Posted on 12/05/2003 4:13:14 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
SCO Group Chief Executive Darl McBride is invoking the Founding Fathers in his company's battle over Unix intellectual property rights.
In an open letter posted on the SCO Web site Thursday, McBride argues that the General Public License (GPL) that underlies distribution of Linux, a Unix-derived operating system, is unconstitutional because it violates copyright and patent laws established by Congress. He also sharply criticizes two of SCO's most aggressive adversaries who, he says, do not believe in federally mandated copyright protection.
"In the past 20 years, the Free Software Foundation and others in the open source software movement have set out to actively and intentionally undermine the U.S. and European systems of copyrights and patents," McBride wrote. "Red Hat's position is that current U.S. intellectual property law 'impedes innovation in software development' and that 'software patents are inconsistent with open source/free software."
The Free Software Foundation is an open-source industry group, and Red Hat is one of the primary distributors of Linux.
Separately on Friday, SCO said it had postponed its quarterly earnings report but would stand by its earlier revenue forecast.
The Lindon, Utah-based company attributed the delay to the need for more time to account for a $50 million investment. SCO had planned to report results for its fiscal fourth quarter, ended Oct. 31, on Friday, which already was a slip from an earlier schedule. SCO has now moved the earnings release to Dec. 22, but said the transaction would not affect its revenue or cash holdings.
The company reiterated its previously stated fourth-quarter sales projections of $22 million to $25 million.
SCO owns several key copyrights related to the Unix operating system and has been aggressively defending its intellectual property holdings connected to the software, including filing a $3 billion lawsuit against IBM earlier this year. IBM later responded with a related countersuit against SCO.
In the letter, McBride said that the ongoing controversies related to its claims regarding Linux "will rage for at least another 18 months, until our original case (against IBM) comes to trial."
The GPL, which serves as the legal foundation for Linux, was created in the 1980s by Richard Stallman to govern the Gnu's Not Unix (GNU) software project to clone Unix. The license permits anyone to see, modify and distribute a program's underlying source code, as long as the author of the modifications publishes them when distributing the modified version.
McBride contended in the letter that copyright and patent laws adopted by the U.S. Congress and the European Union are critical to the "further growth and development of the $186 billion global software industry, and to the technology business in general." He also said that the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is aimed at protecting intellectual property rights, helps validate SCO's Linux claims.
"It is paramount that the DMCA be given full force and effect, as envisioned by Congress," McBride wrote. "However, there is a group of software developers in the United States, and other parts of the world, that do not believe in the approach to copyright protection mandated by Congress."
SCO recently vowed to widen its legal battle against the open-source community, saying it intends to sue large-scale Linux users for copyright infringement. The company signed an agreement with the law firm of David Boies, who is already handling its case against IBM, to include other Linux-related copyright cases. SCO plans to begin filing suits within the next few months, targeting large companies that have significant Linux installations.
Lawsuits targeting Linux users are expected to be filed within roughly the next 90 days, with initial suits targeting 1,500 companies that have significant Linux systems.
CNET News.com's David Becker and Mike Ricciuti contributed to this report.
I had to laugh at the clueless journalist who reports the ruling on the motion to compel as...
Gee, to hear Blake Stowell tell it, the generous judge has just given SCO the 30 days it asked for to "pass along" some information. You'd never know from reading the story that this was a gun-to-the-head "put up or shut up" ruling compelling SCO to respond. |
His interpretation will be laughed out of court. His reasoning is so ludicrious, it suggests that McBride is clinically insane. He certainly should be removed from his position at SCO.
This is not the first time SCO has done this, or something similar.
The entire history of the company is one Keystone Kops incident after another... they even had to delay their IPO because, on the day they were supposed to IPO, a woman that worked for the company president or VP filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against them.
If SCO could be, they would be as monopolistic as Microsoft; but they don't have the savvy. They are pathetic wannabes.
Huh? If I write a program I could allow you to use it for free. I could allow you to use it for $1000. I could allow you to use it if you stand on your head and sing the Turkish national anthem. How is allowing you to use it, but requiring you to publish any changes you make and pass on the same licensing terms to any future users a violation of copyright and patent laws?
| His interpretation will be laughed out of court. His reasoning is so ludicrious, it suggests that McBride is clinically insane.
I used to get just furious when Clinton would say these things that weren't just lies, they were obvious, brazen lies... and the press would print these things as if we were all to take them seriously. And I attributed that to "liberal bias." But now I see this same thing with Darl McBride. He says these things that even he can't believe, but he's on to the same secret Clinton was -- most journalists are so culturally ignorant that they can't tell he's spouting nonsense. They will print it. "McBride says the GPL is unconstitutional," as if this argument had some merit to it, or would last 1 nanosecond in a room where people knew what they were talking about. Instead of "McBride goes crackers, spouts gibberish about law, history," we get some big piece about how Darl McBride is once again on the attack. This can't be liberal bias... there's nothing like that here. I don't think it's any sort of bias at all. I think it's that the news business is full of people who are just really, really ignorant about a lot of basic things, to the point that they can't tell when they're being totally snowed. |
Darl, put down the crack pipe, step away from the booze, and come out with your head clear.
| "... blah blah blah," McBride wrote.
Anyway, it seems that SCO had this "open letter" on their web site in the form of a Word document, and somebody downloaded it and bothered to look at the Properties. Word helpfully filled in the Author field, as it always does, allowing us to know that Kevin McBride actually wrote it, and one Dave Zimmerman was the last one to edit it. The letter was so bad that it moved Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig to actually write about it on his blog. Then the next day Kevin gets the same treatment from the judge at the hearing, who listened to Kevin and then proceeded to rule for IBM. If SCO really paid David Boies millions of dollars like they said they did, why is Darl's brother writing SCO's public statements and representing SCO is court? Something is not right here. |
But who knows, maybe SCO put Darl's brother on the plate because he's a better lawyer. Maybe if Al Gore had hired Darl's brother, he'd be the President today.
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Yeah, SCO postponed their earnings announcement. Well, we can't have that be the story. So Darl tosses out some chum, and all the reporters bite on it, and the earnings postponement goes unnoticed. Plus they probably figured they were gonna get hosed in court today, so they wanted to be "on the attack."