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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

> So this movement toward resolving such conflicts in the courts, instead of by companies competing to out-innovate one another, is very troubling.

A lot of the things you cite were actually fought out in the courts. Motorola sued MOS Technology [1]. AMD and Intel have been in constant legal battles since their inception. The complicated question of Unix ownership started the famous SCO-Linux litigation. This isn't anything new.

And Anthony Levandowski is one of the least sympathetic figures in the industry; virtually no story about people who worked for him has been a positive one. I have sympathy for ordinary senior engineers getting strangled by non-compete agreements. Not for Levandowski.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502#Motorola_l...

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Do you think MOStek would have been able to survive in today's legal environment? I don't think so, and that's what worries me.

The SCO-Linux litigation wasn't complicated. It was just fraud on SCO's part, under copyright law that was well-established at the time. With the Google/Oracle precedent in place, SCO would probably win.

I agree that Levandowski, like weev, is profoundly unsympathetic, but we can't let that blind us to the precedents he is being used to set. If Levandowski wins his case, ordinary (and extraordinary) senior engineers will be safer from getting strangled by non-compete agreements; if he loses, they will be in more danger.

> Do you think MOStek would have been able to survive in today's legal environment? I don't think so, and that's what worries me.

What’s different about “today’s environment?” If anything patent rights are weaker today—back in 1976, there were no ex parte or inter partes reexams to challenge patents in the PTO. You had to challenge patent validity in district court, where the patent was accorded a presumption of validity and a high “clear and convincing” standard was necessary to overcome that presumption.

Looking briefly at the case history, it seems like the litigation with Motorola would have played out the same way today. Motorola had patents in the 6800 chip bus. As a result of the litigation, MOStek had to drop the 6501, which was socket compatible with the 6800. But the 6502 was a substantially different architecture internally, and was not socket compatible. (Moreover, that lawsuit settled when Motorola got the upper hand when it discovered that one of the MOStek’s engineers had taken confidential documents with him from Motorola. Taking confidential documents with you, which is what happened here, wasn’t okay back then either.)

As someone who grew up in Santa Cruz with parents and friends working in tech, I feel the need to point out that the "SCO" involved in the lawsuit wasn't the same people as the "SCO" that developed the tech - the rights to the name and the software were purchased by Caldera after (it seems, although I'm less confident about this part) all that was left was at Caldera were the lawyers and MBAs.

Yeah, I have several friends who were at the real SCO. They had nothing to do with this.

If he wins, why bother investing in research, just steal someone else's.

No one else has done the research I’m doing. My goal isn’t to get rich, it’s to solve the problems my community is having.

If someone else wanted to solve those problems using my work, I would be very glad and would do something else with my time.

That’s great for you — I don’t feel that way for me. Stealing ideas is one thing, but stealing a complex implementation is another.

The Google-Oracle precedent is not actually relevant to SCO v IBM, because IBM didn't re-implement an interface copyrighted by SCO.

You're right, of course, because it turned out SCO wasn't the owner of the relevant copyright.

True, but the bit about interfaces is also not comparable between the two. There wasn't a lot of commonality between openserver and IBM (RedHat) Linux. It's not like the libraries on one system would run on the other. SCO's seminal allegation was that code was copied between the two, but they never produced evidence. Likely, because there was none. The case was eventually dropped when it was determined SCO couldn't even make a claim to begin with and the rightful copyright holder, Novell, stated they didn't believe SCOs claims. Then SCO went bankrupt and the whole situation just kind of quietly went away.

They did eventually show some “code”, namely signal.h and a couple of other similar files.

However, thanks to iBCS, it is actually possible to run SCO Unix binaries on Linux, and has been since last millennium. That's why interfaces like signal.h shouldn't be copyrightable: the goal of copyright Law is not to give SCO control over code their customers write.

Not quite. The case is still active (!) in the Federal court in Salt Lake City. The judge lifted the stay on the case on May 14, 2018. Since then, absolutely nothing has happened. But the case has not "gone away" so far as I can tell.

There are cases saying you can't copyright an interface:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_In....

> The complicated question of Unix ownership started the famous SCO-Linux litigation. This isn't anything new.

Just a bit correction there. SCO-Linux litigation is pretty contemporary. Way back before then, there was the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars )

SCO-Linux litigation was just the SCO assholes wanting to get a piece of the pie when they were dying out.

There was also a fair bit of speculation that it was some folks in Redmond using SCO as a tool to spread FUD [0].

[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/sco-leaked-e-mail-a-misunderstandi...

Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T.

The Day SunOS Died

    "Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
    ATT System V has replaced BSD.
    You can cling to the standards of the industry
    But only if you pay the right fee -- 
    Only if you pay the right fee . . ."

http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html

For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann

> virtually no story about people who worked for him has been a positive one.

I am reminded of Bob Widlar, inventor of the op-amp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Widlar#Personality

And from all accounts Shockly was a hard man to work for.

Indeed, but because of the legal climate at the time, his “Traitorous Eight” had the option of exiting. Today they'd have to put up with Shockley.

A few yeas ago a mate who worked for TI told me about a time he shared a flight with a v senior guy from TI (Texas Instruments).

On the flight the senior guy mentioned "Gee I wish I had gone in with those guys" And I don't think he was talking about Intel :-)

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