A Proposal of Truce (LinuxWorld)

Posted Feb 15, 2004 16:57 UTC (Sun) by neoprene (guest, #8520) [Link]

What "IP" do you specifically refer to?? The one SCOX claims to own that Novell convincingly demonstrated it never sold?

Wake up Nathan Hand, while SCOX should stop infringing on GPL, SCOX owns no Copyrights or Patents that could challenge Linux.

Stop bolstering SCOX's false claims. This is another .com red herring.

Posted Feb 15, 2004 17:22 UTC (Sun) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

I, for one, don't acknowledge software patents and don't check my code for possible patent violations. If "IP" (I miss the days when it meant "Internet Protocol") includes software patents, the letter is not in my name.

Legitimizing of software patents by free software community is very dangerous. If we acknowlege the "IP" of SCO today, tomorrow companies with bogus software patents will demand equal treatment.

Please don't overestimate the danger of SCO compared to a company with a patent for e.g. hyperlinks or optimizing compilers.

Posted Feb 15, 2004 17:34 UTC (Sun) by dlapine (guest, #7358) [Link]

It's a good letter, and won't hurt the Linux community if it receives widespread publicity.

The letter reads like a laundry list of actions by SCO that are harmful to the linux community; it certainly doesn't support SCO's IP claims, other that to simply say that SCO must support our IP claims if they want us to support theirs.

It's not feeding a troll to write that SCO has made IP claims, because they have. The letter is intelligent in that it spells out clearly that SCO certainly shouldn't expect others to give them rights that SCO denies the linux community.

I realize that Linuxworld is packaging it as if it were a truce offer, but it looks more like a list of grievances than a real recognition of SCO's claims. It's useful to collect and publish the list of harmful actions that SCO has taken against us.

Posted Feb 15, 2004 21:55 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

We don't need a truce with SCO, and to suggest otherwise gives them more credibility than they deserve. In any case, they are going down to defeat. Given this, the best strategy is for all editorial references to them in the Linux press to be completely dismissive. A party that is confident of victory does not ask for a truce.

I don't want SCO to start respecting the GPL as part of a truce. I want a court to order it, so that never again can anyone claim that the GPL has not been tested in court.

Posted Feb 15, 2004 23:00 UTC (Sun) by zedman (guest, #12798) [Link]

>Stop telling the public that you can charge a fee for Linux. You may
>charge whatever you like for your own intellectual property, but you may
>not disobey the terms of the General Public License that we have chosen
>for Linux. Our license specifically requires no-fee licensing for our
>intellectual property. You are violating our intellectual property right
>by attempting to charge a fee for the use of Linux.

Relevant licenses (in this case the GPL) do *not* forbid the
charging of a fee for redistribution, *provided* other terms
of the license are upheld.

Much as it goes against the grain, for SCO to charge a fee is not actually
a breach of license in itself.

On the other hand, SCO threatening end-users unless they pay up
would seem to go way beyond what the GPL allows.

Ian

Posted Feb 15, 2004 23:12 UTC (Sun) by wildpossum (guest, #17744) [Link]

You only make truces with reasonable people.

SCOX will turn this around and make PR of it.

You don't speak for me, Nathan Hand. Let SCOX get flattened in court.

Posted Feb 15, 2004 23:13 UTC (Sun) by NZheretic (guest, #409) [Link]

The following is the wording of the printed statement that Neville Chamberlain waved as he stepped off the plane on 30 September, 1938 after the Munich Conference had ended the day before:

"We, the German Führer and Chancellor, and the British Prime Minister, have had a further meeting today and are agreed in recognizing that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for our two countries and for Europe.
We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe"

Chamberlain read the above statement in front of 10 Downing St. and said:

"My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time...
Go home and get a nice quiet sleep."

The SGO Group's rhetoric attacks against the legal validity of the GNU General Public License started only after the SCO Group signed an aggreement with Microsoft for the licensing of unnecessary rights.

The SCO group and Microsoft claim that the millions of dollars is payment for the right to license the Unix API in Microsoft's Services For Unix ( SFU ) product.

A bit of History, Softway Systems wrote the NT DDL POSIX compatablity Layer in 1995, and Microsoft aquired Softway in 1999. The OS level was written to the POSIX standards, for which AT&T and later Novell relinquished all copyright claims for for both the ANSI/IEEE (POSIX) and Federal Information Processing Standards Publication FIPS 151-2 (POSIX.1) and FIPS 189 (POSIX.2) standards. Microsoft should know this because they themselves participated in the FIPS roundtables. The SCO Group itself admits that it does not hold any of the AT&T/USL patents, any of which would be well past it's seventeen years, available now royalty-free and secured with decades of published prior-art.

Microsoft's SFU and Interix products are in no way dependent upon the IP that SCO holds.

Microsoft has extended SFU without further violating SCO's ( now claimed as Novell's ) intellectual property. Microsoft embrace and extend the source from the unencumbered OpenBSD varient...
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030927090008

IMO the only real reason for Microsoft paying the SCO Group is to finance the SCO Groups Anti-GPL,Anti-Linux,Anti-open source campaign.

Darl McBride and Co have permanently damaged the reputation of the SCO brand. No one is going to want to deal with an organization which continually threatens its own customer base with legal action. In a search for an exit strategy for its major stakeholder, the Canopus Group, and later to fraudulently boost the overinflated stock price, Darl McBride and Co have decimated the future of Calera Linux and their branches of the AT&T/USL/Novell/SCO Unix. But because Microsoft is now the SCO Groups largest source of revenue, Darl McBride and Co are effectively locked in a course diametrically opposed to its own future existance.

Linux developers and advocates have made repeated overtures to the SCO Group, requesting that the SCO Group come clean and show the offending lines of code along with proof of "ownership" by the SCO Group of the violated code. The SCO Group refuses to do so, even when it is a legal requirement to do so when seeking damages.

In the press, Darl McBride and Co have repeatedly contradicted their own past claims and statements in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain it's stock price and damage Linux.
http://www.groklaw.net/quotes/index.phtml

As with Chamberlain, if you entered into negotiation and even signed a treaty with the SCO group, Darl and Co would just use it as propaganda, an admission of guilt from the Linux kernel developers and users. In the meantime the SCO group would just continue spinning Microsoft's FUD and outright lying.

Posted Feb 16, 2004 0:17 UTC (Mon) by jre (guest, #2807) [Link]

I posted the following to LinuxWorld:

I have three questions (OK, five with the followups) for Nathan Hand:
1) On what evidence do you believe Darl McBride to be a "reasonable man"?
2) If SCO were to accept your terms, how long do you expect they would last as a company, given the ill-will they have already engendered? If the answer is "not long", why in the world should they go for a truce?
3) How do you like SCO's chances of prevailing in their attack on the GPL? If the answer is "not much", why in the world should we go for a truce?

Judged on purely practical grounds, it seems to me that the free software community has little to gain and a lot to lose by attempting to make peace with SCO.
Judged on the grounds of principle, it seems to me that our obligation is to recognize evil, and oppose it.

Posted Feb 16, 2004 1:09 UTC (Mon) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link]

A truce? To h*ll with that. As far as I'm concerned, SCO's options at this point are (1) unconditional surrender or (2) total elimination.

Peter Yellman

Posted Feb 16, 2004 2:07 UTC (Mon) by sed_and_awk (guest, #19483) [Link]

I don't recognize the author as either a representative of the company that SCO brought the law suit against or as a prominent contributor to the linux kernel, so what makes him believe he is in a position to offer a truce? A truce between two parties with dubious creditionals is of little value.

Posted Feb 16, 2004 4:05 UTC (Mon) by dusty (guest, #14668) [Link]

Nah. I dont buy it. A truce means both parties want to settle, and does anyone really want to settle with SCO? Is it even possible to have fair dealings with horse traders? Methinks not! <BR>
SCO started this fiasco, and I am sorry but they now must be held responsible for their actions.

Posted Feb 16, 2004 5:41 UTC (Mon) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Nathan, you've based your truce on a completely wrong premise. Darl is not a reasonable man. He claimed (and still does) that Linux contains millions of lines of code from System V. Discovery in the IBM case has shown zero lines of System V code provided by SCO. Instead they listed some AIX and Dynix files... He is far from reasonable.

Not to mention his blathering about GPL. One day it's valid (when it suits him), the other it isn't.

He was offered an opportunity to clear this whole thing up many times. He wouldn't take it. Now it's time for Mr Marriot and the rest of IBM to grind him, SCO and their lawyers into dust.

Posted Feb 16, 2004 12:42 UTC (Mon) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

You're rigth. Why should we want a "truce" ? What will that give us that grinding SCO into a fine dust won't ?

I'm sorry, but the time when I considered it possible that SCO could possibly somehow transform itself and become a positive force is long past. The only positive thing we stand to get from them at this point is statuating an example for other companies who migth consider similar behaviour.

It's a bit like Saddam, being hauled out of a hole in the ground by US soldiers having invavded and conquered his entire country, and then he is offering to negotiate. I'm sorry, but at that point he doesn't have anythint to negotiate with anymore. Now, if he'd done that years before, sure. But "negotiating" as a consept is simply meaningless when you have no bargaining-power left.

SCO looks doomed. Even the financial people look like they're starting to get it, the stock is down over 40% from it's top valuation (allthough still sky-high over earlier levels), and the short-interest stays steadily at insane levels. (i.e. the number of people willing to be cold hard cash that SCO is, infact, bullshitting is staying steadily at record levels.)

Offcourse the nerd-population has been saying this for months. I hope there's a few kernel-contributors among the many many many people holding this stock short.

Posted Feb 16, 2004 13:30 UTC (Mon) by vondo (guest, #256) [Link]

"Begs the question" is almost always used incorrectly, and is here too. What you mean to say is "invites the question" or "raises the question."

See here for a better explanation.

Posted Feb 16, 2004 15:36 UTC (Mon) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

SCO is attempting to charge all linux users for what isn't theirs.

They won't show the code. Even when ordered by a judge.

They are liars and cheats, and are attempting an elaborate scam. Any
reasonable question gets lies and evasions as answers.

When it comes to showing proof of ownership, all they can do is yell
slander.

I'm with IBM and Novell here. No truce. Crush them.

Derek