SCO vs IBM results

[alexander]

this is a hot press release:

Thursday, July 14 2005 @ 04:12 PM EDT

If this doesn't make your blood boil, see your doctor right away. We have obtained the August 13, 2002 Michael Davidson email to Reg Broughton, who forwarded it to Darl McBride with a cover note. It was previously sealed, and you can see why SCO would want it to be. It records Davidson's memories of Bob Swartz' earlier months-long code comparison between Linux and several versions of AT&T's Unix for oldSCO.

 

Davidson reports:

The project was a result of SCO's executive management refusing to believe that it was possible for Linux and much of the GNU software to have come into existance without *someone* *somewhere* having copied pieces of proprietary UNIX source code to which SCO owned the copyright. The hope was that we would find a "smoking gun" somwhere in code that was being used by Red Hat and/or the other Linux companies that would give us some leverage. (There was, at one stage, the idea that we would sell licenses to corporate customers who were using Linux as a kind of "insurance policy" in case it turned out that they were using code which infringed our copyright).

So, Darl's SCOsource scheme wasn't even original, was it? SCO *hoped* to find copyright infringement so they could make some money selling "insurance" for Linux, the email says. Sound familiar? And after all that effort, what did they find?

At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.

This email is dated August 13, 2002, and Darl became CEO June 28, 2002. So now what do you think he was hired for? I note Davidson says he no longer has the report. My favorite sentence is Davidson saying that once you find evidence of copyright infringement, it's easy to prove. Indeed. And two years and counting, we're still waiting for any evidence. We first heard about this email at the September 2004 hearing, and now we get to read it for ourselves. Davidson was on the list of SCO people IBM deposed that we saw last June, 2004, and now we likely know why. More on Davidson here, where we learn SCO did eventually dig up the study the Davidson email is describing and turn it over in discovery.

 

This email may explain why SCO said originally, in the very beginning, that there were no issues with the Linux kernel until 2.4. But if they already knew there were no issues from its inception until quite late in its development, why did they tell the court they needed all versions of Linux since the world began? And why did their complaint repeat the by-then discredited theory that Linux *must* have been helped by someone to get where it was, when that was the theory behind the Swartz comparison of code, and he found "absolutely nothing"? Linux code was clean as a whistle.

 

And why did Darl tell the world, and Congress, that because Linux was written by volunteers, there was no way to know if it was clean code, that it was a "free-for-all", that "there's not a policeman to check in the code at the Linux kernel level to ensure that there are not violations", when they already knew that it presented very clear evidence of purity? Yet, by May of 2003, VarBusiness wrote, "No version of Linux passes legal muster yet, believes Darl McBride":

Q: Is there anyway to get a real Linux version from your perspective without violating SCO IP?

McBride: Based on the understandings we have right now, we don't see how.

 

Here's another example:

I believe the way the open-source community works right now has some fundamental flaws that have got to be addressed. We need to address how this open-source intellectual property is developed, routed, and sold. Thousands of software developers send code to contribute to open-source projects -- but there isn't a protective device for the customer using the software to ensure they're not in violation of the law by using stolen code.

Basically it's a "buyer beware" situation. The one holding the hot potato is the end-use customer. If the process can't provide more guarantees for customers, I don't think it will pass the long-term test at the customer level. You need some comfort level other than "We can warrant none of this, we don't know where it came from. And because you got it for free, you shouldn't complain about it.

 

Aside from all the factual errors, now we know he had good reason to know that Linux had been looked at very carefully earlier, and it was clean up until then, so they were clearly doing something right. Evidently, the development process worked very well. Even if it were true that later there were isolated issues with code, and so far there is no proof of anything like that, why was the rhetoric what it was? And do you remember how the media responded? Here's Stephen Shankland's article when SCO's attack began in May of 2003:

McBride's accusation cuts to the heart of the open-source movement's legal and philosophical underpinnings. . . .

"We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code," McBride said in an interview. In addition, he said, "We're finding code that looks likes it's been obfuscated to make it look like it wasn't UnixWare code--but it was."

 

McBride refused to detail which specific code had been copied but said there were several instances--"

some of them go back several years

, and others are recent"--and said the copying was "not minor." SCO, however, won't publish what it's found.

 

"We feel very good about the evidence that is going to show up in court. We will be happy to show the evidence we have at the appropriate time in a court setting," McBride said. "The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go."

 

I added the emphasis, to highlight that if you went back "several years", you'd bump into the study saying there was no copyright infringement at that time. Perhaps SCO's answer would be it happened later. Or they found it later. But they'd best make it known, then.

 

Proprietary software has infringement issues all the time. Microsoft just settled a patent infringement case with Alacritech, for example. But it is Linux that was said to have problems with its development methods? Based on what? Why didn't SCO ever mention this study's results and tell the world about it, or at least qualify their statements more carefully? To sell "insurance"? To smear Linux?

 

If SCO had issues with IBM over contract matters, that is one thing, but why did it throw in the virulent anti-Linux copyright nonsense? Would you call it honest? I reviewed what Darl said in the early days in our Quote Database, by the way, in case you'd like to do the same. I hope Red Hat shows this to the judge in Delaware.

 

This is a paper exhibit, which Frank Sorenson obtained from the court, scanned for us, and did the HTML. There are misspellings in the original. Thank you, Frank.

 

UPDATE:

 

CNET's Ina Fried got a reaction from SCO:

A SCO representative told CNET News.com that the e-mail was authentic, but noted that the e-mail doesn't say when the SCO investigation took place or what tools were used.

"That e-mail probably creates a lot more questions than it answers," SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said. "We'll be fully prepared to address that, but we will be doing that in a court setting if it is necessary."

 

An IBM representative declined to comment. . . .

 

Stowell said that IBM has brought up the e-mail in court and noted that a judge has refused to dismiss SCO's suit.

 

"It doesn't really spell out anything," Stowell said of Davidson's e-mail.

 

As I am sure you know, SCO folk never talk to the media about this case, saving it instead for a court setting.

 

Not.

 

********************************

 

From: Reg Broughton

Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 10:05 PM

To: Darl McBride

Subject: Fwd: Re: Patents and IP Investigation

 

DARL

 

we can probably track down Bob Swartz if you want to dig further. Based on our last conversation, this summary of the code investigation probably closes that discussion.

 

This of course does not invalidate any of your statements on Caldera owning the central IP, and being the core provider of key technology and IP over the years into the UNIX and Linux communities.

 

REG

Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 13:26:51 -0700

From: Michael Davidson

Organization: Caldera International

X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en] (Win98; I)

X-Accept-Language: en

To: Reg Broughton

Subject: Re: Patents and IP Investigation

 

The actual investigation itself was done by an outside consultant (Bob Swartz) hired by SCO. I worked with him and reviewed his findings.

 

My recollection is that Bob produced an initial proposal for the project which outlined the methodology to be used, and he *may* have also provided a final report, but I don't have copies of either.

 

The project was a result of SCO's executive management refusing to believe that it was possible for Linux and much of the GNU software to have come into existance without *someone* *somewhere* having copied pieces of proprietary UNIX source code to which SCO owned the copyright. The hope was that we would find a "smoking gun" somwhere in code that was being used by Red Hat and/or the other Linux companies that would give us some leverage. (There was, at one stage, the idea that we would sell licenses to corporate customers who were using Linux as a kind of "insurance policy" in case it turned out that they were using code which infringed our copyright).

 

Note that the scope of the project was limited to looking for evidence of copyright infringement (we didn't consider patents because SCO didn't own the rights to any patents, and more general IP issues were just too vague - besides SCO was *sure* that it was going to find evidence of copyright violations which are comparatively straightforward to prove once you have found them)

 

An outside consultant was brought in bacause I had alrady voiced the opinion (based on very detailed knowledge of our own source code and a reasonably broad exposure to Linux and other open source projects) that it was a waste of time and that we were not going to find anything.

 

Bob worked on the project for (I think) 4 to 6 months during which time he looked at the Linux kernel, and a large number of libraries and utilities and compared them with several different vesrions of AT&T UNIX source code. (Most of this work was automated using tools which were designed to to fuzzy matching and ignore trivial differences in formatting and spelling)

 

At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.

 

There is, indeed, a lot of code that is common between UNIX and Linux (all of the X Windows system, for example) but invariably it turned out that the common code was something that both we (SCO) and the Linux community had obtained (legitimately) from some third party.

 

md

 

 

HA, Innocent I tell you, Innocent! Yippie:friday:

All hail to Linux, Linus, Stallman and all the prople who made Linux possible: :eek:

 

:eek:

 

ok, now that aside, let me recap what happened:

basically after Linux was released and gained popularity, and quickly became more popular then Unix (at the time owned by IBM), IBM filed a suit against Linux claiming that they used Unix code in the OS, without credentials, and in total violation of the copytight infringement. The investigation decided to contract SCO to condict an investigation compaaring the two codes. Since there is 3.5 million lines of code in the Kernel and probably about the same if not a bit more lines of Unix code, you can imagine that the investigation would take a little while to complete. This is an email from SCO basically saying that tere were no violations of anything anywhere because Linux did not use any of the Unix code at all, so HA (and thats where the above picks up :eek:)

[nemo]

Perhaps one of the biggest ironies in this case is the fact that Caldera (part of SCO) used to distribute its own flavor of Linux. My first experience with Linux was dual-booting Windows 95 and OpenLinux on a PC that Irish was kind enough to provide. I seem to remember their logo being a lizard of some kind, and being thankful that I didn't have to see that condescending paper clip any more.

[C1ay]

Perhaps one of the biggest ironies in this case is the fact that Caldera (part of SCO) used to distribute its own flavor of Linux.

Caldera Linux 1.3 with the "Looking Glass" desktop (kernel 2.0.36) was actually my primary OS for about 6 months several years ago. Now I've grown to hate the present company more than M$ :eek: