Enterprise Unix Roundup &#151 SCO Goes Back to the IP Future

Fri Jul 23 17:25:46 UTC 2004

Dear TLUG,

George (fiala-WCaKCDwya6ZYzD5mSbZInQ at public.gmane.org) wants you to read
the following article with the comment "SCO is at it again.

the articel is included below, since some could not read the link the last time.".

Enterprise Unix Roundup &#151 SCO Goes Back to the IP Future
Michael Hall
07/22/2004

This article can be found online at the following location:
http://www.serverwatch.com/eur/article.php/3384991

Main Â Â Â  In Other News Â Â Â  Security Roundup

Â Â Â  Tips of the Trade

We were all set to open this week's column with a colorful composite
character -- someone we were going to name "Davey McBird." We were going
to create an anecdote wherein Davey McBird rented us his lawn mower for
a few weeks, then took us to small claims court for stealing it when we
wouldn't post a daily picture of it on the Internet so he could be sure
it was all right and still in our garage. But who would believe a story
like that?

Apparently not Judge Rae Lee Chabot, who tossed SCO's suit against
DaimlerChrysler out the window on all but one count, which was the
question of why it took the automotive company more than 30 days
to report to SCO that it hadn't used SCO software for more than
seven years.

Suing customers makes potential customers nervous. Loudly suing a
customer that then loudly announces it hasn't used your software since
before the Internet Bubble is just embarrassing.

At this point in the alternate narrative we never got around to
writing, Davey McBird is standing on the steps of small claims court
with little birds and planets circling his head; he screws up his
dignity (like a Mike Royko character, who always had a sort of tragic
dignity, even at his most wrong) and wags a finger under our noses,
exclaiming, "but still!"

Which is exactly what we got from SCO spokesman Blake Stowell who,
internetnews.com reports, "said the ruling wasn't unexpected and leaves
the door open for the company's lawyers to look into why it took so long
for DaimlerChrysler to send the certification letter."

Kind of like Ahab with the whole "for hate's sake I spit my last breath
at thee" business. Or Davey McBird waggling his imaginary finger and
saying "But still!"

The long and short being: DaimlerChrysler was part of SCO's overall
strategy of getting people to take its licenses seriously and possibly
setting enterprises up for horrendous grief if they also dared to bring
Linux into their operations, and that suit is now dead.

One could hear champagne corks popping in Linux-land Wednesday
afternoon, although the case doesn't represent vindication so much as
it does a setback for SCO. As we just noted, DaimlerChrysler hasn't
used SCO software in seven years, so failing to certify its compliance
with a dust-gathering license when there was probably a mad dash
around the DaimlerChrysler offices to figure out who the heck SCO is
and where they'd left the old boxes in the first place probably didn't
seem like the most egregious intellectual property trespass the judge
had ever seen.

SCO should probably be relieved: Suing customers makes potential
customers nervous. Loudly suing a customer that then loudly announces it
hasn't used your software since before the Internet Bubble is just
embarrassing.

Melville - 1, Kafka - 0.

On the other hand, SCO this week added some detail to its case
against IBM.

According to a report, SCO's latest filings in that case include a
statement from its VP of engineering, who maintains that Linux
includes SCO's Executable and Linking Format (ELF) code. ELF is, in a
nutshell, key to the way executables (programs) and objects are
compiled in Linux and multiple other Unix variants (including Irix,
Solaris, and the BSDs).

ELF rose to dominance in the Linux world in the mid '90s as a
replacement for the a.out binary format as developers began to recognize
the need for better ways to manage shared libraries and cross-compiled
binaries. The transition wasn't particularly easy, but by 1999 the
author of the Linux Documentation Project's GCC HOWTO, a document
detailing how to use the GNU project's C compiler, said the transition
was "long past."

ELF came out of Unix System Laboratories. It started life as a company
in 1991, the same year Linus Torvalds began work on the Linux kernel. An
industry consortium introduced ELF as a standard in 1995, offering it
under a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license." SCO now says
that even though it was a member of that consortium, the license was
inappropriately granted.

That move, along with several other specific claims (including one that
says the Linux init program, which is responsible for booting and
powering down a Linux system, is copied from Unix, and another stating
the IBM-contributed JFS file system is a derivative work), changes SCO's
Carl-Sagan-like claims of "millyuns and millyuns" of lines of copied
code. Now, the vendor is edging closer to claiming that Linux, to the
extent it's a Unix variant, is a Unix variant, AKA a derivative work.

Having learned the value of silence after months and months of abuse and
investor threats about its bellicose public posturing, SCO is playing
its cards a little closer to its chest this round.

The flavor of issues the company is striking at is not new to open
source developers, however. In late 2001, the open source community
rallied against the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) when it considered
introducing a policy of allowing "Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory
Licensing" (RAND) into Web standards that it's responsible for
approving. Under RAND licenses, enterprises developing intellectual
property surrounding a particular Web technology could charge for
implementation of that technology in Web-related software.

The move was fine with commercial software houses, which trade patents
and IP like baseball cards. However, independent open source and free
software projects found it more troubling, as they saw RAND as a way to
lock them out of developing competitive Web browsers. SCO's current move
is an apparent attempt, at least in the case of its claims on ELF, to go
back to the past and retroactively push Linux away from the table by
closing a standard presented as open for nearly a decade.

If the move works, the Linux world might have a mess on its hands, since
switching binary and library formats isn't exactly easy. Plenty of folks
have their doubts about whether SCO really has a leg to stand on, and
they are interpreting the move as a way for the vendor to back away from
the unsubstantiatable claims of wholesale copying.

With its DaimlerChrysler case in the trash can and its Autozone case on
hold, SCO has to do something to allow its one remaining in-play case
look viable if it has any hope of jump starting its stalled and
apparently doomed licensing program.

>> To Other News

>> To Security Roundup

>> To Tips of the Trade

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