Finally, I’ve got around to fixing the poxy 3Gig drive that turbotas.co.uk has run on since 1997.
Lately, the drive errors have been increasing and the uptimes have tumbled down to windows levels (Grin), so Something Had To Be Done.
Interestingly enough, it’s not actually all that obvious what it is that you have to do when replacing your /root partition drive.
In the end, all was well courtesey of a boot CD and a spare machine: I just installed the old and new drives, booted to CD, and used the normal fdisk/mkfs commands to build the new disk, then mounted both and copy the files accross.
I was careful to make the new drive hda, then when the copy finished, I just chroot’ed to the drive and ran the grub installer. All was NOT this easy in the LILO days!
I used the spare space on the new drive for Swap, Logs, tmp and WebRoot. All should be swifter now.
Finally got around to enabling the second CPU too: Hitcounts have increased (a bit) since the NewsForge article was published and that SSL traffic has been killing the box.
Spam Free Email, Guaranteed?
With help, TurboTas has been busily at work for more than a year on the MailSleuth system. I’m almost in a position now to be able to guarantee the spam-free’ness of an email feed with some caveats.
Guarantee is a pretty stong term to use in email cleaning circles, so better explain the rationale here.
It’s really important to understand that SPAM’s are becoming harder and harder to detect: Those email worms which mail address books out are a good example as to why: It’s only a matter of time before the spammers use this information as a whitelist bypass mechanism.
There are many other reasons, but the key point is that no combined technology seems able to get to above around 95% accuracy in email classification.
The essence of the MailSleuth system is that perhaps that we should not try too hard with the technology element.
It’s therefore the suggestion that the best way to sort this is to have a RealPerson having the final say.
At first, this seems kind of odd: ‘I don’t like people reading my email’ is the most likely first thought, followed closely by ‘That sounds like a really slow process’. Lets look at both of those points.
It’s right and propper that you don’t like the idea that someone can read your mail. Why do you assume that they don’t now though? Chances are that you’ve no idea where your mail has gone or who has potentially seen it. Think about this always when you send email!
The OperatorConsole that the Mailsleuth System uses anonymizes headers so as to make it far less obvious who the ultimate email recipient is. Some tokens are needed as there are customer specific config elements, but in general, the operator won’t know whose email they are checking.
On most occaisions, the operator will make their decision based on content outside the email body itself: Subject Line, Receipt Time, Other recipients, IP addresses of relay’s etc.
The second point is a tougher one. It’s true that having a positive release mechanism for every message is a pain in the butt. MailSleuth mitigates this somewhat by having a pretty well streamlined console which allows the operator to acheive pretty good throughput’s.
On the plus side, the delay gives the Virus vendors time to catch up: Although the MailSleuth system uses two serial Virus checkers, it’s not unusual for new outbreaks to occur before the anti-virus vendors have a chance to react. The inherent MailSleuth delay means that the final virus check can occur after the AV vendors release patches
Perhaps you are thinking that this sounds interesting? Tell Me! No dates or prices yet, but it’s likely to be something like £5 per month or 1p per email received (That’s pre-filtering so it’s still in your best interests to minimize the publicity of your email address!).
TurboTas has devised some interesting terms of service though, so think about what it is that you need email for.
There is a little info at the MailSleuth site, but by all means ask for more info.
But what about this guarantee? Oh, well it’s leikly that the guarantee will be backed up by cash credit or free months. Cash credit (perhaps £1) for those paying per email and month’s free for those paying by the month. Think about it, it’s quite compelling!
IBM Court Filing Seeks Money Damages and Injunctions Against SCO-Caldera
IBM and RedHat have both counterfiled against SCO this week. IBM’s counterclaim has no less than 10 pretexts, many of which are for Patent Infringement. TurboTas guesses that these are ‘gif’like patents which ralate to PI in use in the public domain. Here’s the full article from MozillaQuest.
IBM filed its answer and counterclaim to SCO’s Amended Complaint late on 6 August 2003 in the Utah Federal court presiding over the SCO-Caldera v IBM lawsuit. IBM’s counter claims for money damages and injunctive relief come only days after Red Hat Software, announced a two-pronged legal counter attack against SCO-Caldera’s anti-Linux war.
SCO-Caldera has been attempting to scare GNU/Linux users into buying SCO UnixWare licenses that promise to hold them harmless from SCO anti-Linux lawsuits. SCO-Caldera also has filed a lawsuit against IBM, which is essentially a fracas about IBM contributing code to the Linux kernel and otherwise heavily supporting GNU/Linux and the GNU/Linux community.
SCO Infringes on IBM Patents
According to a letter from Bob Samson, Vice President, Systems Sales, IBM Systems Group, IBM is seeking an “injunction requiring SCO to refrain from misrepresenting its rights, and to cease further infringement of IBM’s patents.”
In MozillaQuest Magazine’s 5 August 2003 article discussing SCO-Caldera’s Amended Complaint and the SCO v IBM lawsuit, Tom Carey and Mike Angelo discussed the IBM patent issue: on page 4 of that article.
MozillaQuest Magazine: Could this produce an anomaly where IBM owns the copyright and patent interests in these derivative works and extensions yet IBM is subject to the Unix license agreements for them anyway?
Thomas C. Carey: This is unlikely. But it is possible that either party may have written code that infringes on the patent rights of the other party. If IBM owns patents that cover the functions served by the disputed code, then IBM is in the driver’s seat. It is relatively easy to code around copyrighted software. Patent protection is much more of a challenge. In that case, SCO might have a hard time selling UNIX without a license from IBM. [Emphasis Added.]
Here is the meat of Bob Samson’s letter:
IBM counter sued SCO on a range of issues. Simply put, SCO’s scheme is an attempt to profit from its limited rights to a very old UNIX operating system by introducing fear, uncertainty and doubt into the marketplace.
The counterclaims are detailed in our legal filing, but here are the key points:
SCO has violated the GNU General Public License, under which it accepted
Linux contributions and distributed Linux.
SCO has improperly claimed the right to revoke IBM’s UNIX license, despite the fact that IBM’s contract expressly provides that IBM’s rights are irrevocable and that Novell, which is a party to the agreement under which IBM obtained an irrevocable and perpetual UNIX license, agrees that SCO cannot terminate IBM’s license and has exercised its right to waive this claim.
SCO has directly infringed four IBM patents relating to SCO’s commercially available UnixWare, Open Server, SCO Manager and Reliant HA clustering software products.
IBM is seeking compensatory and punitive damages and an injunction requiring SCO to refrain from misrepresenting its rights, and to cease further infringement of IBM’s patents.
The Germans already have been quite successful at getting the German courts to force SCO-Caldera from making its Anti-Linux claims and spreading FUD in Germany. Will the American’s be as successful in their court battles to stop SCO-Caldera from making its Anti-Linux claims and spreading FUD in the U.S.A.?
A Quick Look at IBM’s Answer and Counterclaim
We still are digesting IBM’s 45-page puppy. It’s a hum-dinger. But here are some highlights of IBM’s counterattack.
First off the full title of IBM’s answer and counterclaim taken from the filing is “DEFENDANT IBM’ S ANSWER TO THE AMENDED COMPLAINT AND COUNTERCLAIM-PLAINTIF IBM’S COUNTERCLAIMS AGAINST SCO”. SCO now is the Plaintiff/Counterclaim-Defendant and IBM now is the Defendant/Counterclaim-Plaintiff.
* The Answer
The first sixteen pages of IBM’s Answer and Counterclaim are comprised of 170 paragraphs answering the 170 numbered paragraphs of SCO’s Amended Complaint. The sixteen page Answer is pretty much a straight up and down denial of just about every allegation made in SCO’s Amended Complaint.
That’s a major change and improvement from IBM’s Answer to SCO’s original Complaint. In that original Answer, IBM tried to evade answering many questions there by falsely stating that it did not have sufficient information so as to form a belief about the truth of the allegations. More about that and the details of the sixteen page Answer to the Amended Complaint in an upcoming article.
* Affirmative Defenses
Pages 17 and 18 of IBM’s Answer and Counterclaim raise ten boilerplate affirmative defenses. However, of particular interest might be the Tenth Defense, set forth on page 18: SCO has failed, in whole or in part, to mitigate its alleged damages.
IBM fails to specify with sufficient particularity how SCO allegedly has failed to mitigate its alleged damages. However, it is quite likely that this is where SCO and its CEO Darl McBride’s refusal to show IBM (and also the Linux kernel and GNU/Linux developers and distributors) just what code SCO claims IBM improperly contributed to the Linux kernel is going to boot SCO and McBride in the butt.
* IBM’s Counterclaims
IBM’s Counterclaims start on page 18 of its Answer and Counterclaim. Pages 18 through 44 are about IBM’s ten Counterclaims — 103 numbered paragraphs of counterclaim pleadings. Particularly interesting is the Second Counterclaim, relating violation of the Lanham Act — 15 U.S.C. § 1125, 15 U.S.C. § 1117(a).
Red Hat’s lawsuit against SCO also includes allegations of SCO violating the Lanham Act. To all those people in the GNU/Linux community that want to sue SCO, check IBM’s Second Counterclaim and the comparable allegations in the Red Hat v SCO Complaint. You likely can use the Lanham act as a basis to sue SCO too.
Here are the ten IBM Counterclaims:
FIRST COUNTERCLAIM Breach of Contract
SECOND COUNTERCLAIM Lanham Act Violation
51. IBM repeats and realleges the averments in paragraphs 1 through 50, with the same force and effect as though they were set forth fully herein.
52. IBM sells and distributes AIX and Linux-related products and services in interstate commerce.
53. SCO has made material false representations regarding AIX and IBM’s Linux-related products and services, which affect a customer’s decision whether to purchase these products and services. Specifically, SCO has publicly misrepresented the legitimacy of these products and services by falsely representing that IBM no longer has the right, authority and license to use, produce and distribute these products and by misrepresenting SCO’s own rights in and to UNIX, AIX and Linux.
54. SCO has published its false statements in a series of widely-distributed press releases, press interviews and other streams of commerce, as part of its bad faith campaign to discredit IBM’s products and services in the marketplace, to increase the perceived value of SCO’s limited rights to UNIX and to promote SCO’s own, UNIX operating systems, UnixWare and Open Server.
55. These statements are likely to cause confusion and mistake and have in fact caused confusion and mistake as to the characteristics of IBM’s goods, products and/or services.
56. As a direct result of SCO’s false representations, all of which are in violation of 15 U-S.C. § 1125, IBM has suffered damages in an amount to be determined at trial. IBM is also entitled to damages and attorneys’ fees pursuant to 15 U.S.C. § 1117(a).
THIRD COUNTERCLAIM Unfair Competition
FOURTH COUNTERCLAIM Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Relations
FIFTH COUNTERCLAIM Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices
SIXTH COUNTERCLAIM Breach of the GNU General Public License
SEVENTH COUNTERCLAIM Patent Infringement — United States Patent No- 4,814,746 “Data Compression Method”
EIGHTH COUNTERCLAIM Patent Infringement — United States Patent No. 4,821,211 “Method of Navigating Among Program Menus Using a Graphical Menu Tree”
NINTH COUNTERCLAIM Patent Infringement — United States Patent No- 4,953,209 “Self-Verifying Receipt and Acceptance System for Electronically Delivered Data Objects”
TENTH COUNTERCLAIM Patent Infringement — United States Patent No, 5,805,785 “Method for Monitoring and Recovery of Subsystems in a Distributed/Clustered System”
There’s lots more info at the MozillaQuest Site
source: MozillaQuest.com
SCO Wants $32 for Embedded Linux Now.
SAN JOSE, Calif. The SCO Group said Tuesday (August 5) it wants $32 for each embedded system using Linux. That request stems from the Lindon, Utah company’s claim that Linux versions 2.4 and above contains code that infringes on its Unix software.
SCO is currently suing IBM Corp. for breech of contract for allegedly supplying some of that Unix code as part of the open source development process for Linux.
After IBM, large businesses using Linux servers are SCO’s first target. The company sent letters to about 1,500 large companies it believes could be running such servers. Through October, it will charge them $699 for rights to its Unix code for each single-CPU Linux server they operate, after that charge double.
In a less well-publicized part of the company’s licensing terms, announced Tuesday (August 5), SCO said it will charge OEMs $32 per unit for each embedded Linux device they own.
The $32 fee applies to any embedded system regardless of whether it is a Tivo set-top box which uses embedded Linux or some models of the Sharp Zaurus which also use that kernel.
A diverse group of embedded systems that market watchers number in the millions currently use embedded Linux. They range from consumer and handheld systems to networking devices such as routers and firewalls, medical equipment and some military electronic systems use Linux. Venture Development Corp. pegs sales of embedded Linux tools and services at $62.6 million in 2002, a market growing at compound rate of 20.1 percent through 2007.
SCO will seek royalties from OEMs though it is not yet pursuing such companies actively, according to a company spokesman.
However, analysts said if the company is successful establishing its claims with server users, embedded systems could be the SCO’s next target.
SCO’s chief executive Daryl McBride did travel to Japan in July to make his case with eight consumer electronics companies there after they set up the CE Linux Forum. McBride met with at least on Fujitsu executive on that trip, the spokesman said.
“This situation is rather odd in a lot of ways,” said Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at Illuminata (Nashua, N.H.). For instance, SCO was formerly Caldera International Inc., a Linux distributor and developer before it abandoned Linux to focus on Unix, Haff noted.
SCO has not detailed its infringement claims, but the company has shown a portion of its infringed Unix code to people willing to sign non-disclosure agreements. Haff claims if SCO did detail all the allegedly infringed code, developers could write new code to replace it, defusing the situation.
For its part, SCO claims it has lost to free Linux distributions substantial revenue it might have gained from Unix sales.
If SCO is successful in establishing its claims, “Linux would die,” said Haff. But he doesn’t expect that will happen.”It’s hard to say what will happen in a complicated legal case, but from my perspective this is a Hail Mary pass from a company that the market has passed by,” said Haff.
It its most recent earnings report, SCO reported declines in product and services revenue in the six months ending April 2003 compared to the same period last year. However, those declines were offset by $8 in new licensing revenues. The company also turned a profit of $3.7 million in the recent period compared to a $17.6 million net loss for the year-ago period.
The embedded Linux licensing move “is extortion based on fraud. They are out to shake down people for what they can get,” said Inder Singh, chairman of the Embedded Linux Consortium and chief executive of embedded Linux and real-time operating system maker LynuxWorks (San Jose). Neither the consortium nor his company has had any communications from SCO on the royalty demand, Singh said.
“We will wait until they show us something,” that infringes their code, before taking any action on the licensing move, he added.
source: EE Times
Walk Through Screens made of Fog!
The walk-thru fog screen is a novel and intriguing method for forming a superior quality physically penetrable dry fog display. It is a break-through technology, literally!
The key features are that the screen is flat, enabling high-quality projections, and walk-thru is possible. The fog screen feels like nothing and does not make things wet. It creates a magical effect as if the imges are floating in thin air. This work has international patents pending.
Since announcing it publicly in Taejon, South Korea in Dec. 2001, the fog screen has gained an enthusiastic audience everywhere. The world premiere demonstration was in the Science Fair in Turku, Finland in October 2002. The prototype in the Science Fair was a success. It was covered in all the Finnish main TV news broadcasts, newspapers, etc.
The fog screen has also been presented in New Scientist (UK), Wired (USA), Focus (D), and many other international magazines. The first permanent prototype installation has been running reliably in Vapriikki museum in Tampere, Finland since January 24th, 2003. See it here!
The Million Dollars
Toby Seaman, Aug 2003
I have a million dollars. It is a stack of one million dollar bills. They have been donated to me by my brothers. I contribute dollars back where I can. We are a happy brethren. We all have stacks of dollars
Many men have began looking at our stacks. These men are not Brethren.
That was yesterday. Today I get a phone call. It is the one I dreaded. All is not well with my million dollars. One of the dollars is stolen! There can be no mistake I’m told, for the serial number of the bill is proof!.
I am guilty and ashamed that I’m party to a theft. Surely I share the blame simply by possessing the dollar. I must make amends! Alarmed, I ask for the evidence.
If one of the dollars is stolen, it makes no great difference to the fortune: the men who I love like brothers will surely replenish the dollar in but a moment. We cannot go on with this tainted dollar. It does not belong.
I am a law abiding man, I can’t have this theft of a dollar hanging over me.
There is still a problem. I cannot make amends! The aggrieved man for whom I feel sorry is an avaricious man and has has seen the size of my stack of dollars and he no longer wants just his dollar back.
No, my best beloved, he wants to build his own stack of dollars using my good nature.
This man will not tell me which dollar belongs to him. He gets nasty. He is suing me: I have offered to Help!
In public he has branded me a thief. In private he employs lawyers to do his bidding. He will not give his evidence so I can return his dollar and get on with my life.
Alone his dollar is worthless: why does he insist it has high value and yet not identify the dollar by number?
Instead this man offers me what he claims is a lifeline: He offers me prosecution immunity. He does this with impunity. He still will not give me the evidence, but he will sell me this immunity for 1000 dollars!
Now I am angry. I see a greedy man hiding behind the law. I look around me and there are millions of my brothers. Each of my brothers has a stack of a million dollars. My brothers are angry and scared too.
Must each of us pay money to the aggrieved man. can’t we all cast his dollar aside?
Horley Reports by TAS.
Ho Ho SCO to Get Their Own Medicine at Last!
Yippee!
From the SCO site: Those chaps at RedHat have finally decided to teach the twerps from SCO a lesson and have counter sued.
Read it all here, It’s hilarious. Those twerps will be bust soon (I Hope!)
SCO has taken the unusual step of publishing correspondence between it and Linux distributor Red Hat, following the latter’s launch of a countersuit yesterday.
Red Hat started legal proceedings on Monday to stop SCO “making unsubstantiated and untrue public statements” about its code being used in Linux distributions.
SCO has hit back at Red Hat’s moves and claimed that Red Hat’s actions will not help the long-term future of Linux.
In a letter to Red Hat chairman and chief executive Matthew Szulik, SCO’s president and chief executive Darl McBride said: “I am disappointed that you have chosen litigation rather than good faith discussions with SCO about the problems inherent in Linux.
“Of course, we will prepare our legal response as required by your complaint. Be advised that our response will likely include counterclaims for copyright infringement and conspiracy.
“I must say that your decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux.”
SCO has published two letters. One is the response from McBride to Szulik, and the second a letter drafted at an earlier date but not previously sent.
The full letters are reprinted below:
August 4, 2003
Matthew J. Szulik,CEO, RED HAT, INC., 1801 Varsity Drive,Raleigh, NC 27606
Dear Matthew,
Attached is the letter I discussed with you during our July 31, 2003 telephone conversation. Instead of actually sending the letter, I thought it was best to telephone you and speak in person to see if we could resolve the issues between our companies short of litigation. We left the conversation with a preliminary agreement to meet and continue our discussions further.
To my surprise, I just discovered that your company filed legal action against The SCO Group earlier today. You, of course, mentioned nothing of this during our telephone conversation. I am disappointed that you were not more forthcoming about your intentions. I am also disappointed that you have chosen litigation rather than good-faith discussions with SCO about the problems inherent in Linux.
Of course, we will prepare our legal response as required by your complaint. Be advised that our response will likely include counterclaims for copyright infringement and conspiracy.
I must say that your decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux.
Yours truly, Dim C. McBride, President & CEO
******
July 31, 2003
Mark Webbink, Esq.
Sr. Vice President and General Counsel
RED HAT, INC.
1801 Varsity Drive
Raleigh, NC 27606
VIA FACSIMILE
Dear Mr Webbink,
This letter is in response to yours of July 18, 2003 to Darl McBride, president and CEO of The SCO Group, Inc.
Before responding to your request, it is important to place your letter in context. Your letter follows on the heels of Red Hat’s S-3 filing of July 7, 2003, in which your company revised its risk disclosure statement.
In addition, SCO is currently engaged in litigation with International Business Machines Corporation [IBM] regarding its role in the development of the Linux operating system. At the time of your letter, we had expected the possibility of a global resolution of SCO’s intellectual property claims against all Linux-related companies that would have likely included Red Hat. This effort has apparently stalled, through no fault of SCO.
Based on the posture of our litigation and your revised risk disclosures, it is unclear to us the purpose of your July 18, 2003 letter. If you desire to enter good faith discussions to address SCO’s intellectual property claims against Linux, either on behalf of a wider consortium of Linux companies or solely on behalf of Red Hat, we are willing to meet with you for that purpose.
In any such meeting, we will provide example after example of infringement of our intellectual property found in Linux. Of course, any such demonstration must be pursuant to an acceptable confidentiality agreement and must be intended to further good-faith discussions about resolving the differences between us.
If you seek information for the purpose of informal discovery intended to benefit IBM in the pending litigation, or for the purpose of devising your own litigation plans against SCO related to Linux, we must respectfully decline your request. Therefore, please clarify in writing the purpose for your request. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Robert Bench, Chief Financial Officer, The SCO Group, Inc.
Dead TCP connections over VPN Tunnels?
Why Security Alerts? Okay wrong area, but ICMP must be the most commonly blocked protocol on the planet, yet in today’s VPN/tunnelled world, it can be the most vital one to get right!
If you find that your’e having trouble over restricted MTU links, try this on your Cisco 12.2.4 onwards: ip tcp adjust-mss 1350.
This will ‘tweak’ SYN packets as they pass through the router and make sure that both ends negotiate an MTU that is far more likely not to result in ICMP ‘Fragmentation Needed but DF bit set’ errors (dead connections without ICMP working!).
Not really an RFC compliant thing to do, but trust me, this seems like a good fix!
Red Hat Takes Aim at Infringement Claims
Complaint launched against SCO claims, Red Hat pledges $1M to create fund to protect Linux
SAN FRANCISCOAugust 4, 2003Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT) today made two significant announcements to protect Red Hat Linux customers and the worldwide Linux industry. First, Red Hat announced that it filed a formal complaint against The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX, “SCO”). The purpose of this complaint is to demonstrate that Red Hat’s technologies do not infringe any intellectual property of SCO and to hold SCO accountable for its unfair and deceptive actions.
“We filed this complaint to stop SCO from making unsubstantiated and untrue public statements attacking Red Hat Linux and the integrity of the Open Source software development process,” said Mark Webbink, General Counsel at Red Hat. “Red Hat is confident that its current and future customers will continue to realize the significant value that our Red Hat Linux platform provides without interruption.”
To further protect the integrity of Open Source software and the Open Source community, Red Hat has established the Open Source Now Fund. The purpose of the fund will be to cover legal expenses associated with infringement claims brought against companies developing software under the GPL license and non-profit organizations supporting the efforts of companies developing software under a GPL license. Red Hat has pledged one million dollars to be provided as funding in this initiative. For more information please e-mail opensourcenow@redhat.com.
“The collaborative process of Open Source software development which created the Linux operating system has been unjustly questioned and threatened,” said Matthew Szulik, Chairman and CEO of Red Hat. “In its role as industry leader, Red Hat has a responsibility to ensure the legal rights of users are protected.”
Source: RedHat
Site Upgrades
Finally got around to getting some much needed updates done:
Gallery to 1.3.4pl1 (Security bugs)
phpMyAdmin to 2.5.3-rc1 (Security bugs)
Netjuke to 1.0-rc1 (Bug fixes)
phpNuke up to 6.7 (Various fixes)
Hardware Disk Encryption for the Masses, Finally!
PC security is a tough nut to crack. this is especially so if, like Turbo, you work in an environment which needs highly secure PC’s and laptops which can be safely lost!
Turbo has been saying amongst peers for more than a year, that an excellent way to maintain the Integrity of transient data on the machine is Hardware Encryption. It’s such an obvious step: Software encryption will always leave you with that nagging doubt.
Not long after saying this, I found a product from Thales eSecurity called GuardDisk. This UK govt approved box of tricks is a modified disk with a RFID token.
The idea is that as the machine (Laptop) Boots, you stick the token near the lappy. The disk drive reads the ID and the DEK from the token and all is well. The Disk does block encryption/decryption on the fly. Transparent to the machine so run any OS you like. Yes, any.
At a few hundred pounds a pop these are not yet cost effective for everyone though. Worry not: help is at hand. As if the Thales box was not cool enough, similar technology may soon find it’s way into home user machines for no extra cost.
This
article on the ABIT site suggests that ABIT are busy putting hardware based IDE disk encryption technology into their standard motherboards.
Now that sounds both smart and interesting. If only all Manufacturers could innovate like this!
Finally we get SCO business comments from the Oracle.
This article from MercuryNews.Com features frank comments by the man we all know and love, Linus Torvalds.
These give a full insight into Linus’ thoughts and give one the distinct feeling that we are not the only sane person left in a mad world: From this article it’s clear there is at least one other!
more…
Linus Torvalds is the creator of the Linux operating system, the open source version of Unix that is sweeping through the software world in a direct challenge to Microsoft. He is a technical leader and an outspoken advocate of open source development, which allows software users to develop and modify their own versions of software for free. He spoke candidly with Mercury News staff writer Dean Takahashi about the lawsuit from SCO Group versus IBM (where Big Blue is accused of illegally putting Unix code into Linux), on Microsoft and open source development. He also shed light on his decision to leave chip maker Transmeta for a Linux corporate software consortium, the Open Source Development Lab. Here is an edited transcript:
Q: The SCO Group has sued IBM for illegally contributing Unix code to Linux. Do you believe this episode reveals any vulnerabilities in the open source movement?
A: Not really. Open source software is very visible. That means it’s very easy to see if there is something wrong. I think that is a good thing. I think the whole point is that, with the kind of transparency you get with open source, people are a lot less likely to ever have intellectual property issues. I compare it to stealing a car. Do you steal a car in the bright daylight with a lot of people around? Or do you steal a car, go for a joyride at 4 am in the morning when there aren’t a lot of people around. With open source, there is a lot of daylight. A lot of people looking at the code. You don’t really go around and steal things.
Q: There was some mention of the origins of Linux being murky.
A: There has been a lot of rumor. It’s more of an allegation. It’s complete crap. Quite the reverse. If you look at murky, it’s SCO’s allegations that are murky. With Linux code, you can see how it’s been developed. You can see who applied patches. You can see when they got applied. It’s all in the open.
Q: They were referring to the original creation of Linux.
A: No, it’s not an issue. Some of the history might be slightly hard to find, but compared to other projects, it’s a lot better documented than any proprietary operating system ever. Most of the stuff that has been on public mailing lists is archived.
Q: How about the history of Unix itself. Is it hard to follow?
A: There was a lawsuit between AT&T and Berkeley. AT&T sued UC Berkeley for copyright infringement because the Berkeley version of Unix was made available openly with the Berkeley license. It took a few years but it was shown that it wasn’t Berkeley that stole code from AT&T but it was AT&T that stole code from Berkeley, removed Berkeley copyrights, and they ended up settling out of court. So there is no judge that has said so officially but it was believed that Berkeley had done nothing wrong. This is the same code at issue. In that case, there was a clear genetic continuation. Now SCO is trying to use the same code that already failed a test once and to apply it to something where there isn’t the same genetic continuation.
Q: For our readers who don’t know the origins of Linux, can you talk about how it was written given the existence of Unix?
A: The origin was all written by me. For the first six months or so I was the only person working on Linux. It took almost a year before there was a major contribution from people outside. It’s all original code since day one.
Q: The SCO Group has said that you haven’t had the highest respect for intellectual property rights. How do you react to that?
A: That’s very normal that you always try to twist the truth in lawsuits. The only part that has been irritating is they make it personal. They are showing my e-mails to the Linux community to the press. They called my approach cavalier because I made a joke in an e-mail. OK. Tough. If they can’t take a joke, that’s their problem. I think it backfired. Most journalists do have a sense of humor. They didn’t mind.
Does it surprise you that Linux is a pawn in a battle between big companies, like IBM and Microsoft?
No. I’m not surprised about lawsuits per se. When there is enough money involved, lawsuits are inevitable. I don’t think that’s anything strange. To a large degree, and a reason I made it open source in the first place, was I was interested in the technical side, and not the legal and commercial side. It’s not a pawn that somebody takes over. That’s one of the points. I find it interesting that people have used it in different ways that I didn’t envision and also that they’re raising issues that I don’t care about.
Q: What do you care about?
A: I still care about the technology and the community. The people putting it together. And I do care about if someone has actually copied stuff into Linux that they don’t have rights to, I’d be upset about that. I care about software rights. Right now I’m taking a leave. From what it looks like, as long as it is contract rights between SCO and IBM, I don’t care at all. IBM can defend themselves. And if IBM ends up having to say OK we did something bad, it’s not my problem.
Q: Microsoft took out a license from SCO. Do you think that was necessary and that the timing seemed strange?
A: It’s not exactly clear what they licensed. Most people see it as a PR move. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I’m not a lawyer.
Q: Do you worry now that, regardless of who wins the lawsuit, that it will do some damage to the adoption of Linux?
A: What I worry most about is these things tend to drag out. If somebody were to show this is what a judge thinks about this case, I’m fairly confident that Linux is OK. I worry that it will drag out forever.
Q: Can you tell us how Linux evolves?
A: It all boils down to hundreds of different groups. A group can be a huge company that has an agenda. Or it can mean one person at a university working on a research project. They have their own thing they want to fix. All of these people make their modifications, and not all of them are accepted. I see it as a kind of ecosystem. You have survival of the fittest. Some changes work better. Sometimes it is for purely technical reasons. It’s just the right thing to do. Sometimes it is for personality reasons. Some people who push their changes are more likely to get things done because they are nicer about it. It’s not really centralized. I am at the center, but I don’t direct any teams. All these people are trying to pull me in different directions. Some groups pull together in the same direction. It’s a very dynamic situation.
Q: Do you think it works well that you have the final say?
A: I think it works well because I don’t have the final say. I have this final say in my tree. It is special in that a lot of people trust my tree. So some people will not use it if it is not my tree. That is a minority. But most people end up using various appendages. My tree is really not. Yes I have the final say on my tree. There is always this forking but there is always this joining. There is more forking than there is joining. But that just means that there are all these dead branches that not end up not being interesting. My branch is to some degree, you could think of it as the trunk of the tree. People try to join back into my tree.
Q: Competitively, do you think this controlled chaos works against a company like Microsoft?
A: I think it ultimately the only way to do software. I have arguments why. The main one is the complexity issue. It’s very hard for someone who doesn’t work like this to keep control of an increasingly complex source base and increasingly complex user base. If you try to control the process too much, you can go straight to the end point where you want to go. That works well if you know where the end point is. If you don’t know where it is and you can’t control where people want to use your software, it’s a very bad thing to have one branch that is very concentrated on one line of development. The best analogy is biological diversity. You have the Linux approach that is fairly diverse and all over the map. Maybe it is not very efficient. But it works very well in the face of complexity and changing circumstances. Changing circumstances will really show that part of that diversity really works. Biology on the other extreme is a very mono culture, which works very well as long as the circumstances stay the same. To some degree they are seen as very efficient and they can live on for a long time. A perfect case in genetics is sharks. They are very stable but they also don’t evolve anymore. That works, but if you want to go past a certain point, it’s a problem.
Q: That’s what Bill Gates is.
A: That’s a fairly good analogy but sharks is a bad word. I should make up another example. Turtles! Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. The Dodo too. Biodiversity is good and I think it is good in technology as well. If you look at a lot of stable things, you have a certain amount of biodiversity. Look at cars. The U.S. car industry was sloppy. There wasn’t a lot of biodiversity. There no real competition from true diverse species. The Japanese came in and provided new diversity for the market. It was a huge boon for the car industry, though not so good for certain countries. Cars started improving.
Q: If you look at how Microsoft is now struggling to deal with Linux, what do you think?
A: They are not in trouble. I think they are struggling to deal with Linux partly because Linux is undermining them the same way they undercut their competition. If you look at DOS, or maybe compilers, one thing that happened with Microsoft was that these small upstarts came out and had cheaper compilers. DOS was also cheap and it undercut the competition. They never had a competitor like themselves. Then comes somebody who undercuts them and they start acting exactly how all of their competitors acted. If you look at how Unix vendors acted toward Microsoft, they were belittling Microsoft. They were saying yes we’re more expensive but we’re better and we give better support. Whether that was true or not was not the point. The reaction to somebody coming in and undercutting you is for Microsoft exactly the same as the failure mode for their competitors. Microsoft is on the receiving end of this undercutting.
Q: You have left Transmeta (the Santa Clara maker of low-power microprocessors) where you worked for six years. Now you’ve joined the Open Source Development Lab (which is creating a version of Linux for corporations). Can you explain why you took the leave of absence?
A: It’s a number of reasons. One was for the last six months I was spending a lot of time working on the next 2.6 release of Linux. We’re getting close. But I expect it to take a few more months at least. This happened before with other releases. I don’t like doing releases but we have to do them. Before releases you get into a painful mode. Transmeta has been very good to me. This time I felt I’d have a hard time bouncing back to the Transmeta work. I was feeling more guilty about that. I talked to a lot of people there. They knew how I worked. The OSDL thing came along. I asked about that position when I decided I needed to leave. It was a neutral place. I need to concentrate on Linux. Why not let somebody pay me for that? I can’t go to a Linux vendor like Red Hat because I would no longer be seen as neutral.
Q: With Transmeta, their plan didn’t work out as expected. Did that affect your decision to leave them?
A: A lot of companies share that problem. I don’t know. What made it easier to leave now was that it seems to have stabilized lately. We didn’t have the panic problems we had. That made it easier and I didn’t feel like I was a rat leaving a sinking ship. The fact that it didn’t worked out affected a lot of my co-workers more than it did me. I ended up being able to cash in on my dream. It happened in a strange way. But I got my house in the area. In that sense it didn’t affect me. Because the Transmeta dream didn’t work out, it has less resources to do fundamental research. It has to concentrate on the customers and the products. For me, because I’m interested in the crazy stuff, that made Transmeta maybe not as fun as it was five or six years ago. Five or six years ago we did stuff at Transmeta that universities didn’t do. We did fundamental research. That made Transmeta a very special place.
Q: You want to concentrate on going after one monopoly at a time?
A: (Laughs). I never saw Intel as a monopoly. It has competition. To me personally, Intel has always had a healthier position. A lot of people thought, yeah, he’s always going after the big guys. That wasn’t the point of being at Transmeta. I want to do something that is relevant, and if it is relevant there is always somebody else out there.
Q: Do you see any boundaries for Linux? Do you want to go after Wind River and other companies in the embedded software space?
A: That is a traditional company question. If you’re a company, you want to go after certain markets. The point of open source is there is no such thing as certain markets you go after. It’s more like certain companies use Linux to go after a market. The embedded space has been very receptive to Linux. It’s not like Wind River doesn’t exist, but Linux is growing.
Q: Did it surprise you that IBM, this big giant company, embraced Linux?
A: I always thought IBM was interesting. Early on in 1998 and 1999, a lot of people were going through the motions of embracing Linux. They would mention it in a press release. But IBM always followed through. Because I was never interested in the commercial market, I never found fault with how people used Linux there. I enjoyed that IBM started porting Linux to the S390, found that hugely amusing. I thought, OK, somebody has done a few too many drugs. But it ended up being a master stroke. The people who started it just did it because they found it interesting. It ended up working out really well.
Q: You mentioned you wanted to end up at a neutral space. Do you feel like a religious leader? Or what kind of leader do you see yourself as?
A: I try to avoid that. I think I’ve been fairly successful. Some of the free software people don’t like how I’m not very religious. I try to be pragmatic. People know that. At the same time I have a very high profile and because people trust me and want to continue to trust me and I want people to trust me, I want to make sure that there is nothing that has the appearance of being bad. Going to work for a specific Linux company would, even if I work the way I’ve always worked, it would still look like I was favoring one vendor over another. You can’t avoid it in the environment we’re in.. I want to make sure everyone sees that I’m neutral. They may disagree with me and quite often they do. But at least they know I’m not working for the competition. I may not care about their viewpoint, but they know I do it for my own personal reasons. That makes people a lot more accepting. That makes it easier for me to make decisions. People will accept those decisions more if they understand they are my personal decisions and not because I am trying to screw them over as a competitor. It gives me more authority. That’s the only authority I have. I don’t have legal rights. I have one special right since I started Linux as the owner of the collective copyright. From a license standpoint I don’t have any special rights.
Q: What about cashing in on Linux? Where do you stand on where it is appropriate for you to make money from Linux?
A: I’m cashing in in the sense that I have a good salary. I did get stock options and I accepted them when there were no strings attached. In the good old days there were a few Linux companies that gave me stock options as a thank-you. Nobody thought they would be worth that much when they gave them to me. I bought a house in this area so they were worth a lot. I’m doing OK. I’m not a Larry Ellison. There only needs to be one.
Q: You moved from Finland. How do you like living in Silicon Valley.
A: Some parts I love. I have a convertible. I will never ever move to a place where I can’t drive a convertible. I like the dynamics. Sometimes it’s sad how you go into a random restaurant and all the tables around you talk about technology. At the same time, it is nice to be where you understand the people. Genetically maybe not very homogenous. But perspective wise, it’s a nice place to be. It’s too crowded. It’s too expensive.
Q: And what about the bust?
A: Everybody was expecting it. Everybody was calling it a bubble. The people who now complain about it. They didn’t complain two years ago. What I think is sad is the people who came here two years ago, just as the bust was starting, had jobs for not very long, got laid off, and had to move back. They changed their lives. That’s nasty. I remember it took me four years to get a green card. The people who came in at the wrong time, they had to go back. The social issues there are huge.
Q: Any irony that you might be deposed by (SCO counsel) David Boies, who led the case against Micosoft?
A: I was a bit surprised. I realize that David Boies wasn’t against Microsoft. It’s that he likes high-profile cases against big companies. That’s what he specializes in. In that sense, SCO vs IBM makes sense. It’s a nice twist but it doesn’t mean anything.
That SCO Business does just seem to be a money scam
Trying to make sense of The SCO Group’s threat last week to sue any Linux user who doesn’t buy a Unix license? Forget the threat. Instead, look at the announcement SCO made the following day — the one in which SCO said it’s now in the Web services business thanks to its acquisition of Vultus Inc.
Trying to make sense of The SCO Group’s threat last week to sue any Linux user who doesn’t buy a Unix license? Forget the threat. Instead, look at the announcement SCO made the following day — the one in which SCO said it’s now in the Web services business thanks to its acquisition of Vultus Inc.
And how did SCO buy Vultus? With newly issued SCO stock, of course — stock whose price gets a boost every time the company makes yet another wild claim about who it will sue next.
Actually, the Vultus deal is a lot more complicated than that. You wouldn’t know it from what SCO said last week, but SCO has finally found a way to make money — literally.
No, not from its attempts to sell Unix licenses to Linux vendors and users. Since January, when SCO started trying to get Linux types to cough up some cash, the company has sued IBM, sent threatening letters to nearly 1,500 big companies, tried to revoke IBM’s license to sell Unix and threatened darkly that if someone didn’t start buying Unix licenses soon, it would sue Linus Torvalds. None of that seems to have sold many Unix licenses.
But every time SCO makes a new, wilder set of legal threats, speculators bid up the price of SCO stock – starting in March, with the IBM lawsuit, then in May, when the threatening letters were sent, then again in June, when SCO tried to make IBM users pull the plug, and again last week. SCO’s stock price is now about 10 times what it was six months ago.
Pretty impressive, eh? Especially for a company with no serious hope of getting cash flow from any of these threats for years.
None of the threats make legal sense. If they did, SCO would be able to get an injunction to shut down Linux users. In practice, SCO hasn’t even been able to get an injunction against IBM and won’t get a court hearing on its request to do that until 2005.
Meanwhile, a German court told SCO in June that it must stop threatening Linux users. And an Australian government agency is looking into charges that SCO is essentially running a shakedown racket by claiming that Linux users must buy a license they don’t actually need.
And SCO’s tactics don’t make business sense, either. SCO is a software company that has slashed its R&D budget, alienated its customers and demolished the value of its brand. That’s not the way you build a business.
So, what do you do when you have no real business but your stock price keeps going up? We all learned that lesson during the dot-com bubble: You use that stock as currency.
That brings us back to Vultus, which was majority-owned by The Canopy Group, former Novell boss Ray Noorda’s personal investment fund. And Canopy — surprise! — also controls SCO, as well as some 30 other small companies.
Last week, SCO didn’t disclose much information about the deal. But in fact, the details were already on the record in SCO’s recent filings with the SEC.
It turns out SCO didn’t simply use stock to buy another company. SCO printed up about $3 million in new stock. Then, in the complicated deal in which SCO acquired Vultus, the stock was cashed out, with most of the proceeds going to Canopy.
Some went to Canopy as a Vultus shareholder; the rest went to Canopy as compensation for taking on Vultus’ debt, some of which was presumably owed to Canopy.
Got all that? If it sounds like a shell game, well, that’s the way Canopy likes to move its companies around. But in effect, Canopy used SCO’s stock price, boosted by SCO’s Linux threats, to rake in a couple of million dollars in cash behind the scenes.
And apparently it worked. Which means we can expect that as long as Canopy can find ways of cashing in on SCO’s threats against Linux users, those threats will keep coming — no matter how little sense they make.
Source: Computerworld
IBM Tries to Calm Customers over SCO threat.
IBM is trying to reassure its customers regarding legal threats by The SCO Group Inc., the software company that has accused IBM of distributing code it owns in versions of the free Linux operating system.
Read More.
Lindon, Utah-based SCO has sued IBM for $3 billion, saying the computer maker used parts of its Unix operating system code to enhance the performance of Linux — a freely available operating system that’s increasingly being used to run corporate computer networks.
Earlier this week, SCO said it would offer licenses to companies that are using the version of Linux distributed by IBM, noting that IBM customers would then be protected in using the software without having to go into the courtroom” (see story).
In a memo for IBM sales representatives obtained by Reuters, the company said, “SCO is asking customers to pay money based on pure unsubstantiated threats, without offering any facts.”
The memo told IBM sales representatives, “Remember, we are counting on you to make sure that customers with questions or concerns get the correct facts.”
SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said the memo is a sign that IBM sees SCO’s claims as a viable threat.
“I think they are taking the threat seriously. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be informing their salespeople about that,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of customers suggest they’d be interested in taking out a license.”
IBM, the world’s largest computer company, has rejected SCO’s claims, saying it has not demonstrated that its intellectual property rights have been violated.
SCO’s Unix-based software is used to run corporate tasks such as accounting and manufacturing systems and is licensed by IBM for use in its own version of Unix, known as AIX.
An IBM spokeswoman declined to comment.
Source: Reuters
SCO threats dont have Linux users worried
The SCO Group Inc. may be threatening to sue all businesses using Linux, but users so far appear to be unmoved by the company’s latest legal stance.
Tom Pratt, information systems manager at Coastal Transportation Inc., a shipping company in Seattle, said SCO’s newest threats aren’t a concern because far too many businesses are now using Linux.
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“I don’t see how they could sue so many [companies] to pony up for a licensing fee,” he said. “They don’t have any kind of tracking [system]. I don’t remember signing anything with SCO saying I owe them any kind of licensing fees.”
Coastal uses Linux as its primary computer operating system to run databases, payroll and other accounting functions, human resources applications, and shipping logistics software, according to Pratt.
“I’m not scared at all,” Pratt said of SCO’s threats. “I don’t think this will have any effect on us at all,” he said.
Kevin Gray, IT operations manager at DreamWorks SKG’s film studio in Glendale, Calif., said he sees SCO’s allegations and posturing as a “big red herring … that’s not going to go very far.”
DreamWorks uses Linux in film production, animation, database servers and more, he said.
“I haven’t read anything that really showed us that … their claims are anything more than just lip service,” Gray said of SCO’s latest legal salvo. “If they have some major victories in the courts, you know, I think we might have to think about it. At this point, we just kind of laughed it off,” he said.
Brad Friedman, vice president of IS at Burlington, N.J.-based clothing and housewares retailer Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp., said SCO’s newest legal front won’t change his company’s strategy, where Linux is currently used to run point-of-sale machines and for in-store transaction processing. Back-end uses for Linux are also being considered, but they haven’t yet been widely deployed, he said.
“It’s not like we should go out and license every single Linux box we have today, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t watch what’s going on,” Friedman said. “I’m not staying up all night over it.”
For Burlington Coat Factory, the SCO situation isn’t the only software question mark dangling over its IT department. Burlington is also an Oracle shop and is in a similar wait-and-see mode to see how Oracle Corp.’s hostile takeover attempt with PeopleSoft Inc. and J.D. Edwards & Co. plays out.
“We still have some time to go on this scenario,” Friedman said. “It’s a different adventure every day. This SCO/Linux thing is far-reaching. It’s just too early for anyone to put a stake in the ground one way or another.”
On July 21, Lindon, Utah-based SCO said it will now pursue lawsuits against any business running Linux if the business doesn’t buy a special SCO UnixWare 7.1.3 license to make its Linux software legal (see story). The prices of the licenses haven’t been announced, but are expected to be comparable to existing SCO UnixWare licenses.
SCO has been going after the Linux marketplace since March, when it sued IBM for allegedly misappropriating trade secrets related to SCO’s Unix products to benefit IBM’s Linux strategy (see story). SCO is now seeking $3 billion from IBM as part of the lawsuit, in which it says it has uncovered hundreds of lines of code in Linux that were allegedly illegally copied straight from SCO’s System V Unix code.
The company has claimed that because of illegal use of its System V code in Linux, its Unix business has been harmed by the rise of Linux in corporate computing.
In May, SCO warned all commercial Linux users that they could be using its code illegally and recommended that they seek legal advice to decide what to do about the issue (see story).
But the IBM lawsuit still hasn’t entered a courtroom, and many Linux users are apparently waiting to see what will happen there before deciding to deal directly with SCO in any kind of licensing arrangement.
Harry Roberts, CIO at Reading, Pa.-based Boscov’s Department Stores LLC, said his company continues to watch the SCO situation. Boscov’s runs both Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux in its operations.
“What we know is that Linux … is certainly open-source,” Roberts said. “We don’t believe we’re doing anything in violation of our agreements [with Red Hat Inc. and SuSE Linux AG].”
Source: Computerworld
Those Loonies At SCO want a license fee for Linux now!
The gloves are now officially off — all enterprise Linux users have to pay The SCO Group Inc. new licensing fees to use Linux, or they could find themselves on the wrong end of a copyright infringement lawsuit.
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That was the ultimatum laid out today by SCO CEO and President Darl McBride, who said that the $3 billion lawsuit against IBM in March was apparently just the start of his company’s march to defend itself from what it sees as rampant theft of its Unix System V intellectual property (IP).
“We agree on the point that this case started out as a contracts case against IBM. As of today, it’s a different game,” McBride said today in a conference call with reporters and analysts.
“SCO’s Unix IP has been misappropriated into Linux,” he said. “SCO is giving customers [of any Linux distribution] the opportunity to run Linux legally.”
Back in May, SCO warned all commercial Linux users that they could be using its code illegally and recommended that they seek legal advice to help decide what to do about the issue (see story). Last month, McBride said, some corporate Linux users contacted SCO and said they wanted to find a “way to work it out” so they could continue to use Linux.
“We think this allows both parties’ concerns to be met,” McBride said.
Lindon, Utah-based SCO also announced today that it has now received copyrights for its System V code (see story). The company had never before officially filed for the copyrights, which it needed to do as a procedural step while it pursues its legal case against IBM, McBride said. In that case, SCO alleges that IBM misappropriated trade secrets related to SCO’s Unix products to benefit IBM’s Linux strategy.
The specially tailored SCO UnixWare 7.1.3 licenses will support runtime, binary use of Linux for all commercial users of Linux based on kernel Version 2.4.x and later, according to the company. Buying a license would allow users to comply with SCO’s copyrights, the company said, adding that if enterprise Linux users do so, SCO won’t pursue legal challenges against them related to the code. Pricing hasn’t yet been announced but will be comparable to existing UnixWare licenses, McBride said.
“Today’s announcement is really a new front that we’re opening up” with existing enterprise Linux customers, McBride said. “It gets you clean, it gets you square with Linux without having to go into the courtroom.”
Also involved in today’s call with McBride was SCO’s lead attorney, David Boies, who served as special trial counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice in its antitrust suit against Microsoft Corp.
Boies said the new licensing offer to existing Linux corporate users comes even though the SCO/IBM case hasn’t been decided in any court.
“It is not necessary to resolve the IBM case” to deal with other issues, Boies said. While the case works its way through the court system, Linux corporate users don’t have the right to take advantage of SCO’s IP in Linux, he said, adding, “If the conduct is improper, the conduct is improper.”
Analyst Gordon Haff at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., said he sees SCO “going after users because if they go after [Linux vendors such as] Red Hat Inc., those guys are going to have to fight them” to defend their businesses. “They can’t roll over” and pay the demands like corporate users could, he said.
“The end users aren’t going to be so principled here,” Haff said.
George Weiss, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said that if SCO is successful in squeezing licensing fees out of users, it would essentially create a new tax on Linux, perhaps upsetting the often-favorable total cost of ownership arguments for using it.
“SCO is really applying pressure. It’s gotten very nervous” among users, he said. “They don’t know what to do.”
One part of SCO’s argument, though, is that much of the alleged code infringement is related to the latest symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) capabilities in Linux kernel 2.4 and later, Weiss said. If that’s the case, then SCO’s claims may not affect most enterprise users, who are using Linux more for infrastructure services than SMP.
“SMP is where the impact could be more in the future. [The SCO threats] could slow the advance of Linux” for higher power uses for now, he said. “It could put on hold a lot of planned purchases.”
Source: Computerworld
Linux advocates doubt validity of SCO licensing scheme
Open-source advocates yesterday blasted a Linux licensing scheme that The SCO Group Inc. is proposing to address alleged copyright violations in the Linux operating system.
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SCO CEO Darl McBride announced the licensing plan on a conference call with press and analysts earlier in the day. “SCO is prepared to offer a license for SCO’s UnixWare 7.1.3 product for use in conjunction with any Linux product,” he said. “This licensing format will assure that Linux users will be able to run Linux in full compliance with SCO’s underlying IP [intellectual property] rights.”
SCO will begin discussing the new licensing scheme with Linux users this week, McBride said, but Linux advocates are already attacking it.
“They’re selling a pig in a poke,” said open-source advocate Bruce Perens. “I think they’ve made an error through overconfidence, and that error has made them liable to be sued by every person who has code in the kernel, and every company.”
Perens and other open-source advocates claim that SCO’s licensing scheme appears to violate the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GPL) software license that governs Linux. “It’s very definitely in violation of the GPL,” said Perens, who believes that SCO’s terms would place restrictions on Linux users’ ability to modify and redistribute source code, making it at odds with the GPL. “We do not authorize our code to be used under the terms of the SCO license; it’s very plain in the GPL,” he said.
An independent intellectual property lawyer said Perens’ contention has merit. “On its face, it sounds like that’s a plausible argument,” said Jim LaBarre, a partner at Burns, Doane, Swecker & Mathis LLP, a law firm in Alexandria, Va.
SCO disagreed, saying that its new license, which has yet to be publicly revealed, won’t conflict with the GPL.
The Linux source code has been under attack from SCO for months. In March, the Lindon, Utah-based company sued IBM for $1 billion, claiming that IBM had harmed SCO’s market for Intel-based Unix operating systems by improperly adding code to the Linux kernel, the software program at the center of the Linux operating system. The value of the suit has since risen to $3 billion.
At the time, SCO claimed that its dispute was with IBM and not the Linux community, but it has gradually set its sights on Linux users as well. In May, SCO sent letters to 1,500 companies warning them that they could be held liable for IP violations in Linux, and yesterday SCO’s attorney David Boies, of the firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, said that there was a possibility that SCO could pursue case-by-case litigation against companies that used Linux.
SCO’s McBride declined to say exactly what SCO’s licensing plan would cost, but he said it would be a per-processor license, with volume discounts available for some customers.
The licensing plan would not only be in violation of the GPL, but also completely pointless, according to Free Software Foundation general counsel Eben Moglen. “You don’t need a copyright license from anybody to use any program,” he said. “That’s like saying you need a copyright license to read a newspaper. … If there’s plagiarized material in The New York Times, that doesn’t mean that people who buy The New York Times are liable.”
A copyright license is required to redistribute software, Moglen said, but Linux distributors won’t be able to adopt the SCO license because it would place them in conflict with the GPL, he said.
Linux distributor Red Hat Inc., for one, had no interest in adopting SCO’s license. “We have full confidence in our code, so we don’t feel this license is necessary for anybody,” said Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day. “It’s just another tactic in this battle that they’ve waged through the media. It’s just a distraction.”
Talk of licensing SCO’s code is premature, given that the company has yet to publicly identify where the alleged violations of its copyright occur, Linux vendors said.
“SCO has not shown us any code contributed to Linux by IBM which violates SCO copyrights,” said IBM spokeswoman Trink Guarino. “SCO needs to openly show the Linux community any copyrighted Unix code which they claim is in Linux. SCO seems to be asking customers to pay for a license based on allegations, not facts.”
SCO also announced yesterday that it had received U.S. copyright registration for its Unix source code, a move that observers say is a necessary precursor to any copyright-based litigation.
source:IDG News Service
eInk
You May not realise it yet, but the world of thin, flat displays is changing.
Certainly resolutions get higher all the time and there are new technologies around the corner.
Get ready for the next quantum leap though: Electronic Paper.
more…
Okay, okay, it may not sound amazing but this is pretty cool stuff: Imagine anything that is presently printed on paper could be replaced with a soft equivalent.
A broadsheet newspaper which refreshes every morning. A Soft Book which lets you load a tome then rifle pages just like the real thing.
Many of the problems that plague present display technology are eliminated: Resolution, viewing angle, backlighting, power requirements. The display has a paper white background and very high contrast.
The best available monitors give you a display resolution of around 100 dpi. Imagine technology that is 150dpi today and could easily scale way way beyond that.
The technology is based on that found in traditional printing: black pigments on a light background.
The display is non volatile meaning that it holds it’s picture without power. This gives ir tremendous appeal in the mobile devices market and indeed, a notable mobile phone manufacturer is already interested in the technology.
Perhaps all these reasons explain why the list of investors in e-Ink is so impressive. $100M raised from companies like Philips, Motorola and Lucent.
Things are certainly going to happen at eInk so keep watching and remember: you heard it here first!
Turing Test Finally Finds A Real World Use
AT&T have been pestering people for months to pay up after they fell victim to the ‘Yes Yes’ Scam on poorly configured voicemail systems. Bills for £6,000 were not unusual.
more.
In the scam, the hacker first war dials looking for voicemail boxes with weak PINs. Then the greeting is reconfigued to say ‘Yes Yes Yes’ repititively.
The cunning perp next uses the number of the voicemail as the chargepoint for calls. when the automated AT&T system dials the number and asks for permission to place the charge and authorise the call, the Yes Yes Yes is enough to fool the system (And the majority of real operators).
AT & T claimed that this problem was wholely down to poor security on the voicemail services rather than their own procedures for checking cross charging. Now that some people have sucessfully sued AT&T, they’ve dropped all payment demands and improved the secuirity on the checking procedure.
To fix the problem AT&T have developed a Turing style test to ensure that the YES is actually coming from a Human being rather than a machine. The operator now asks the person to read back a number rather than just say “yes”.
Todays New Virus Warnings
A tranche of new viruses reported late yesterday and already today.
more…
W32/Sage-A
Worm masquerading as ICQ software. Writes itself as svch0st.exe, mods reg to run on startup and makes many outbound connections. Possible remote control client. O. Few reports of this in the wild.
W32/Yaha-T
Writes itself as WINTSK32.EXE, mods reg to run at startup. Possible Keystroke recorder, possible DOS attacks against pakistan based machines. Propogates by SMTP, and Network Shares. Few reports of this in the wild.
W32/Sobig-E
Worm Virus propogating as email attachment with various subject lines looking like replies to previous messages. Will not spread after July 14th. File attachment is called ‘your_details.zip’.Many reports of this worm in the wild.
WM97/Simuleek-B
Word Macro worm which creates a VBScript file called WordSeek.vbs. Adds a line to wini.ini to infect Word files with another Virus, VBS/Simuleek-B. Few reports of this in the wild.
JS/Fortnight-E
JavaScript/Java applet combination that forces HTML aware email clients to open a website. The website runs Troj/ByteVeri-A to install itself locally. Attempts to subvert some websites by putting entries into the local hosts file. Exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft VM ActiveX component. Adds some Porn related Favorites. Few reports of this virus in the wild.