Analysis of Linux Code that SCO Alleges Is In Violation Of Their Copyright and Trade Secrets.

Perins.com ^ | Bruce Perins (with help from many members of the Linux community)

[Liberal Classic]

But this unorganized gushing is worthless, and the critical root flows still aren't being adressed.

What are you doing on an internet message forum then? You should know better than to expect critical root flows to be addressed anywhere on the web. :-P

[Tribune7]

So is there going to some kind of sword fight at the climax of this lawsuit?

[Bush2000]

SCO has made a monumental mistake. The burden will now be on them to show conclusive proof that is not refutable.

You haven't seen all the evidence and yet you're calling it a "monumental mistake". Un-freaking-believable how far you guys will go to extrapolate...

[Bush2000]

SCO should be cautious declaring victory before they have a judgement in a pending lawsuit. They've not been cautious, however, and I fear they may run afoul of the FTC before it's all over.

They haven't declared victory. They've filed suit. What did you expect them to do? Say that they've filed suit and expect to lose?

[Salo]

Didn't you say, before seeing *any* evidence, that SCO had a strong case against IBM?

You haven't seen all the evidence and yet you're calling it a "monumental mistake". Un-freaking-believable how far you guys will go to extrapolate...

[Bush2000]

Didn't you say, before seeing *any* evidence, that SCO had a strong case against IBM?

No. I said that, if the evidence turns out to be true, they most certainly have a good chance of winning. I've also been saying that we need to wait until the trial to find out.

[TechJunkYard]

You haven't seen all the evidence and yet you're calling it a "monumental mistake". Un-freaking-believable...

Bwaaahahahahaha! Look who's saying "wait for the evidence" now! You are incredible.

SCO is publicly showing 30-year-old BSD code that they claim was "infringed". Now we know why they're so afraid of showing ALL of the "infringements".

[Liberal Classic]

What did you expect them to do? Say that they've filed suit and expect to lose?

Goodness gracious no, but have you ever wondered why companies were so tight-lipped about pending litigation? They have to be. If SCO is not, I think it may come back to haunt them.

[Dimensio]

But aren't Slashdot readers all commies? Golden Eagle proved that by posting an out of context comment that, when examined in context, was completely sarcastic in nature.

[Coral Snake]

Not only have these geeks' morality reached an absolute GOOSE EGG (As Slashdot postings prove every day.) But it looks like their intellegence has as well. Are we really supposed to believe that it is Eienstein level brain power
that accepts stolen goods and publishes them in a GPLed project for all the world to see including
the people the goods were stolen from in the first place??!!! And we are supposed to depend on these geeks for security WITHOUT obscurity. I think not.

[cc2k]

cc2k wrote:

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In short, this probably wasn't even a trade secret in 1975. It is entirely possible that this code was copied by an AT&T engineer from a textbook or technical journal back in the early 1970's, and that it is not an original work of anyone at AT&T.

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Golden Eagle replied:

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Wild speculations certainly seem to be your specialty, if not this how the GPL servers possibly got hacked.

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OK, I was speculating there, but only a little bit. I have personal, first hand knowledge that by 1981 all of the code on that slide that came from malloc() was common knowledge. I have several books that I didn't sign any NDA's to get that have that code in them. The earliest was copyrighted 1979 and the copyright was not AT&T or any predecessor in interest to TSG (The SCO Group).

There is no way that TSG can claim trade secret status on this or that IBM violated any license agreement requiring them to protect trade secrets. This code was common knowledge before IBM licensed UNIX SVR2 (or was it SVR3) from AT&T.

One issue that TSG is going to run into here is when you have a copyrighted work and you allow the copyright to be infringed over a long period of time, you lose your right to enforce that copyright. The actual legal requirements are somewhat arcane, but in the most basic terms, if the statute of limitations has run out on the first infringement, then IBM can stand up in court and say that AT&T (and TSG as a successor to TSG) failed to enforce their copyright against others (including the authors and publishers of the books I have) in a timely fashion, and by doing that they have waived their right to enforce the copyright forever. There's a legalese term for this that I can't recall right at the moment. IBM used the proper terminology for this in the "boilerplate" responses to TSG's original complaint.

cc2k wrote:

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As far as this representing "infringement," I doubt that will stick.

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Golden Eagle replied:

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You're guessing again, but it may not matter if SCO can show that without their "official" release to copy this code, which may not have ever been explicitly granted, anyone who copied it did so illegally.

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Well, Caldera, the company now doing business under the name "The SCO Group" and the one that filed the lawsuit against IBM released this code on January 23, 2002. The letter of license for that is available online at ftp://ftp.tribug.org/pub/tuhs/Caldera-license.pdf. Since you obviously didn't click the link in the original story, I'll put the text of that letter in this post.

240 West Center Street
Orem, Utah 84057
801-765-4999 Fax 801-765-4481

January 23, 2002

Dear UNIX. enthusiasts,

Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source code, including creating derived binary products created from the source code. The source code for which Caldera International, Inc. grants rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating Systems that operate on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System, with specific exclusion of UNIX System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems:

• 32-bit 32V UNIX
• 16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Caldera International, Inc. makes no guarantees or commitments that any source code is available from Caldera International, Inc. The following copyright notice applies to the source code files for which this license is granted.

Copyright(C) Caldera International Inc. 2001-2002. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code and documentation must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:

This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc.

Neither the name of Caldera International, Inc. nor the names of other contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

USE OF THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED FOR UNDER THIS LICENSE BY CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Very truly yours,

/signed/ Bill Broderick
Bill Broderick
Director, Licensing Services

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* UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries.

Prior to that, AT&T (under the name UNIX Systems Labs I think) released this particular code to BSD under the terms of the settlement with BSDI, and BSDI released the code as open source under the BSD license.

Golden Eagle wrote:

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What your mistaken about is that they want to sue everyone involved, every end user, when actually they just want business customers to pay.

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They want business customers to pay for something they no longer own and can't legally demand payment for. They also want business customers to pay The SCO Group a license fee for code written by IBM, Sequent (and probably SGI and others) that is copyrighted by IBM and Sequent. This is code that The SCO Group does not have a copyright to and that the SCO Group has no economic investment in the development costs, and they want businesses to pay the SCO Group a license fee for this code.

As one business user of Linux, I can say, when they can prove that they own something that I need to license, I'll consider paying the license (or I'll stop using their intellectual property). Until they prove it, they can go pound sand.

They also want IBM to pay them $1 billion to continue to use software that IBM developed and IBM copyrighted.

[Coral Snake]

Here is the Linus Torvalds hit-man email in full context for thise who haven't seen it.

I do not look up any patents on _principle_, because (a) it's a horrible
waste of time and (b) I don't want to know.

The fact is, technical people are better off not looking at patents. If
you don't know what they cover and where they are, you won't be knowingly
infringing on them. If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you
just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git.

Linus

I have a pretty extensive arsonal of "venomous" weapons in addition to the coral snake ping and this is one of them. ;-)

Really seems that this guy has a little "attitude" problem
that could get him into an orange suit and cuffs for contempt of court if he were actually called as a witness at the trial. :-)

[Dominic Harr]

I sincerely hope that is not the situation, but as you probably know my convictions on this issue go beyond this particular case.

Don't even try it.

You've staked your entire rep on this single issue here.

You've made some amazing, wild predictions about this case, in the most obnoxious, rude manner.

If you do, in fact, turn out to be completely, totally wrong, it speaks directly to your credibility. You've wrapped yourself in the flag to defend apparent criminal stock manipulation.

Here on FR, where we take patriotism very, very seriously. You've used it as a weapon to further your own ends. Claimed to be the defender truth, justice and the American way as a method to aiding and abetting stock fraud.

You'll need to retire this screen name, after this is all said and done . . .

[Coral Snake]

Before you start accusing Golden Eagle of using his patriotism and moral sense to protect stock fraud than I demand to see the REAL evidence for SCO stock fraud. Particularly on the part of Darl McBride WHO HAS NOT SOLD ANY STOCK acording to the "evidence" that you publish and in fact has EVEN BOUGHT SCO stock as late as last year. If
you can't produce REAL evidence of stock fraud on the part of Mr. McBride then YOU sir are the one who is guilty of false accusation here.

[Dominic Harr]

Young man, the quality of your posts to this point suggests to me there's no reason to attempt to engage you in any serious discourse for at least several more years.

I'm merely going to say I note your opinion, and I disagree with you.

[justlurking]

Why did you even post it then.

Because it was in the article that started the thread.

Your whole defense is scrambled and meaningless.

Only because you refuse to acknowledge the evidence and insist on having it laid out on a silver platter. OK, have it your way. But, I demand the same thing: no more vague allegations. If you have an accusation to make, back it up with hard evidence. In other words, put up or shut up.

Direct me to a concise corroborated description and I will evaluate.

You can start with the article posted at the beginning of the thread.

But this unorganized gushing is worthless, and the critical root flows still aren't being adressed.

The existence of the code in question in the public domain, after being put there by previous "owners" of the Unix license establishes that SCO's claims are bogus.

What is the timeline, and how hard is it to understand why timelines are needed?

The timeline has already been established by the timestamps on previous releases of the code into the public domain, most recently by Caldera in 2002 (a previous incarnation of today's SCO Group).

But, if pictures will help you, try this:

It's part of this article. It's a long, but interesting read, such as:

The dashed red arrow from 4.2BSD to System V represents stolen property. AT&T, SCO/Caldera's predecessor in interest, took code from BSD Unix into System V, removing copyright notices and attributions in violation of the Berkeley license.

There's a much longer discussion of this, in the section entitled: SCO/Caldera misrepresents the scope of its rights over Unix.

[justlurking]

You haven't seen all the evidence and yet you're calling it a "monumental mistake". Un-freaking-believable how far you guys will go to extrapolate...

The evidence is already clear: SCO is claiming proprietary rights over code that was released into the public domain twice by previous "owners" of Unix.

This error was discovered in a matter of hours after the disclosure became public. SCO apparently isn't bothering to do even basic research into the origin of the code in their own kernel, using tools and archives that are available to everyone.

That is indeed monumental. Even though it is only one of their claims, it was so easily discredited that it calls the rest of their claims into question.

It will be interesting to see how SCO responds this time, and how the market responds once it becomes widely-known during the next tech news cycle (at C/Net, etc)/

[justlurking]

I can't put my hands on the article right now, but stock fraud doesn't necessary require direct sale by the officers.

SCO is nearly majority-owned by the Canopy Group. The Canopy Group has been engaging in some interesting transactions, purchasing other companies in some sort of stock swap -- made easier by the inflated value of SCO stock.

I'll try to dig up the article tomorrow. I also read another that establishes that even the planned sales were initiated after corporate officers had to know about the plans to pursue IBM.

[Bush2000]

The evidence is already clear

It is? Great! Please give us a listing of all the items entered into evidence, then. If it's "already clear", I'd like a full accounting. Take your time: I'll wait.

[Golden Eagle]

I fail to see any relevance to that letter you and Danger are posting everywhere. It says clearly:

with specific exclusion of UNIX System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems