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Sunset Grill: Home -> The SCO files |
06Sep2003
They got the letter, the return receipt was retrieved from my box today. Film at eleven.
25Aug2003
Still no response from SCO.
ESR recently responded to allegations that IBM was more or less stage-managing the entire anti-SCO thing that's been happening recently. His response is here. See below for the usual link to the Slashdot stuff.
He echoed my words perfectly in a way that I could not, so naturally, had to write another letter to SCO and, with Eric's permission, include a copy of his letter.
August 22, 2003
Darl McBride, CEO
The SCO Group
355 S 520 W, Ste. 100
Lindon, UT 84042
Dear Mr. McBride:
First, please accept my apologies for the misnomer in my previous correspondence.
Second, over the past few weeks, I have watched the entire situation at hand degrade to little more than psychobabble. And then there is the circumstance of all the other letters to you.
Including the one I am enclosing. Eric S. Raymond, whom you are quite familiar with, wrote an open letter to your company that perfectly echoes my current sentiment.
Your commentary as well as the commentary of your firm has become so bombastic that it is increasingly funny. Your legal team is throwing around bogus arguments about copyright which, as an amateur musician, I feel I can speak with some authority: they are, if you will pardon the expletive, bullshit.
Further, I will make it absolutely clear that the only thing I have ever had to do with International Business Machines is that for four years I ran OS/2 Warp 4 on my computer at home before switching to Linux. To this day, I run Linux on two computers. QED, contrary to your allegations, there are people such as myself who are critical of you that are completely independent of IBM.
I am now at a point where I am tempted to send you 699 units of a currency that is worth slightly more than monopoly money, but I do not wish to waste postage in doing so; I would send you $699 in monopoly money, however I don't want to remove something from my Monopoly set at home as I consider it of a higher value than your license. Please note that any real money you request will be paid into the Red Hat fund established for the purpose of fighting against your case rather than your firm.
So you can see that I am no fool, and I will not even send you play money for your licenses, because even that is worth more than your license, and further I will not pay money to a company who treats its potential customer base in this fashion. I have worked in customer service for over ten years, and I simply cannot believe that I am explaining to a Chief Executive Officer of a major company that his actions are an excellent way to destroy its customer base and drive away potential customers. It's why Ernie Ball moved away from Microsoft, it's why I will certainly avoid SCO in the future, and it is now why I will completely obliterate the last Caldera product I have on my spare drives (specifically, OpenDOS) when I get home tonight. You treat us like garbage, and we give you the finger and do business elsewhere.
Finally, I have yet to see a response directed to me that explains your position, or a copy of the source code for that matter. Under no circumstances will I sign an NDA - the burden of proof is on you, and before you take these actions and attempt to extort money from the masses, you need to prove in a court of law that not only what you are doing is legal (it probably isn't), but that, indeed, the source tree is contaminated with old code that, per ESR, was "too ugly to live" (and aparently removed from the kernel as such).
I say it again, Mr. McBride. Put up or shut up.
Sincerely,
Dennis Carr
Open mouth, insert foot. It's not "South Coast", it's "Santa Cruz". Corrected accordingly.
-Dennis
Unless you have been living in a box (or otherwise just haven't been keeping up with Slashdot like a good geek), Santa Cruz Operations (better known as SCO) has been waging legal war with IBM over the rights to a particular chunk of code in Linux that deals with SMP. (For the non-geeks, SMP is basically something you use with motherboards that have more than one processor.) If I remember correctly, there was also contention about things called RCU (Read-Copy-Update) and a couple of other things. Where is there a problem? IBM had apparently, according to SCO, injected this into the Linux kernel against their wishes. Now here's another problem: SCO has yet to turn up any evidence to support their stance.
This link will take you to a simple search on Slashdot for artices relating somehow to SCO.
So naturally, being the screwball that I am, I have taken a stand. See, this link in particular is an article about how SCO now wants to provide a SCO-branded license to Linux users to "legitimize" their copy of Linux because of this. Which, of course, is utter bunk - remember, they have merely sued IBM, which means only that. They have not won. Reading the articles in the above slashdot search link, also, the general bent is that SCO not only has no leg to stand on, their legs were cut out from under them ages ago.
Well, not only am I going to not pay for a license, I also decided to send them a letter:
August 1, 2003
Darl McBride, CEO
Santa Cruz Operations Group
355 S 520 W, Ste. 100
Lindon, UT 84042
Dear Mr. McBride:
With recent events in the Linux community and the allegations that the Santa Cruz Operations Group is placing against the community and the International Business Machines corporation, this brings grave concern on my part as an end user of Linux. This has naturally borne some investigation on my part, as I am a very curious man. To wit, however, I am not a lawyer or a software developer; I am a layperson and an end user of Mandrake Linux.
Upon investigation of your claim, I find that there has been no tangible evidence other than explanations and a powerpoint demonstration presented by SCO of any wrongdoing on the part of IBM or the Linux community in general. As the allegation is that pieces of SYS V source code has been injected, I would expect to find the lines of code that have been injected from both the kernel source tree as well as what SCO presents from the SYSV code tree; in short, a diff or a fc. This is cause for even graver concern on my part, especially because you represent a company that not only used to sell Linux (former Caldera), but to this day the sources are available on your FTP site.
As you are aware, a claim such as yours must be backed up with a preponderance of evidence. To date, your company has, in the name of protection of intellectual property, failed to do this. You should also keep in mind that, if the Linux development community is made aware of the lines of code that are actually property of SCO with evidence that they are indeed 1) yours and 2) not code that has been contributed under GPL, I am positive they will be happy to work with you. In the interim, however, please be advised that I will not be purchasing a license from your company so that I may use Linux on my home network.
In otherwords, Mr. McBride, put up or shut up.
Sincerely,
Dennis Carr
Now let's see if he responds.