Xinuos sues IBM [LWN.net]

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 3:17 UTC (Thu) by andyc (subscriber, #1130) [Link] (1 responses)

Looks like the Zombie SCO is back for more!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinuos

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 7:19 UTC (Thu) by pdewacht (subscriber, #47633) [Link]

Is the original lawsuit even concluded? According to Wikipedia's timeline, it was still ongoing in 2018.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 3:52 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

If we're unearthing zombies, can we also get Groklaw back to fight them?

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 6:40 UTC (Thu) by suckfish (guest, #69919) [Link] (1 responses)

That would be great! I still miss daily visits to Groklaw to catch the latest news and gossip on open source law in general, long after the original court cases had ceased to be of much interest.

Is this lawsuit serious, or have they simply hoping that they've set their sights low enough that they'll get paid to go away even by people who have proven that they'll bear the cost of standing up for their principles?

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 13:21 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Is this lawsuit serious, or have they simply hoping that they've set their sights low enough that they'll get paid to go away even by people who have proven that they'll bear the cost of standing up for their principles?

If the SCO-IBM lawsuit has taught us one thing it is that IBM doesn't pay a plaintiff to “go away”. They leave a smoking crater where the plaintiff used to be. To them it's a matter of not creating a precedent that would encourage others to try the same tactic on them, and they have pockets that are deep enough to litigate this until the Second Coming if necessary.

If this goes forward it will probably play out just like the other lawsuit: The court will ask Xinuos to come up with actual evidence (such as the lines of code that were allegedly copied into Linux from Project Monterey via AIX), and the plaintiff will hem and haw for a while before the whole thing is stopped by a summary judgement. It won't go anywhere near a jury. If anything, IBM and Red Hat are better placed to defend themselves now than they used to be in the 2000s, because the provenance of code in Linux is much better documented and easier to look into than it was. (And we don't even need Groklaw to figure this out for us.)

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 13:08 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

This one is so lame that Groklaw can stay where it is. It will keep a bunch of lawyers and a judge busy for a while but isn't likely to result in the big payout that Xinuos seems to be hoping for.

If you file your lawsuit on 31 March and the first thing that happens is that people wonder if it's an early April Fool's joke, that should tell you something already right there.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 4:16 UTC (Thu) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (2 responses)

FreeBSD may need to say something here: the old UNIX guy now drags FreeBSD to their side. What say you, FreeBSD?

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 4:27 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

"specifically Xinuos’ OpenServer 10 product, which is based on FreeBSD, an open-source UNIX-based operating system"

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 4, 2021 2:43 UTC (Sun) by kmeyer (subscriber, #50720) [Link]

Don't blame Xinuous on us. We think they suck, too. -FreeBSD

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 5:23 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (1 responses)

They limit their claims to 1995 and later, so only SCO code. In the abstract, I could see IBM taking code from a smaller partner in Project Monterrey, but I'd be a lot more convinced if it was specific, instead of acting like some (not clearly specified) code from 1995 is critical to a large range of things in IBM. As it is, of course, it's an extension of the SCO lawsuits, so how they can claim (as they do in the suit) that they didn't realize this until 2019?

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 1:23 UTC (Fri) by ErikF (subscriber, #118131) [Link]

I'm also interested in how debugging and tracing (para. 67) and the /proc filesystem (para. 68) are innovative.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 6:12 UTC (Thu) by wzzrd (subscriber, #12309) [Link] (4 responses)

Please be a bad April fool's joke...

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 6:57 UTC (Thu) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link] (3 responses)

That's the first thing I too checked, but it was posted (by them) on March 31st ...

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 10:01 UTC (Thu) by arnd (subscriber, #8866) [Link] (2 responses)

Moreover, the filing was at an actual court, with actual lawyers. Still, half the internet seems to assume it's a joke. For instance, the (usually) reliable Heise website included an article on the lawsuit in their list of the best hoaxes for this year.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 11:40 UTC (Thu) by xophos (guest, #75267) [Link]

Let's just hope, they get laughed out of the court.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 2:34 UTC (Fri) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]

Legal Twitter liked to point out during the interregnum between November and January that a court filing is simply a press release with a filing fee attached.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 9:32 UTC (Thu) by edeloget (subscriber, #88392) [Link]

That /could/ be hilarious if it was not that sad...

> 134. Given all of these significant, commercially valuable features, OpenServer 10
> would have brought great consumer benefits. Yet, here, Xinuos and its FreeBSD-based product
> are being specifically targeted to prevent introduction into that ecosystem"

Guys are looking at IBM/Redhat promotion material that promots Linux for IBM cloud, conflate this with an abuse of power. A simple yet non exhasutive look to their cloud offer shows that Red Hat is not even the default choice for their virtual servers (it's CentOS, out of 5 possibilities : CentOS, Debian, RedHat, Windows, Ubuntu ; it's also possible to use Suse if I understand that maze of choices correctly).

"Good luck" to them.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 9:57 UTC (Thu) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link] (7 responses)

The “OpenServer” name is making my eye twitch. I wonder why.

Otherwise, were it not for the lawsuit and the news piece here, I reckon I would keep on being blissfully ignorant of Xinuos’ existence, as would many others.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 11:35 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (6 responses)

I note that if you reverse their name, it's sounix... and behold, they are souing. I'd say this was a coincidence, except these guys are *literally* the lineal descendants of the sue-happy versions of the renamed ex-Caldera ex-SCO Group shell.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 20:36 UTC (Thu) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link] (4 responses)

Ah, those guys.

And now they are suing IBM and Red Hat for the chutzpah Red Hat and IBM had by advertising the products of, surprised gasp, Red Hat and IBM, and not OpenServer or whatever else there is! This would totally work!

Either the lawyers who compose such lawsuits should belong to the loony bin, or the judicial system in which such lawsuits have even a flying chance should.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 1:14 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (3 responses)

Either the lawyers who compose such lawsuits should belong to the loony bin, or the judicial system in which such lawsuits have even a flying chance should.

The company deserves the majority of the blame for this. Behind every sleazy lawyer, there's a sleazy client*. That's not to say the lawyers deserve to be absolved; they didn't have to take the case. But the primary blame should be on the client who initiated the suit. And it's not at all clear this suit has any real chance. Anyone file a suit over just about anything, and it takes the legal system a little while to throw out even the most obviously frivolous of suits. I don't expect this suit to stick around nearly as long as the original SCO suit.

*OK, maybe not quite every sleazy lawyer. Occasionally a sleazy lawyer will start with an idea for a lawsuit and then hunt for a client to justify it, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 15:08 UTC (Fri) by jebba (guest, #4439) [Link] (2 responses)

Remember when Microsoft got SCO $50 mil?

"Update: Microsoft behind $50M SCO investment"

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2563673/update--mic...

Microsoft -> Fund -> Client -> Lawyer -> Lawsuit

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 16:08 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Remember, but it was 17 years ago. What's the relevance to the situation now?

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 18:20 UTC (Fri) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody was trying to fund this from behind the scenes, but I really doubt it’d be Microsoft this time around. Oracle, perhaps.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 9, 2021 7:26 UTC (Fri) by jimbo (subscriber, #6689) [Link]

Xinuos
cf: sinous, ophidian, snakelike

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 12:24 UTC (Thu) by JMB (guest, #74439) [Link] (14 responses)

Interesting - not that there is real substance here - but as SCO suite proved it is not about proof.
The timing is interesting - RedHat/IBM and development groups affiliated to them press out RMS from FSF - and do everything to stop his return.
Yesterday there was a short note: Canonical Releases "Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview".
SCO was interesting - and so was the Oracle - Google affair ...
We should all wake up - as kernel hackers already said - this is a world of monopolies - and all think that there is only one - and work hard for that goal. And when their rights are to be limited, they are in need of rivals - M$ took GNU/Linux back then, Apple took Google - and when they saw it was too much of a rival, Apple used connections to Oracle to stop them - on the legal front, of cause. Technically Apple was always inferior and are to that date.
LLVM would not exist if GCC would not be using GPL - a monopoly must embrace and extend - must steal code and make it their own and stop other to use similar code.
So what had we learnt from SCO: Sun backed SCO, and Sun got payment from M$ and after that was non existent. Similar to M$ payment for DEC for stealing the NT code from them incl. hiring former developers who was pressed to bring the entire source code (well, I don't have to say anything about copyright message of another company in MS DOS - do I?).
Linux market share on the desktop is 30 percent so we don't have to worry - oh wait, it is ... only a tiny fraction.
Why? Schools are using Windows ... instead having to pay big license fees - biggest companies are using Windows (nearly for free with their CEOs sitting in the other ones supervisory board - you now - this is not bribery ;) ... so smaller ones have to pay full priced licenses to work with the big ones. Can anybody deny that?
Having been more than 10 years in IT business I had really seen enough of that going on.
This suit is technically non existent - we seem all to agree - but the question is who is pulling the strings.
Free and Open Source SW was never in so much danger - and never saw so much wrong decision and stupid behavior like today.
No, I am not in search of popcorn ... if the spirit of free software "to enable the user" ... is lost, we all have lost.
And currently it does not seem that there is even a fight against that progressive loss happening anymore.
Everything is misused for their goal - even Corona is now a force for putting everything behind digital learning.
It is just stupid - every scientist knows it - studies prove it - but this if forced non the less - there is money to earn. Or the Corona App - as the perfect surveillance device. And the necessary data for a rough probability of being infexted can not be concluded from the available data (who uses a mask in that very moment - is there glass between them - are they shouting ... an endless list of missing important factors).
And which percentage of the world population is able to understand those details - the Internet is harmful and not helpful here ...
Maybe some brilliant people should think about the situation - and work for a change.
And one should stop "GPLx and higher" as that higher version may no longer be a free license at all.
So chose GPL2 or GPL3 - what ever suits your willing as author best if you want to use the GPL.
Who would have seen that all comming ... ?
So SCO was the beginning - not the end of misusing ill legal situations.
And yes - good journalism is rare to find - so calling for Groklaw may be one of the first thoughts of all of us ...

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 12:48 UTC (Thu) by mgk (guest, #74833) [Link] (3 responses)

Had anyone heard of Xinuos before today? C'mon now, small fry.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 0:07 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

I thought the name sounded familiar. And as Nix says, they're the company that bought the corpse of SCO Group, which is why I remember it.

Cheers,
Wol

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 12:05 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

According to the Wikipedia article, they are a company that was spun off by the newer SCO (around 2010) to focus on the UNIX business, and leave the law suits to the parent company (The SCO Group, and later TSG Group). At some point that parent group went completely bankrupt (chapter 7) and its sole asset was the legal claim.

Also, according to the Wikipedia article, their FreeBSD OpenServer is based on FreeBSD 10, and their last releases were in 2018.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 4, 2021 2:47 UTC (Sun) by kmeyer (subscriber, #50720) [Link]

I'd heard of them before. They had 1-2 people at a FreeBSD conference I attended 3-5 years ago. They didn't present anything, just made some dumb "I have a question; my *comment is* ..."-type grandstanding remarks during Q&A sections.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 14:56 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (6 responses)

> LLVM would not exist if GCC would not be using GPL - a monopoly must embrace and extend - must steal code and make it their own and stop other to use similar code.

I have no idea if you're implying that LLVM is stolen (it's not), or that corporations can extend LLVM and that this constitutes theft (it doesn't, and wouldn't even if copyright violation was involved, which it isn't) or if you're suggesting something else, but this doesn't make me want to try to plough through the rest of your badly-formatted comment: it's too likely to be a morass of evidence-free conspiracy-theorizing.

(Your belief that RH has something to do with the whole RMS kerfuffle is just more evidence. The timing makes it perfectly clear that they just followed the wave of revulsion because they're not complete idiots.)

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 8:03 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (5 responses)

Apple probably would not have financed LLVM if GCC was under a permissive license (i.e., amenable to incorporation into a proprietary product); LLVM then might have suffered the usual fate of research projects. Apple's enmity to GPL is widely known. Conspiracy theory? I have experienced it personally: they wanted us to release Gforth under a different license.

Concerning "stealing", do you complain when proprietary software companies call copyright violations "stealing"? Apparently JMB considers it "stealing" when a company takes free software and uses it in a proprietary product. I have seen complaints in a similar vein by advocates of permissive licenses when software under such a license was integrated in software released under a copyleft license.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 10:04 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

It's worth noting that at one point, Apple was actively looking at integrating LLVM with GCC under the GPLv2: Chris Lattner even e-mailed about it back in 2005 from his Apple e-mail. That work was rejected, in part for political reasons, and arguably is part of the back story to why Apple dislikes the GPL.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 12:19 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

I don't think your conclusion is sound.

It's quite clear from Apple's behavior -- although they've made no public statement -- that they dislike the GPLv3 _specifically_.

They were -- and are -- willing to ship GPLv2 code, but not a single smidgen of GPLv3. The mass relicensing was the immediate turning point at which they ceased updating all GNU software on their systems, and started rewriting or otherwise finding alternatives to everything.

The integration of LLVM and GCC being rejected/ignored is a much too low level technical issue to cause such a major direction change. I suspect that he only way in which these are related is that the integration proposal likely stopped being persued from Apple's side soon after being posted, as they realized the implications of GPLv3 (the first draft of which was released a couple months after this proposal!).

One might wonder what would've happened if they had successfully contributed llvm to FSF/GCC a year earlier, and it, too, had been relicensed to GPLv3...

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 12:26 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh I know about the LLVM versus GCC license thing. The conspiracy theorizing I was talking about was all the rest of JMB's comment, bloviating about monopolies and "theft" and embrace and extend and "the Corona app" (as if there is just one) as "the perfect surveillance device", which makes me wonder if JMB knows anything about them at all (hint: those that tried to use centralized databases failed, largely due to the reluctance of, uh, Apple and Google to allow such Bluetooth-backed always-on surveillance. The systems that did survive use a much more privacy-focused architecture.)

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 12:28 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

> Concerning "stealing", do you complain when proprietary software companies call copyright violations "stealing"?

Yes, because it's not theft, it's a completely different legal category with different implications, different penalties, etc etc etc. As the FSF has long noted, calling it "theft" is pure propaganda on behalf of the beneficiaries of a set of state-backed quasi-monopolies (proprietary software companies and other restrictive copyright owners).

Property laws are millennia older than copyright laws and not related to them.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 18:24 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> Apple probably would not have financed LLVM if GCC was under a permissive license (i.e., amenable to incorporation into a proprietary product); LLVM then might have suffered the usual fate of research projects. Apple's enmity to GPL is widely known. Conspiracy theory? I have experienced it personally: they wanted us to release Gforth under a different license.

That is how the GPL is supposed to work: It imposes a tax on proprietary hardware and software, by forcing the developer to avoid using GPL'd code. Apple decided to pay that tax. Is that wrong?

Now, the permissively-licensed alternative turning into a serious competitor to the GPL-licensed software is probably *not* what the FSF wanted, but "not having the outcome the FSF wanted" is a far cry from "evil." If the GNU people want GCC to win, then they need to actually make it a superior product. Ironically, LLVM's fully reusable IR is (or at least has been) a major product differentiator, to GCC's detriment.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 15:43 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

>Linux market share on the desktop is 30 percent so we don't have to worry - oh wait, it is ... only a tiny fraction.

Maybe this is some kind of April Fool's Day comment or wishful thinking but you truly should not be giving the year of the Linux desktop people some false hopes since realistically speaking the Linux desktop market share is somewhere close to 2% not 30% and with people moving towards Apple not Linux from the looks of it [1].

1. https://www.t4.ai/industry/desktop-operating-system-marke...

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 22:16 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

> LLVM would not exist if GCC would not be using GPL - a monopoly must embrace and extend - must steal code and make it their own and stop other to use similar code.

It is GCC that would not exist if not for looting the commons of EGCS and LLVM. LLVM has always used a GPL-compatible license, and perhaps that was in error.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 22:30 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

GCC *is* EGCS.

Per Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#EGC... ):

"While both projects followed each others changes closely, EGCS development proved considerably more vigorous, so much so that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x compiler, blessed EGCS as the official version of GCC, and appointed the EGCS project as the GCC maintainers in April 1999. With the release of GCC 2.95 in July 1999 the two projects were once again united."

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 1, 2021 21:18 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

In this day and age I genuinely can't tell if this insanity is coming from the shambling husk of Darl McBride or someone from the anti-progress crowd. They lead with some pretty choice green ink either way.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 22:24 UTC (Fri) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link]

Tell me about a tech company that is not hiring - https://www.xinuos.com/careers-overview/

Their press releases page is interesting too https://www.xinuos.com/press-news/

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 4, 2021 4:26 UTC (Sun) by freebird (guest, #43129) [Link]

Xnakes are Xinuos. Nice of them to tell us who and what they are.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 4, 2021 15:06 UTC (Sun) by yoduh (subscriber, #38527) [Link]

oh lordy, is this an april fools joke ?
Serious Foolery here.

Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 5, 2021 18:05 UTC (Mon) by jhhaller (guest, #56103) [Link]

Commenting on articles out of order, but based on today's Google-Oracle Supreme Court decision, it may also be much easier for IBM to claim fair use even if they did reuse something from SCO.