paid millions of dollars in licensing fees to SCOX, and they accepted it. Why?

In a statement, Microsoft said the Unix license was intended to ensure that the software maker did not violate any intellectual property rights when developing products that allow computers with differing operating systems to work in tandem with one another. "This helps to ensure IP (intellectual property) compliance across Microsoft solutions and supports our efforts around existing products, like Services For Unix that further Unix interoperability," Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel and senior vice president, said in a statement. Microsoft's announcement comes as SCO last week turned up the heat on its intellectual property battle by notifying 1,500 of the world's largest corporations that their use of Linux may be in violation of SCO's software rights.

What SCOX IP claims could have possibly existed at that time in Services For Unix if not the GPL'd GNU code mentioned in the right margin on this page? http://www.micr osoft.com/windows/sfu/howtobuy/default.asp

Microsoft doesn't distribute the Linux kernel, so Microsoft and SCOX can't have had that in mind. In an email interview Chris Sontag said: We're not talking about the Linux kernel that Linus and others have helped develop. We're talking about what's on the periphery of the Linux kernel.

http://mozillaq uest.com/Linux03/ScoSource-10_Story01.html

People who don't want to admit that SCOX has already made millions -in part - from licensing claims on GNU software are free to believe whatever they want.

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By my reading of the scheduling order (document 23 at http://www.utd.uscour ts.gov/documents/ibm_hist.html) IBM has until 10 Nov to file a motion to dismiss. If they intend to do this is there any reason why they would delay it as long as possible? Would they be able to dismiss the SCO case without having to thyen refile their counter claims as a separate case.

Does anyone know how long SCO have got to respond to IBMs counter claims? And when they have to file their 10Q - the last one was filed on 13 Jun so I guess they've got at least until 13 sep even though apparently it is traditional to file them straight at the same time as the earnings call

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It's Dee Ann LeBlanc.

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Have I missed something? The only press I've seen has been SCO whining about how IBM is picking on them. Links from a story on slashdot.

You can't tell me that is what spawned a buy on the stock?

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Somebody on Slashdot got it right yesterday... It may be spelled S-C-O but it's pronounced "ass hats"

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"As the president of OSI, defending the community of open-source hackers against predators and carpetbaggers is mine — and if you don't stop trying to destroy Linux and everything else we've worked for I guarantee you won't like what our alliance is cooking up next."

What is the chance that he has consensus of key developers to bring a GNU GPL violation case against SCO on their Unix offering? What is involved in getting say Samba, the Linux kernel and the GNU Compiler Collection to attempt getting a temporary injuction to stop SCO from selling its new Unix version with their software? They could gut SCO's product line and advertised features by doing this. Is his letter just brinksmanship or is something nasty like a temporary injunction really possible?

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http://newsf orge.com/newsforge/03/08/22/1746248.shtml?tid=19

It contains this legal threat:

"........ You have a choice. Peel off that dark helmet and deal with us like a reasonable human being, or continue down a path that could be bad trouble for us but will be utter ruin — quite possibly including jail time on fraud, intellectual-property theft, barratry, and stock-manipulation charges — for you and the rest of SCO's top management. You have my email, you can have my phone if you want it, and you have my word of honor that you'll get a fair hearing for any truths you have to offer."

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I know about the Dee-Ann typo, and I've tried to correct it several times, but the software isn't helping today. Eventually, it should show up correctly. Thanks for noticing though.

I've written to a lawyer who does German English translations, but if anyone wishes to step up to the plate, pls. do. Especially the last five or six paragraphs of McBride's section of the interview. Thanks.

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I sincerely doubt Microsoft would use their patent portfolio against Linux. They must know that would mean they'd also be taking on IBM - and according to at least one book, IBM have wielded their humongous patent portfolio in Gates' direction before.

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Someone buy him a beer or something. :)

Although if he and his allies really are "cooking up" some legal action, how do I get in on that as a Linux end-user?

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"In a statement, Microsoft said the Unix license was intended to ensure that the software maker did not violate any intellectual property rights when developing products that allow computers with differing operating systems to work in tandem with one another.

"This helps to ensure IP (intellectual property) compliance across Microsoft solutions and supports our efforts around existing products, like services for Unix that further Unix interoperability," Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel and senior vice president, said in a statement.

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PhilTR, if you use &lt; instead of the less than sign, then HTML will translate it into a less-than sign onscreen. Do a google search for "HTML entities" for more information.

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As for the veiled legal threat, I have no doubt the OSI and FSF are planning a two-pronged counter-attack against SCO and it would be righteously deserved considering SCO's deplorable, unethical, thieving, smarmy scumbucket actions.

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"c't: Why then are you demonstrating exactly this code publicly as evidence? You are sueing IBM.

Sontag: We found several kinds of breaches of copyright and of contracts. Literal copying of code was the most obvious kind, and we wanted to prove this as well. Therefore, we have shown it in the public talk, and demonstrate the example also unter terms of an NDA. In the case of IBM, we have not yet found such cases of verbatim copying, but we have not examined everything yet. With IBM, this is above all about a different kind of breach of contract, namely the transfer of derived results on a very large scale. The licensing agreement provides that all changes and derived products remain within the originally licensed body of work.

So, they found, to this day, zero evidence of IBM verbatim of copying. Therefore, the talk of lawsuit with IBM is back on the breach of contract.

Quite a dance! Don't you think! But they are doing a Texas 2-step to a Salsa beat.

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So you have a group of investors keyed to thinking in terms of greed, hearing a message of greed from a CEO, seeing a message of greed from an analyst, and without having dug too deep into the veracity of those claims. It's not surprising to see them speculate on SCO as a gamble. The stock is still fairly cheap, so hey, let's throw a few bucks down and maybe we'll hit the jackpot.

Groklaw readers are among the most well-informed folks about SCO. Even on Slashdot there are many misconceptions and fears (along with the blind bravado). Imagine the average investor and how little he or she knows about these facts. And remember how many people threw money at the sinking ship of the dot com era. SCO stock going up with each new interview and press release is not a surprise considering the mindset of the average investor. And yes, I know this is an overgeneralization, and there also exist sharp, informed, reasonable investors. You can easily tell them apart -- they are the ones investing in IBM at the moment... ;)

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c't: You are acting fairly belligerent on this forum. You declared war against open source, since it becomes destructive for the software industry. Does the whole movement have to die so that a few software companies can live well?

McBride: Actually, that was more aimed at the GPL, not open source as a whole. There's a lot of very valuable effort in open source. But the extreme interpretation that nobody himself owns anything that he developed himself, that can't remain like this. With this, created value gets destroyed. The GPL must change or it will not survive in the long run. I have discussed with many exponents of the open source side about this already.

So the GPL takes away ownership of anything you write yourself. PJ, are you still offering GPL 101 courses? McBride needs a refresher!

Unlike the claims SCO is making about the far reaching effects of the UNIX license (they own / control all derivative works to anything that even touched UNIX), the GPL doesn't provent the rightful copyright holder from taking their own code and doing anything else they wish with it.

Man, someone should start selling t-shirts or something with some of these quotes on them. This shit is funny! ;)

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McBride: ... That's completely wrong. We posess all files of this code with the complete source tree (lit: pedigree) in all version, up to the origin in 1969

In Dennis Ritchie's description of the nsys code (earliest traced version on the internet) he said that the tape was labelled Nov 73 and that that date must be about right as the struct keyword used in this code wasn't added to C until mid 73 - the code would look radically different without it. I'd love to see the code that McBride has got that is 4 years older than the language syntax it uses.

McBride: "The code in question dates from exactly the version of Unix System V which we have delivered to SGI and licenced with a signed contract"

Strange then that it contains the Linux specific spinlock and not the Unix lock that is in the SVR4 version. It also seems suspicious that there is an SGI copyright but no AT&T / USL copyright. According to the Unix timeline although SGI didn't start using SVR4 until 1989, it was released in 1988 (no exact date and I don't have an exact date for the Berne convention implementation either) and the changes between SVR3.2 released in 1987 and SVR4 were mainly merging of BSD derived code. Could it be that SVRx as distributed to many licensees still didn't contain a copyright statement as late as this and hence even that falls into the public domain? By the time this case is over there may be nothing left of the Unix copyrights for IBM to get from SCO.

Other than that the c't article was weaker than I expected - They should have already known that this was supposed to be the evidence for other infringers, not IBM but instead wasted about half of the interview discussing that point. I'd have loved to hear the issue of HP being the ones to actually add this to Linux being raised too but that was too much to hope for.

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Yes. I thought it didn't need an answer - as I think it did plenty of good for our side even without a response. So much so, I was really hoping it would get published everywhere (and I guess it still may).

My guess is the CNBC is what drove the price. You have to remember some people may accept the gamble or the CNBC theory - but there are also some stock holders who might be betting on a temporary rise in the stock price because of these "gamblers".

Another thing on this aspect, is new short statistics will be published soon, and a temporary rise, might drive out some of the shorts.

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I should have been more explicit that I was talking about the speculators. As I said at the end, there are other types of investors too, but those types are not the type to invest in something as speculative as SCO. I wasn't trying to insult stock investors, as trying to point out the kind of person who would be making SCO stock rise despite the facts we all know about. But I agree that even the speculators will get the message sooner or later, and when that happens I would expect the stock to drop fast.

And as Adam said, and I alluded in my message, people have recently heard from a stock analsyst saying, 'Buy! Buy!' People who don't research, but just listen to such recommendations, may also cause the stock to rise. Remember during the dot com era how analysts were publicly saying Buy but internally saying 'This is junk.' Listening to analysts without doing your own due diligence brings its own 'rewards.'

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Yes, but it's perfect!

I really applaud any FOSS representative, who would persuit SCO "on their level."

Eric's open letter speaks the language of SCO, and it's about time someone got off their ivory tower, and spoke to them on their level.

I still think highly of Eric, and consider this a big sacrifice on his part. Someone, with clout, had to do it. Eric had the guts to be that one!

Second, I think someone from the recipients of the SCO to debvelopers letters (1,600 or so) would take the bait, and file a preliminary injunction against SCO, until the big guns *IBM and RH) get their time in court.

Masterful move, IMHO.

I'm disappointed that SCO sent me no threats, otherwise I'd have played the gambit, and sued for preliminary injunction, liable, and asked a court to gag them until they prove their case in court.

My dedicated dual XEON server (hint: SMP Linux 2.4 enabled) is the one in my sig, so SCO can track me with a simple "whois command" from my URL, with full name, address :)

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I've found another nice quote http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7089&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 Blake appears to be confusing the 2000 educational release with the 2002 BSD like one - they really need to get their story straight.

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http://www.ew eek.com/poll_archive/0,3666,p=1237&bn=1,00.asp

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" Am I missing something? I see a June date on that Cohen thing."

There's something else there that is quite interesting... look at the mast head, then look to the right side.

"Advertisement"??????

Unless I'm mistaken, this indicates that this whole "news story" is in fact nothing but a shill for SCO.

Comments??

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What the heck is going on with that? Usually that's a disclaimer that the attached material is a paid-for ad. I can't believe all the stock stories on CNBC are all paid ads...

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That's what's your missing. Effectively a TV infomercial for SCO stock.

If SCO had been half as good at selling Unixware or Linux, as they are at pushing their stock, do you think this thing would ever have happened?

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