Speaking of soap operas, there’s one soap opera in the technology world that has been going on for so long that nobody really seems to know why it was ever started, whatever all the different moves have been over the years, or whoever lost or won which battle. Just like a true soap opera, you can just jump right in the middle of it and feel like you’ve always been part of the regular audience. The SCO saga is such a case.Ars is reporting right from the countertrial that Novell started after having more or less won the trial last year SCO sued Novell with. During that trial it was determined that Novell owned the copyrights to AT&T UNIX’ source code and derivatives, including SVRX (System V, Release X). Novell has already stated it has no interest in suing Linux users or distributors with these UNIX copyrights (they depend on Linux now, you see).
SCO senior vice president Chris Sontag was first to take the stand, and when asked “Is there any UnixWare code in Linux?”, Ars reports him as answering:
“There very well could be, […] I’ve never done that analysis, never seen that analysis.” Sontag also testified that there was no difference between the Microsoft and Sun licenses for UnixWare, saying, “They were equal.”
Darl McBride, CEO of SCO, was up next. His answers were… Peculiar, to say the least. He stated that SCO holds the copyrights over UNIX, and that “many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developers. We have evidence System V is in Linux.” Which contradicts the statements made by Sontag, but as Ars explains, due to the witness exclusion rule, McBride was not present during the testimony of Sontag. McBride had one throwaway remark, one that really shows how much this man has lost touch with reality – which may probably be the most opinionated remark ever in an OSAlert news item, but just read what he had to say, and you can do nothing but agree with me. McBride said:
Linux is a copy of UNIX, there is no difference [between them].
Next up on the bench was Greg Jones, VP of Technology at Novell. He stated SCO had never told Novell specifically SCO would sue Linux users. He also explained that SCO did not notify Novell about entering into an agreement with Microsoft, even though they were supposed to. Ars continues:
Jones testified that SVRX code is in Solaris and that he had discovered several cases of this. At that point, Novell entered into evidence at least 21 examples of OpenSolaris code that had been taken from the SVRX code base (one such example can be found on the OpenSolaris web site) and re-licensed under Sun’s open-source CDDL license.He further testified that the agreement between SCO and Sun was “extraordinary” in allowing a move from a proprietary license to an open-source license, and if Novell had been asked, it would have prevented SCO from entering into that agreement. He said the same thing regarding the Microsoft agreement with SCO, as well as the agreement between SCO and Computer Associates.
I’m still amazed at the remark McBride made. What intrigues me now is if he believed as such all along, or that the events over the last few years made him believe it. Both are equally disturbing.
You would have thought that SCO would at least get their stories straight after all this time. If their head honchos can’t tell the same story then they are weel and truly up the creek without a paddle.
There are many people who want sco to lose and do so badly but I expect that they all thought that a better fight would be put up when they got their day in court.
IANAL etc, but if they continue to contradict themselves they will severely limit their ground for an appeal in the future. That always assumes they have not gone to Chap 7 by then…
In all fairness to him Chris Sontag has moved on and is now working for a different company. It is not in his interest to lie in order to maintain a unified front for SCO against Novell, IBM and RedHat. Attempting to do so now would only risk getting nailed as a criminal perpetrator, co-conspirator or accessory. His testimony rings true to me since he was a PR guy and not a real techno-type. He is no longer part of the fraud ; trying to help them now would no doubt endanger his present job unless he needs to display some misplaced sense of loyalty in order to stay with his current employer. That will be Darl’s only functional future resume highlight: I’m not afraid to lie when it’s needed by the company!
Darl has to continue to try to maintain the facade that SCO acted reasonably and responsibly and that this is all just a big mistake on the part of those counter-suing and/or making Lanham Act claims against SCO. But once the [counterclaim] prosecution lawyer got him to assert that what he put in the SEC filings was true then what he is saying now about licensing fees, the meaning of the licensing agreements and the relative values of SysVrX and Unixware of code must be false.
I think everyone who has ever seen the sun, including Darl, knows that this was just a ploy to begin with, but Darl can’t ever admit that because it would put him in a variety of hot water.
We don’t tend to punish people for being the town idiot, but we do punish people for doing things like taking advantage of the stock market, etc.
Darl is doomed to parrot this nonsense the rest of his life, I think.
SCO is dead, he only state things, as did Steve Balmer. The matter that most Linux users don’t care. Even enterprises. The same happened when MS was attacked cause they break the MP3 patent. The user are not concerned. The buzz-word is Linux, the good thing is only that peoples cares about Linux and make them known with all that words, instead to get that fear! OS X is “very Linux like, very much so!” look at the first presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko4V3G4NqII (is Linux-like). The thing that matters, is that process-separation, and etc. are like Unix from ’77, but what matter, is that Linux is not at the ’77 year level. As not Windows is at level of Windows 3.1 + OS/2. That is the foundation, but is not the OS/2, is much more improved.
SCO itself instead innovating will die as a bad image company, a company that will not compete with software, they compete with patents! Even they say that they bought the Unix copyrights, and is true, the image itself is bad: which company will take patents to sue you! What happend when Macrosoft, when will attack FreeDos, or Wine cause they emulate their stack of software? Or a company will say: TCP-IP is patented, and no one may use it without paying for it?
So, I will not care much on SCO if they will not offer more than patents portofolio!
SCO needs grow, elsewhere is a dead company for me and I will never buy it Linux or Unix from them if I will know that I will remain locked in with SCO. Migrating to any other simialar OS means to care on patent issues, so no reason to risk my future with a lock-in.
I will not take the today convenience for headache for tomorrow.
Edited 2008-05-01 20:56 UTC
“Linux Is a Copy of UNIX”
I thought this was common knowledge?
And only copying someone’s ideas to make something similar, or exactly the same, is *not* the same as copying copyrighted works
Thus Darl is a moron if he believes this is why Linux is wrong.
> And only copying someone’s ideas to make something similar, or exactly the same
Linux implement POSIX. Linux does not copy Unix.
It’s like Firefox implementing HTML. Firefox is not copying IE, It’s just implementing HTML.
No, Firefox is copying Netscape, and both Netscape and IE are copying Mosaic, however, only one of them had to use Mosaic code to do it. The other line was innovative enough to implement it on their own.
Ouch…IE innovative?
I wondered if he wasn’t implying the opposite.. hard to tell as Netscape used some NCSA Mosaic code while Internet Explorer used some Spyglass Mosaic code.
EDIT should have read the other pages. Seems this has been addressed already
Edited 2008-05-02 15:32 UTC
Mark Andreessen co wrote Mosaic and he then co founded netscape. I’m fairly certain that netscape is based on the original Mosaic Communicator…or is the original mosaic communicator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communications_Corporation#Ea…
Specifically:
‘The Mosaic Netscape web browser utilized some NCSA Mosaic code with NCSA’s permission, as noted in the application’s “About” dialog box. ‘
Edited 2008-05-02 15:49 UTC
To be fair, the X in ajax came from ie, inner/outerHTML came from ie, element.style.cssProp syntax came from ie.
IE was innovative once upon a time, it just hasn’t been for close to a decade or so
Correction: only one company was innovative enough to buy another company’s code and rename it Internet Explorer.
Wasn’t Mozilla a spin off of Netscape or something like that?
Sadly IE, until version 8, hasn’t done very well (from a technical point of view) at making a really good quality browser that supports generally accepted standards laid out by the W3C. Of course that hasn’t hurt it’s ability to dominate the market, but it’s made designing a compliant website a lot hard. Thanks for the innovation Microsoft. We could’ve done it without you.
Sort of…but I dont think Mozilla and Netscape were ever 2 separate entities competing with each other.
Netscape basically opened their source code and I’m not sure of the exact link between netscape and the mozilla foundation but they were linked. So its more like mozilla is the successor of netscape, rather than one company COPYing another company’s product.
in the case of IE, microsoft basically licensed someone else’s code (spyglass Inc’s Mosaic, then the most popular browser) and modified it to make Internet Explorer. I’m not sure how much (if any) of that original code still exists in IE however so its probably fair to say that both IE and Mozilla in their current forms are original products.
As for Linux being a copy of unix…its been public knowledge that linux was created to duplicate many UNIX API’s etc (or POSIX) so that UNIX apps could run under it. There was no copying of code as such.
I believe the whole case has nothing to do with Linux or SCO and everything to do with how much SCO execs made from messing with the stock market. What we are seeing now is just people doing what they need to do to avoid being found out…just an opinion…
Yes, as I understand Netscape released the source and the mozilla project started.
If I remember correctly, around the beginning of mozilla 1.5, major changes were made that broke how many sites with tables, etc.. looked. Then those issues were fixed in 1.7 just in time for Firefox 1.0 release.
Edited 2008-05-03 01:57 UTC
No. You have the wrong idea here.
“Copying” in a legal sense (ie in order to violate copyright) requires that there be a direct copy of the lines of code. There are no lines of code from Mosaic in Netscape. There are probably no lines of code left from Netscape in Firefox.
Just because two things perform the same function does not mean they are copies of one another.
Is a diesel engine the same as a gas turbine engine (aka a jet engine)? No? Is either one the same as a petrol engine? No? Are they copies of one another … of course not. Yet all three of these different engine types burn hydrocarbon fuels and produce rotary motion.
Edited 2008-05-01 23:53 UTC
Actually, Firfox *is* Netscape, at least it’s based on Netscape’s source code.
IE *is* Mosaic “Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.” (From IE6 About… box), although IE7 apparently no longer contains any Mosaic code, it is still highly likely to have design/structure features inherited from Mosaic.
Netscape did copy Mosaic to an extent, but Mosaic was far from the first graphic web browser (WorldWideWeb, ViolaWWW and Erwise all pre-dated it).
wrong…
‘The Mosaic Netscape web browser utilized some NCSA Mosaic code with NCSA’s permission, as noted in the application’s “About” dialog box. ‘
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communications_Corporation#Ea…
Well HTML is free, try to implement e.g. H264 and sell the product. Tadaaaa, so it has nothing to do if you implement something, but if it’s free to use!
Linux mostly implements POSIX.
Welcome to reality, copy something of the behaviour of Apples beloved OS and they will sue you until the end of the world
That isn’t copyright infringement (unless you copied their logo and/or artwork directly) – that’s trademark and/or patent infringement.
These are completely different topics. It’s unfortunate that people get those mixed up so much.
edit: added clarification on logo/artwork
Edited 2008-05-01 23:25 UTC
Apple’s beloved OS isn’t a public standard.
POSIX is a public standard.
And then reality answers back that Apple already sued Microsoft and lost.
Linux isn’t wrong … in exactly the same way that any collaboration isn’t wrong.
If we didn’t have collaborative works … there would be no innternational telephone network. There would be no shipping. There would be no international flights.
There would be no food industry, no agriculture. There would be no industry at all, in fact, without collaboration and working interfaces between the efforts of separate parties.
Collaboration … in the sense of many parties working together to make separate small pieces work well together to form a wider system … is an essential engineering process. Without it, our species would revert to living in caves.
Exactly so. Linux is a collaborative work of many parties … it is an operating system that implements the POSIX standards.
There is nothing at all “wrong” with that in any way at all … despite the greed and delusions of some corporate money-grubbing types.
linux is a *reimplementation* of unix. freebsd is closer to a copy of an actual unix.
It’s not common knowledge because it isn’t.
Linux is a unix-like OS that conforms, to various degrees, with the POSIX standards.
UNIX is a family of similar operating systems and a trademark not an implementation. A set of specifications and tradition defines what UNIX is, not the origin of its source code.
To say that Linux is a copy of UNIX makes no sence. You could say that Linux is an implementation of UNIX or that Linux is a copy of SYSV.
Linux is not certified as a UNIX implementation but there is no theoretical reason to stop a Linux vendor to get a UNIX certification.
When will he shut up?
Never. Like you didn’t know that.
I thought the amusement was over months ago… <breaks out popcorn>
What crack is he smoking? If he truly believes this, then I have to wonder what the hell he thinks BSD is.
If I had to take a WAG, he probably considers BSD to be a less easy target with less deep pockets.
I do wonder what he thinks about BSD too
Do you remember the trial between AT&T and BSDI back in the nineties? Well it’s important, the clarified it out of court. And guess why? Because there is (was) lots of BSD code in UNIX
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.html
“The second example says nothing about Linux, since it’s obviously not SCO code. It does, however, suggest that SCO is abusing the BSD license”
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.html
If you have a single clue about the heritage of BSD you wouldn’t ask such a silly question.
I suppose then that if McBride had twin daughters, he’d think they’re the same girl!
well, they’d have the same Look and Feel (c/tm) ^_^
ok, I’m going to hell for that one.
McBride is a bad copy of human DNA. Someone revoke the license, please…
He’s a good argument against cloning isn’t he.
… the ReactOS team for “copying” “their” system?
When it gains traction and they can make an example out of them.
That’s why they have standards as to how code can get into their system. For example, there was a really big audit of their code recently – shut down work on the project for a while to my understanding – to help prevent Microsoft from being able to make any claims as such (patents, etc. aside) like SCO is trying (and failing) with Linux.
Wasn’t his real name McBribe and shouldn’t his company be written as $<0
No?
… Microsoft server 2008 is already arrived?
My, how time flies when you’re having fun does it not?
it says “Application Anywhere”
http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/testdrive/windows-server-…
System Check
Checking for the javascript support
This site requires JavaScript to be enabled.
Checking for IE6.0 or higher
This site requires IE6.0 or above.
Checking for the ActiveX control to be installed
“Application Anywhere” fails to run oh cant be anywhere then can it…
it’s not a copy. their is no UNIX code in linux.
It was already old five years ago.
SCO said to IBM: “Linux is a copy of UNIX”.
IBM said: “Show us where”.
SCO said: “No, we won’t. Give us money”.
… at that point, all of five years ago, we already knew that there is no UNIX code in linux.
McBride is a copy of an ape.
Not exactly sure why anyone would be amazed that Daryl would say that… I mean he led his company down the garden path of threatening it’s market, and tangling with giants.
Anything he does at this point is just staying the course.
As mentioned above, UNIX is a specification. There are different implementations of that specification (or a specific version of the specification, to be exact), and only the Open Group (iirc) can “bless” ann implementation as UNIX. Linux, on the other hand is a unix-like OS. It implements much of the POSIX standard.
There is no such thing as the “UNIX” code. You can’t copy “UNIX” code into your OS, it does not exists. However, there implementations of the standard that can be called UNIX. Thus, it would be more appropriate (technically, not actually) to say Linux is a copy of AIX, or Linux is a copy of SCO Openserver. Or you could say Linux took System V code. But you cannot say Linux is a copy of UNIX. Unless you are Darl, of course!
POSIX is a standard, UNIX is a trademark
But in order you call your product by the trademarked name “UNIX”, you must implement the Single UNIX Specification (currently version 3). So, to split hairs, I am referring to the Single UNIX Specification. Woohoo!
Sigh!
Linux is not a copy of AIX, and Linux is not a copy of SCO Openserver, and Linux is not a copy of any UNIX.
Linux is a new codebase, built from the ground up. It is a mostly-compliant implementation of the POSIX standard.
Just like the situation where, even though both Fords and Hondas have petrol-driven engines, a Honda engine is not a copy of a Ford engine, so too is Linux NOT a copy of any other POSIX compliant OS.
Period.
Get this word “copy” right out of your head.
Linux is an mostly-complete re-implementation of the POSIX standard, written by collaboration over the Internet (mostly via mailing lists) starting from the efforts of Linus Torvalds in about 1990.
Edited 2008-05-03 00:55 UTC
Well, you are wrong in your argument. BSD, SunOS, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX were all forked from the Unix Time Sharing System at one time or another. They probably do not contain much of that old code if any at all but most recent direct descendant is Novell UnixWare from 2004.
I don’t see many Unix programming books, but there is a load of Linux Programming books. Maybe bookstores in Utah are different!
We all know a certain CEO of bankrupt company is a complete and total ID10T.
What ID10T and his group of ID10Ts were trying to do is to create a “golden retirement parachute” from the Linux and Unix legal suit they had in their mind’s eye.
They took on IBM and IBM took their collective butts to task. Now they are up against Novell, which, by ruling, owns UNIX, not SCO, and it will be great to watch the village ID10T get his butt spanked again.
I thought Darl McBride was going to be replaced – have plans changed or has this just not happened yet?
http://osnews.com/story/19433/McBride_Ousted_at_SCO_Lawsuits_To_Con…
It’s explained here, along with some other interesting history regarding Darl McBride that I did not know before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darl_McBride
McBride is a babbling idiotic fool!
Is he Steve Ballmer’s twin by any chance?
Dave
Mozilla was a “copy” of Netscape. Firefox was redesigned from the ground up to replace Mozilla.