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Friday, August 15, 2003
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Miss Otis Regrets
The SCOForum 2003 Sponsors page has been taken down. Instead you find:
"Document Not Found
"To find the document you're looking for, please see our company sitemap.
"If you're having problems with a broken link, send us your e-mail and we'll find the page for you. If the page is on the Linux Documentation Project site (http://www.sco.com/LDP/), email feedback@linuxdocs.org."
You certainly get ample chances to give SCO your email address. Linux gets special mention, I see. Maybe because so much of the pages on Linux have simply disappeared. There one day and then, no explanation, just poof. Desesperado.
There is a search engine on the page, so I typed in "Sponsors" and got a list of pages. Number four on the list took me to the old, now removed, page, where you can see who was on the list previously as Bronz and Silver sponsors. It has been reported that Intel was once on the list "by mistake" but I don't see it on this page. Perhaps the report was about a different, even earlier, page. Anyway, there was a flap about it, as you can read in the article.
HP is number one on the list on the removed page. They are certainly in an awkward position, thanks to SCO, but then, who isn't? It'll be interesting to see who actually shows up and who the actual sponsors turn out to be in the end. The article says there has been pressure from the IT world on HP to drop the sponsorship. That article says the pressure is falling on deaf ears, but the page came down, and it looks like it just happened today.
SCO's McBride in the recent teleconference said "the silent majority" in the IT world supports SCO and hopes they win. Maybe in an alternate universe, but back on this planet, in this galaxy, in our universe, SCO doesn't appear popular, judging from this SCOForum episode or the reaction already from the IT world to his remark, intense enough to warrant a second story by Computer World just about the reaction. The emails they received were not from lunatic fringe types, either, as you can see when you read them. Here's one, from the president of a consulting company:
"Joey Mele, president of JBT Production Services, a small consulting company in Las Vegas, wrote that McBride is off-base in claiming that the silent majority of the IT world is behind him. 'I just couldn't believe the guy could say something like that,' Mele said in an interview. 'It's so detached from reality.'"
It's sad when you see someone throw a party and people everywhere suddenly remember they have to wash their hair that day and can't make it. But when things like that happen to you, you just might take it as a clue as to how popular you actually are. Or are not.
9:43:24 PM 
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Methinks He Doth Protest Too Much
Or else he doth need to get his story straight.
Bloomberg News has an article, appearing in The Salt Lake Tribune, reporting that Darl McBride says that SCO's CFO submitted a sales plan in January "months before legal action was contemplated", presumably as proof that there is no connection between the stock sales and the lawsuit:
"Chief Financial Officer Robert Bench began the selling by SCO insiders, four days after SCO filed the suit against IBM. Bench is selling to help pay a $150,000 tax bill, McBride said. Under the Sarbanes-Oxley law, companies are no longer able to loan executives money to pay taxes or other expenses.
"Bench submitted a sale plan in January, months before any legal action against IBM was contemplated, McBride said. His agreement called for the sales to begin on March 8. He planned to sell 5,000 shares a month for the next 12 months, according to the plan."
Now, I'm no stock expert, but as for SCO not "contemplating" any legal action in January, here are some news stories from January of 2003 that I believe indicate that they were contemplating legal action in that month. All emphasis added by me.
It was on January 10 that the story first broke, in an article entitled, "SCO Threatens to Press IP Claims on Linux", by Maureen O'Gara:
"Informed sources, who would only talk on the guarantee of anonymity, say SCO has been proposing to charge users $96 per CPU for a so-called one-time System 5 for Linux software license to protect their systems from SCO-enforced patent issues if they ante up as soon as demand is made. . . .
"Sources say the scheme, which pretty much sounds like a protection racket - we won't sue if you pay - isn't engraved in stone but an undated weeks-old draft SCO press release that details the plan and was read to us has been quietly making the
rounds. At press time, we got word that a major player, believed to be
IBM, thought it had dissuaded SCO from going through with the idea.
"A usually reliable source swears a SCO executive told him that
SCO has hired the redoubtable David Boies, who prosecuted the Microsoft
antitrust case for the Justice Department, to press infringement claims
not against users but against the other Linux distributions."
If IBM, or whoever it was, was having discussions with them at that time, they are in a position presumably to testify as to the content of those discussions and as to the truthfulness of McBride's assertion that they were not contemplating legal action until "months" after January.
EWeek mentioned the January date too, in a story published later:
"The company in January hired high-profile attorney David Boies and his law firm to investigate whether Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and versions of BSD
infringed on the Unix intellectual property it owned."
They
hired an attorney regarding infringement of IP, but they were not
contemplating litigation at all? Here is another:
"Rumors escaping the Lindon, Utah-based company as early as mid-January had suggested the company may be gearing up to sue one or more of its competing Linux distributors, such as Red Hat, in the near future. The speculation intensified when SCOsource, the
intellectual property-licensing wing of the company, was announced
during LinuxWorld in late January. In part, that announcement
acknowledge the retaining of star attorney David Boies by SCOsource for
research and protection of SCO's patents,' providing many observers of
an ominous feeling about what SCO was up to."
Stephen
Shankland, in an
article entitled "SCO fees may hit some Linux users", wrote this on
January 14:
"The company, which is seeking untapped revenue
from customers who migrated from SCO Unix to Linux but are still using
SCO Unix software components, plans to detail its efforts in the coming
weeks or months. SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride created an
organization last fall 'to formalize the licensing of our intellectual
property,' according to a company presentation seen by News.com and
according to sources close to SCO.
"'SCO is concerned about
violations of our software license copyrights. SCO pays royalties on
software, and we're asking companies/customers to do the same,'
according to the October presentation. . . .
"Chris Sontag, hired
in October as senior vice president of SCO's Operating Systems division,
leads the intellectual property organization, sources said. Earlier in
his career, Sontag led marketing and product development for Novell, a
once-powerful operating system seller with ties to SCO. . .
.
"'Our Unix IP is a significant asset. And for several months,
we have been holding internal discussions, exploring a wide range of
possible strategies concerning this asset,' the company said in a
statement Monday. SCO hasn't decided how exactly to collect more Unix
revenue, the company added. . . ."
Here's their press release back in January, on the 22nd:
"The SCO(R) Group (SCO) (Nasdaq: SCOX), a leading provider of Linux and UNIX business software solutions, today announced that it has created a new business division to manage the licensing of its UNIX intellectual property. . . .
"Appointment of Boies, Schiller and Flexner
"As part of SCO's plans
to protect its intellectual property, the company has retained David
Boies of the law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner for research and
protection of SCO's patents, copyrights and other intellectual
property."
On January 30, LWN.net reported an interview with a
SCO spokesman:
"Rumors have been circulating for a few weeks: SCO, it is said, has hired a fancy law firm and will be pursuing
intellectual property claims against Linux users and distributors. . .
.
"What will SCO do if it finds something? As might be
expected, the company is not willing to say much:
'If we found
unlicensed use of our intellectual property in a product like Linux, any
action we would take would have to be based on the scope, source and
impact of the violation. We do not feel we can rule out any particular
response without impairing our fiduciary responsibility to our
stockholders to protect their property. Certainly our first choice in
helping to resolve this issue would not to be heavy handed in our
response.'"
On January 23, 2003, Internet News had a "Are Linux Users Infringing on SCO's Property?":
"'Anybody that does not have intellectual property issues related to SCO can sleep well at night, but for anyone violating our IP we are going to be more
aggressive enforcing our rights than we have in the past,' Chris Sontag,
SCO senior vice president for operating systems, told internetnews.com .
. . .
"Still, the move had been hinted at earlier, prompting some
observers of the Linux scene to wonder whether SCO wasn't simply fishing
for financial settlements from companies looking to avoid a lawsuit. . .
.
"SCO's chief executive, McBride, has played it somewhat coy, acknowledging that Boies was hired (Boies is known for taking on
Microsoft on behalf of the Justice Department in its antitrust case, and
for defending Napster) but telling the media only that he was 'not
prepared to answer' what course of action the company was going to be
taking."
Not answering is not the same as not contemplating. In March, Peter Galli wrote in eWeek that
discussions had been going on with SCO and IBM since early December.
But in January they still were not "contemplating" legal action? I don't
think that word means what he thinks it means. Here's what McBride said
back then:
"McBride said the bottom line was that SCO owned the source code to Unix and the right to that operating system. IBM had taken AIX and made it available to the Linux community in an unlawful
way.
"'IBM has been happily giving part of the AIX code away to the Linux community, but the problem is that they don't own the AIX
code,' he said. 'And so it's a huge problem for us. We have been talking
to IBM in this regard since early December and have reached an impasse. This was thus the only way forward for us.' . . .
"While McBride
said SCO expects much of the $10 million in licensing revenue to be
raised amicably, it was willing to litigate in order to enforce its IP
and other rights."
When they announced the establishement of SCOsource, they said this, on January 22:
"'The most substantial intellectual property in UNIX comes from SCO,' said Chris Sontag, Senior Vice President for Operating Systems and SCOsource, The SCO Group. 'While Linux is an Open Source product, it shares philosophy,
architecture and APIs with UNIX. Starting today, SCO's libraries will be
available to third-party application developers, OS vendors, hardware
providers, services vendors, and end-users. SCO will help customers
legitimately combine Linux and UNIX technology to run thousands of UNIX
applications. SCOsource plans to create other new licensing programs to
make our rich inventory of UNIX System technology available to the
market.'
"As part of SCO's plans to protect its intellectual
property, the company has retained David Boies of the law firm Boies,
Schiller and Flexner for research and protection of SCO's
patents, copyrights and other intellectual property."
Now, it's possible that Bloomberg News misquoted McBride, and he didn't say that Bench filed his plan in January "months before" they "contemplated" legal action. In that case, it brings us right back to the question of the timing of all this. But if the quotation is accurate, the assertion doesn't appear to match the facts. I believe there is a word for that. The real question in my own mind is one nobody seems to be asking, namely why did SCO decide to change its policy and pay in stock when it did? SCO's comments on all this can be read here but it leaves questions in my mind still.
Today's 3rd-Quarter Financials
Speaking of changes, there was a change of procedure in today's teleconference. When SCO announced
its first-quarter results on Feb. 26, it publicly invited anyone to
listen in live by simply calling in. The number was listed on their web site. When it
announced
its second-quarter earnings, the procedure was the same. But today, in
contrast, if you wished to participate, you first had to provide an
email address. There was no number listed publicly. Alternatively, you could listen to a webcast, if you had certain proprietary software. Whatever could have made them make this change if they are so upbeat about their finances? Whatever the motive, the result has to be the capability to select the audience, I would think, and screen out naysayers. I don't know if SCO used that capability, because I didn't attend, but I am simply recording that they changed their procedure.
7:54:25 AM
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Is SCO Math-Challenged?
When SCO "terminated" Sequent's
license on August 13, it said:
". . .Sequent-IBM has
nevertheless contributed approximately 148 files of direct Sequent UNIX
code to the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels, containing 168,276 lines of code.
This Sequent code is critical NUMA and RCU multi-processor code
previously lacking in Linux."
I got the following email from
a programmer, in which he challenges those numbers:
". . . NUMA and RCU implementation is at most no more than a dozen or
two files in Linux. Each one is likely 1500 lines on average. So how
does that get to be 148 files and 168276 lines? I think there are 2
possibilities and one of them is very interesting IMHO because they
would have to be saying that they are extending their theory of derived
works to large parts of linux.
"1. They are counting for multiple revision of the files.
"2. They are counting everything that NUMA and RCU _touches_, not just the implementation itself.
"Two other interesting things are the precision with which they state this is clearly bogus. Does that include whitespace? How about comments? Why not 168277 lines? The only way I can see that happening is pick a version (which one? there are over a hundred major releases from Linus alone in 2.4 and 2.5 series), find the RCU and NUMA functions/headers and count every line in every file that includes an RCU/NUMA header or calls an RCU/NUMA function. Anything else would require SCO to have access to the Sequent code (or 3. Just make things up).
". . . Defending these exact numbers is going to be a burden .. ."
I noticed Adam Baker commented on that same 8/13 story, and he did some calculations of his own:
"I've just had a quick grep through the (2.4.19) kernel
source and other than trivia such as calling rcu_init() at startup, RCU
seems to consist of one source file (kernel/rcupdate.c) with a
corresponding header file and NUMA of one architecture independent file,
most of which will be ignored by the compiler in some configurations
because of #ifdef statements and less than 20 architecture specific
source files a few of which would be used in any particular kernel that
supported a specific NUMA machine. Large chunks of this code would also
be Linux specific.
"If you exclude the areas which aren't really
part of the core kernel such as networking, filesystems, device drivers,
SCOs GPLed ABI stuff and sound libraries then the kernel only consists
of 86 architecture independant source files and a further 85 to support
the i386 platform and altogether they only total about 100,000
lines."
I'm not a programmer, so i can't speak to this, but when I get information from two sources I trust, it's time to put it up on Groklaw. Did SCO flunk math, as well as GPL Summer School? Or is this foreshadowing an attempted land grab for "derivative" code?
P.S. I just got an email from Roberto Dohnert. He did the math and he says: "To be exact, Numa and RCU come out to 29 files with 1836 lines of code."
6:14:18 AM
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