LWN: Comments on "SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux"

Easier way to get a license

cpm — 2003-07-23T19:49:16+00:00

Right, and they never do.
That sorta sits at the core
of the whole thing, doesn't
it?

Occam's razor applies here.

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

cpm — 2003-07-23T19:47:20+00:00

Hypothetically;

The trust layer is always a variable.
Yes, the straw man "you" could have stolen
the code and included it for review and
had it later adopted.

Be we are not talking about a straw man,
we are talking exactly about IBM.

Nothing SCO has said yet about this
so-called case has made any sense.
Everytime and I mean everytime it looks
like they might get pinned down they
change the story, changing the rules.

Can you come up with an example of a developer
who would have been the type of person
who did this?

Yes, SCO has stated that it is the Kernel
code they are talking about, then they
have stated it is not the kernel code.

If it isn't the kernel, it isn't Linux.
Linux is the kernel.

does SCO own the copyright? What copyright?
The whole history of the "Unix wars" is
so convoluted that the very few who understand
them have a very difficult time explaining
them.

As to whether SCO is harping about lines
of code, or IP, well, that changes. Depends
on which formal complaint.

Yes, it is acrimonious.

SCO has gone from how many to how many in
how long? What do they do now? Peddle licenses
and lawsuits. They are dead. I think it's
not just a little disingenious to think
that the whole MS/SCO license agreement a
back room deal to try to harm the entire
linux movement.

It's a very old trick, "Let's see 'em deny it".

Works really well in the press and doesn't cost
much.

SCO is nothing but big bosses and lawyers anymore.
This whole "IP" thing is so perverse it's sick.

I'm going to dare scox to sue me

walterbyrd — 2003-07-22T21:44:52+00:00

I'm going to call scox and say: "According to you, I'm using Linux illegally. I'm not going to stop, and I'm not going buy UnixWare."

What do you think scox will do?

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

MLKahnt — 2003-07-22T17:08:28+00:00

I think it is less a question of whether the teams were kept separate than if SCO did include GPL'd code into UnixWare, it may well have happened before the transfer to Caldera, rather than from the time of having two active programming teams. While Novell did some nominal work with Unix after acquiring it, SCO has not had a reputation of active development or vision of the future of that system, which is why the development mindspace has moved to Linux and the *BSDs.

An observation, however - the licenses matter. GPL'd code except as GPL'd callable modules would be a no-no for inclusion. BSD licensed stuff, however, is legal, AFAIK.

I remember reading, years ago (as in late '80s of some previous millenium) that the SCO name was chosen as a marketing slight of hand - they tried to sneak in under the radar of large companies by leaving the impression that they were an office of the company, located in Santa Cruz.

Meanwhile,,,, back in Florida...

MLKahnt — 2003-07-22T16:55:22+00:00

Noticing the listed cases on which David Boies made his reputation - I'm not sure about the New York Yankees vs. Major League Baseball case, but wrt the Al Gore Florida election case and the CBS vs. General Westmoreland, he was on the losing side of both of those. Great track record ;)

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

Wol — 2003-07-22T12:04:01+00:00

Get an ex-SCO employee to sign a legal affidavit, and the linux developer concerned can demand that SCO release it into court.

If SCO won't show its codebase then, they have effectively admitted IN COURT that they are guilty of theft.

Bearing in mind SuSE now employs most of Caldera's linux developers, maybe one of them could spill the beans... or did SCOldera do the right thing and keep the Unix and linux teams apart ...

Cheers,
Wol

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

jdthood — 2003-07-22T06:11:55+00:00

> Now they are claiming ownership of the whole thing, going to do
> a binary package of it

They do NOT say that they are going to distribute Linux binaries.

That would be even more confrontational than what they are already
doing -- which is offering to license the binaries that people are
already running.

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

walterbyrd — 2003-07-22T03:47:39+00:00

>>It is time to start ask questions about the procedures used at SCO
to ensure that their codebase is clean! <<

You can ask questions, but you won't get answers for sco. SCO will not show it's codebase to anybody. Ex-SCO employees have stated that SCO was frantically stealing GPL code.

FSF now has "Legal Standing"

freeio — 2003-07-22T03:03:32+00:00

ftp.sco.com is an interesting site. While downloading the above, I took a look around with gftp and found that the S390 linux source is found here on sco's site.

ftp.sco.com/pub/updates/OpenLinux/3.1.1/Workstation/CSSA-2003-020.0/RPMS

Why does that matter? Well, the S390 linux is the only linux version for which FSF owns the overall copyright. IBM donated that to FSF. SCO is non-compliant with GPL, and is distributing code for which FSF specifically owns the overall copyright. Thus FSF has "legal standing" for copyright claims, since under the circumstances, sco is now distributing FSF code without a license.

Remember, the GPL is the only license anyone has to distribute linux. Since sco is flagrantly violating the GPL, they have forfeitted their GPL license to release linux at all. They are thus infringing copyrighted material belonging to the Free Software Foundation.

Easier way to get a license

dark — 2003-07-22T00:16:05+00:00

Hmm, it wasn't gone when I looked again just now :) Maybe you're not set up right for FTP urls? If you're firewalled you need to use passive ftp.

Clean UnixWare code ?

nicke — 2003-07-21T23:26:23+00:00

Looking through the list of features in UnixWare that are
not from the old SysV codebase one cannot help but wonder how
much of the new stuff:
hardware support (USB,SCSI3 ... driverers for a lot of hardware),
scalability etc
are based on concepts and/or actual code based on work done by the Linux community? this in addition to the contested "derivative work" like RCU
and NUMA

We all know that they have been involved in the Linux development
and the question I ask is if it is possible for a company like SCO
to develop all this without "borrowing" from the GPL Linux codebase.

It is time to start ask questions about the procedures used at SCO
to ensure that their codebase is clean!

Meanwhile,,,, back in Florida...

alonzo — 2003-07-21T22:30:01+00:00

Looks like SCO's lawyer is having a little problem of his own.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17302-2003Jul19.html

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

walterbyrd — 2003-07-21T22:14:05+00:00

>>RCU, JFS, SMP, NUMA<<

SCO also claims to own: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and C++. SCO has hinted that they may also own MacOS and MS-Windows.

Easier way to get a license

Kef — 2003-07-21T21:16:21+00:00

It is gone from SCO's site now... How come? :c)

Easier way to get a license

allesfresser — 2003-07-21T20:55:54+00:00

I know they didn't say it explicitly--it's a synthesis: (a) They're still distributing 2.4.13 under GPL, (b) They say that people have been infringing since 2001, therefore, 2.4.13 seems to be the last version they aren't complaining about. They are very foggy in the extreme about their understanding of "Linux" in the first place--they can't seem to figure out the difference between the kernel and the aggregate collection of software in general--so the synthesis seemed as logical as anything else I can think of related to this psychotic case...

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

Odysseus — 2003-07-21T20:23:11+00:00

>> This is way SCO won't actually show the alledged infringing code -

Actually we know most of the claimed infringements

RCU
JFS
SMP
NUMA
AND MORE....

to wit,
Anything ever developed by any licensee of Unix from AT&T, Novell, USL, old-SCO and SCO/Caldera that has ended up in Linux belongs to SCO.

Easier way to get a license

sandy_pond — 2003-07-21T20:15:10+00:00

If that's the last version they say is legal

Go back and reread. They said no such thing.

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

Crusher-1 — 2003-07-21T20:09:42+00:00

Google search:

Ransom+Love+conference+Linux+Unix = SCO dead in the water. Ransom Love
gave a speech at a major conference. In said speech he stated that Caldera would
"help" the development of the Linux kernal, and made direct mention of the 64bit
development by make Unix codes available to the developers.

If you read the speech and then look into IP and "trade secrets" one will find that
SCO's claims are essentially baseless. Also, they started this soon after a couple
of the news sites posted the article with the details about Mr Love's speech.

The first sign of backpedelling is concessions. "Ok, so maybe if the trial doesn't go
well we can still scare the CIO's and Legal teams at various companies and make a
little cash then - that way we still don't have to actually have a product or
development cycle".

The other thing to remember is that this is a contract dispute overall. This is way
SCO won't actually show the alledged infringing code - if they did that all the steam
would go out of the FUD campaign.

Expect more twists and turns as the trial date gets closer. Perhaps, we will actually
see a buy out. Oh, and does anyone know SCO's stock value right now - gee it
seems that everytime they pull this it goes up! Hmmm, can you say day trading on
the specs?

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

dkite — 2003-07-21T20:01:43+00:00

I think SCO is making a grave mistake here.

Up till now there has been alot of very hot air with regards to linux itself. Now they
are claiming ownership of the whole thing, going to do a binary package of it, and
license it. Included in linux is a huge body of code that clearly doesn't belong to
them, is clearly licensed, clear as to provenance, and clearly owned by the various
kernel hackers. They are including that in the license, or they must be, since a
binary linux to work (if it is actually linux) must include them.

Are they assuming that the developers will be happy with a portion of the take?
Or are they assuming that they don't care about their property which they
licensed under the GPL?

What will the reaction be if say, Al Viro, announces that the binary linux is ok as
long as it doesn't have any of his bio code in it? Or Linus says it's ok as long as
none of his code is in it? Etc. There won't be a whole lot left, I think.

Or maybe someone will call the prosecutor about a theft.

Derek

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

brouhaha — 2003-07-21T19:51:21+00:00

1 - Does SCO actually own the copyright? If not, then IBM simply stole it from someone else, so this isn't entirely a good thing.

What??? If SCO doesn't own the copyright on the code in question, it does NOT follow that IBM stole anything.

For instance, IBM almost certainly owns the copyright to the read-copy-update (RCU) code. This code was developed by Sequent who was acquired by IBM. SCO claims that their contract with IBM gives SCO ownership of any modifications to Unix that IBM develops. But this is based on an interpretation of the contract clause that is very unlikely to be upheld by a court, IMHO. There's a remote chance that SCO might have some limited rights to RCU, but not exclusive ownership.

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

kunitz — 2003-07-21T19:40:16+00:00

SCO announced today there new marketing campaign: "April, 1st, all year". CEO Darl McBride explained to reporters today, that tests with focus groups have shown to increase the brand recognition dramatically. SCO will now do everything to become the most well known brand in America and in the rest of the world, even if it needs to sue Coca Cola for the use of the letters C and O. Industry analysts commented, that this might be a very smart move by the company, given that its brand name consists almost 67% of the letters C and O and Coca Cola uses both letters two times. SCO Vice Presiden Chris Sontag is quoted by reporters with the question: "Do you know how often the word Copyright, containing also C and O, has been found by researchers in our UNIX code?"

SCO says it's in your best interest to wait till you are sued before buying in:

jcurious — 2003-07-21T19:29:32+00:00

I realy find this quote intresting:
"SCO will hold harmless commercial Linux customers that purchase a UnixWare license against any past copyright violations, and for any future use of Linux in a run-only, binary format."

so basically it is in your best interest to wait until you are sued since your rights to linux and SCO's copyrights are greater before you purchase UnixWare ("ANY copyright violation") then after ("use of linux in a run-only, binary format").

Easier way to get a license

KaiRo — 2003-07-21T19:03:42+00:00

From this list of committers, who's working for IBM?

Easier way to get a license

allesfresser — 2003-07-21T19:01:10+00:00

Well, let's think about this another way: sco says people have been infringing since 2001, and their kernel srpm is 2.4.13, which is from Oct. 2001. If that's the last version they say is legal, then let's have a look at the changelog for 2.4.14:

final:
- David Miller: sparc/scsi scatterlist fixes
- Martin Mares: PCI ids, email address update
- David Miller: revert TCP hash optimizations that need more checking
- Ivan Kokshaysky/Richard Henderson: alpha update (atomic_dec_and_lock etc)
- Peter Anvin: cramfs/zisofs missing pieces

pre8:
- Andrea: fix races in do_wp_page, free_swap_and_cache
- me: clena up page dirty handling
- Tim Waugh: parport IRQ probing and documentation fixes
- Greg KH: USB updates
- Michael Warfield: computone driver update
- Randy Dunlap: add knowledge about some new io-apics
- Richard Henderson: alpha updates
- Trond Myklebust: make readdir xdr verify the reply packet
- Paul Mackerras: PPC update
- Jens Axboe: make cpqarray and cciss play nice with the request layer
- Massimo Dal Zotto: SMM driver for Dell Inspiron 8000
- Richard Gooch: devfs symlink deadlock fix
- Anton Altaparmakov: make NTFS compile on sparc

pre7:
- me: reinstate "delete swap cache on low swap" code
- David Miller: ksoftirqd startup race fix
- Hugh Dickins: make tmpfs free swap cache entries proactively

pre6:
- me: remember to bump the version number ;)
- Hugh Dickins: export "free_lru_page()" for modules
- Jeff Garzik: don't change nopage arguments, just make the last a dummy one
- David Miller: sparc and net updates (netfilter, VLAN etc)
- Nikita Danilov: reiserfs cleanups
- Jan Kara: quota initialization race
- Tigran Aivazian: make the x86 microcode update driver happy about
hyperthreaded P4's
- me: shrink dcache/icache more aggressively
- me: fix up oom-killer so that it actually works

pre5:
- Andrew Morton: remove stale UnlockPage
- me: swap cache page locking update

pre4:
- Mikael Pettersson: fix P4 boot with APIC enabled
- me: fix device queuing thinko, clean up VM locking

pre3:
- René Scharfe: random bugfix
- me: block device queuing low-water-marks, VM mapped tweaking.

pre2:
- Alan Cox: more merging
- Alexander Viro: block device module race fixes
- Richard Henderson: mmap for 32-bit alpha personality
- Jeff Garzik: 8139 and natsemi update

pre1:
- Michael Warfield: computone serial driver update
- Alexander Viro: cdrom module race fixes
- David Miller: Acenic driver fix
- Andrew Grover: ACPI update
- Kai Germaschewski: ISDN update
- Tim Waugh: parport update
- David Woodhouse: JFFS garbage collect sleep

Anybody see any possible infringements?

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

davidl — 2003-07-21T19:00:49+00:00

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I'm not a concerned user nor will I ever be. There is no evidence or legal basis whatsoever that says SCO owns anything within Linux. But just on the off chance that they are right, with no evidence whatsoever, we can give them our money to get them off our backs. Come on SCO, please defend your intellectual property rights in court and give us all a laugh will you?

Alternatively, just go out of business, will you? The end cannot be far away. Is that Frank Sinatra I can here?

Easier way to get a license

lyda — 2003-07-21T18:51:32+00:00

i just did that. i post the following log:

kevin@owsla( 7:37)% rpm --checksig -v linux-2.4.13-21D.src.rpm
linux-2.4.13-21D.src.rpm:
MD5 sum OK: 475d343933d92e03c8143b4b2124e873
gpg: Signature made Wed 07 May 2003 22:42:45 IST using DSA key ID C4970D31
gpg: Good signature from "Caldera Security <security@caldera.com>"
gpg: Fingerprint: 2885 2E24 B0BD 3CD0 D063 203B 6E5B 99B2 C497 0D31
kevin@owsla( 7:37)% rpm -qip linux-2.4.13-21D.src.rpm [~]
Name : linux Relocations: (not relocateable)
Version : 2.4.13 Vendor: Caldera International, Inc.
Release : 21D Build Date: Mon 05 May 2003 09:26:30 IST
Install date: (not installed) Build Host: build311.ps.asia.caldera.com
Group : System/Kernel Source RPM: (none)
Size : 27986389 License: GPL
Packager : Ashish Kalra <ashishk@sco.com>
URL : http://www.kernel.org/
Summary : Linux kernel sources and compiled kernel image.
Description :
Linux kernel sources and compiled kernel images.
B-
kevin@owsla( 7:38)% cp linux-2.4.13.tar.bz2.sign src/rpmtree/SOURCES/linux-2.4.13.tar.bz2.sig
kevin@owsla( 7:38)% gpg --verify src/rpmtree/SOURCES/linux-2.4.13.tar.bz2.sig
gpg: Signature made Wed 24 Oct 2001 06:32:44 IST using DSA key ID 517D0F0E
gpg: Good signature from "Linux Kernel Archives Verification Key <ftpadmin@kernel.org>"
gpg: Fingerprint: C75D C40A 11D7 AF88 9981 ED5B C86B A06A 517D 0F0E

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

walterbyrd — 2003-07-21T18:10:17+00:00

>>Well, it's understandable for any media to avoid giving its readers legal advice.<<

How about this: "At this time, there is absolutely no evidence of any kind that SCOX owns Linux."

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

walterbyrd — 2003-07-21T18:07:28+00:00

stark, I'm sorry but: you're really missing something critically important here.

At the very least scox is putting the cart before the horse. Let scox prove they own linux *first* then let scox start talking about royalties or whatever. Doing things the other way around makes no sense. It would be like me putting up a toll both on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Scox is threatening to sue people for using a competitor's product. Scox is saying that is because they own the competitor's product. But scox is only *saying* that. They have offered no proof. It would be like me selling you real estate without ever showing you my deed.

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

tjc — 2003-07-21T17:58:09+00:00

Just when I thought that SCO couldn't go much lower.

Or in the long run, do more for the Linux community.

Assuming that SCO does badly in court, they will have effectively rendered Linux FUD-proof for the near to mid-term future. It won't matter what anyone says that might cast doubt on the legal standing of Linux, the response will be "SCO already tried that and lost."

PS. I hope this post looks OK; I'm posting from a sub-standard system.

Does BSD now belong to SCO?

ctg — 2003-07-21T17:45:22+00:00

This is my understanding of today's disturbing events:

After the BSDI/UCB v. AT&T lawsuit it was sort of found that most of the System V stuff was more/as much BSD than AT&T. That AT&T didn't have the copyright; and BSD was liberally copied into their sources.

Has this decision now been overturned, and all the BSD code copied into System V been assigned to SCO? And this is turn means that now BSD is a copy of System V rather than the other way round.

So any BSD code in Linux is now System V code in Linux?

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

stark — 2003-07-21T17:36:14+00:00

You're really missing something critically important here.

Hypothetically :

If I submit code through LKML to Linus and it gets into the
kernel, and I say "hey, I wrote this, it's cool and works
wonders on the thingamabob" and everyone's happy, and it's
all GPL licensed and everyone uses it, then by your definition
everything is fine and OK.

This is, obviously, patently false, ignorant, and misleading.

The problem is that there is a trust layer in that I said
"I wrote this" when I may, in fact, have stolen it from SCO.

Then the GPL licensed code contains tainted material and it
is wrong (morally, ethically, and legally) to distribute that
GPL licensed code base to the world.

So if IBM submitted code to the Linux kernel that IBM stole from
SCO then IBM has committed fraud and the Linux kernel must remove
that code and nobody is allowed to use that code without SCO's
permission.

So you should be saying "how come SCO is charging me insurance to
use something without proving that it belongs to them?"

I don't think they could win a court case against an end user
unless they can prove that the end user knew the source code
was tainted in some way, so until they release a code fragment
we should all be safe :)

The problems that people _should_ be harping on are :

1 - Does SCO actually own the copyright? If not, then IBM
simply stole it from someone else, so this isn't entirely
a good thing.

2 - Is SCO harping about specific code or IP? If it's IP that's
vaguely defined, then of course we can bash them for being so
frivolous, but if it's a specific line of code then there's
an issue. The problem of "why haven't they released the
code fragments as proof?" is a separate issue.

3 - Has the Linux kernel ever, from any source, not just IBM/SCO,
taken any source code for which we're unsure of the original
source? If so, we should fix that ASAP! An OpenBSD style code
audit would work wonders for the Linux Kernel source tree!

4 - I seem to recall early on in this SCO claiming that the source
code wasn't in the kernel.org sources, but in other sources
that IBM helped develop (I immediately thought of Red Hat's
Advanced Server product.)
Perhaps they are right, and there is a line of code, but it's
not in the kernel and it's only in some vendors' modifications
to the kernel, only in one specific distribution.

In the end, I'm reserving judgement till the code fragments in
question are identified and the issue is resolved. There's simply
too much acrimonious commentary going on here (and seeing as my
employer is under Chapter 11 right now, I don't need any more
acrimony :)

Where is the mainstream media?

trutkin — 2003-07-21T17:17:57+00:00

Well, it's understandable for any media to avoid giving its readers legal advice.

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

Odysseus — 2003-07-21T17:03:15+00:00

Please help polish this up, make it persusasive.

http://twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/SCOvsIBMSCOLicensingJustSayNO

Easier way to get a license

dark — 2003-07-21T16:57:26+00:00

Just download ftp://ftp.sco.com//pub/updates/OpenLinux/3.1.1/Workstation/CSSA-2003-020.0/SRPMS/linux-2.4.13-21D.src.rpm

Now you have linux under a general public license, from the SCO Group.

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

dwalters — 2003-07-21T16:52:03+00:00

This is absolutely incredible!

How dare they ask me for money so that they won't sure me for making money using a free operating system, distributed under the GNU General Public License!

It's difficult to put into words the anger I am feeling right now towards this company.

How can they possibly get away with this? How can they be stopped? Surely the GPL does not allow this?! Or is there a loophole, as long as they themselves aren't distributing Linux? It seems more likely to me that SCO is simply ignoring the GPL, and hoping that it can't be enforced.

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

philips — 2003-07-21T16:24:15+00:00

I will love to see in USA the same action against SCO as in Germany: show the code or shut up.

I do really not understand legal system - but I beleive even IBM can go with this kind of case: IBM already involved. Actually any-one who is in UNIX business involved.

SCO has _*nothing*_ concerning Linux kernel source code infrigement. It will be just sad to see how much people will be bought to SCO.

They just have grown in eyes of publicity big enough - they are attacking Big Blue after all - to persue anyone to pay them money.

I hope that court will dissmiss they motion to enforce license on Linux kernel - if will be any - on base that they gave _*no*_ chance to customers of Linux kernel to aviod IP infrigement.
In fact, they knowingly and willingly forced people to infrige they copyrights for quite long time.

Good Luck there in USA.

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

dvrabel — 2003-07-21T16:10:25+00:00

I always assumed they couldn't actually find any...

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

sandy_pond — 2003-07-21T15:58:28+00:00

Now you know why they will not post the infringing code!!!!

Where is the mainstream media?

walterbyrd — 2003-07-21T15:50:08+00:00

Can we at least get the mainstream media to at least say:

"Linux user do not owe SCO anything"

Would that be so much? Theoretically, the media is supposed to inform the public. I know, in practice, the pop-media is a just a shill for their advertisers.

Still doesn't the media have *some* obligation, *some* concern to alert the public to an absolute fraud?

As you probably already know, SCOX is claiming, that unless Linux users buy UnixWare SCO will sue the Linux users.

>>The company said it plans to offer UnixWare licenses tailored to support run-time, binary use of Linux for all commercial users of Linux based on the 2.4.x and later versions of the Linux kernel. SCO said any commercial Linux customers that purchase the license will be held harmless against past copyright violations and for any future use of Linux in a run-only, binary format<<

http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/2237771

Of course, SCO can not enforce this. But, those who don't know better may be fooled SCOX's attempts at fraud and extortion.

SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

freeio — 2003-07-21T15:44:56+00:00

Hey, you! Yes, you!

You never know what might happen to a nice business like yours. All sorts of things just might happen - the place might burn down, you might get a case of broken kneecaps, or lawyers might appear at your door. It could ruin you! You just never know, do you?

But me and my buddies here can help you with this. Understand? All you gotta do is buy our "insurance," see?

I mean, the choice is yours, of course. But we will be back.