LWN: Comments on "SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)"

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

ekj — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 12:14:48 +0000

Surely those claims are libellous ? He is directly claiming that each and every one of us who has reacted negatively to their bullshit are "sponsored by IBM".

I personally object strongly to having my integrity questioned. My opinions may be wrong, thick-headed or indeed patently stupid, but atleast they're MY opinions, not IBMs. (though IBM may, or may not, agree with me as they see fit)

Re: THIS is a conspiracy! :-)

fLameDogg — Sun, 24 Aug 2003 00:43:51 +0000

That's interesting. "The site www.sco.com is running Apache on Linux."

What's also interesting, to me, are the blocks owned by NFT (Noorda Family Trust). If
you click an NFT, you get to see "Sites with longest running systems at NFT"
"NFT 333 S 520 W Suite 300 Lindon UT 84042 US". These include canopy.com,
vultus.com, and, uh, bushfam.com, among others. Okay, maybe this is just new to me
:O) But whoever NFT's IT ppl are, they do seem to like Linux. Why aren't they just using
SCO's fine products (cough)?

By the way, not that it's breaking my heart, but has anyone been able to access sco.com
in the last couple of days?

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

jbbm63 — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 20:38:49 +0000

Maybe this is wishful/biased thinking here, but methinks that Mrs McBride and crew have greatly undermined their case in the last few days, probably to the extent to have lost credibility with many PHBs. With their (IIRC) "pattern recognition experts", their "rocket scientists" and now the latest outburst about IBM masterminding ESR and co's response to the presentation that was supposed to prove that the Linux kernel consists mostly of stolen code (more or less), I find it hard to imagine how this cannot have a negative impact with the non-tech crowd.

While the Free Software movement and its sympatisers (sp?) know that NewSCO's case does not have merit, the Lord High MuckyMucks of this world, all those MCSE executives (I've met my share of them) and their non-tech colleagues could until recently still buy into NewSCO's message. And that was the scary part. Even though the chances were infinitesimal for a court to inflict defeat onto IBM (and the Linux crowd), the PHBs of this world that bought Mrs McBride & Sontag's line could still stall the progress of Linux/*BSD into the enterprise or even undo some of the inroads that had been made in the last few years before the IBM-NewSCO trial.

But now, what do they think? Are they aware of what the NewSCO crew has said in the last few days? I'd be curious to see the result of an opinion poll of CIOs/CTOs/etc.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

ccchips — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 19:04:13 +0000

I believe they also had a strong sense of loyalty to each other, as well; a sense that, even with the strong heirarchy, all members of the group were important, and no loss of life was insignificant.

*that* said, I used to have a friend who was involved in the US-Russian partership operations in Germany. He said that when he was out in the field, near a French encampment, he would go nuts because they made a ridiculous amount of noise at breakfast (rattling pans, arguing about the menu, boasting about how good the food was today, etc....) with German troops nearby.

THIS is a conspiracy! :-)

ernstp — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 15:23:51 +0000

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.sco.com

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

Fearless_Fred — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 12:14:55 +0000

Actually the Roman empire won their battles due to a superior military force based on(and certainly not limited to):

-A very well trained, well organized heirarchally structured military
-Superior weapons
-The Calvary
-Extremely secure dug-in camps
-Strategic military formations
-Extremely adaptable to learning new tactics

That said, it really had nothing to do with being quiet.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

microlhk — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 02:22:07 +0000

Well, assuming that the code was designed to work,
IBM and HAL are both 32bit integers.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

ccchips — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 02:02:05 +0000

Hmmm.....

First, the code samples are still being discussed, with just as much vigor. The difficult part is that they are also being discussed to determine if, in fact, some sloppy corporate employee dumped ilicit code into Linux. We *do* want to keep the high moral ground.

OTOH, this is comic relief here. 2 reasons:

1. The interview sounds like someting out of a pulp magazine or tabloid. I *love* to poke fun at conspiracy theorists.

2. We've done a bit of that ourselves, coming to the conclusing (as silly as it may be,) that Microsoft and SCO and Sun are conspiring to destroy *us*.

If anyone with any sense can't see that neither one of these are true, I don't know why.

Hey---this SCO thing is really important and serious. Once in awhile people have to have a little fun.... ;)

As for walking in silence:

I'm not a kernel coder (heavens, I wish I had the time, but I have too many other personal issues to deal with!) This isn't a kernel mailing list, it's a news and discussion board. A place to make noise, and discuss issues.

If you want to find people marching in silence, go to the coders. They are doing just that. I can almost guarantee it. Because if I could come up with the time and energy to code, that's what I'd be doing, too.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

WZot — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 23:21:25 +0000

I sent an email to my good (ehh) friend Darl today asking where he got that stuff from... No reply yet. Must be some really crazy shit he's on; he has probably been high since march.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

WZot — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 23:13:12 +0000

Amen to that!

And we got Linus Torvald by our side also saying that!

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

tjc — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 23:07:56 +0000

That won't work either, assuming that HAL is an 8-bit ascii string.

char s[] = "HAL";
int i;

for (i = 0; s[i]; i++)
{
        s[i]++;
}

I hope I didn't just violate any SCO IP. They probably have a patent on incrementing the value of an array element within the body of a "for" loop. Now everything I write from this time forward will belong to SCO, having been derived from original Unix code. ;-)

Changing the value of a literal string in the text area used to be a naughty thing to do, but gcc -Wall didn't complain, so maybe this has been changed? I'm too lazy to find out...

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

jachim — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 22:51:01 +0000

I think every C*O at SCO has been smoking crack continuously since early March.....

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

microlhk — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 22:43:39 +0000

This statement will go down in infamy, just like
everything else SCO's dysfunctional management
claimed.

Michael Frank

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

microlhk — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 22:28:19 +0000

Buggy arithmetic:
IBM==HAL+0x10101

Just having fun ;-)

Absolute, direct knowledge

dark — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 22:10:10 +0000

Proof of IBM's involvement will be presented on blurry, badly typeset slides, available only under NDA. These slides will show edited extracts of certain letters (with sender and recipient names and other details obscured or falsified), and will be accompanied by Mr. McBride's insistent and repeated assertions that they constitute absolute, direct proof.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

vijayandra — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 21:05:56 +0000

Yes McBri IBM is behind why you worry about that ????????

Eric Raymond responds - big time

walterbyrd — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 20:47:49 +0000

Must read response from Eric Raymond - it's great.

http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/08/22/1746248

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

potiron — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 20:18:03 +0000

This is stupid.

Open Source community have always been active and virulent (sometimes too much) against people trying to denigrate their work. They don't need IBM for that.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

kunitz — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 20:14:49 +0000

Ladies and Gentlemen,

please calm down a little.

Reading the comments on Slashdot and here on LWN, I get the
impression, that open source folks, us, behave like a bunch of ill
bred kids. Certainly we don't look like people, you would trust a
critical part of your infrastructure or even believe statements about
intellectual property rights.

Think what you want about Darl McBride, but it never helps to
underestimate your enemies. And this interview about the the big
blue empire IBM concerting an attack against the little SCO was
aimed to remember the press on balanced reporting. Second, the
reactions of the open source folks should let look them as -- well --
ill bred kids. Third he could move the discussion away from the
relevance of SCO's samples to something else.

Remember how the Roman army won their battles: the barbarians
made noise, but the Romans marched in silence.

Respectfully,

Ulrich Kunitz

PS for ESR: There is the chinese saying: "Wait by the river long
enough, you will see the dead bodies of your enemies floating by."

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

drathos — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 19:55:20 +0000

My favorite thing to say to people who are off their rocker (like Darl):

What are you smoking? Where can I get some?

Absolutely

roystgnr — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 18:55:06 +0000

Please don't take my speculations too seriously; "Darl thinks he has a divine mandate" is just another hypothesis to put next to "SCOs execs are trying a pump and dump stock scheme" or "Darl is trying to get bought out by IBM" in your list of attempts to explain SCO's behavior, and I suspect that out of all the theories on that list Occam would prefer the simplicity of "They're idiots".

As for LDS members that abhor what he's doing, they're not hard to find: I think the Provo Linux Users' Group was the first to publically protest SCO, and they've got links on their webpage (currently at http://ruistech.com/mirrors/mirror.lug-nut.com/ ) to a half dozen other Utah LUGs that are probably at least 50% LDS and 99% PO'ed.

As I type on my new Dell Laptop...

rjamestaylor — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 18:40:27 +0000

I am one of the active participants in the Yahoo!Finance message boards. I do not work for IBM. In fact, I'm the CTO for a pharmaceutical company (for whom I am not speaking, this is all my own opinion) and use a mix of Linux and Windows to meet our IT objectives.

IBM has nothing to do with my "response" to SCOX's blatant disregard for the community that gave it birth and enabled it to purchase SCO UNIX code.

McBride lives in an alternate reality.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

mmarq — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 18:28:26 +0000

DAMN, THAT CRACK STUFF MUST CERTAINLY BE GOOD !

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

icc — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 18:03:27 +0000

I guess that would be IBM == (HAL + 1) :)

Close

ccchips — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 17:18:29 +0000

I'm sure you're right; I can't imangine any good, spiritually-minded people approving of his behavior.

Though I tend to joke about religion sometimes (I love to go to http://www.subgenius.com), I don't mean them any harm. Just a little ribbing.

Maybe that's what DM is actually doing---joking about it.

...most everything else he says is a joke, so why not this?

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

dbhost — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 17:15:12 +0000

Yep, looks like they need to send in the truck with the nice padded interior, and that nice pretty self hugging jacket. You know the kind with the sleeves that tie in the back. These guys are completely off their collective rockers!
Let me get this theory straight. And I really like parables and stories so bear with me, I am going to use a childrens schoolyard analogy here....

If it is recess, and Damien walks up to Irwin and screams "You stole my stuff!", and runs off to tell the teacher to get Irwin in trouble, The Teacher calmly reminds Damient that the allegedly stolen property was never his, then Damien proceeds to, while the teacher is talking to Irwin, runs off to Leonard, and says "Irwin stole my stuff and gave it to you, so you stole my stuff too!" and proceeds to kick Leonard in the shin. Leonard, not being as much of a whimp as his name lets on, rears back and kicks Damien square in the 'nads, to which an agonized Damien shrieks "Irwin made you do that!". Is this rational behavior on the part of Damien? I would think not! Darl and his SCO buds went after IBM, in an obvious ploy to get bought out, and IBM didn't play nice by that game, and so Darl escalated the issue and started threatening others, who in turn swung the fat old "You're number 1" finger at SCO, and fought back debunking EVERY SINGLE ATTEMPT BY SCO TO PROVE THEY HAVE BEEN WRONGED. To put it bluntly. SCO has no grounds for any case, except perhaps the shareholders have a case against Darl McBride and David Boise for misleading SCO down this foolish road...

Close

freethinker — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 17:02:17 +0000

Maybe, like Spock, he just did a little too much LDS...

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

sreed — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 16:45:51 +0000

I've said this here before.

This is "litigious paranoia." (Suing and
blaming others for ones own crimes.)

The symptoms are classic, and Darl just
won't stop himself, folks, because _you_ are
the evil ones, not him.

Time to send in the padded truck and the guys
with the butterfly nets. Or at least, someone
who has any sayso at all ought to fire the whole
lot of top management at The SCO Group, REAL SOON NOW.

Close

allesfresser — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 16:33:54 +0000

Now, now... we don't actually know if McBride is LDS or not, do we? Even if he went to BYU (which I am not sure of, having not had the time to browse through his resume), it doesn't mean he necessarily is an LDS member (thought that is a high probability in that case), or even if he is technically a member, it's not certain that he is an active member or has a temple recommend or whatever... there's plenty of people that are religious in past connection or in name only. And I'm sure there's more than a few LDS members that abhor what he's doing.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

allesfresser — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 16:22:55 +0000

Darl really showed his hand at knowing absolutely nothing about developers or the community on this one... anyone who has spent a single day working with browsing mailing lists or message boards related to free/open source development knows that trying to "stage-manage" developers is like herding cats. It's virtually impossible, because of the personality that almost necessarily goes along with the inclination to be a hacker/developer. And I'm sure there's more than a few people that still are wary and distrustful of IBM because of their actions in the past with regard to world domination (this despite their recent apparent change of course.) So, saying that all the outrage has been stage-managed by IBM is like saying that all of the anti-abortion protestors are being stage-managed by the Vatican.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

tjc — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 16:04:32 +0000

From the article:

"If you go behind the scenes, the attacks that we get that don't have IBM's name on them, underneath the covers, are sponsored by IBM..."

From dictionary.com:

par·a·noi·a
n.

   1. A psychotic disorder characterized by delusions of persecution
      with or without grandeur, often strenuously defended with apparent
      logic and reason.
   2. Extreme, irrational distrust of others.

I'd say both definitions 1 and 2 apply here.

Close

ccchips — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 15:56:31 +0000

Hmmm...you know, that's like having only half a Ouija Board, with no letters or numbers below the "yes."

SCO scam working flawlessly

ccchips — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 15:53:20 +0000

I thought they had their paperwork in order, and we were supposed to keep quiet about that.

Close

roystgnr — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 15:53:07 +0000

Not a Gnostic, a Latter-day Saint. The epistemology is similar; in the Mormon version: phrase whatever you want God to tell you in terms of a yes or no question, with the answer you expect to get as a yes. Then, pray fervently for God to tell you the answer, and interpret any pleasant change in your emotional state as a yes. Since being told you're right is a good feeling, you get a nice impressive positive feedback loop. Most Mormons are wise enough to only try this on the question "Is the Book of Mormon true?"; trying to ask more easily falsifiable questions (like "Am I going to make billions of dollars exposing IBM's evil thievery?") that way can backfire.

More to it than that.

ccchips — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 15:41:33 +0000

Actually, here's how it worked:

Step 1: Hardware makers felt jilted by Microsoft.
Step 2: Microsoft wouldn't deal the way HW people wanted
Step 3: HW makers said: OK--we'll fix ya! We'll use Linux
Step 4: They all got together with IBM, and began smearing egg all over BG's face
Step 5: BG arranged to get DM to make an ass of himself, so people wouldn't look at BG's messy complexion.
Step 6: BG went back to his mansion, cleaned himself up, and continued replacing Java applets with C# applets in his house software.

SCO scam working flawlessly

walterbyrd — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 15:39:53 +0000

Say what you want about scox insiders being insane or stupid. Scox share price went up another 20% yesterday. This immediately after strongly negitive news about scox's "code showing."

US justice system asleep at the wheel. Canopy/scox insiders laughing all the way to the bank.

"We have absolute, direct knowledge..."

ccchips — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 15:32:11 +0000

So...then this McBride is a Gnostic?

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

gups — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 15:24:01 +0000

"We have absolute direct knowledge of this. If you go behind the scenes, the attacks that we get that don't have IBM's name on them, underneath the covers, are sponsored by IBM,"

I don't know about that. On the contrary, I have absolute direct knowledge that shit will continue to come out of this guy's mouth.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

ccchips — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 14:44:45 +0000

Sorry about the typo(s) above.

Forgot to mention; I usually start implementing my devious plots around 11:30 P.M., and I can tell when they start having an effect because my jack-o-lantern turns off shortly after that.

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)

metacircles — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 14:43:46 +0000

Dear Mr McBride,

Your recent actions suck. Your software's not that great either.

Yours sincerely,
Daniel Barlow

(Hey, IBM! Where should I send the invoice?)