Month: August 2003

Teen prostitution articles may sell magazines and papers, but what’s behind the scary pronouncements? We’re not sure, but apparently actual numbers and figures are nowhere to be found, leading one to wonder “bullshit or not?”

Al-Qaeda: we caused the Northeast blackout. No doubt they’ll claim responsibility for this year’s frequent thunderstorms as well.

Weekly Standard: the BBC is the problem. All this license fee money, and for what?

Report a vulnerability, go to jail (at least in the U.S.) It’ll get filed as a side effect of letting retarded monkeys (in Congress) make bad laws.

I forgot to mention, don’t forget to take advantage of the RSS feed! It gives readers a quick way to check for new articles on this site. “Get it, use it, wear it out.”

Those google ads continue to puzzle me. At this point some are correct, and some are old — you get different ads depending on whether you’re coming in through www.clevershark.com or clevershark.com, for instance. The ads also take quite some time in catching up to the content. I may have to look into putting together a sort of “hybrid ads” system where some articles would have Google ads while others have other ads where other ads would be more appropriate. I have to say it’s a little frustrating.

I thought it might be a good idea to have some sort of “google ping” which an AdSense customer could use to notify google that his/her site has changed, as this would be mutually beneficial to both the advertiser and Google (which gets to sell more ads or increase rates). Pretty much something outlined in Tristan Louis’s article on the subject save that I see this primarily as an added value to the AdSense proposition (especially for sites who don’t see so much traffic), whereas Tristan sees this more as a general-purpose tool for Google.

Cringely about Macs, productivity and outsourcing. He has some interesting points.

NY photo coverage of the blackout. There’s some great photography there.

Hard as it may be to believe that any company could replace Microsoft as chief recipient of vitriol and hatred among Linux users, there is a company which is trying very, very hard for that title of infamy. The name of that company is the Santa Cruz Organization, better known as SCO.

What is that company? they’re the company that purports to own the rights to UNIX, although there is some debate about that point. Ceding on this for the sake of brevity, the crux of the matter in contention is a claim SCO made that some of their intellectual property has somehow made its way into the Linux kernel code. What makes this case interesting — and many would say what makes it a transparent case of lawyer-aided extortion — is that whereas in most cases of copyright infringement the grieved party attempts to stop the infringement from going on, it is clear in this case that SCO just wants money.

The “Claim”

The first interesting feature of this circus is the way in which the claim is staked. Is SCO trying to prevent the further distribution of their IP? No. That they are not. So far the only concrete legal action has been, bizarrely enough, to make an attempt at retroactively pulling IBM’s UNIX license.
It’ll no doubt be entertaining to see this sideshow, since there is scant chance of this being legally doable at all. This hinges around SCO’s contention that IBM is somehow responsible for the phantom infringement, which even experts under strict NDA say is unlikely.

SCO’s biggest boner of a move was, however, the second shameless attempt at cashing in on Linux. They have started sending threatening legal letters to companies known to use Linux demanding what has appeared to most as being some sort of extortion or blackmail payment. While this has probably worked in a few instances in the US, companies abroad have responded with demands to see evidence of that IP. At this point SCO is not providing any, which is a big sticking point.

Since Linux is open-source, SCO providing evidence could easily and quickly be rooted out of the kernel code. At this point the IP infringement would cease, and SCO would be happy, right?

That’s not what SCO wants.

SCO would rather force the infringement to continue, and essentially charge users of an OS they did not write for code they do not want to have. This sounds suspiciously like racketeering, where (in the ‘classical’ definition) a young thug shows up in a shop demanding protection money so the shopkeeper will be protected from, er, the thug himself.

This is PRECISELY what SCO’s “SCOsource” program is all about. The message is essentially, “Nice server. Be a shame if anything happened to it.” Clearly SCO has no interest in “protecting” their so-called “intellectual property”, they want to strong-arm their way into your wallet. And this is why they have refused to specify their so-called “claim”.

The code

This is going to be a short section (or is it?) because we don’t know what the infringing code is. Not only has SCO not stated what IP linux users supposedly infringe on, they are going to great lengths to not let anyone know. Certain so-called “experts” were apparently allowed to see, but only under a very strict NDA, so they may not legally say anything about it which SCO does not agree with.

Now tort law — at least anywhere but in the US — requires the complainant to make a good-faith attempt at mitigating the damage caused by the tort, or at the very least not become a party to the infringement.

However SCO is doing absolutely nothing to mitigate the “damages” caused by the alleged infringement. As pointed out before, if the code were to be identified, it would be removed. SCO is making no effort whatsoever at mitigating whatever damages would result from the use of their IP.

SCO Linux: the plot thickens

That being said, the most damaging action SCO has taken is to issue Linux distributions itself.

Yes, SCO publishes two Linux distros, SCO Linux and OpenLinux. With both these distributions SCO distributed the source code for the Linux kernel — the very chunk of code they claim is “tainted”. Normally this may not be a big deal, except that the Linux kernel code may only be distributed under the General Public License (GPL) which, among other things, prevents an entity from asserting licensing rights. By distributing the code SCO has itself made whatever “infringements” essentially part of the public domain. SCO has recently stopped distribution of their Linux products, but they themselves claim that the “taint” is present in kernels going back to the early days of kernel 2.4. They have issued distros since.

The only defense SCO could possibly put to this is that they didn’t know what they were distributing. Is that really the message SCO wants to send about itself, that it is not competent to determine what is and isn’t distributed as part of their core operating systems products?

However that stance could explain why Microsoft somehow became interested in SCO as the whole legal offensive (and is IS offensive) began. As we’ve recently seen with the blaster worm it might appear to some as though Microsoft itself isn’t too sure of what it’s putting out there, so their interest in SCO — they became licensees! — is not unnatural. They have so far deflected criticism that their licensing the SCO code was merely a “back door” by which they could pump funds to finance SCO’s legal team, but then they also say that Windows is “trustworthy” and “secure”, so I guess we’ll have to take that pronouncement with a very large grain of salt.

To get back to the point, however, even if SCO did have a strong claim, they invalidated it by distributing that code under the GPL. Plain and simple. This will ultimately prove so central to any legal action that SCO considered arguing against the GPL altogether, although they have since found that position to be untenable.

The repercussions

Following the announcement of their “claims” SCO’s stock price has gone up about %1000, which is what these curious moves are all about. Let’s hope the execs cash out before the legal hammer comes down on them — RedHat and IBM have both filed suit against SCO.

As for the claim itself, dubious as it it, even if it was solid at one point SCO itself distributed the code under the GPL. That seems pretty clear-cut to me.

And Linux in all this? It’s being a happy little penguin. Linux end-users have seen the same data I have and have largely come to the same conclusion. SCOsource has, so far, not exactly been the smashing success SCO thought it would be, and indeed has been the subject of derision among the Linux base.

Woman caught driving with a BAL of over .4. Might be a new world record for a female. It happened in Australia.