SCO opens new front in Linux war

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SCO has been caught in its own web of untruths

http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/12/pr03080.html

The SCO Group did NOT have clear title to the Unix source code and manuals to register the copyrights with US Copyright Office. It is federal crime to fraudulently claim ownership when registering copyrights.

The SCO Group cannot expect to win any case based upon application interfaces which its AT&T, USL and Novell predecessors released in open standards specifically for the purpose of interoperability.

The headers that The SCO Group declared ownersip of in the most recent letter, including signal.h, errorno.h,and ioctl are all parts of many released standards including The Open Group and IEEE POSIX Base Specifications and the Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 151-2.

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/basedefs/signal.h.html
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/basedefs/errno.h.html
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/functions/ioctl.html
http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/fip151-2.htm

It is a requirement of the ISO, IEEE and ANSI standards body that participants involved in the development of standards must pre-declare and clearly lable and identify any section of a standard in developent that an implementation would be dependent upon a patent for which royalties must be paid.

Both AT&T and Santa Cruz Operation participated in the development of the POSIX / FIPS 151-X standards and they did not identify any such royalty/patent dependent section as required for federal endorsed standards. For The SCO Group to claim ownership rights over these standards must raise the interest of the relevent federal authorities.

In terms of copyright, anyone and any organization who has purchased an ISO standard and any subsequent recipients, are free to release implementations based upon those standards.

Linux kernel developers are free to develop implementations based upon publicly documented interfaces.

Common numeric assignemts to header constant/macro definitions are also a result of the Old SCO and Intel actively pushing for the adoption of the iBCS Intel Binary Compatibility Specifications across *all* i386 Unix vendors.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20016%40scorn.sco.COM

Both Novell and Caldera ( now called The SCO Group ) contributed patches to the Linux kernel headers to improve compatibility with existing Unix applications and the iBCS interfaces. Even going back to 1994.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1994Apr25.151605.293@umr.edu

Even IBM is publicly recognizing that the GPL license does not allow additional terms and conditions to be added to the released binaries and source for downstream recipients.

Since 1994, Novell, The Santa Cruz Operation ( Old SCO ) and Caldera ( New The SCO Group ) received GPL code and contributed, redistributed and profited from the sale of GPL'ed products and related services. Each of these player fully realized that they were only able to under the terms of the GPL license.

The GPL license is the only only required, any other license which attempt to add a charge is would add an unnecessary expense.

However SCO has demanded that government Linux users "pay up".
http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/1_1/daily_news/21384-1.html

Which brings us to the False Claims Act. The DOJ have charged other
corporations and executives with breaches very similar to what the SCO
Group are attempting to do.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 1999
U.S. JOINS FALSE CLAIMS ACT CASE AGAINST COMSAT CORPORATION
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/1999/January/014civ.htm
The United States has joined a lawsuit against a Washington, D.C.,
company based on allegations that one of its subsidiaries defrauded
the government by charging costs incurred on its commercial
contracts to its contracts with the Department of the Navy for the
restoration of radar equipment used on U.S. Navy warships.

Note
Under the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act, a person with
knowledge of financial fraud against the government can file suit
against the alleged wrongdoer on behalf of the government. Subject
to certain statutory provisions, if the lawsuit results in a
monetary judgment or settlement, the whistle blower is entitled to a
share of the proceeds recovered by the government.

See
http://articles.corporate.findlaw.com/articles/file/00903/005657/title/Subject/topic/Criminal%20Law_Criminal%20Fraud/filename/criminallaw_1_400

And this article which gives a wider scope to who can file a Qui Tam
case...
http://www.qui-tam.org/false_claims_act.html
IV. WHAT TYPES OF PEOPLE FILE QUI TAM LAWSUITS?

EMPLOYEES: A current or former employee who blows the whistle on his
or her employer is one of the most common type of qui tam
plaintiffs. Detecting fraud is usually very difficult without the
cooperation of a close observer of the fraudulent activity. In the
case of a former employee, they were usually terminated or quit as a
result of complaining about the fraud or trying to blow the whistle
internally. Typically, the complaints fall on deaf ears.


COMPETITORS AND SUBCONTRACTORS: Another less common type of whistle
blower is the competitor of the company committing the fraud or an
employee of the competitor who has direct knowledge of the fraud
being committed. Also, companies or persons who subcontract with a
government contractor have filed qui tam actions against the
contractor.


INDUSTRY EXPERTS: In a few cases, industry experts have successfully
brought suit against multiple defendants alleging an industry-wide
practice. Their understanding of the industry and the common scheme
throughout helped them to be in a position to blow the whistle. Two
recent examples include "yield burning" in public finance deals by
underwriters, and underpayment of oil/gas royalties by major oil
companies.


In general, frauds like the above can be uncovered by people with
knowledge of the requirements of the government programs involved
and the misrepresentations made by the recipients of the government
funds.

How many US Federal, Military and Medical Institutions and contractors will be invoiced by the SCO Group?

The public claims of the SCO Groups CEOs and legal representatives are putting them at risk of doing time in a federal institution.

I have not scratched the surface on the number of outright lies and potential criminal acts that the SCO Group has perpetrated upon Linux vendors, Linux Users, SCO's own shareholders and even tech journalists.

Get informed...

http://www.groklaw.net/

Posted by: David Mohring   Posted on: 12/23/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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