Getting a glimpse at SCO's evidence

CNET news.com ^ | August 19, 2003 | Lisa M. Bowman

[Coral Snake]

See that you didn't want to make a reply about my "handy little gif". It and the coral snake pic are only a tiny part of the arsonal of "handy little gifs" and "handy little jpgs" I've got stored up on for when members of the free software "community" try to push THEIR talking points on me. And Google Images provides me with more of this every day. ;-)

Also you are basing your whole case that its "All BSD or PD" on a SINGLE SLIDE. Whoever leaked this for some reason
(perhaps REAL stolen code) did not put ALL OF THE SLIDES on the non NDA presentation of the stolen code on the internet for the Linux commies to play with.

[dwollmann]

And Google Images provides me with more of this every day. ;-)

So, you post links to images expropriated from other peoples' web sites, blatantly ignoring their copyrights, all the while making baseless, trollish accusations of theft and violation of copyrights against users, developers and distributors of open source software. Sweet hypocrisy.

[Coral Snake]

The difference is that I'm ready to tell Free Republic to moderate the immages off of FR if I or they receive any copyright violation complaints. You don't seem to be ready to give up "free" linux do you. That is probably what the damages would ammount to in this case since they are not being used for a PROFIT like some people are attempting to use the linux kernel for. By the way I think that the other posters here who use graphics and immages probably use Google Images for the purpose. Also I think that NON PROFIT
use of such immages in a parody mannor as I use them constitutes legal fair use. All of the pictures of Dubya, Hillary, Arnold, Gray Davis and Cruz Bustemante I see here are modern and certainly would NOT fall in the public domain would they.

[dwollmann]

The difference is that I'm ready to tell Free Republic to moderate the immages off of FR if I or they receive any copyright violation complaints. You don't seem to be ready to give up "free" linux do you.

You're willfully ignoring the possibility that the images you're stealing (because they were acquired apart from the content with which they were intended to be viewed) are copyrighted and their use restricted, so I imagine you should be ready and willing to withdraw them.

I, on the other hand, have licenses (GPL and others) that explicitly grant me restricted rights to use the code and to derive from it, and no evidence to cast doubt on the grantors' rights.

As for "giving up" Linux, you're right, I refuse to give it up on the basis of wild-assed, constantly changing claims from David Boies and his merry band of clueless, money-grubbing stuffed suits and their "pattern recognition experts" (a.k.a. "a couple of soon-to-be-unemployed-anyway entry level coders with a total of one year of experience between them, a shiny new copy of O'Reilly's Learning bash, and nothing better to do").

[Coral Snake]

If you are so worried about non GPL copyright then you should leave FR. 90 percent of the stuff here except the
comments (without images) is "missapropriated" for NON PROFIT fair use including the article we are commenting on.
(It has been "missapropriated" from ZDnet.)

[HiTech RedNeck]

I can't -- I just CAN'T -- believe the engineers of the "pattern matching" could possibly be that dumb. Unless they farmed it out to India, heheheheheheheh...

[HiTech RedNeck]

McBride has gotten on stage numerous times now to tell the world that IBM no longer has the right to sell AIX. He has threatened IBM's AIX customers with audits and possible lawsuits. If it turns out now that he is an ignorant 'suit' braying like an ass in Geekland, he and SCO are not just finished, they will be cratered.

This is just like, totally, bizarre, dude. How McBride's engineers could POSSIBLY miss a blockbuster like this. POSSIBLY.

Of course, not all the shoes have dropped. After this embarrassment I would expect they are now looking for the "real McCoy" minus BSD and all the things that Caldera released for free. Or are they. More and more this is beginning to read like Alice in Wonderland complete with magic looking glass and rabbit hole and shrinker-grower mushroom and all that jazz.

[HiTech RedNeck]

I also don't normally click links over to hacker hangouts without a good reason.

It's a link to a post in this VERY SAME THREAD, birdie!

[HiTech RedNeck]

Who gives a buzzard's hoot whether it was in SysV? It was, before that, in a legally emancipated BSD. SysV, at MOST, copied it. So did Linux, in a totally legal manner. If I copy Shakespeare into a proprietary work of mine, that does not prohibit you from making your own copies of Shakespeare, or establish any evidence that YOU copied from MY proprietary work. Bees Louise!

[dwollmann]

So I take it that it's Ok for you to condemn others who are only accused of unknowingly violating copyrights, even after publically boasting that you willfully and negligently ignore the copyrights of the producers of the images you use?

[Nick Danger]

I can't -- I just CAN'T -- believe the engineers of the "pattern matching" could possibly be that dumb.

They could be that young.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Something is to be said for the wisdom of software engineers with EXPERIENCE (wink)

[HiTech RedNeck]

Enough already. I think you've proved that you're a mongoose.

[cc2k]

Golden Eagle wrote:

---

Is that all it takes to permanently steal code these days? Just have some rogue post it on Usenet, and *BAM*, no longer yours.

---

Not exactly. That posting does negate any attempt to claim this code as a trade secret, though.

Golden Eagle wrote:

---

It actually makes sense that if SCO was willing to show any portion of their evidence in public, it might be something that was already 'public', even if illegally.

---

Well, it wasn't "illegally" made public.

In 1993 or 1994, in the settlement between Novell (as successor to AT&T UNIX Systems Labs, and a predecessor in interest to The SCO Group) and BSD, Novell and USL agreed that BSD had full rights to this code (among many other things). BSD almost immediately released everything they got in the USL/Novell settlement under an open source license with almost no restrictions on use in derivative works.

In 1996, the Santa Cruz Operation published this code in a book with no restrictions on it's use. Actually, a very similar piece of code was published without any explicit restrictions in a book in 1978, and this code appears without restrictions in many other books, too. The fair use doctrine allows the use of small sections of computer code from books without attribution or license.

Then, again in 2002, Caldera (the same company as The SCO Group, but before the name change) released this code under an open source license.

If the code in Linux came from BSD, or from any of the other sources I've mentioned, then it is not an infringement. Even if the Linux infringement pre-dated the 1994 release by BSD, the BSD license (and the Caldera license) effectively establishes the actual value of the damages at zero. That's also the value of any license that SCO wants to sell me on this particular piece of code. I'm not sure that this code is running on any of my Linux machines, but if it is, I wouldn't pay money for a license to it because it is widely available as free code.

[HiTech RedNeck]

P.S. the mongoose comment was not supposed to be an insult! It was a back handed compliment :-)

[dwollmann]

Thanks.

[steve-b]

Er, SCO still has to specifically identify the allegedly infringing code in order to prove its claim that the alleged infringement happened in the first place. They don't get to refuse to do so on the grounds that people would quit infringing if they were given notice of just what exactly they were not allowed to use.

[steve-b]

I believe the article mentioned that anyone who wanted to see some of the evidence could do so if they signed a non-disclosure.

Pinging Nick to this thread -- IIRC, he posted a good explanation of the booby traps in SCO's "non-disclosure agreement".

[Golden Eagle]

Wrong, the BSD/ATT case was never decided by judge or jury, so it is not any sort of legal precident. Sorry this complicates your defense so much.

[Golden Eagle]

Who gives a buzzard's hoot whether it was in SysV? It was, before that, in a legally emancipated BSD. SysV, at MOST, copied it. So did Linux, in a totally legal manner.

You have no proof of that, that I've seen. BSD could have gotten it from ATT, if you have proof of where it first originated other than "from BSD" by all means let's see it. But on other forums of many more knowledgable than you this is still a question.