SCO thrashes on

10 More Years in Bankruptcy?

With this approach SCO may have to remain in bankruptcy until IBM’s countersuit is decided and that would be how long? Another ten years?

SCO v IBM: I wanna kick!

The Appeals Court decision is over and done with, the en banc hearing denied, and a Supreme Court hearing distant and unlikely. What is certain is that absent any proof of impropriety on the part of the court there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

The fact is that based on this decision Cahn plans to forward with the litigation. It may end up in court, it may end up in another sleazy sealed settlement that satisfies the objectives of the corporations involved but leaves the F/OSS community twisting in the wind.

So why not kick 'em in the nuts?

We know empirically that major corporate players have done code studies and come up with results completely opposite to those claimed in public by SCO. HP offers free indemnification, Red Hat has brought suit stating that Linux does not infringe. IBM has whittled down the "mountain of code" to a handful of lines filed under seal. For whatever reason, none of the corporate interests on either side has actually published the results of a code study. Eric Raymond gave us the Comparator and said he was grinning, but that was all.

There's absolutely no value to the litigation over the ownership of the Unix copyrights if they aren't being infringed. The SCOSource and Linux Licensing scam have no value without proof of infringement. Frankly, what the hell do we care about IBM, Novell, or SCO, other than the claims Darl McBride and his minions and cohorts have made? What better way to prove him a liar than to do a code comparison and publish the results?

I did a quick and dirty blind comparison using a copy of SysV at a local school. By blind I mean I wasn't allowed to actually view the Unix code, and wasn't allowed to even keep the output of the Linux code matches. This was in 2003, late summer or early fall, when the fear of SCO's lawsuit was real. While I couldn't even come close to stating that there was no infringement ( I don't have the qualifications to do so anyway), it was enough to make it clear that the "mountain of code" was pure fabricated nonsense.

For this purpose all that would need to be done would be a comparison of SysVR4 and the current Linux kernel. Let the corporations squabble about the past, I'm concerned with the present and the future.

Surely there is enough expertise here and Groklaw to do this. If no one else is interested, if I should receive a copy of the SysV code in the mail with no return address I would be more than happy to do the grunt work of running the comparison and putting up the results for analysis.

I'm tired of sitting on the sidelines bickering, and waiting for corporations whose interests are only tangentially those of the community to resolve things.

I wanna kick some butt!

clear writing.

I find it hard to believe that anyone would consider an amendment that says copyrights will be transfered if necessary as a clear writing that copyrights are transfered, listing the specific rights that are transfered. That is what SCO was trying to get from Novell when they started this whole mess and Novell said no.

SCO's whole hope hinges on a news report, which was completely outside of any court or official document.

Presently the trustee will be educated.

SCO vs IBM

If I remember properly, Judge Kimball ruled that Novell did have the right to direct SCO to drop the IBM suit. I don't remember that being reversed in the appeal.

Unix family tree

Not too long ago, as part of celebrating 40 years of Unix, Computerworld published a graphic of the Unix family tree. URL:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9133696/The_Unix_family_tree

The Linux lineage is totally stand alone. Funny, but there are no comments to this graphic from Anonymous Insider crying foul.