[Am-info] SCO Investors are going to read this and bail

[Fred A. Miller]

http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/08/technology/techinvestor/hellweg/
index.htm

"When I reached McBride on Tuesday at his office in Utah, he defended 
the executive sales as a simple case of executives finally being able 
to sell shares that were underwater until the recent run-up. And he 
argued that the amount sold is "very small" compared with the total 
number of insider shares owned.


Others, however, aren't so sure. "


However, Eric Hellweg misread SGI's report on its analysis of Linux 
kernel code.  SGI didn't analyze the entire 8+  million lines kernel 
code,  just those parts that it contributed.  Of those parts it found 
only 200 lines that were of questionable origin.


http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33250.html

"Silicon Graphics says that after an internal review, it has removed 200
lines of source code in response to The SCO Group's threat to revoke its
irrevocable UNIX? license. SGI acquired the rights to UNIX? System V 
from AT&T in 1985."
...

"SCO yesterday said that this wasn't enough. "

Did they expect any other response?  :-)

"SCO argues that 'derivative' software libre works devalue its 
intellectual property. Which is a great argument, until you remember 
that most of the intellectual labor was made by parties other than SCO, 
and where plagiarism took place - as it undoubtedly did - the 
'plagiarists' had every legal entitlement to do so. The SCO Group has a 
defensible case if it can prove that its commercial prospects were 
harmed by infringement. It has yet to show an example of this.  Then 
again, it doesn't have to: what matters is how effectively it can 
convince a court, rather than the peanut gallery.

Meanwhile, the long phony war is set to continue well into next year. 
SCO has requested a four month delay to IBM's countersuit, which is due 
to be heard on February 4. The case isn't expected to be heard until 
2005."

Expect more delays from SCO.  They can't harass Linux adoption if they 
go to court too quickly.  Here is SGI's statement on their code 
analysis: http://www.ciol.com/content/developer/2003/103100301.asp

"We quickly and carefully re-reviewed our contributions to open source, 
and found brief fragments of code matching System V code in three 
generic routines, all within the I/O infrastructure support for SGI's 
platform. The three code fragments had been inadvertently included and 
in fact were redundant from the start. We found better replacements 
providing the same functionality already available in the Linux kernel. 
All together, these three small code fragments comprised no more than 
200 lines out of the more than one million lines of our overall 
contributions to Linux. ", says Rich Altmaier VP of Software, SGI.
...
The three System V code fragments were apparently been placed previously 
in the public domain, which means that it is very doubtful that the SCO 
Group has any proprietary claim to these code fragments in any case."

So 200 lines out of 1,000,000 and those 200 had already been released by
Caldera to the public domain, before they changed their name to SCO:
http://www.tribug.org/pub/tuhs/Caldera-license.pdf.  Most people come to
the conclusion that no infringement has taken place.  Here's why:


"240 West Center Street
Orem, Utah 84057
801-765-4999 Fax 801-765-4481
January 23, 2002
Dear UNIX. enthusiasts,
Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that 
includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source code, 
including creating derived binary products created from the source 
code. The source code for which Caldera International, Inc. grants 
rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating Systems that operate 
on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX 
Operating System, ...."

You can still download what SCO calls "ANCIENT UNIX" code at :
http://www.tribug.org/pub/tuhs

-- 
"...Linux, MS-DOS, and Windows XP (also known as the Good, the Bad, and
the Ugly)."