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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#31

Post by jedberg »

politician wrote: post #24
ChuckMcM wrote: post #16

Interesting side effect of this (to me :-)) is that when Blekko was acquired by IBM I got stuck doing what is called "Blue Washing" where IBM tracks down the licenses, origins, and usages of all the source code the acquired company is bringing to IBM. According to people I worked with when doing this, the entire process and toolset was an outgrowth of the work they did to disprove SCO's claims in the lawsuit. I found…

I wonder if it'll be much easier going forward. Take a suspect piece of code, run it through an LLM to explain it, pass the explanation to another LLM to generate code from the explanation. An automated pipeline for clean room reverse engineering.

As long as you can prove that you had a license to all the code that was used to train the LLM! :)

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#33

Post by heelix »

One of my greatest white elephant gifts were SCO stock certificates. Was a real challenge to figure out how to spend $20+ for a bit of paper as they were getting close to delisting. Really wish I had kept one for myself.

Miss groklaw... what a loss when that shut down.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#34

Post by akiselev »

jedberg wrote: post #31
politician wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it'll be much easier going forward. Take a suspect piece of code, run it through an LLM to explain it, pass the explanation to another LLM to generate code from the explanation. An automated pipeline for clean room reverse engineering.

As long as you can prove that you had a license to all the code that was used to train the LLM! :)

Someone would first have to prove you used an LLM, no?

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#35

Post by BeFlatXIII »

AlbertCory wrote: post #11
JohnFen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with cleaned up laws Which one I'd pick depends a whole lot on what those "cleaned up" laws consist of. But generally, this looks like an exercise in determining which is the lesser evil.

"No IP protection for software at all" is your position, then?

Information deserves to be free.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#36

Post by vondur »

cheekibreeki2 wrote: post #25
jedberg wrote: post #15

I had to deal with fallout from this. At the time I worked at eBay, and were not allowed to use any OS except Windows or RedHat Linux. The reason we had to use RedHat? Because we had a paid license from them that included them absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux. But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time. So we were forced t…

Rh 4.2 ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?

This was pre DNF/YUM days. RedHat could be a pain installing stuff from RPM’s that had crazy dependencies back in the day.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#37

Post by sjm »

gemstones wrote: post #12

I hadn't heard of Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) and I looked at his LinkedIn; this is his side of the story from his time at SCO, as he puts in in his work experience section. I found it super interesting. All of my work experience before and after SCO was of the startup/entrepreneurial variety. Fun stuff, new, exciting and positive. Then some former colleagues on the board of SCO (previously Caldera) convinced me to com…

And today he's a Marjorie Taylor Green-retweeting bankrupt conspiracy theorist. Funnily enough his personal website is "Billionaire Cheat Codes"

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#38

Post by hinkley »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #19
tpmx wrote: post #13

This article doesn't give Microsoft enough credit for funding the whole thing. I was going to write that the Internet remembers, but apparently that has its generational limitations. :(

It's a friend now, remember?

How's that Chrome download page hijacking thing goin'?

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#39

Post by morelisp »

gemstones wrote: post #12

I hadn't heard of Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) and I looked at his LinkedIn; this is his side of the story from his time at SCO, as he puts in in his work experience section. I found it super interesting. All of my work experience before and after SCO was of the startup/entrepreneurial variety. Fun stuff, new, exciting and positive. Then some former colleagues on the board of SCO (previously Caldera) convinced me to com…

IDK, if I was put in charge of a company losing money like crazy and was genuinely trying to turn it around, my first thought would not be "oh, let's hire David Boies".

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#40

Post by surfingdino »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #19
tpmx wrote: post #13

This article doesn't give Microsoft enough credit for funding the whole thing. I was going to write that the Internet remembers, but apparently that has its generational limitations. :(

It's a friend now, remember?

Sure, we remember... https://www.junauza.com/2011/07/microsoft-fud-campaigns-agai...
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