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You realize that Caldera became SCO, right?

Wrong, they acquired SCO.

Enemy #1 of FOSS.

No, Enemy #1 of FOSS is Microsoft, which paid for much of SCO v. Linux. SCO was (is!) only an instrument of Microsoft.

And as much as it galls me, Microsoft has a point. How do you use your judgement without spending the time installing and using the software? I do it by reading reviews. I could have saved myself years of frustration with KDE 4 just by reading this one: http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/kde-its-time-for-a-fork/. Now I listen to what sjvn says. Hell, read the gnome developer mailing list. Half of them are unhappy.

Oh wow Alex being a FOSSie and throwing insults, surprise surprise. Hey here is a video of RMS you'll find enlightening and as a public service allow me to post some facts (with links, which of course you can NEVER provide) to give those that aren't sucking GNUoolaid some information about the product you keep championing blindly like a Moonie following his master.

How about a nice kernel exploit? Or how about the guy that wrote EEEBuntu saying Ubuntu sucks? which considering they are the current savior of Linux kinda tells you something.

How sad was it that even when a bug was spreading through OSX there were writers pointing out that's no reason to torture yourself with Linux , after all even a virus ridden OSX actually runs which is more than most distros LOL! But hey, you can always tell them they can fix it otherwise they don't need that right? LOL! And I noticed you just couldn't fricking resist screaming "Nigger!" which in FOSSie is done by screaming PaidMicrosoftShill, hey you think you could throw in one more FOSSie cliche please? Then I'll have a FOSSie Flush ROFL!

But if you didn't have cliches and your pathetic attempts at insults why then you might have to have an independent thought and realize what everybody knows that even when MSFT put out a universally reviled OS you STILL got curb stomped, does that give you ANY clues? or all they all brainwashed by those black choppers that have been following you? Hell when the Chinese were given the choice of your "free OS" or pirating Windows they chose the latter even if it meant staying on XP and using IE fricking 6, LOL! Does that ring ANY bells? A smart person would say "what are we doing wrong the other guy is doing right?" but a FOSSie who is just like a Moonie in that they blindly follow, instead says "Its all a conspiracy! They are all shills keeping the masses from true salvation!" and then you wonder why we all laugh at you because you DON'T Listen, you DON'T learn, and Torvalds could take a big steaming dump and hand it to you and you'd thank him for his generous gift. So enjoy that fresh bitchslapping loony, enjoy the fact that the world really doesn't care...but I do, I enjoy slapping you, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Nope, sorry, Linux still has major issues with driver, upgrades breaking shit, and with the DE wars and pulseaudio being flaky. Instead it'll be Vista all over again where even SJVN said Vista's failure hurt Linux as people just bought XP instead. In case you didn't hear MSFT quietly boosted the EOL for ALL version of Win 7 from 2014 for the non business versions to 2020 so anybody who doesn't want Win 8 will be able to buy Win 7 no problem and it'll last longer than most keep their systems for. I know my customers have been buying up quads with plenty of upgrade-ability so they can just bypass Win 8 completely.

So sorry, it won't be enough for MSFT to put out a bad product, not with their long support cycles. Linux would have to make a major breakthrough but instead according to one of the big cheese at Red hat Linux desktop is instead in its death cries due to design mistakes made 20 years ago. and hey, guess what? He also said it needs a fricking driver ABI! Nice to see even the guys at RH know a bad design when they see one.

See this is why I love to LMAO at the FOSSies, they are so "There is but one true god!" they can't even think, its like a cross between village idiot and conspiracy nut, all rolled into one!

You want some fresh bitch slapping? Be careful what you wish for FOSSie, how about a nice kernel exploit? Or how about the guy that wrote EEEBuntu saying Ubuntu sucks which considering they are the current savior of Linux kinda tells you something. But why don't you say "Use Distro X" and then have the balls to name the X so i can show its just as big a POS, huh? BTW frankly everyone has stop giving a fuck about your OS, you aren't even newsworthy anymore really. Now its all Win 7&8, OSX&iOS, and of course Android which just shows what happens when a company bitch slaps the community and takes it away from them, why it actually fucking runs!

How sad that even with a bug spreading through OSX there are writers pointing out that's no reason to torture yourself with Linux , after all even a virus ridden OSX actually runs which is more than most distros LOL! But hey, you can always tell them they can fix it otherwise they don't need that right? LOL! And I noticed you just couldn't fricking resist screaming "Nigger!" which in FOSSie is done by screaming PaidMicrosoftShill, hey you think you could throw in one more FOSSie cliche please? Then I'll have a FOSSie Flush ROFL!

But if you didn't have cliches and your pathetic attempts at insults why then you might have to have an independent thought and realize what everybody knows that even when MSFT put out a universally reviled OS you STILL got curb stomped, does that give you ANY clues? or all they all brainwashed by those black choppers that have been following you? Hell when the Chinese were given the choice of your "free OS" or pirating Windows they chose the latter even if it meant staying on XP and using IE fricking 6, LOL! Does that ring ANY bells? A smart person would say "what are we doing wrong the other guy is doing right?" but a FOSSie who is just like a Moonie in that they blindly follow, instead says "Its all a conspiracy! They are all shills keeping the masses from true salvation!" and then you wonder why we all laugh at you because you DON'T Listen, you DON'T learn, and Torvalds could take a big steaming dump and hand it to you and you'd thank him for his generous gift. So enjoy that fresh bitchslapping loony, enjoy the fact that the world really doesn't care...but I do, I enjoy slapping you, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

See this is why I love LMAO at the FOSSies, they are so "There is but one true god!" they can't even think, like how you at the very first sentence threw an insult and then dared to get butthurt when i slapped your dumb ass down.

You want some fresh bitch slapping? Be careful what you wish for FOSSie, how about a nice kernel exploit? Or how about the guy that wrote EEEBuntu saying Ubuntu sucks which considering they are the current savior of Linux kinda tells you something. But why don't you say "Use Distro X" and then have the balls to name the X so i can show its just as big a POS, huh? As for why the older ones? frankly everyone has stop giving a fuck about your OS, you aren't even newsworthy anymore really. Now its all Win 7&8, OSX&iOS, and of course Android which just shows what happens when a company bitch slaps the community and takes it away from them, why it actually fucking runs!

How sad that even with a bug spreading through OSX there are writers pointing out that's no reason to torture yourself with Linux , after all even a virus ridden OSX actually runs which is more than most distros LOL! But hey, you can always tell them they can fix it otherwise they don't need that right? LOL! And I noticed you just couldn't fricking resist screaming "Nigger!" which in FOSSie is done by screaming PaidMicrosoftShill, hey you think you could throw in one more FOSSie cliche please? Then I'll have a FOSSie Flush ROFL!

But if you didn't have cliches and your pathetic attempts at insults why then you might have to have an independent thought and realize what everybody knows that even when MSFT put out a universally reviled OS you STILL got curb stomped, does that give you ANY clues? or all they all brainwashed by those black choppers that have been following you? Hell when the Chinese were given the choice of your "free OS" or pirating Windows they chose the latter even if it meant staying on XP and using IE fricking 6, LOL! Does that ring ANY bells? A smart person would say "what are we doing wrong the other guy is doing right?" but a FOSSie who is just like a Moonie in that they blindly follow, instead says "Its all a conspiracy! They are all shills keeping the masses from true salvation!" and then you wonder why we all laugh at you because you DON'T Listen, you DON'T learn, and Torvalds could take a big steaming dump and hand it to you and you'd thank him for his generous gift. So enjoy that fresh bitchslapping loony, enjoy the fact that the world really doesn't care...but I do, I enjoy slapping you, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Oh and Microsoft doesn't need shills, they have YOU. Its batshit loony tunes like YOU that make the entire community look like retarded basement trolls, its YOU that gives everyone the fodder for all the "Linux is for lusers" jokes, because you sound like a religious whacko. Frankly all any Microsoft or Apple rep has to do is show posts like yours and say 'you would want you company de

Today, as Jones wrote, âoeThe crisis SCO initiated over Linux is over, and Linux won. SCO as we knew it is no more.â And, thatâ(TM)s what really important here, not the carping of desperate anti-Linux enemies looking for anything to whine about.

Linux has won. It dominates the smartphone market. It owns a virtual monopoly in supercomputing. It powers the biggest websites that people use every day - google, facebook, amazon. It runs the worlds stock exchanges and financial markets. Linux webservers power the web. It's over. Linux has won, SCO and the people funding SCOs attack on linux, have lost.

Yes, there is a PJ

Let me address this directly. Yes, Pamela Jones is a real person. Iâ(TM)ve met her several times, and Iâ(TM)ve often âoetalkedâ with her on email and IM. I consider her a friend.

She is not a front for anyone. She is a paralegal, hence her excellent legal research skills, which are the foundation of her stories. And, sheâ(TM)s a journalist by any standard I know of.

So, you're just a sore loser.

But the only one a quick Google search brings up is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

I am not a journalist, but I thought that "one source = no source"...

and he does admit that he didn't check her passport, and those can be faked anyway, so I guess there's still room for mystery if you're into that sort of thing.

I don't care about here passport or age or anything personal; I would just like to be sure that she is a real human being and not for instance the creation of a bunch of IBM lawyers.

I perfectly understand PJ's right to privacy, but I have always been puzzled by the fact that nobody seems to have ever met her physically.

I think at least a few people have met her (or at least have claimed to have doesn't and there doesn't seem to be any reason to doubt them).

But the only one a quick Google search brings up is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and he does admit that he didn't check her passport, and those can be faked anyway, so I guess there's still room for mystery if you're into that sort of thing.

First of all, the link you provided leads to an opinion article. 'Nuff said.

Even if Microsoft bought some rights from Novell via the Attachmate deal, the current stack is *not* Microsoft tech. The Accenture/MS solution (TradElec) was binned as it was problematic, it crashed for a whole day and it never reached its performance targets (using Server 2003 and SQL 2000). The CEO who had brought it in was apparently fired.

I think it might be enough to be able to not include the firmware in the repositories, but to dynamically download the firmware from a specified FTP site and then apply it.

But what about people installing off a usb thumbdrive on a system with a wireless card but no ethernet jack (or at least no ethernet cable handy) ?

The real solution here is to open the firmware. I'm no expert here, but I believe that the current atheros chips have both open drivers and open firmware. So you don't have any distribution, linking, derivative work, etc... issues.

To sum up:
- Kudos to Broadcom. We didn't think you'd do this in 2010!
- Dear Broadcom, please consider releasing the firmware as well (and drivers/firmware for older models...we're still using them!)
- Dear Users, please consider how open broadcom and atheros chipsets are when you buy stuff!

SCO claims that IBM took IP from Project Monterrey and used it in AIX on their Power architecture. Under the terms of their deal, IBM could only do that if they also released Monterrey on Intel's Itanium. However Itanium was an troubled architecture that never found many customers and IBM backed out of later having only sold 40 licenses by 2002. According to former SCO CEO Ransom Love, IBM offered to pay SCO for their troubles but SCO refused.

Historically, Microsoft licensed the Unix code from AT&T in 1980 to make its own version of Unix: Xenix. At the time, the plan was that Xenix would be Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system. Microsoft quickly found they couldn’t do it on their own, and so started work with what was then a small Unix porting company, SCO. By 1983, SCO XENIX System V had arrived for 8086 and 8088 chips and both companies were marketing it.
It didn’t take long though for Microsoft to decide that Xenix wasn’t for them. In 1984, the combination of AT&T licensing fees and the rise of MS-DOS, made Microsoft decide to start moving out of the Unix business.

So why did MS suddenly decide they needed to buy $ 10M worth of old Unix licenses in 2003?
BTW, Novell claims they're entitled to 95% of those licenses SCO sold, in their 2005: breach of contract counterclaim. We'll soon see how this all plays out because the SCO-Novell case is finally in court now (the part that's still going on, whether Novell has or hasn't sold the Unix copyrights to SCO, is moving forward because SCO is sueing Novell with Novell's own money :-) ). If it turns out Novell owns the copyrights, all other SCO court cases should quickly collapse, which *might* in turn get people to understand that this whole SCOsource anti-Linux FUD was in fact a scam to scare potential customers away--but I digress.. sorry..
2004: Baystar connection (warning: by Enderle), and here in 2006 new info
I quote:

Buried in IBM's recent motion for summary judgment against SCO is a Declaration from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb. Near the beginning of the long-running legal soap opera, BayStar invested $50 million in SCO. In exchange for their investment, BayStar received 20,000 shares of preferred stock in SCO.
In his declaration, Goldfarb testifies that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed "a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop,' or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment." Goldfarb then said that after BayStar committed the $50 million to SCO's cause, Microsoft "stopped returning my phone calls and e-mails, and to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Emerson was fired from Microsoft."

I just woke up and realized that you've reminded me that many people may not know where Gibson got the title for "Burning Chrome" - AFAIR, the opening line of the story - I've not read it in years - was, "It was the night we burned Chrome." F-ingA hilarious.

Nichrome (nickel chromium) was used in PROMs - one literally burned through nichrome wire junctions to set logic paths (to open). After that, we all said we burned EPROMs and EEPROMs - just like we burn CD-RWs.

One of my co-workers got the first EPROM burning setup I'd ever seen, for his Apple. We'd spent weeks going over what and how were going to do things with it in anticipation of its budgeting, purchase and arrival. So, I'm off for a few days when the thing arrived. I get back to work, he's beaming from ear to ear - holding his first, newly-burned EPROM. Like an idiot he handed it to me. Why do I say, like an idiot? Because like a supreme idiot, the first thing I did was to remove that little paper-tape cover - obviously, you don't want some jerk's serial label or whatever that was on your motherboard, right? And you could see inside! Especially if you put it under a nice, bright light!

After I got up from the floor, I learned why those beasties were EPROMs as opposed to PROMs. Good times!

And speaking of tight coding - when you mentioned that, I was reminded of this quote:

Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.

No sweat on the FORTRAN - anyone who burned ERPOMs is a Real Programmer. Remember:

If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.

I'll bet these gems are ringing bells.... The rest is here - Enjoy!! :D http://practical-tech.com/entertainment/real-men-dont-use-pascal/

That was not a troll. At worst it was a funny. Has /. moderation been taken over by Redmond?

Linux share of the Top500 is 87.8%. Linux share keeps growing.

Somebody is trying to use the /. moderation system to hide the truth. Please mod them down.

This incident does bring up the question of what we will do when a government, NGO, or criminal group like the Mafia decides that Open Source software belongs to them and that people must pay a fee to them for using it...

Which is precisely what you have here. M$ tried via SCO to scuttle Linux. It turned out that SCO hadn't a leg to stand on. So, enter the Novel-M$ SW Patent deal where de Icaza and other receipt-carrying M$ Boosters inject proprietary technology into otherwise free and open source projects. Novell differs from SCO in that this time around there is a trail of receipts showing that yes you do owe M$money for their products even though they were readily available for download.

People have been good about readying the licenses for the main packages, but de Icaza and co. target the libraries and other components that these packages are built on. Combine that with a marketing team that hangs around Slashdot and goes after sites like Boycott Novell and they have made some headway. To be sure, Mono wastes a lot of space on the Ubuntu installation CD. Space which could have been used by Free Software. So even without the sw patent deal, Mono is technologically unsound.

Then there are Novell's attacks against OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Format. But that speaks for itself.

At the beginning it was simply described as a stupid move. Novell/M$ is a problem that is getting worse, mostly due to the noise they make and the interference they cause in free and open source projects. The patent pact put Novell outside the free and open source software community. The actions since then have only proven this to be more so.

That's the rumor goin' round, since the pictures of Jeff Bonwick (Guy in charge of ZFS) and Linus Torvalds havin' some beers together surfaced: relevent article

It seems to be common now for companies' to strip users of all their privileges ASAP. If you think this was bad, be glad you're not be laid-off. I've often many people tell me that they learned they no longer had a job when their sessions were terminated in the middle of the work day.

Welcome to the work-world of the 21st century.

Steven
http://www.practical-tech.com/
http://blogs.computerworld.com/sjvn

I'm curious. The blog you linked says that Vista would decline to play a DRM-protected audio CD over SPDIF outputs. How would it know that an audio CD has DRM, does Vista's Windows Media Player have an ID list of every possible DRM scheme used on audio CDs?

I think not. What's probably going on here is that the author tried to play one of those trick CDs that have several sessions, and when used with a computer the session that's visible is the data CD session that holds DRM'd WMA versions of the songs.

You have NEVER been able to play DRM-crippled WMA files over SPDIF. This is NOT a Vista thing, it's an inherent idiocy in Windows Media DRM.

the theory- http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
the goal http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/10/microsoft-vista-drm-tech-security-cz_bs_0212vista.html
a practical consequence -http://davisfreeberg.com/2008/01/03/bad-copp-no-netflix/

And:
broken sound API's (change for change sake)
Lack of drivers for older hardware
Useless on older machines with just 512 MB of RAM
too many versions
SP1 released just last month
Did I mention the DRM? http://practical-tech.com/entertainment/vistas-multimedia-mess/

As someone already mentioned, MS has 2 OS's in competition, and the newer one is losing. Why is it surprising that they would provide a "fix" to XP that makes it less desirable? Let's face it- they could have put out SP3 at any time in the last three years, and should have. They took the time to pull SP3 last week when it was conflicting with some MS Point of Sale software, but they don't have the resources to test it on any HP systems with AMD cpus's?

Caldera bought DR-DOS from Novell in 1996, for $400 thousand, long after the alleged damage to the product had been done. The company settled with Microsoft over the DR-DOS lawsuit for an 'undisclosed sum' in January 2000, which Microsoft valued at $155 mn, but others speculated was actually 'much higher'.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/600488.stm

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/ArticleID/804 5/8045.html?Ad=1

In August 2000, Caldera agreed to acquire the Santa Cruz Operation's Unix products, including UnixWare and the SCO name. Caldera later changed its name to The SCO Group, but Caldera management remained in charge, i.e. the company was actually Caldera, not the old Santa Cruz Operation, which became Tarantella, and in 2005 was acquired by Sun Microsystems.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/08/02/ 000802hncaldera.html

http://www.sun.com/software/tarantella/index.xml

Caldera's financial statements (see www.sec.gov) show it lost more money in 1999 and 2000 than its total revenue for each year, and had negative cash flows from operations. How was such a company able to issue equity that investors actually bought, pay for its ongoing losses and come up with enough money to acquire and sustain UnixWare, another loss-making business, along with the SCO name, in a deal valued at $91 mn? The answer is that the entire operation was funded by the DR-DOS lawsuit.

http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/linux/c aldera-buys-sco-unix-professional-services/

http://www.newsforge.com/os/04/03/30/0047220.shtml

I guess things like this really had nothing to do with it....

http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b05212003.h tm

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=microsoft+sco+sto ck&sm=Yahoo!+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=& ei=UTF-8

will turn up lots of interesting results. The fact is that MS poured money into SCO to let them be the "bad guy" in the linux bashing since they already learned that bashing linux directly only hurt them more and brought more attention to linux that otherwise wouldn't have been realized. So they used someone else to do the dirty deed.

Not that I don't believe the proper tool for the proper job, sometimes Windows IS better for a person's needs, but that doesn't change the fact that MS will do anything to attempt to destroy, discredit, dismantle linux because it is the only true threat they face due to their size.

First, yes there is "a small, independent media company founded and run by journalists." The key though is that you need to run it like a businessman, not as a journalist.

I know hundreds of people who want to be freelance writers or journalists. Some of them quite well. But, for every one I know who makes a living at it, I know two dozen who don't.

The secret? Treat it like a business first.

What's your business plan? You describe several tried, true and _lame_ ways of making money from journalism. Online advertising and newsletter subscriptions are the only ones that have a proven track record of working.

How many online publications do you see making living money from the methods you describe? I can't think of any.

Google ads by themselves though, won't cut it. You need someone who spends all their time looking for advertisers.

If you go the newsletter route, you typically have to become the Expert in one area that people with money want insider information on.

Now, that can be pretty broad. Fred Langa does very well with his personal computing newsletter, the Langa List (http://www.langa.com/), but Fred, former editor of chief in Byte in the good old days of print tech. journalism, already had a lot of fans.

OK, so those models can work, but you also have to content people value and want to read.

200K unique readers a month is good, but it's not good enough.

Still, with 200K, and aggressive, non-intrustive advertising, you should be able to generate enough cash to survive on.

But, income is only part of the equation. In a real business, yoy must learn how to manage your money. This isn't a skill that for some reason many writers or journalist have, but learning how to keep costs as low as possible while maximizing revenue is a must.

That sounds simple. It's not. It's a skill your group must master though.

I've made more money in journalism years ago than I am now, but I'm doing much better overall. My secret? I finally learned finance 101.

Finally, you really aren't staffed up enough to "deeper understanding of the wide swath of research discoveries poised to affect the technologies driving day-to-day life and business."

Pick a narrow area of technology, stick with it, and you can probably provide the "deeper understanding," you're striving to cover. Once people learn that your site is The site for nano-engineering, which seems a reasonable goal based on your existing coverage, you can probably make a go of it.

Good luck.

Steven,
Senior Editor, Ziff Davis Internet (http://www.eweek.com/
Editor, Practical Technology (http://www.practical-tech.com/
Chairman, Internet Press Guild (http://www.netpress.org/

Let me spell it out for you -

R e a l - M e n - D o n t - U s e - P a s c a l

Doesn't SCO have some connections with Microsoft?

Microsoft doesn't exactly have a clean record when it comes to fighting fair.

(SCO-Microsoft connection)
Where is the source for this information?

Does this little lot help?

http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween10.ht ml

http://trends.newsforge.com/trends/04/03/08/045725 9.shtml

http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b05212003.h tm

If you have a bogus patent, sue one of

• EV1
• Sun, or
• microsoft

If your claims are bogus, never even think of suing IBM.

• EV1
• Sun, or
• microsoft

If you have a bogus patent, sue one of

• EV1
• Sun, or
• microsoft

If your claims are bogus, never even think of suing IBM.

Enough tangents and wishing SCO to simply vanishing - it's going to be around a little while.

The issue at hand in the article and context is SCO will not be battling Red Hat and IBM at the same time. The case against SCO from Red Hat wasn't dismissed but deferred. Red Hat claims damages from SCO in regards to harming the Linux kernel because of the lawsuit and publicity towards suing IBM over the Unix core system.

In context against IBM - that is another story and we'll be seeing that unfold. In my opinion that is going to be a tough case to win for SCO. Remember SCO was a happy go lucky company and then Linux IPO Caldera Systems bought SCO. I can't see a Linux company coming to power and suing others over the Unix System even though IBM already had a license for the Unix core system.

Now back to Red Hats Case. RH is suing SCO basically over the suite against IBM. I seriously doubt that RH will win this case because the grounds of suing someone because you sued someone. RH is must prove malice in the context of SCO public statements. This is very hard to prove.

The break it down here is what's going to happen. First RH has to wait, IBM will win, RH will lose the Case against SCO, SCO will loose market share from other litigation cases yet to be determined.

We don't need any "conspiracy black helicopter rubbish" to know that Microsoft is working hard to kill open source. I don't question the low-level reasoning behind open source, as I have been using it for over a decade, but Microsoft releasing WiX under an open source does not make up for a long history of illegal and unethical behavior that is still going on!

• SCO UNIX(R) is backed by a single, experienced vendor. Where "experienced" is defined as less than four years .
• SCO UNIX(R) has a Committed, Well-Defined Roadmap
• SCO UNIX(R) is Legally Unencumbered

When Ransom was the new CEO of SCO, he was full of Open Source ideology.

In those days, SCO was asked about moving Unix IP into Linux. Ransom said they were doing their best to "open up" the Unix technologies, but that a lot of things belonged to 3rd parties, and SCO didn't have the rights to them. See this article.

Then we have Ransom's LinuxWorld 2001 keynote where he discusses SCO's role in helping IBM get enterprise features into Linux. One of his statements went as follows: "But clearly we are going to add components back to the Linux kernel on both IA-32 and IA-64 platforms". This was during the whole Monterey project as I recall.

So if you look at SCO in this context, you get the idea that they knew very much what was going on, that they sanctioned it, and that they probably even helped expedite it. It doesn't make sense for Ransom to start raising IP questions when he has made statements about SCO's support of Enterprise Unix features in Linux.

I'd suggest looking into UnitedLinux; heck, even SCO likes it! Evaluate it and see if that's more compatible out of the box with your stuff.

If you want a second opinion, here's some more advice; he also confirms that it's easier to move existing SCO stuff over to UnitedLinux than it would be to switch to RedHat Linux, for example.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2093314,00. html

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2093314,00. html

http://linuxtoday.com/high_performance/20010208009 06PSCDHE"

http://www.practical-tech.com/infrastructure/i0331 2003.htm

http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b06122003.h tm

http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3668,a=43186, 00.asp

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2093314,00. html

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2093314,00. html

http://linuxtoday.com/high_performance/20010208009 06PSCDHE"

http://www.practical-tech.com/infrastructure/i0331 2003.htm

http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b06122003.h tm

http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3668,a=43186, 00.asp

I was just wondering: since SCO is dying and, they are probabily cheap now, what if some other evil corp (let's say M$) decides to buy them? Oh wait a minute they just started doing that.

---
nothing to say

Microsoft must âoeimprove business consistencyâ so that customers are not hit with unexpected â" and unwanted â" changes.

You mean like finding out after you've bought into the expensive Windows 2003 Server upgrade, you find out that many of your mission-critical software packages, even Microsoft's own products are incompatible with 2003 and you'll have to buy those all over again too?

# Microsoft® Exchange 2000 will not run on Microsoft Windows(TM) Server 2003
# Internet Information Services 5.0 will not run on Windows Server 2003
# SQL Server 2000 will only run on Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 3 installed

See this article for details.

Also consider that every MS server application comes with a GUI. Therefore if a new version of Windows breaks backwards compatibility for its GUI it breaks its server applications. See their plans for the future.

I'm not arguing with your assertion about him (I wouldn't know).. but I don't think he had anything to do with the current mess.

The real story is that Maureen O'Gara and LinuxGram deliberately spread the false rumour about SCO. The only reason I can think of is that they must dislike SCO.

If you read O'Gara's article carefully she says that she presumed that SCO was going to go after Linux users. She only talked to one person at SCO who thought the idea was retarded. He said going after Linux users would be "suicide." After that most people would probably decide they had presumed incorrectly but O'Gara likes to go with the most damaging thing she can presume even if it's wrong.

The day after the article SCO said: "SCO has no desire to take legal action against fellow Linux vendors."

But the rumour had already spread. Stupid reporters took O'Gara's speculations and said, "It was reported that SCO was planning to sue Linux users."

Here is a factual article:
http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b01162003.h tm

Actually, there are patents open on *nix: the famous example is patent no. 4,135,240, the setuid patent (this link may work), filed 1973, granted 1979.

I don't know if there were any post-assignation grants of ownership to the patent, or if Lucent (nee Bell Labs) still owns it.

A press release from SCO states that Boies, Schiller and Flexner has been retained in an advisory capacity, which isn't unusual when a company is trying to determine an IP strategy. We often forget that lawyers are often used for things other than suing people (such as, uh, determining under what statutes one may sue, who one may sue, contracts to enforce terms over which one may sue ... I'm not helping my case here, am I?). The press release (and this story) indicates that the UnixWare and OpenServer libraries are affected. Unfortunately, their "Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart" is one of the least useful displays possible, since it appears simply to be the "History of UNIX" chart with some colored lines added. Hopefully, a full clarification by SCO will be forthcoming.

SCO is not going after every Linux vendor, only those distributing the two libraries without SCO's permission.

To me, this is all just FUD, and is being blown WAY out of proportion.