SCO Group executives said Friday that the company’s copyright dispute with Novell doesn’t affect its legal campaign against Linux, but they’ll probably sue Novell anyway.
SCO to Novell: See you in court
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Go SCO. Model capitalist.
“hundreds of lines of code.”
It’s like 24, I can’t wait to see how this thing ends.
And why they should’nt sue an other company if they think and have proofs that Novell acted illegally ? Where were you when Netscape sued Microsoft ? Happy and praising capitalism freedom ?
I for one don’t understand why you can sue Linux itself, as nobody “owns” it. But Novell is a corporation like all the others. What’s the difference suddenly ?
I love how SCO’s answer to eveything is: Well we’ll sue them too!
I mean it’s not like they have anything to lose.
Wonder if this will turn into a pseudo-case on “Law & Order”
the linux kernel hacker community produces around 50,000 lines of code a month or something like taht. even if they’re right the few hundred lines of code could be re-written in a matter of weeks i’m sure.
and even if its not easily completely re-written it could be borrowed from another free *NIX os.
besides the next few months are a pretty good time for them to let us know with the 2.5 nearing 2.6pre . it could be replaced by the time the new kernel is released…
How many people here think Darl should change his name to Sue.
I think it would suite him pretty well.
Sue McBride…
all in favour say “aye”
see you in court…sco to lisa ling…see you in court……..sco to god…see you in court.
is it just me or does it look more and more like SCO is sueing everyone and everything they can?
Go SCO. Model freeloader.
What a joke.
SCO reminds me of the Nazis or a rabbid animal. It just runs around attacking everyone else until someone puts a bullet in its proverbial head. Where’s the gun?
What is really troublesome is that Novell contends that they did not sign over the rights to UNIX that they had when SCO bought the technology from Novell.
Why should Novell create a post like that and statement without backing it up properly. (they could have, I know)
It seems like SCO is trying to reach over and quiet everyone in the LINUX community and to garner recognition that they own the code that is in the LINUX Kernel.
Does anyone else find it funny that SCO was party to the UnitedLinux front (carry over from Caldera) and now they are slapping everyone with lawsuits.
That strikes me as very odd.
All their lawsuit does is: NOTHING.
Stopping the few companies who are legal distributing the software will in no way affect the communities that have spawned from the LINUX front. If every RedHat-Like distributor (SuSE, Turbolinux, etc. etc.) were ‘legally’ stopped, the community will still survive and build. A virtual underground Linux movement.
🙂
My two cents (all my words are worth, these days).
McBride I have some newsflash for you NDA’s do not work, Someone will release the info and you will not know who it is. So give it a rest, Sue IBM for your contract breach and leave it alone.
Actually, SCO still sells Linux:
http://www.caldera.com/products/workstation/
I guess they are next on their lawsuit.:-)
Here’s an idea…bankrupt the company. You have mega corporations being attacked, so they should file court papers in as many jurisdictions as possible, as well as issue a temporary restraining order on the shipment of SCO UNIX and SCO Linux while the controversy simmers. I can’t believe that these huge companies couldn’t legally press SCO into the ground, or at least into a very bad stock situation where a hostile take over and dissolution wouldn’t be possible. We are talking about combined corporate assets hundreds of times that of SCO, just with the major players alone.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1113018,00.asp
A German court granted a preliminary injunction against the company (Sco).
Joe Eckert, spokesman for SuSE Linux A.G., said the court has ordered SCO to stop claiming that the Linux operating system is an illegal derivative of Unix. “If SCO ignores the court’s order, it faces a fine of up to 250,000 euro,” he said.
I guess SCO group hopes Novell doesn’t have the letters asking for the rights to any ip property in their possession. You wouldn’t ask for something you already had….
“It appears the German groups that brought the action saw the letter on a Web site and perceived that to be a direct threat against them. We don’t view it that way”
Will someone bonk this guy on the head for me? Thanks. It doesn’t matter if you don’t see it that way. It’s not easy to change an operating system in a company – logical deduction man, not knowing all the facts, and seeing a sue happy company libelling and slandering the GNU/Linux operating system… and a company is likely to see it as a threat. If you aren’t threatening companies to remove Linux from their systems then what ARE you trying to accomplesh by sending such messages out to those companies?
As a warning? A warning of what? You say yourself you don’t mean to threaten them yet that’s exactly what you’re doing.
The only other possibility I can see is that you’re trying to deface the integrity of Linux…
So how dare you ask why we respond in this way, and cast a cold shoulder and a pompous snuff, saying ‘well we don’t see it that way.’
Learn some ethics.
– SCO, “defender” of UNIX
– IBM, who is one of the leading seller of Linux servers
– Linus Torvalds, representing Linux
– Novell, a small but persistent vendor of a server OS
This smells so Redmond’ish, it’s almost obvious they use SCO as a scape-goat to shuffle the server OS market.
I predict SCO will go after SUN next.
Metallica did a big mistake naming their new album St Anger.
They should have called it Sue ‘m All! (A SCO inspiration).
But if they did I guess that SCO would have sued them too
🙁
Someone mentioned this on /. I didn’t know of it.
URL: http://www.sco.com/ibmlawsuit/ibm5-27.qxd.pdf
It’s just a fax or a scan from paper but it’s rather amusing. Published by SCO.com, May 27, 2003.
[IBM] “denies the averments of paragraph 6, except admits that IBM’s principal place of business is in the State of New York.”
SCO reminds me of the Nazis or a rabbid animal. It just runs around attacking everyone else until someone puts a bullet in its proverbial head. Where’s the gun?
A rabid animal, sure, but Nazis? Why the obtuse and out-dated reference?
bullhorn: …Place the “It’s a long way to Tipperary” album on the ground, sir. Step AWAY from the album, and put your hands above your head…
Just wondering if someone had a sniper rifle I could borrow for the weekend. I mean somebody has gotta take this guy out. You can’t go around bad mouthing and sueing everyone, what a bunch of pompous bastards.
Uhm, don’t you think it’s a bit psychotic to want to kill someone over some ones and zeros? Sheesh. Darl McBride may be an asshole, but he’s human.
1. As a gun owner, I’m appalled that anyone thinks you could solve a problem in that fashion. Guns kill, my friend. It’s permanent and horrible. Don’t go there.
2. Fundamentally…relax! The rabid animal dies quickly, and the desperation is palpable from SCO. Let ’em go. They’ll be out of money and time soon enough.
Lots of people seem to – for what ever reasons – see Linux & open source (especially GPL) software as a threat. Thus, despite how unjustified the claims made by SCO might be (like it would almost own the whole *nix thing…), SCO may have many strong supporters backing their case, which may also explain why SCO dares to use so strong rhetorics all the time.
Still, in the end Linux will likely not suffer from this so much as some people would want.
Those against the open source movement don’t even now seem to fully understand that the open source development model is here to stay and grow, already out of their grip, and a major force in software business too which should be understood, possibly used, and not just fight against.
On the other hand, the open source people (especially the GNU aficionados…) should learn better that the quality of development, not to mention ethical values, do not usually rule in the software world (or elsewhere), but more often money & power do. Which means that proprietary software is here to stay too – side by side with open source software.
Why can’t these people just accept the facts, and use what ever sofware development model and license (proprietary, open source or a combination of them) is best in each case? Open source does not ruin software business, and proprietary software is not a threat to open source software development.
Hey, quick show of hands for anybody here not being sued by SCO yet?
Thank you reverand, but I was just cracking a joke. My point was that how did we ever lower our tolerances enough to let a bunch of slime become powerful people ie(CEO’s, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Governers, and Senators).
I gotta say as long as they don’t try and sue me they’ll stay alive.
Q: To rectify the alleged violations, why doesn’t SCO just contribute that code to the open source community?
A: SCO has invested millions of dollars in developing its’ UNIX IP. SCO believes in protecting the value of intellectual property for itself and others. Software companies have invested billions of dollars in IP and should not expect that others freely take it for their use.
“SCO has invested millions of dollars in developing its’ UNIX IP.”
Disregarding the superfluous apostrophe, they seem to be implying that they developed UNIX. What has SCO “developed” into its UNIX IP? “printf(“You are using SCO(R) UNIX(TM). We 0wNz UNIX. Take that, open source.
“);” Hoo boy.
SCO is doing Microsoft’s bidding with these lawsuits. MS wants to be able to go to large companies and government officals and say, “Linux is risky, there could be another lawsuit at anytime and you’ll have to stop using Linux or pay fines!” MS knows from experience that the pace of the courts in the US is so much slower than the pace of the technology business, they can win in business even if they loose in the courts. By the time the IBM $1B lawsuit is settled, MS will have 6 months to a year of FUD to fall back on.
It is pretty obvious to me.
I hear SCO is planning to sue the Gideons, something about the Book of Revelations containing old Unix code. 😛
int i = 0;
Blatantly ripped from System V. Here come the lawyers….
Hmm, anyone able to list 5 companies SCO isn’t sueing? LOL
Dammit, SCO just needs to die a slow death… I hope they sue EVERY company, and lose every single court date, then go bankrupt and fade off to nothing!!
Novell should GPL the Unix code and bring this whole circus to a screeching halt. That would make my day. Of course then they would be sued by SCO, but what else is new?
What’s the basis for the 1 Billion dollar number anyway? Are they suggesting that everyone who downloaded Linux would have bought SCO products instead? Ridiculous.
-Bob
Linux getting a lot of media coverage due to this SCO thing. In the end, I think Linux wins… which ever way this whole thing goes.
Let me get this straight – SCO found hundreds of lines of matching code?? The kind of noise that SCO was making I though that they had tens of thousands of lines. There is something like 15 million lines in a modern OS. So SCO is making their claims on something like 0.001% of all the code in one distro of Linux. Even if SCO can prove clean ownership of that amount of code it can probably replaced within hours considering the size of the workforce now available to Linux community. I still wonder just how may stolen lines of code are hidden in SCO Unix closed code. It time for the Linux comunity to start demanding that the accuser come out and prove to Us the accused the fact of their statements.
Stolen code in SCO probably has more to do with them wanting NDA’s on the people will view the code more than anything else. If the code is in linux, then the code is out the open. So not much point in hiding it, right? Unless there’s something else you need to hide.
A coworker of mine used to work for SCO. In fact, he did so for a number of years. He explained to me that there is a great deal of stolen source code in SCO unix. He said while he was working there, this was not uncommon among the industry as a whole. It’s hard to get caught if no one can view your code, right? His exact words were “SCO is built from the stolen code”.
He also said that if there’s any code in both (which he said is unlikely), it was taken from Linux.
He hasn’t worked for SCO for a great deal of years (think it was 5 years ago), but I believe he did work there for 5-10 years. He said that the top execs there were all huge crooks.
So I think that the people already convinced that this is all utter BS are right. As for the MS conspiracy theory, I think it’s possible but that doesn’t make it true. We’ll just have to see where it goes.
the other possibility is that the code originates from BSD, which was then incorporated into System V and later borrowed to Linux (from BSD sources, not System V, since the license permits it, well it even _encourages_ it
. there could be thousands of such lines out there. maybe it would be interesting to compare Linux and e.g., 4.4BSD-Lite2 sources, just out of curiosity.
I know Linux borrowed a lot of things directly from BSD (networking I believe; everyone likes that damn TCP/IP stack), so why should the code go through an (illegal) proxy? Seems simpler the first way.
Ah, but on the MS conspiracy angle –
you have the fact the Microsoft OSes have suddenly got realistic uptimes now;
you have the likeliehood that SCO and MS made liberal use of Linux to get their respective – if not respectable – products respectable, since it’s not that</> likely that either MS or SCO had the resources for developing a fully-functional enterprize-ready OS – a cast of thousands of programmers and debuggers;
and you have the timimg of the court suit, the timing of Microsoft’s perchase of an unnecessary Unix source code license, and so on and so forth;
Of course, I could be blowing smoke out of my nether regions, but it is terribly addictive to make stories – at least, unlike a certain Darl McBride, I don’t go believing them and suing everything in sight! ;^)
Lets just assume for a minute that there is bad code that shouldn’t be there, that it does origionate from unix.
Wouldn’t Novell still atleast have rights to distribute it’s old IP. Sure its possible they completly sold it all, but given the nature of their products I truely doubt they would of handed it all over without even retaining the rights to use it. There has been much evidence to the fact that Novell does still own a lot of the IP.
It’s statments like this and sueing Linus that really make SCO lack any credibility, and make this whole ordeal look more like a publicity stunt move. Its very easy to see where the conspiracy theorys involving microsoft get their roots from.
What does SCO have to gain from all this?
“On the other hand, the open source people (especially the GNU aficionados…) should learn better that the quality of development, not to mention ethical values, do not usually rule in the software world (or elsewhere), but more often money & power do. Which means that proprietary software is here to stay too – side by side with open source software. ”
There’s a reason for that. Hint:end user. If people want quality software developed in an ethical manner then they need to ask for it. One can’t depend on it to occur naturally.
“what does SCO have to gain from all this”? $8.8 million form licenses, to two new accounts -I’ll bet that one of those is Microsoft at $8 million so far. It turns out that some people are willing to pay big for FUD.
“Hmm, anyone able to list 5 companies SCO isn’t sueing? LOL”
No, but i can list the next 2000 in line …
http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=…
“Sue McBride implied that SCO’s Unix customers, which he pointed out include many hardware and software makers and numerous Fortune 2000 companies, may themselves be in line for lawsuits.”
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1011627.html
“To the extent we want to deal with copyright issues down the road, we have our attorneys working on that,” McBride said.”
Linux is mostly used in low end servers. That is the bulk of the installed base. The kernel does not matter that much. Any “possibly tainted” kernel can be swapped with a compile-it-yourself Linus kernel at least for the time being and you and your company will not be affected by any of the legal troubles.
You can then say “Sue me too!”
Eh, corpies….
“There’s a reason for that. Hint:end user. If people want quality software developed in an ethical manner then they need to ask for it. One can’t depend on it to occur naturally.”
Well, yes. But what I simply meant is that the most harsh black-and-white wars between the most stubborn open and closed source defenders often do no good to software development – nor to end users. Of course one should defend oneself and not be naive, but often too on-sided attitudes seem just increase useless fears and the amount of fighting like what we see now in this SCO vs. IBM/Novell/Linus/etc. case.
Both open and closed sourced software have been there practically from the beginning and probably will be there in the future too. I do think that open source model is generally a better and more ethical philosophy, but others may and do disagree, which is fine for me, bacause the pros and cons may vary according to a case.
I’m sure that the end users would be more than happy if the (open & closed source) software developers would concentrate on developing a bit less buggier software instead of just concentrating on trying to conquer the whole world with their ideologies or business monopolies.
Also:
Open source people should understand that software business in purely open source way may just often be much more difficult than doing business in a proprietary software world. In the open source circles this seems to be a tabu though, not allowed to be said openly.
SCO tried the open source model & Linux too, maybe they made some mistakes in their Linux strategy, but anyway it didn’t help them to avoid their financial troubles. So now they have changed the sides completely and seem to be quite desperate.
Open source software may be more ethical and easier to develop etc., but it is understandable that things like open enmity against proprietary software may cause software business people to have doubts and fears about the whole open source movement.
Instead of these two software development models and camps trying to replace and mock each other it might be more useful and realistic to try to coexist peacefully and (heaven save us from it!;-) even cooperate more.
” A coworker of mine used to work for SCO. In fact, he did so for a number of years. He explained to me that there is a great deal of stolen source code in SCO unix. He said while he was working there, this was not uncommon among the industry as a whole. It’s hard to get caught if no one can view your code, right? His exact words were “SCO is built from the stolen code”.
He also said that if there’s any code in both (which he said is unlikely), it was taken from Linux.
He hasn’t worked for SCO for a great deal of years (think it was 5 years ago), but I believe he did work there for 5-10 years. He said that the top execs there were all huge crooks.”
Hearsay? Anyway, if any of this is true, then these people need to come forward, or forever be hated by everyone who does code “just for fun.” Maybe it wouldn’t be illegal to stay quiet about an obvious crime, but it is definitely not right.
I certainly hope someone “in the know” does come forth and put an end to this, because not 5 minutes after this started, I publicly speculated that SCO was the thief, otherwise why make so much noise?
That’s scary if it is true. That they could steal code and nobody would be the wiser because of all the NDA’s? What’s stopping them from stealing code out of linux and saying ‘this is our code’, eh? Who, that might know better, can legally argue – besides the accused!?
I’m probably not the only one that think of the following 2(let’s make 3) scenarios:
1) UNIX sources are released for free (Novell could do this?)
2) the right to licence UNIX is bought by Microsoft (from SCO)
3) (why not; we have plenty of time ’till Christmas) UNIX copyrights are bought by Microsoft and sources are released for free. 🙂
Obs: I’m not an expert in IP so please don’t shoot. 😉
There are two things in Caldera/SCO’s lawsuit against IBM that I find interesting.
The first is that the document (intentionally?) confuses x86 architecture (which Linux is mostly targeted at) with tanium architecture (which Caldera/SCO and IBM’s Project Monterey was aimed at) by repeatedly stating just “Intel Architecture”.
The second is the claim that Linux would never have become enterprise-capable without the SCO/Unix (nee AT&T SVRx) code that was supposedly misappropriated by IBM, which brought
scalability (The System/360)
multitasking (OS/360)
multiple users (CICS)
virtual memory (OS/VS1)
multiple processors (The IBM 3033)
practical networking (SNA)
encryption (DES)
high-speed laser printing (the 3800 printing subsystem)
fault-tolerance (through the purchase of Sequent)
relational databases (DB/2)
clustering (Sysplex)
to the enterprise.
All -before- Caldera acquired the AT&T code from Novell. And almost all before IBM got a Unix license to develop AIX.
@hiryu
The current (sue-happy) SCO is ‘SCO Group’ which used to be Caldera a year or so ago. It is _not_ the same SCO which ported UNIX to PCs, first as Xenix, then as SCO/Unix. That SCO is now called Tarantella. Which SCO did your buddy work for?
Are fat cat executives and leech lawyers in the corporation you’re working for bleeding it dry with unbelievably excessive wages? Does your corp. no longer have the means of providing these leeches with those HUGE wages because they have grinded all the technically competent/innovative people working for your company into the ground or chased them away with that irksome, dilbertesque “I have a MBA so I can manage anything” mentality? Well don’t fret. There is a solution for you… Its time for a frivolous lawsuit! Or 1,500 of them. SUE! SUE! SUE!
*burn in corporate hell SCO :-p*
**I’m no legal expert and all of my comments&questions are personal question with no legal or incriminating basis.. in fact i void all liability from these words as they are all of a lay person with no understanding of the basis of SCO’s legal proceedings** <– just so i don’t get sued
Microsoft can keep on buying IP from SCO and fund a lengthy law case?
BSD stuff went through legal proceedings and now still alive and moving along… Linux will find a way to move along. (not sure where.. but i am sure it will move along some place..)
As I said.. i don’t know the laws, esp in USA.
Well, AT&T/USL filed a somewhat similar suit against the University of California at Berkeley 10 years ago because of BSD… And the judge found out that their Unix code had a lot of code ripped from BSD without any licence or credit. They settled the case outside the court (if I remember) because they were going to lose and probably get sued. The same thing could probably happens if they find out Linux code in SCO.
I just hope that SCO didn’t/won’t corrupt the judge, as it’s probably the only way they would win the case.
OK, Lets start keeping score… SCO wants to sue:
IBM
Linus
Fortune 500 Companies who use Linux
Novell
(have I left anyone out?)
Has SCO just given up on the idea of making money on the sale, services and support of thier product? After they sue everyone, how will they make money then?
You know, SCO has had to change their Stock symbol several times over the past year or so with name changes and reverse stock splits. If I remember right, It went from CALD, to CALDD to SCO… or something like that…
I vote the next stock symbol they use is SUE!!!
If certain code is open source, then if SCO use it, you cannot say SCO stole it.
But if SCO claims they own the code and they say “Hey, you stole our code”, now that’s stealing.
>The current (sue-happy) SCO is ‘SCO Group’ which used to be Caldera a year or so ago. It is _not_ the same SCO which ported UNIX to PCs, first as Xenix, then as SCO/Unix. That SCO is now called Tarantella. Which SCO did your buddy work for?
Are you sure about this? The “original SCO that ported UNIX to PCs” is called Microsoft
. SCO bought Xenix from them and turned it into SCO/Unix. I think it is the same Santa Cruz Operations Group.
@Greg – You’re probably right about Microsoft Xenix -> SCO/Unix.
As I recall, the rest of the timeline goes like this: (some of this may be/is probably wrong)
After the 1984 judicial breakup of AT&T, AT&T forms Unix System Labs to commercialize Unix SVR4
SVR4 is licensed to HP (HP/UX), SGI (IRIX), IBM (AIX) and others for their proprietary hardware.
Santa Cruz Operations (no ‘Group’) continues with SCO/Unix for x86.
Linus starts building his own POSIX kernel. (Note – IIRC, he has said in interviews that he wanted POSIX on x86, not a Unix clone)
AT&T decides they don’t want to be in software, sells USL IP to Santa Cruz. (Or maybe this was later & sold to Novell)
Novell buys the SCO/Unix IP from Santa Cruz, original SCO goes off to do other things. (don’t know when they form/rename themselves Tarantella)
SCO/Unix becomes Novell Unixware.
Ray Noorda leaves Novell, forms VC company. Caldera begins as a Linux company. It also gets DR-DOS, which Novell had purchased earlier.
Caldera gets rights to all Novell Unix IP – both Unixware and SVR4 Unix.
Caldera forms partnership with IBM (and ???) in Project Monterey to port SVR4 (and/or Unixware) to Itanium.
Caldera renames itself SCO Group.
Itanium I sucks, IBM pulls out of Project Monterey.
IBM gets Linux running on System 390/ z-series (this may have occurred earlier).
SCO Group sues IBM and everybody.
This is all from memory, so details have a probability of being wrong, but the general flow of SCO -> Novell -> Caldera/SCO Group is right.