Posted on 08/19/2003 7:39:56 AM PDT by Joe Bonforte
LAS VEGAS--When SCO Group first filed its lawsuit against IBM in March, critics characterized the move as the last gasp of an ailing company hoping to strike a series of lucrative licensing deals.
Since then the company has come out swinging even harder, bashing its detractors, standing by its allegations, and most recently, posting a profit that SCO said would allow it to continue its aggressive intellectual property fight.
At the SCO Forum here Monday, the company pulled out its latest weapon: lines and lines of disputed code that were allegedly copied from SCO's Unix into IBM's version of Linux. The company claims that IBM illegally copied Unix code into its version of Linux, and it's warning Linux customers that they may be violating copyright by using the operating system without paying SCO. It's also recently announced a new licensing plan that would require Linux customers to pay between $199 and $699 per computer.
In a quiet conference room tucked into the conference center at the MGM Grand, SCO offered customers, partners and the merely curious the chance to view the code for themselves, as long as they signed a nondisclosure agreement.
Companies involved in litigation traditionally keep such information under wraps in order not to tip their legal hand, but SCO said it decided to display the code because its critics were charging that it didn't have a case.
"Given the nature of this case and that there may be a significant period of time before it's resolved and that people were clamoring to see it, we decided to show a few pieces of evidence," said Chris Sontag, senior vice president of the SCOsource unit, which is charged with protecting SCO's Unix-related intellectual property.
As of the end of the day on Monday, more than 150 people had seen the code presentation, which the company said includes a small portion of the infringing code it has found so far. Sontag said the company has uncovered more than a million lines of copied code in Linux, with the help of pattern recognition experts.
A compelling case?
According to those who viewed the code at SCO Forum, company representatives showed off several categories of code that allegedly infringed its copyrights, including some lines that appeared to be directly copied, some that were derivative works and some that were obfuscated, such as code from which legal disclaimers had been removed. (This reporter declined to sign the nondisclosure agreement required to attend the special sessions where the companies showed off a special side-by-side comparison of the code, opting instead to gather reactions from people who saw the presentation.)
After viewing the code, Don Price, general manager of Price Data Systems, said he was surprised at the volume that was allegedly copied. "It's compelling," he said. "Some people were either extremely sloppy, or copied and thought no one would go after them."
Neil Abraham, with SCO reseller Kerridge Computer, said SCO made the right decision to pursue IBM. "I think they've got a very firm case," he said, after looking at the code. "It's not just one line. It's huge chunks."
Bob Ungetti, of Raven Technologies, who was milling about waiting to get into a room where the code was being shown off, said he wanted to see the code because his customers have been asking him about the suit. "I want to see the code myself just to substantiate the claims SCO is making, so when I talk to my customers about the credibility of the lawsuit, I can say I saw it for myself," said Ungetti, whose company is a reseller for SCO. "If they're interested in using Linux, they're concerned they may be adversely affected; my SCO customers are concerned that if the company loses the lawsuit, it may be out of business."
Ungetti said a keynote address on Monday morning had already convinced him that SCO had a pretty solid case. During a speech, SCO representatives showed a few slides containing the allegedly infringing code, offering attendees a taste of what they could see if they signed the nondisclosure agreement.
"The spelling errors and comments (copied into the code) are the real kicker. To me, that's the nail in the coffin," Ungetti said.
Many attendees of the conference are longtime SCO fans, so convincing them that the company has a case by showing them the code probably wasn't too tough. However, at least one attendee was appalled by SCO's decision to sue IBM. The man, an exhibitor on the show floor who asked that his name not be used, said that SCO's hands aren't clean either, because the company has probably taken code from other sources and incorporated it into its products. "It looks to me like there's been a lot of cross-pollination" between Unix and Linux, said the attendee, who jokingly called SCO's legal saga "As the Stomach Turns."
Legal experts agreed that SCO faces a challenge of proving that it has the original rights to the code--a task that could prove especially daunting because of a special license popular among makers of free and open-source software known as the GNU Public License, or GPL. The GPL requires companies that incorporate code into their product to share their changes. In its response to SCO's legal filing, IBM claims that SCO can't assert claims to the disputed code because it was originally covered under the GPL.
"Even if there is literal copying, you'll have to say, 'What's the source of the code?'" said Stuart Meyer, a partner with Fenwick & West, who is not involved in the case.
SCO has denied that the disputed code is covered by the GPL. An attorney for the company said Monday that even if it were, federal copyright laws protecting the company's intellectual property would trump the free software license, an argument that could form the crux of the case should it go to trial.
Analysis of Linux Code that SCO Alleges Is In Violation Of Their Copyright and Trade Secrets
Still true. SCO doesn't want removal, they want a shakedown.
They are now saying that some of the code may have originally been GPL'd,Berkeley code, but if AT&T copied it (remember, SCO themselves bought this in -- they develop NOTHING) then the AT&T and subsequent SCO licence override the GPL.
In plain English, "We copied it, but it's OK; if you copied it from the same source, you have to pay us."
Their legal strategy will hinge on getting a very stupid jury, sending them to sleep with long and irrelevant exhibits, and banging on the table in the closing arguments.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Well, they're secure on that flank, because the company and the OS are both at death's door. There's no money there, and no ethical attorney would let his client waste his money filing against an empty shell.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
In a just world, Boies himself would have his pants sued off.
SCO will not win this case by showing comparisons of non-functional comments. Bring on the subpoenas. Let's see a comparison of real code, and hear the testimony of the programmers and the copyright experts.
http://ftp.lug.udel.edu/pub/oldunix/local/unix/v3wkt/ken/malloc.c
In the README file:
http://ftp.lug.udel.edu/pub/oldunix/local/unix/v3wkt/Readme.html
In January 1999, Dennis Ritchie sent in a copy of the `nsys' UNIX kernel for inclusion in the PUPS Archive. In the accompanying README, he says:
So far as I can determine, this is the earliest version of Unix that currently exists in machine-readable form. ... The dates on the transcription are hard to interpret correctly; if my program that interprets the image are correct, the files were last touched on 22 Jan, 1973. ...
No, it's being Slashdot'ed. The link was posted as an update to the original story about the SCO code, on the front page. There are probably something on the order of 250,000 people trying to read the article.
In my opinion, the second article is a bit better, anyway.
It appears those comments are not relevant: no one has found them anywhere. They are probably from SCO's kernel and truly proprietary.
It was just a lame attempt to obfuscate it. I'm not sure why they even included it. And if you look closely at the code on the second page, you will notice a typo that apparently occurred when cutting/pasting the code into the slide.
The code pre-dates SCO's implementation, and indicates that SCO actually copied it from BSD. That's legal under the BSD copyright, until they claimed it as their own.
http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html
It demolishes a number of SCO's claims, point by point. It also provides good information about the origins of Unix.
A court is unlikely to take seriously any attempt by SCO to re-litigate the settlement reached between Unix System Laboratories/Novell and Berkeley over just these issues. To the extent SCO inherited AT&T's contracts and AT&T's UNIX IP, it also inherited the settlement reached in 1994.
In its never-ending silliness campaign, SCO will no doubt claim they intend to do just that, but no judge is going to let them re-open an issue that was settled nine years ago by the then-owners of the properties.
It's slashdotted. (if that means nothing to you: when the open source news site slashdot.org cites something of interest to its readers, the server frequently gets buried. Lwn.net is there, it's just overrun with readers and reeeeeal slow).
For people who want the technical side of this, here is the /. thread... most of you who'd benefit have probably already been there.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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