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Another SCO teleconference

SCO has announced another teleconference; this one happened June 6, 2003 at noon, U.S. eastern time. According to this ZDNet article, they have dug up a new contract with Novell that, they say, clarifies the Unix copyright picture.

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Another SCO teleconference

Posted Jun 6, 2003 13:48 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

"Oh, look, we found this thing in a file drawer that says we own every work ever published and that will ever be published. And it has all of your signatures on it! All of them! What's that? You don't have a copy? Guess you must've lost it. We're such a honest company that it's pretty unlikely that we forged it or something."

Another SCO teleconference

Posted Jun 6, 2003 14:04 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (7 responses)

I wonder if they will now comment/gloat about this item, noted in InformationWeek:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10300314
"First Analyst Impressed By SCO's 'Proof'
...
"My impression is that [SCO's claim] is credible," says Laura DiDio, a Yankee Group analyst who was shown the evidence by SCO Group earlier this week. "It appears to be the same" code."

Another SCO teleconference

Posted Jun 6, 2003 15:20 UTC (Fri) by jmitchel (guest, #11611) [Link] (4 responses)

What I wonder is who Laura DiDio is. She seems to have quite a portfolio of soundbites on Google.

Another SCO teleconference

Posted Jun 6, 2003 15:41 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

The following document (links to a conference speaker list as PDF) includes as short CV which makes it pretty clear that Laura DiDio apparently is not a programmer, but a some sort of integration consultant, mostly dealing in Windows stuff.

http://www.yankeegroup.com/public/events/conferences/ITF2003/components/IntegrationTechForumSpeakers.pdf

Based on this and other Google hits, I would not consider her qualified to comment on the code similarities. To get a believeable statement, someone with real operating systems programming experience and knowledge of Unix history needs to be involved.

Another SCO teleconference

Posted Jun 6, 2003 16:33 UTC (Fri) by mdekkers (guest, #85) [Link] (1 responses)

She is a reporter. Check the bio linked to in a previous post. hardly qulified, i think.

Another SCO teleconference

Posted Jun 7, 2003 0:12 UTC (Sat) by utidjian (guest, #444) [Link]


I think she is qualified for French and which end of the mike to put her mouth. Doesn't look like she has ANY formal programming or software experience other than as a user/reporter.

Sorry cheap shot.

-DU-...etc...

Another SCO teleconference

Posted Jun 6, 2003 21:27 UTC (Fri) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link]

I dunno who she is but that name looks highly contrived it would not take much
to re-jig would it now thinkl about it ..Di?do get what i mean ...

nuff said

and as for SCO well i think it is time to sort of deny the existance of SCO Err
who's that never heard of em mate ..what are they some form of fast food out let
or summat ..

pete .

Corporate Analysts

Posted Jun 6, 2003 15:24 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Whenever a corporate analyst issues a press release, it's worth noting that corporate analysts hardly ever do anything without having a customer P.R. department they can bill for the time spent. The right question to ask is, who is the plausible P.R. department customer for this Yankee analysis?

Former U.S. President Lyndon Johnson used to boast that he had never cast an unsold vote. He saw that as testament to his skill at finding someone who wanted him to vote the "right way", and getting a concession for it, which is how U.S. politics works. It is possible for analysts to work that way too. Aberdeen has been very good at finding customers for their careful analyses, while Gartner appears to control expenses by letting the customers do the writing. The analysts with a shred of dignity left have recused themselves already because they recognized that the NDA stacks the cards enough to prevent any chance of anyone publishing a fair analysis.

The crash has been hard on analysts. (You can see that in the periodic, contradictory swings by Gartner as IBM and Microsoft alternately gain control of their corporate voice.) Yankee, here, seems to be demonstrating mainly that they're hungry.

Another SCO teleconference

Posted Jun 6, 2003 15:29 UTC (Fri) by erat (guest, #21) [Link]

If such things are going to be tied to IBM, wouldn't it be more telling if the same code existed between Linux and AIX? IBM isn't the only source licensee, unless I'm mistaken. As pointed out somewhere else on this site, anything short of

// This is code stole from Unixware and placed in Linux
//
// Thanks,
//
// codestealer@ibm.com
int somefunction()
{
...
}

would be hard to tie to anyone definitively.

There is also the task of proving who did the stealing. For SCO to prove that the code is actually theirs, I'm guessing they'll need to prove that their code pre-dates the same code in Linux. The only kernel that I can think of that I can't find code for is 0.11 from back when I started using Linux. It wouldn't be too hard to do a recursive zgrep through the source tarballs to see when the code first appeared.

Of course, I'm assuming the alleged offending code is in the Linux kernel; everything else is owned/copyrighted by other folks like the FSF and have nothing to do with Linux when in source code form.

Another SCO teleconference

Posted Jun 7, 2003 13:51 UTC (Sat) by walterbyrd (guest, #11620) [Link]

>>For SCO to prove that the code is actually theirs, I'm guessing they'll need to prove that their code pre-dates the same code in Linux. <<

The will also have to prove the code did not from a third source, such as BSD.


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