Peace For Our Time

Posted Feb 15, 2004 23:13 UTC (Sun) by NZheretic (guest, #409)
Parent article: A Proposal of Truce (LinuxWorld)

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.