Code red for open source? (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com talks with SCO CEO Darl McBride about the IBM suit. "'We feel very good about the evidence that is going to show up in court. We will be happy to show the evidence we have at the appropriate time in a court setting,' McBride said. 'The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go.'" Despite being yet another insult against the Linux developer community, this remark shows a great ignorance of how that community works. No amount of "laundering" will make the code history go away.

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Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 2, 2003 16:01 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

"We're finding code that looks likes it's been obfuscated to make it look like it wasn't UnixWare code--but it was."

Having a court determine if code has been "obfuscated" is the stuff that nightmares are made of. If IBM loses this, the implications are huge. It seems to me that there's no way IBM can lose, but the little that I do know about the legal process in the US seems to suggest that rational thinking does not always prevail in court.

The last three words of the above quote -- "but it was" -- serve to underscore the arrogance of Darl McBride. There's no way that one can determine a person's intent by looking at a few lines of code, unless they have big chunks that have been copied in unaltered, which seems unlikely.

Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 2, 2003 19:18 UTC (Fri) by southey (subscriber, #9466) [Link]

I'm sure that SCO will probably claim code like for (i=0; i<n; i++) especially given the other things they have claimed :-). Really they have to prove that their code was first - to implement algorithms and standards correctly there are only so many ways to do that. So they have to show that their code is not unique and has no prior art. But they also shoot themselves in the foot by distributing a very current Linux distro containing this very code after the suit was filed.

I'm greatly offended by this for a second time

Posted May 2, 2003 16:14 UTC (Fri) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

First SCO called Linux developers incompetent and painted an entirely
unrealistic picture of the importance and abilities of SCO's software. Now
they are calling the Linux developers untrustworthy.

If the evidence is so strong, how could revealing it before the trial hurt
SCO? There is no way to tamper with history when it is splattered across
so much of the Internet. Do they expect us to somehow magically change the
documents in their possession and on everyone's hard drives?

Why doesn't SCO at least tell us which program or library they are talking
about? Their claims get less and less credible the longer they drag this
out. Maybe they are hoping their stock will continue to rise based on this
speculation. I'd really like to know. From reading the initial claims,
you would think they were talking about the kernel proper but apparently
that is not the case.

Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 2, 2003 18:04 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Is that headline supposed to suggest that SCO is performing a terrorist attack, or that the UNIX source is a destructive virus? Or is there some other possible meaning that I'm not seeing?

Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 2, 2003 20:42 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

The former, I'd speculate.

Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 2, 2003 23:27 UTC (Fri) by fandom (subscriber, #4028) [Link]

If I don't understand usa movies wrong, when there a civil case like this there are
'depositions' if which lawyers from both sides get to question potential witnesses, so
that there are not taken by surprise by what they may say when they take the stand.

So, what difference could it make to state their case now? and if the case was really
any good, would it really make a difference? If they think their case can be 'laundererd'
they can't have that much confidence in winning themselves, can they?

Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 3, 2003 3:40 UTC (Sat) by utidjian (subscriber, #444) [Link]

IANAL (always wanted to say that ;-))... but...

The process is called "discovery". I do not know in which cases it applies or when it applies during the process. Basically the defense gets to see what the prosecution has as far as evidence goes. It does NOT mean that they get to view the briefs or notes or whatever of either side.

Basically IBM already has the Linux source code... and presumably the SCO source code... so they already have the evidence that SCO is going to use. I think they are going to be doing some serious grepping and diffing... there is a lot of code. There are probably some very efficient methods for indexing it and searching for very long strings.

-DU-...etc...

Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 10, 2003 3:14 UTC (Sat) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Hmmm... on a quick look, I find that (contrary to my perception) you can do discovery in a civil case.

I knew in criminal cases, it was mostly the defendant who got discovery rights, I'd assume something similar applies in the civil realm...

but I'm not a lawyer; I just play on on the net.

Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 5, 2003 17:46 UTC (Mon) by jsherrill (guest, #11013) [Link]

One interesting piece of history or, as the lawyers say, prior
art, I have not seen mentioned is Lions' Commentary on
UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code. Western Electric's
lawyers prevented its publication in 1977 but SCO granted
permission for it to be published in 1996. This web page
http://www.terrigal.net.au/~acms/history/t00003/t0000300.htm
has more details.

--joel sherrill

Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 6, 2003 12:29 UTC (Tue) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link]

What has SCO got left?

They've lost all their good coders, they are down from
a staff of over 1200 to what, about a little less than
100 in ten years?

What does SCO do now? File lawsuits. That's all.

In short, they no longer matter. All they can
do at this juncture is make things worse for
others. They are pretty much an ex-parrot. Dead.

A software technology company run by folks who have never
written a "hello world" routine in their lives
will die.