It is on our shoulders, each and every one of us, to help combat the SCO FUD. There’s so much good debunking material out there that it should be easy for people to plop it on the boss’s desk or forward an email with a list of juicy links. Since a lot of people aren’t going to take the time (or just don’t have the time) to collect these, I thought I’d pull together a listing of material with the help of some research and my readers.
Perhaps I should informally title this press kit, “SCO: Refute THIS”:
- OSDL’s position paper on SCO and Linux.
- MontaVista’s statement on SCO
- SCO’s Web server runs on Linux?
- Novell’s latest statement on SCO
- Inconsistencies abound from SCO
- Round-up of how the community is finally waking up from the “They can’t be serious!” coma and responding
- A step by step debunking by Eric Raymond
- A look into financials
- SCO’s previous incarnation, Caldera, already released the code into open source
- What about those MIT experts that verified SCO’s claims?
- An attorney on SCO’s claims
- Linus Torvalds on SCO
- Sun playing both sides of the fence?
- An in-depth analysis of the supposedly stolen code
- From the people who claim now that they never planned to sue anyone
- Oh yeah, and they never planned to sue anyone
- McBride claims that people who have put years of blood, sweat, and tears into Linux are only up in arms because IBM is organizing it
- Where SCO says they’re not after the GPL after saying they’re after the GPL
- Yet more SCO code claim debunking
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) finally wakes up about SCO
- The Economist on SCO and Linux
- A look at odd happenings with SCO stock
- Major consumer electronics companies don’t seem too concerned about SCO’s claims or attempts to make embedded Linux companies pay
- Odd findings about SCO’s denial of service attacks
- More on SCO’s legal footing
- A look at the company that owns SCO
Have any links to add? I’ll re-release this press list when it’s significantly better.
USA Copyright Law (1.4Mb PDF)
In case you want to read it yourself:
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/circ92.pdf
IBM's developers on adding aix code
http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/02/06/18/1339201.shtml?tid=136
This is an interview with some AIX developers. They discuss how the program was overseen and cleared by IBM's legal team.
I'm posting it because it deals with SCO's claim that IBM added "derivative works" to Linux
Lee Gomez' wall street journal article
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Aug/08122003/business/83192.asp
This may be the first "mainstream" pro-Linux article.
This is a reprint in the Salt Lake City Tribune of a Wall Street Journal Article.
Unilever's quotation: No Grounds for End Users
Here is a google cache of an article from VNUNet.com . It isn't on the website any longer. There's no telling how long it will be in Google.
Unilever is one of the largest food production companies in the world.
Economist Magazine on SCO
Here Economist Magazine compares Darl and SCO to fundamentalists trying to fight the teaching of evolution in schools.
Obfuscated code?
Here Sontag says the slides were misunderstood.
"But Sontag said the BPF routines were not intended to be an example of stolen code, but rather a demonstration of how SCO was able to detect "obfuscated" code, or code that had been altered slightly to disguise its origins. The slide displaying the code should have been written differently to reflect that intention, he said. "
But if you go to Slide 15 It's pretty clear what they were saying before the code was debunked was much different from what they are saying now.
SCO fined EUR10,000 for infringment claim
Here, this recently from GROKLAW: (unofficial translation provided by a pro-linux.de reader.)
"Disciplinary penalty of 10.000 Euro against german SCO Group GmbH
The regional court of Munich I has punished the german SCO Group GmbH by an administrative fine of 10.000 Euro.
As the "tarent GmbH" and the "LinuxTag e.v" say, SCO has infringed upon the temporary injunction that prohibited to claim that Linux would contain
illegally provided intellectual property of SCO. In May 2003 the "tarent GmbH" among other enterprises had obtained this injunction.
The regional court accuses the SCO Group GmbH of "negligent behaviour" by having claim on their website that the end user who uses the software linux could be made responsible for protection violations of intellectual property of SCO still after the publishing of the temporary injunction.
The SCO Group GmbH has two possibilities: It can pay the 10.000 Euro punishment or the manager is taken to prison for 10 days."
Lawyers call SCO claims "bizarre" "ridiculous"
EE Times article by Charles J. Murray
'But others questioned the argument's merits and legal analysts insisted that the likelihood of SCO making such a case before a judge is slim. "It appears to be a totally bizarre argument," said James Boyle, a professor at Duke University's law school (Durham, N.C.). "It's hard to imagine what they're thinking." '
'Success for SCO could damage the open-source movement, which depends on the GPL. It could also raise serious legal questions for OEMs with Linux-based products. "If SCO is correct, it means that their alleged infringers could not rely on the GPL as a defense," said Brian Ferguson, an intellectual-property (IP) attorney with McDermott, Will & Emery in Washington...
'Still, legal experts last week said SCO's new legal tack may not stand up. "It's true that pre-emption is a valid defense," Ferguson said. "Whether or not that will carry any weight in court is somewhat suspect." '
Greg Lehey's analyses are worthwhile, too
Great press kit - the only thing I missed were Greg Lehey's (of The Complete FreeBSD and FreeBSD Core fame) analyses and links to various resources, at http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/