Ummm...

Can I sue SCO for malicious and premeditated assault? I may have ruptured something as a result of reading this.

pca

Customers have come to SCO asking what they can do to respect and help protect the rights of the SCO intellectual property in Linux

Yeah, i'm sure they came begging to respect SCO's rights. If anyone asked it was purely to cover their ass, or to find out how the F SCO thinks they are going to get away with this one.

You'll need a license first.

Brought to you buy the same people who brought you the BT hyperlink patent suit

BTW, RH fires back.

Can I sue SCO for malicious and premeditated assault? I may have ruptured something as a result of reading this.

Yeah, I had my own rant on this a couple weeks ago.. But I'm a lot calmer now. This is all going to blow over, and at the end of it, SCO will have egg on their face, and will probably be paying damages as a result of their extortion and barratry.

Really, this is just the next logical step in the cottage industry known as Patent Exploitation. Slashdot has another frivolous patent story every third day, and until the Judicial system steps into action and sets a clear precedent against this type of racketeering, this activity will keep escalating, and everyone who's ever filed a nebulous patent will claim the entire world owes them 100 billion dollars and a tank full of sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.

Actually, if you think about it, SCO is doing us all a favor. By engaging in such a blatant abuse of the spirt and letter of copyright laws, they're getting peoples' attention, and the backlash will probably significantly slow the spread of this disease. U.S. lawmakers are already starting to take notice, and if SCO does face legal or financial repercussions from this, other would-be patent bucaneers will think twice before they try to con people into giving them money.

So, in summay..

Hooray for SCO!

As far as I can tell, this is the reason they are going forth with this silly concept.

I'm just waiting for when all their execs sell off their options...

I read somehwere yesterday that they already ARE selling off options. too lazy to find it and back myself up though =]

Yeah, I had my own rant on this a couple weeks ago.. But I'm a lot calmer now. This is all going to blow over, and at the end of it, SCO will have egg on their face, and will probably be paying damages as a result of their extortion and barratry.

What the hell are we going to do if the unimaginable happens and SCO actually win ? Anyone here going to shell out their $32 for each embedded copy of Linux in their empeg ?

Anyone here going to shell out their $32 for each embedded copy of Linux in their empeg ?

The last slashdot troll I read said that they were only targetting the 2.4 kernel, which would mean our empegs should get off scott free, if I'm not mistaken. Of course, they claim it's the multiple CPU code which actually infriges, and the only empeg I know of with two processors was extreemly expensive and used the IDE bus to communicate between the two, if I'm not mistaken.

That being said, Linux means too much to too many people to let SCO get away with charging individual liscencing fees. I'd bet the worst case scenario would be IBM loosing the court case and paying SCO enough to pay off their creditors and give the CEO a nice bonus before fading off into the obscurity of supporting SCO Unix.

Matthew

I'd bet the worst case scenario would be IBM loosing the court case and paying SCO enough to pay off their creditors and give the CEO a nice bonus before fading off into the obscurity of supporting SCO Unix.

SCO will lose and will be annihilated. Any other outcome would set back the computer industry in the US by ten years or more compared to the rest of the world.

Peter

In reply to:

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I have Linux servers deployed in my organization. What options do I have besides purchasing a SCO IP license?
There are 3 options for you to evaluate:
• You have the option to do nothing, adopt a “wait and see” attitude, and hope that SCO is not serious about enforcing its intellectual property rights in the end user community.
• You can replace all servers, desktop and embedded uses of Linux.
• You can obtain a license from SCO to use SCO IP in binary form in Linux distributions

---

Replace the servers with what exactly? Windows?

Of course SCO is going to loose this, I don’t see how they can expect to win. As has been said, it would do too much damage to the U.S. computer industry.

However, this whole thing does bring up a few questions for me:

-How can Linux be maintained in such a way that it never gets distributed with code that belongs to someone? I’m not totally familiar with the way open-source works, but certainly it isn’t right to use someone else’s code and distribute it for free if the origional creator didn't want it used that way.

-What exactly constitutes “copying code”? I’ve taken code I’ve written for a previous employer and used it on my current task simply to save time. True that I could have re-written it from scratch, but how would that have helped anything? I would have just ended up with the same thing and I can’t “unlearn” whatever techniques I used to write it in the first place. I’ve also taken other people’s code (from freely distributed examples) and modified it, incorporating it into my software. Most of the time when I’m finished what I have is totally different than what they provided. This isn’t a problem for me as these are all freeware pieces of code, but what if this was licensed code? To what extent does something have to change for it to become different? If I start a new file from scratch and type in everything myself, does that make it mine (clearly not)? Or if you were “inspired” by someone else’s code does that mean you are forever in their debt even if you improved upon their concept?

I realize that these are questions that have probably been answered, but as I’ve never done any open source development, I’m interested to know how these things are handled in the Linux world

I’ve taken code I’ve written for a previous employer and used it on my current task simply to save time.

Almost certainly, this is not allowed. You were paid by the previous employer to generate code (and value) for them, not for your second employer.

That said, it's often difficult to avoid reinventing the wheel in exactly the same way that you reinvented it the previous time, but as long as you don't dip into work that you did for a previous employer, that's fine, IMO.

Of course, IANAL.

If you're consulting/contracting, then the reuse of source code that you create is governed by that contract.

In the past, the company that I was working for full time wrote some code for someone. They wanted an exclusive license to that code, so once we'd handed it over, we had to delete all of our copies, and were not allowed to use it in any further work. Pity -- there was some cool stuff in there that I don't particularly fancy rewriting from scratch. Thems the breaks, though.

Almost certainly, this is not allowed. You were paid by the previous employer to generate code (and value) for them, not for your second employer.

Yeah, I totally understand this. However, I can say in my situation that my previous employer would be totally fine with my reusing of non-trade secret code (in fact, I've probably mentioned it to him). If the situation were not so, though, I wonder what I'd do. Probably re-invent the wheel I guess, as I try to do things as ethically as possible. Besides, code always seems better the second time you do it!

I can't answer your questions, because like "Bud" Melman and roger, IANAL.

But something you said is exactly the basis for SCO's suit against IBM:

>>> ... certainly it isn’t right to use someone else’s code and distribute it for free if the origional creator didn't want it used that way.

SCO says IBM took its intellectual property (the SMP code from UnixWare) and contributed it to the 2.4 kernal (under GNU terms, making it everybody's to use) w/o SCO's permission. If SCO can demonstrate that (which they haven't yet), it's absolutely wrong and IBM owes SCO big-time.

Don't get me wrong: even buying into the IBM suit's merit, my problem with SCO's approach is the way they're trying to undermine the whole open-source movement with it, and that they say they will ("like the RIAA") go after end-users (not just other commercial Linux vendors, which itself is iffy). That has no grounds at all, since end-users would have no way whatsoever to know they were infringing on anything -- BECAUSE CODE SCO SAYS IS THEIRS IS STILL SECRET!

Ignorance of the law may be no excuse, but the law actually has to be made public or else it obviously is unenforceable.

But something you said is exactly the basis for SCO's suit against IBM:

>>> ... certainly it isn’t right to use someone else’s code and distribute it for free if the origional creator didn't want it used that way.

SCO says IBM took its intellectual property (the SMP code from UnixWare) and contributed it to the 2.4 kernal (under GNU terms, making it everybody's to use) w/o SCO's permission. If SCO can demonstrate that (which they haven't yet), it's absolutely wrong and IBM owes SCO big-time.

Actually, that is as far as I know incorrect. Basic SMP support was developed several years ago and really got off the ground after Caldera sent Alan Cox one of the early SMP machines. Yes, the same Caldera that is now The SCO Group. Caldera also worked for a several years on making UnixWare and Linux more compatible.

IBM's contributions have been mentioned often before, amongst which we find JFS, NUMA, and RCU. None of these actually exist in UnixWare, but they were developed by Sequent and later IBM on a kernel that was based on the SysV codebase. Now NUMA is (at the moment) pretty useless for the average user, you really have to get into the massive multiprocessor systems like IBM mainframes.

JFS is a bit superfluous, the kernel already has 3 perfectly fine journalling filesystems. ext3 allows for easy migration for ext2 systems. reiserfs has btree directories and is fast for massive file creation/deletion. XFS is simply impressive. In my eyes, the only interesting part of JFS is for existing AIX users that want to plug their harddisks into a linux box.

So that leaves RCU, which only got merged into the kernel during the 2.5 development kernels. So if 2.4 infringes, then this can't really be the offending code that has 100's of identical lines (yet).

The SCO/IBM lawsuit really seems to be about a contract dispute, who owns the code that was developed by Sequent/IBM. SCO claims that they have distribution (copy) rights as a result of the code being developed as a/on a derived work of the SysV codebase.

For the rest they are throwing up various smokescreens, most of these seem to be anticipating on actually winning the contract dispute.

If they win, they get distribution rights to some parts of the code. And if they do not agree to distribution under the GPL, the 2.4/2.5 kernels will become unlicensed and the exclusive right to copy is with (all) the original authors/owners of the code base. Now those guys can decide whether you can or cannot copy on an arbitrary basis.

So run-time binary licenses are just plain stupid, your binary kernel is unlikely to even contain any NUMA or JFS code, and running a kernel is not violating any distribution rights. How you got the kernel possibly was not legal, but that is really the problem of the distributor (RedHat/SuSe/kernel.org).

Anyone who buys an SCO license clearly agrees that he knowingly violated the copyright of all kernel developers during distribution (aka. bought stolen goods). As a result each kernel developer can independently sue his ass off for copyright infringement. But that's the only thing the SCO license gives you as there is no such thing as 'a right to execute a program' only 'a right to copy/distribute a program'.

My guesses as far as the 'hundreds of lines of identical lines of code'. Possibly example Intel/AMD/chipset initialization, standard textbook functions (allocators), or BSD or Sysv4 derived code. Or code copied from Linux when Caldera was working on their Linux/UnixWare integration strategy. Besides, there probably are few people who have access to UnixWare, but pretty much everyone has complete access to BSD/Linux code.

Finally, it might just have nothing to do with the actual IBM suit which seems to be more focused on obtaining rights to code that isn't even part of UnixWare. Perhaps they are blowing smoke to inflate stock prices, maybe they are trying to distract the opposing lawyers so that they don't focus all of their defense on the actual issues at stake.

This is just my uninformed opinion

-How can Linux be maintained in such a way that it never gets distributed with code that belongs to someone? I’m not totally familiar with the way open-source works, but certainly it isn’t right to use someone else’s code and distribute it for free if the origional creator didn't want it used that way.

By use of legal reverse engineering techniques. Imagine a double ring of trusted people around Linus. The outer ring receives untrusted patches and writes down a formal description which is then passed to the inner ring of implementors who work for companies that put down in writing that their employee's works can be released under the GPL. That way only the ideas are carried over.

Ofcourse with the broken US patent system where basic algorithms can be patented this only avoids potential copyright infringements, not patent issues.

this is dependant on the working contract with the previous employer.

I work as a sysadmin, and I copy my code (small perl hacks and such) from employer to employer. this is my personal code toolbox, and I have to keep it, update it, and bring it with me.

I got a job offer from an ISP at one time, and they wanted me to sign a contract with a non-compete clause, and a ownership of code/ideas clause.. I wouldn't be able to work in the ISP industry for 2 years if i quit, and anything I did, at home or at work would belong to them.. as a sysadmin, I find this intolerable.. I told them to go take a flying leap.

Thanks, jaharkes! Well, obviously I know a lot more about the specifics of the disputed code than I did just from listening to the CEO of SCO on a financial news program last week.Of course, it never surprises me when a management/executive type person doesn't understand his own technical details....

Or does understand it and chooses to present it in the way most favorable to the co's point of view/agenda in order to influence those who don't understand it.
-Zeke

Y'know, the more I think about exactly what he said, the more I think you're right about that, Zeke. (I may see if I can dig up a video of the segment; if so, I'll post a link here.)

On a related note, this guy is my hero.

(server's being slashdotted, page might load a little bit slow.)

On a related note, this guy is my hero.

OMG, ditto.

I hope Parker Brothers sells a million Monopoly sets, and SCO's mailroom is overloaded with envelopes full of Monopoly money. God, that is so perfect.

I don't even run Linux on any of boxes (except the empeg which isn't covered by the SCO extortion), and I'm considering doing it.