Why SCO Decided To Go To Court
from the speak-up dept
The SCO vs. Linux story just keeps going and going... The latest is yet another attempt by SCO to defend their actions by claiming that they're the "victim" in this case. They bring up the usual story, comparing this to "theft" of tangible goods, and even claim that IBM told Novell to come out against SCO (while denying that Microsoft was pushing them to do the same against Linux). They also claim that IBM must have stolen their intellectual property, because they have access to the code, but deny that it was possible that they, themselves, had anything to do with the Unix code ending up in the wrong place. They say that they were always careful to keep their Unix business and Linux business separate, but don't seem to think IBM could have done the same. In related stories, yet another analyst has seen the code, and this time it's someone who actually understands code. He says that from what he's seen he's still skeptical, mainly since SCO wouldn't let him actually dig into the code, but just presented snippets side by side. He also claims they told him (but later called him and denied) that they had no specific proof that IBM put the code into Linux. Finally, over at eWeek, they're telling SCO to put up or shut up when it comes to the code. That means not giving out restricted snippets of the code only to those under NDA - but to actually show people who understand the code where the violations occur so that people can figure out what really happened.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Subject Given
MS pushing SCO to do anything? What kinda crack are you on? MS hardly notices that SCO exists, and here you seem to have them all in bed.
The insignificance of SCO to MS is of the same degree as the insignificance of the freaks out there with the torches and pitchforks who demand to see the court documents before the case opens. MS is not going to do much more than throw pocket change at SCO, and SCO's not going to accomodate the geeks who seem to do not much more than shout and wave their signs.
Let's look at it. SCO can do nothing, ever, to appease the torch-waving geeks. Why should it try? Just, please, try not to make it all a big conspiracy with MS as SCO's puppet master. The only relationship between the two is MS dumping one day's lunch money at SCO to hedge a bet.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: No Subject Given
Let's draw an analogy here.
Suppose you own a garden. You quite enjoy gardening and are fairly good at it. You give some of the produce to your neighbors. And life is good.
Then, a large biotech firm files suit against the garden shop down the street, saying that the garden shop (from which you purchased some items) has been illegally distributing the biotech firm's engineered seeds. The biotech firm then proceeds to send registered letters to all your neighbors, telling them that the produce from your garden may be in violation of the biotech firm's intellectual property, and that they should consult their attornies and possibly have their stomachs pumped.
The biotech firm does not publish a document explaining how they have determined that your garden's produce was grown from their seeds. All they have done is allowed a few industry analysts to view forensic-style DNA test results under NDA, and the analysts who have seen it only have comments like "they look similar, but I'm not a molecular biologist" or "there are similarities, but I would need to see them in the context of a gene, not just a small sampling of nucleotides".
Meantime, the local newspaper is suggesting that people may not be able to get food from your garden, and there are concerns over whether you will be allowed to continue gardening and whether other gardens in the area may be similarly affected. People are accusing you of being a thief, despite the fact that you obtained your seeds from a perfectly legitamite source, and that you have no way of visually identifying a normal seed versus one that might have been from the biotech firm.
In this siutation, wouldn't you be kinda pissed, too? Or would you just hang up your trowel?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: No Subject Given
Here's a stupid question,
How is a judge going to be in any better technical shape than any of these analysts that have been pretending to be programmers?
And now for the hard question:
How do we keep this from happening again?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]