SGI code changes not enough, says SCO

The SCO Group has insisted that changes made by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to some of its Unix code will not be enough to prevent termination of SGI's Unix licence.

SCO plans to revoke SGI's Unix licence even though the latter claims to have removed all potentially offending code from its XFS journalling file system, now in Linux. But this does not go far enough, SCO has told vnunet.com.

The licence is due to be terminated on 14 October, two months after a warning letter was sent to SGI complaining that it had allowed code to be transferred from SCO's Unix System V into Linux.

The letter, dated 13 August, claimed that SGI subjected SCO's source code to "unrestricted disclosure, unauthorised transfer and disposition, and unauthorised use and copying".

In response SGI this week issued an open letter, signed by vice president of software Rich Altmaier, saying it had reviewed the XFS code and changed 200 lines out of more than a million supplied to Linux.

But the letter added: "Notably, it appears that most or all of the System V code fragments we found had previously been placed in the public domain, meaning it is very doubtful that the SCO Group has any proprietary claim to these code fragments in any case."

In response, SCO's director of public relations, Blake Stowell, told vnunet.com: "Making minor amendments to its XFS file system doesn't cure the breach. SGI must do more as outlined [in the August letter] to cure all of their breaches."

SCO has yet to decide how to enforce SGI's licence termination, but Stowell hinted that the company may remove all SGI's rights under its contract.

"We don't believe that SGI has taken all of the steps necessary to cure all of the breaches, and in fact in our letter to them, we state 'SGI's breaches of these agreements cannot be cured'.

"Nonetheless, we will provide SGI with two months to remedy all violations of these agreements."

SCO is currently suing IBM for $3bn, claiming the company misappropriated its Unix code by allowing it to be used in Linux. It terminated IBM's System V licence in June.

It has since told Linux customers they must buy a Unix System V licence from SCO.

In response SGI this week issued an open letter, signed by vice president of software Rich Altmaier, saying it had reviewed the XFS code and changed 200 lines out of more than a million supplied to Linux.

But the letter added: "Notably, it appears that most or all of the System V code fragments we found had previously been placed in the public domain, meaning it is very doubtful that the SCO Group has any proprietary claim to these code fragments in any case."

In response, SCO's director of public relations, Blake Stowell, told vnunet.com: "Making minor amendments to its XFS file system doesn't cure the breach. SGI must do more as outlined [in the August letter] to cure all of their breaches."

$CO is upset that SGI removed public domain code from XFS?

Something else:

SCO Group has asked a federal judge for four more months to answer IBM's claims that the Utah software company violated its patents and engaged in unfair competition and deceptive trade practices.....

SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said Tuesday that he understood the extension is being sought "for the purpose of gaining documents from IBM related to the patents they claim. . . . Some of the patents aren't even filed with the U.S. Patent Office, as far as we can learn."

I assume he's talking about these four patents that $CO is accused of violating:

They're there, Blake. All ya gotta do is look 'em up.

Curiouser and curiouser....

Stowell of SCO: "Some of the patents aren't even filed with the U.S. Patent Office, as far as we can learn."
Curiouser and curiouser....

What SCO is doing here is a form of trolling. They did a similar thing in their recent press release concerning the GPL.

To those unacquainted with the concepts of Postmodernism, the idea of making your case in public by telling a newspaper reporter something that is absurdly false, and expecting to get away with it, seems unwise. And yet here we see the technique used quite successfullly by the SCO spokesperson.

As you point out, IBM had cited these patents by number in its complaint. As a non-Postmodernist, you assume that the records kept by the U.S. Patent Office serve as an "objective reality" against which we can measure the SCO spokesperson's claim.

So, you search the Patent Office site for the numbers cited by IBM, determine that these are indeed patent numbers issued by the USPTO to IBM for the inventions cited in the complaint, and conclude that the SCO spokesperson just told a newspaper reporter something that was easily determined to be false.

But you and I are old fuddy-duddies. We believe in that old "objective reality" crap. What SCO does instead is take advantage of the fact that neither the newspaper reporter nor the newspaper's readers will know whether those are valid patents or not. In the old days, the newspaper reporter would check, but now reporters are all lazy ignoramuses who don't even know how they could check, so SCO gets the result it wants: the newspaper presents the public with an alternate and very plausible reality in which IBM's patents may not even exist.

The SCO spokesperson is a Postmodernist. He does not believe in objective reality. He thinks he can say that the sky is purple, and if nobody bothers to check, he'll get away with it. And in fact he will. As we see here, he just did. You watch... this same claim by Stowell will appear in numerous publicatons, and not one reporter will bother to check.

Blake Stowell is hardly the only one doing this. Our entire public discourse — on every subject — is poisoned by the insertion of ax-grinding falsehoods inserted into the discussion by people who know that the "truth" is whatever the loudest guy says it is. I don't know how a self-governing people can govern themselves when they can't trust anything they hear. And yet, as Blake Stowell shows here, it has become a commonplace for adults to literally lie their way through their case... and there are no penalities for doing this.

It's Post-Clintonism. Say any damned thing. Rely on the laziness of newspaper reporters to get your BS in front of the public without being exposed as BS, and then rely on the average recipient of your BS not to know for sure, and not to care enough to check. If you sound convincing, you might just win, even though nothing you said was even remotely true. Nobody knows what the meaning is "is" is. We can't even tell anymore.

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