SCO v. IBM

Message ID: 166576 Posted By: deepdistrust Subject: Free as in freedom Enderle put up a new article on linuxinsider about his SCOForum talk. The fellow claims he talked about 'free as in free beer' while groklaw mischaracterized this as 'free as in freedom'. I could never get my hands on his original speech - sco.com seems to be always down -, so I can't tell if he is lying now, but if he did summarize his original speech truthfully in the article, I have to say, the man sounds pretty reasonable. He goes on to claim that groklaw contains anti-SCO FUD. I don't think it does. Atleast not a lot. If there is any hype, it is about groklaw's own importance - "We are doing it! We are doing it with Truth! Blah blah blah". In any case, I was startled to find similarities between what he says and what I have been saying here - "Many of you are being manipulated by others ...". On the off-chance that SCO did hire him for PR and this is their officia...

Message ID: 162020 Posted By: deepdistrust Subject: Linux Scare Tactics OSRM says Linux code may be infringing a few hundred patents. Starting from 2005, they will start providing protection against patent infringment claims for a price. They believe either that nobody will be sued over patents or (more likely) that the patents involved can be invalidated. Apparently, they have (or can get) what it takes to invalidate the patents and they will offer that knowledge for a price. OSRM's primary purpose appears to be to make money. That makes them neither noble nor evil, but they are not exactly friends of the community either. (Some will say the last couple of sentences apply equally well to SCO.) For Linux to continue to be safe for use by home users, any information needed to overthrow patents should be owned by the community, not by a private insurance company. This Yahoo! SCOX Message Board post has been licensed for copying and distribution under the following license: CCL Attrib...

Message ID: 159109 Posted By: deepdistrust Subject: A Thousand Monkeys There is a theory that a thousand monkeys, working at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years will come up with Shakespeare. This theory is being put to the test in the field of legal "research" for the last several months, over at groklaw. (The original theory doesn't mention a head-monkey of course). Beating things to pulp is the name of the game at groklaw - they don't even leave out punctuation from their "analysis"! Well, perhaps, something worthwhile will still come out of all this someday, but meanwhile, the ibiblio servers will go down under the heavy load! This Yahoo! SCOX Message Board post has been licensed for copying and distribution under the following license: CCL Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0.

Message ID: 158547 Posted By: deepdistrust Subject: true believers Most of the posters on this board ridicule who they call 'SCO true believers' - those that bought SCO stock in the hope that SCO will win its case against IBM. It turns out most posters here are themselves true believers. They have a number of favorite beliefs for which they don't demand evidence from themselves. Here are some of those beliefs. 1. Groklaw's debunking of SCO claims led to SCO's downfall. What exactly did groklaw debunk? SCO court filings were analyzed and some claims were shown to be false. Was this reported widely by the press? Journalists don't bother themselves with reading case filings for the most part, much less analysis of court filings. In fact, the most "public" debunking came from other sources - a couple of guys at lwn traced malloc's origin & Bruce Perens shared the findings with a few publications, red hat sued SCO challenging its claims of code thef...

Message ID: 56498 Posted By: deepdistrust Subject: GPL unconstitutional? I believe the U.S. Govt prohibits distribution of certain kind of software to some countries. Whoever releases such software through GPL is violating US Govt restrictions. (There is no way to satisfy both the GPL and the US Govt restrictions). However, the fault doesn't lie with GPL, but with the licensor. GPL is simply unsuitable for such software. There is no rule that GPL has to be suitable for all software, but SCO seems to believe there is. I suspect this confusion is behind SCO's claim that GPL is unconstituional. This Yahoo! SCOX Message Board post has been licensed for copying and distribution under the following license: CCL Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0.

Message ID: 56215 Posted By: deepdistrust Subject: GPL All this talk about SCO proposing to invalidate GPL is premature. SCO merely listed a number of affirmative defenses so that it won't be barred against using them down the road, if they need to. It doesn't necessarily mean that SCO is going to attack GPL. It looks like listing all possible defenses is routinely done. Any lawyer-types care to comment? This Yahoo! SCOX Message Board post has been licensed for copying and distribution under the following license: CCL Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0.