IBM Nails SCO to the Floorboards

[Guest]

"IBM offers five independent reasons demonstrating SCO misuse: that SCO does not own all of the copyrights it purported, that SCO claimed broader rights to Linux than such copyrights would allow, that SCO attempted to use its (purported) copyrights to control material copyrighted by others (IBM in particular), that SCO asserted copyright over material not protectable under copyright law, and that SCO attempted to enforce copyright over IBM in ways not allowed by copyright law."


Looks like the Fat Lady is now backstage and warming up. I can't wait for the ruling. Die, Daryl McBride, Die!

Story

mh

"The mouse does not know life until it is in the mouth of the cat."

[JohnRich 4]

What's "SCO"?

[kallend 2,182]

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What's "SCO"?

Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[dorbie 0]

SCO is a company that had a Unix operating system and claimed to own Unix, the code and trademark, the history is complex but SCO stood for "Santa Cruz Operation". They tried to undermine Linux by claiming that it violated their copyrights on Unix code, trademarks etc. and sued IBM for a billion bucks and tried to sue a few of their own customers (based on contracts EULAs etc.) and there was a lot of misrepresentation about this to the press in my opinion.

In my opinion it was particularly bullshit because SCO had contributed to Linux, sold Linux etc. before changing their business model to one of suing the rest of the world over I.P. they didn't actually own. In my opinion some key things about the management at SCO changed and they became clueless about technical details of development, what they could own, what they actually owned and started to believe their own bullshit while ignoring information that clearly undermined their position.

The IBM suit has been running for a long time now. SCO have taken a beating along the way in court and on the stock market after an initial runup, specifically on their inability to produce concrete specifics of copyright violation and their case has morphed significantly.

The chickens are coming home to roost for SCO. Ticker symbol SCOX. It has been very satisfying to see companies like Baystar (who funded what in my opinion was a shakedown scam) get burned financially. Now hopefully David Boise will take it in the shorts for participating (a lot of his fee is in SCO stock I hear).

If SCO is not left as a smouldering crater, something will have gone very wrong with our legal system.

[dorbie 0]

P.S. The lawsuit against IBM was also largely based on their contract with IBM over a collaborative Operating system development project rather than and innate right to Linux code or IBM's work. This was always smokescreened by them in my opinion in an attempt to get people to sign up for their licensing program (licensing SCO's code in Linuc to Linux users for a small fortune).

Particularly insidious is that Microsoft was one of the few takers on SCO's licenses (something people seem to have forgotten) and also encouraged Baystar to invest in SCO. This was a huge FUD success against Linux for Microsoft at the time, but it's pretty much petered out now.

[kelpdiver 2]

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In my opinion it was particularly bullshit because SCO had contributed to Linux, sold Linux etc. before changing their business model to one of suing the rest of the world over I.P. they didn't actually own. In my opinion some key things about the management at SCO changed and they became clueless about technical details of development, what they could own, what they actually owned and started to believe their own bullshit while ignoring information that clearly undermined their position.

Come on, you know the history better than that. AT&T sells "UNIX" to Novell who sells something to SCO to Caldera who renamed themselves to the SCO Group (why, I have no idea - SCO was never a major player).

This is round two of Unix Systems Lab (AT&T) who first derailed freebsd for years in the 90s. Were it not for that, it would have flourished and linux would never have gotten off the ground.

Someone at SCO decided that this IP that had was worth something and set upon to extort from everyone. The lamest bits of their suits, and for which IBM is roasting them, is their refusal/inability to show where code was stolen. It was clearly a shakedown, but fortunately for all the distros, IBM is a much deeper army of lawyers than SCO could ever have.

[Guest]

All this over an OS that was developed in a University and became hijacked into a commercial product (which has been very successful, if somewhat forky, over the ensuing decades).

SCO's sad attempt to hijack Linux was the last gasp of a bunch of losers, unable to innovate and thus resorting to abuse of the legal system in an effort to pump their stock. Now they're going to pay, and I'm delighted.

mh

"The mouse does not know life until it is in the mouth of the cat."

[dorbie 0]

Yup I do know, as I said it's complex, but SCO were very actively engaged in OS development with IBM and were proactively incorporating features into Linux while promoting & selling Linux for a long time.

SCO could have been a viable Linux player and would have grown, they almost went down that path, but as you say they took the other fork in the road.

[dorbie 0]

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All this over an OS that was developed in a University and became hijacked into a commercial product (which has been very successful, if somewhat forky, over the ensuing decades).

Not the least of SCOs problems is the University origins and the earlier BSD case.

It's just stunning to see these guys claim posix like headers as evidence of copyright infringement. They've cited the defines for interrupt codes as proprietary. It has to be the flimsiest software copyright claim in history.

The stuff that looks even remotely suspicious that has been seen in public has been traced to earlier copyright free ancestor code or worse, public code copied by SCO.

It's actually getting entertaining now but it was frustrating watching SCO's early shenanigans and idiots in the media running around taking the pronouncements seriously without the capacity to even comprehend the issues at stake.

This would have been the crime of the century if SCO had pulled it off, a crime against the freedom of humanity of immeasurable impact IMHO and the complicit fools in the media like Laura DiDio were ready to help it along.

All my opinion of course.

[DrewEckhardt 0]

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This is round two of Unix Systems Lab (AT&T) who first derailed freebsd for years in the 90s. Were it not for that, it would have flourished and linux would never have gotten off the ground.

IMHO Bill Jolitz did as much to impede BSD on the PC as the AT&T lawsuit.

Where Linus wanted a working system and would have a new release days after people submtited patches, the Jolitzes didn't. The Linux development model was a lot more elegant to deal with than 386BSD + the patch kit. The FreeBSD spin-off didn't happen until a couple years later.

X under early Linux also worked better on small hardware than it did under early BSD. While statically linked shared libraries weren't elegant, they did keep the memory footprint reasonable. The unified user memory pool + buffer cache helped too. Adding processes to the head of the runqueue on wakeup wasn't as fair as adding them to the end but noticeably helped interactive performance. Etc.

[ryoder 1,590]

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IMHO Bill Jolitz did as much to impede BSD on the PC as the AT&T lawsuit.

Oh, that takes me back to the BSD groups on Usenet!

The good old days of Bill & Lynne Jolitz, presenting BSD to the world, and the world having the audacity to modify the source code, and Bill & Lynne getting pissed and refusing to post anymore, except through a mouthpiece named Jesus Monroy. That was all so silly.

"There are only three things of value: younger women, faster airplanes, and bigger crocodiles" - Arthur Jones.