Slashdot Mirror

So it sounds like you want Xinuos OpenServer 10:

Xinuos OpenServer 10 is a 64-bit operating system based on the popular FreeBSD and designed to support business applications within an enterprise environment.

It should be noted that Xinuos also offers SCO UnixWare and SCO OpenServer. Even sco.com now goes to their web site. What's funny about this is that it wasn't SCO that ultimately harmed Linux to the point of it being unusable. It turned out to be the Linux community itself that made Linux unusable by including systemd! And now it is what could be seen as a successor to SCO that's providing relief from how the Linux community has ruined Linux!

What a world we live in!

According to SCO's website:

The UNIX ABIs were never authorized for unrestricted use or distribution under the GPL in Linux®. As the copyright holder, SCO has never granted such permission. Nevertheless, many of the ABIs contained in Linux®, and improperly distributed under the GPL, are direct copies of our UNIX copyrighted software code.

Wasn't it proven that Novell owned any and all copyrights involved here? How long do you get to publicly libel someone (like everyone who uses Linux) before a judge can order you to cease and desist that idiocy?

Very funny! But Xenix does live on: http://www.sco.com/products/op...

I find this to be highly unlikely since the majority of Ericsson products are using Linux as a platform today

Absolute unadulterated bullshit. The only Ericsson products with Linux at their core are Telecom Server Platform, Integrated Site concept, APZ, Connectivity Packet Platform, Enterprise Media Gateway, and MX-ONE Telephony System. Mere tokens compared to the once vast but now shrinking array of networking equipment they manufacture and deploy with their Global Services unit. Furthermore, most of these are in full "Tivo-ised" mode so you can forget running your custom unsigned kernel on unhacked hardware that you supposedly own.

Face it, Ericsson is a has-been company when it comes to hardware. Out-competed and out-financed whre they formerly led, their hapless, thoroughly uninspired, management have no choice but to follow the common business-sense trope of pushing the company into the "support and service" bankruptcy anteroom. By their own statements, they are making most of their money and seeing the most "growth" in the "Global Services" and "Support Solutions" branches of the company (nevermind that they nosedived negative 42 percent in net income the latest quarter vs. last year's figures).

Guess what, skippy? Intellectual Property is now the name of the game for Ericsson. A tiny company throwing their lot with the likes of MS, Apple, et al, doesn't come free. Believe that bag of freshly minted 30 shekels of silver came with a very thorough reeducation on the finer points of patents and competitive realities vis a vis all things Linux and free/open source software. The plans were already in place long before they came knocking on the devils' door. Like the dogs they have been reduced to, the Ericcson hound will come hunting for whatever crumbs it can scavenge and trophies it can hold up for its master. Already, the wait to see who the first target they had picked for them has come to an end. Hopefully, world courts will see this latest farce for what it is, e.g., the crackle of the first grasped for branch by a once great company now hurtling over the cliff doomed by an obsolete business model, over-paid workers, a cost of production that the Asian companies laugh at between canine sharpenings, and a pathetic zombie existence seen all too often before. Goodbye Ericsson.

Thanks. However, it *appears* to just be updates, not a full install.

ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/UW21/

A few companies actually bought into the madness, but for the most part, the world collectively rolled its eyes at SCO, meaning that SCO would have to soldier on with their lawsuit-based business strategy, or face the wrath of their shareholders.

Once the Chapter 7 filing is finalized by a judge, SCO will cease to be as a corporate entity, however they are proposing that SCO v. IBM be allowed to continue, not for sheer entertainment value, but rather so that they don't risk the wrath of their shareholders.

(emphasis mine) I don't understand how someone can be such a jerk and we can say "oh, yeah, well, they had to do it because of the shareholders." Yes, I know that shareholders can sue you when you commit a colossal screw up but you can't hand out free passes like this for every thing they do. What would the shareholders have done? Sued him out of his position? Well, at least he'd still have his ethics and dignity intact. The problem is that the people running SCO lacked any fragments of those things from the start! Let me remind you of McBride's open letter in 2003 that remains to this day at SCO's site. It contained such gems as:

Based on the views of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, we believe that adoption and use of the GPL by significant parts of the software industry was a mistake. The positions of the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat against proprietary software are ill-founded and are contrary to our system of copyright and patent laws. We believe that responsible corporations throughout the IT industry have advocated use of the GPL without full analysis of its long-term detriment to our economy. We are confident that these corporations will ultimately reverse support for the GPL, and will pursue a more responsible direction.

And what? Was there a shareholder holding a loaded gun to his head when he penned this letter? No, there wasn't. I mean, looking back this comment is laughable.

And a side rant is that this is a perfect example of why corporations have more rights than citizens. SCO goes Chapter 11 then Chapter 7 and all the assholes that ran the show walk. And they're hired elsewhere and they have very minimal repercussions. What happens when an individual makes bad decisions with their personal finances? They get Chapter 13? They get liens slapped on all their income? Regardless of the chapter, their credit is screwed so they can't buy anything big for 10 years? You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see the names of the people running this show published so we know who ran the show at this company. And I'd like to see bankruptcy laws barring them from assuming any position within a company where they have direct purview or control of any assets worth over $5,000. You know what? I'd bet then they'd be a little more rational, ethical and logical in their decisions just like the general populace is forced to do for fear of bankruptcy.

Seriously, where is the blame going to be placed? Who will learn their lesson here? I'll be damned if I allow you to just pass the buck to "the wrath of the shareholders." That black hole of capitalistic logic has lead to major problems in the governance and upper rankings of American companies.

UnXi's claim that you link to http://www.sco.com/5reasons/#5 is just lies. In the UK, I think the Trading Standards Authority would have something to say. If one thing is now clear, SCO never owned the rights to Unix, never owned unix, still don't own unix.

I like the comment on this page which says "UnXis's award-winning Global Services offer a complete portfolio[...]". Which "Awards" exactly? Buying the remains of SCO probably $600k down-the-drain. I also note on the The OpenGroup's website (the owners of UNIX), that they (TheOpenGroup) own the trademark UNIXWARE. So what do UnXi actually own? A few hundred thousand lines of unmanageable and out of date code? Seriously guys, Unixware and OpenServer are deader than a dead thing with dead dangly bits.

Already happened. They've "transferred all their assets" to Unxis Inc, which according to Groklaw seems to be comprised of many of the same people from SCO Group. Even their website has been hastily and lazily re-branded in a "we barely care if you don't believe us" sort of way:
http://www.sco.com/

For now the same place as before. I'm sure they'll have a new domain and team of lawyers soon.

They are coming back as UnXis, and they are still asserting that Linux is infringing their intellectual property, including the McBride letter:
http://www.sco.com/5reasons/#5

It's a coventure between Stephen Norris Capital Partners and MerchantBridge Group. Stephen Norris' biography includes the former presidency of the Carlyle Group, who tried to invest in SCO in 1998, in a deal netting his group 51% ownership with a court filing that included the statement "provides that the reorganized SCO will pursue the Novell/IBM litigation and other pending litigation claims aggressively,".
http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_8267122

MerchantBridge Group is a very deep wallet:
http://www.mbih.com/
Eric le Blan of MerchantBridge is Chairman at UnXis.

I do not expect this saga is over.

True story: Linux copied its x86 userspace ABI from here:
http://www.sco.com/developers/devspecs/abi386-4.pdf

Now pay your $699 license you cocksmoking teabaggers.

Yes, their assets were bought by UnXis and they're called TSG (The SCO Group) now. Yes, their company is now a nested acronym.

Their website looks like it's from 8-10 years ago, if that's any indication of how well they're doing.

I think their physical presence is still in Utah: Contact Us, but I admit I did very little research and mostly depended on a vague association remembered from years ago ^_^

Many MANY companies are a Delaware corporation, even if they do no business at all in Delaware: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-delaware-corporation.htm

The original poster is right: http://www.sco.com/worldwide/us.html

HTH.

Just once I would like to hear from genuine copyright holders on slashdot who both make a living from their creative works *AND* support un-regulated torrenting and file sharing

Sir or Madam,

I apologize for the length and I know some will feel this is irrelevant, but I feel the background is important to the point.

I am a professional software engineer of 25 years ( AST-Cons @ http://www.sco.com/support/docs/openserver/506/rnotes/ipxrnC.install_configure.html & many other non-published works) and a semi-professional musician of 30 years ( http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=7&ti=1,7&SAB1=Chuck%20Fletcher&BOOL1=all%20of%20these&FLD1=Keyword%20Anywhere%20(GKEY)%20(GKEY)&GRP1=OR%20with%20next%20set&SAB2=&BOOL2=as%20a%20phrase&FLD2=Keyword%20Anywhere%20(GKEY)%20(GKEY)&CNT=25&PID=wKzqQlM4-haqA4MgAO7ElXsllTO36&SEQ=20120206023617&SID=1 , http://www.soundclick.com/ChuckFletcher & http://www.musicpreview.com/ )

I am 100% behind the free sharing of all content and for searching out alternative methods of payment.

The most blatant and egregious circumstance that has helped form my opinions are my own experience with copyrighted works and infringement of said works.

In 2006 my company did extensive work for a law firm. The firm had a service agreement in place (since 1996) with my company, under which they purchased time at an hourly rate & licensed our proprietary technologies for which they paid a monthly fee. They purchased a new server for about $15,000.00 and requested our expertise to configure the new server, and their network of about 80 workstations, in order to replace their current 5 or 6 varied-platform servers with this huge AIX-based server. What they forgot is that $15,000.00 was the price of the server & Informix software. When they received a bill for $65,000.00 for time, they proceeded in typical lawyer fashion to sue my company and myself personally for incompetence and a slew of other trumped charges (which were eventually dismissed) in order to avoid payment. For 10 years we provided outstanding performance and overnight became incompetent?

After installation, my company maintained the 'admin' passwords and continued to provide support for the new configurations. During this time there were a few issues which were resolved and their systems were otherwise working flawlessly with 100% access to their data. After three months of non-payment from them, their workstations began displaying a simple non-repeating license non-compliance message upon reboot. They perpetrated a fraud on the courts and acted like their data was inaccessible due to our maintaining the admin passwords. I could really go on, but the main point that I wanted to make is in regards to the proprietary email/firewall extensions, custom Samba Active-Directory extensions & custom tools which were all protected by the admin passwords and the subsequent handing over of said works. The lawyers proceeded to bring us into court under a mandatory restraining order and the judge compelled my company to turn over the admin passwords and in turn all of our protected works. They then proceeded to give that admin password to one of our competitors, in turn giving that competitor access to all of our protected configuration & administration tools including sources & binaries.

My next move was to hire a copyright attorney in pu

Just like SCO filing chapter 11? ;)

Yes, unfortunately. From SCO's official announcement:

Other companies such as Delta Airlines, Texaco, Dow Corning, K-Mart, United Airlines, Toys R’ Us, Macy’s Department Stores and others have emerged from Chapter 11 protection after restructuring themselves for success. We intend to do the same.

Here, you're supposed to go here to make sure you're legal..

How the hell that is still up is bewildering.

SCO is the owner of the UNIX Operating System Intellectual Property that dates back to 1969, when the UNIX System was created at AT&T's Bell Laboratories. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, SCO has acquired ownership of the copyrights and core technology associated with the UNIX System.

In UNIX-land, no it isn't.

Sorry, but shipping code beats standards based theory, and pretty much every *nix vendor ships dc with the OS.

Oracle (nee Sun) Solaris, IBM AIX, HP HP/UX, SGI IRIX, Apple MacOS X, SCO Openserver, SuSE Enterprise Linux (dc listed on bc page), FreeBSD, OpenBSD ...

You also appear to missed a few things about the Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7 / IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 standard - it is in essence a floor, not a ceiling - vendors can ship more tools if they care to. Also, the discussion on bc notes that some implementations of bc are built on top of dc, and that is OK, as long as the behavior of bc is correct.

It is worth noting that dc was one of the earliest programs to run in Unix, making it in while Unix was still written in assembly language. If for some reason it was to be not only omitted, but actually excluded by the standard, it would still be found in the vast majority of shipping systems for years to come until said vendor decided to migrate their Unix system to the current standard, a process that often takes years.

So yes, for the vast majority of people using Unix, an RPN calculator is often only as far away as a shell prompt.

Truly this is horrible. This will definitely sour the relations between the parties. What with the whole hostage thingie, the desire to wipe Israel off the face of the map, nuclear weaponry ambition. Lawyers everywhere, SUIT UP! Iran is going to court.

I hope this gets settled in record time just like SCO v IBM.

The only court I'm aware of where venue and jurisdiction for Iran to "air their innocent grievance" are just and proper is currently the one I'm sitting on.
Iran is welcome to kiss it.

E

Great! Lookie here, guess who is infringing on this patent?

The breach occurs when he communicates information to people when meeting with them at X. To argue otherwise is ridiculous.

2 Delaware corporations sparring over venue. The case was NOT heard in Delaware, even though both parties (SCO and IBM) are Delaware corporations.

Venue is never automatic when dealing with companies that have operations in more than one state, or where parties are located in different states.

All it requires is for someone with stacks of time and money to take a look at the SCO corporate profile and sue them on the basis that just about everything written on that page is a lie.

I mean, does anyone really think that SCO is a "leading provider of software technology", or that their "highly innovative and reliable solutions help millions of customers grow their businesses everyday". As we have just seen, "SCO owns all rights and ownership of the core UNIX operating system source code" is about as untrue as it is possible to get. As a bonus, such a legal action would certainly conclude faster than the 7 years this has been going on.

http://www.sco.com/products/openserver6/osr6-gnu-utils-PA-FINAL.pdf
GNU Utilities Supplement for SCO OpenServer 6
The GNU Utilities Supplement represents the initial supported release of a selection of key GNU utilities for OpenServer 6. With these key utilities customers will be able to more easily port and develop open source products and customer specific applications for OpenServer 6 using the native C and C++ Development System. It will also allow active participation in open source development projects and deployment of updated releases of those projects based on customer specific schedule requirements

Bring on the sequels: "Modern Warfare: Cease and Desist", "MW: IP Violation" and "MW: Litigious Bastards".

Then again, the learning curve might be too difficult: do you call in a counter-suit or a Supreme Court appeal when your position is about to be overrun by litigators? Maybe make "Serious Sam: Lawyers" instead.

...and they're still trying to sell "SCO Source". http://www.sco.com/scosource/license_program.html
Anyone feel up to cutting them a check?

MagicJack are indeed stubborn pricks.

But take it no further: "Litigious bastards" is still a phrase best reserved for SCO.

MagicJack are indeed stubborn pricks.

But take it no further: "Litigious bastards" is still a phrase best reserved for SCO.

I guess that's only because you're limiting yourself to actual tech decisions, not including tech companies litigating.

(Oh wait. Let's make that "litigation companies litigating." I don't even know why I brought it up.)

The even have a new Small Business Edition with support for up to "1 USERS" and "1 GB" of RAM. Imagine, a billion bytes of memory, all in a single PC!

Now, they just need to get rid of Chris Sontag, who publicly brags that he was the architect behind the attack on Linux in the media. A company I used to work for hired him temporarily for business development. On his first day there, he actually thought he'd earn points from the software engineers by telling us about his attack on Linux. Needless to say, he didn't last very long at our company, where we primarily used Linux as our dev platform.

Is this information about POS backends still valid?

FTA:
"Wal-Mart has thousands of servers nationwide, and any one of them crashing would ordinarily be a routine event."

"Someone had installed L0phtcrack, a password-cracking tool, onto the system, which //crashed the server// when the intruder tried to launch the program." [emph. added]

From http://www.sco.com/company/success/story.html?ID=21 :
"Nearly all of the 350 chains using PDI/RMS are deployed on SCO UNIX® technology [...]"

"McLane Co., Wal-Mart's wholesale subsidiary, acquired PDI in 1991. Fischer says one goal of the acquisition was to achieve tighter integration with some of the 30,000 c-stores that McLane serves. However, PDI continues to operate as a stand-alone entity and many of its customers are served by other wholesalers."

The difference is that qw happens at compile time, and split happens at runtime, so it has efficiency advantages.

That's an implementation issue. A smart implementation of the language would apply what C calls the as if rule to methods of literal values. I don't know whether the Python bytecode compiler already does this.

Now you can't get a lot of their more exciting offerings like Server 2008 Datacenter edition unless you buy SA. Which means if you don't buy SA, you have to buy a separate copy of Server 2008 for each virtual machine you might run. And you can only transfer the license every 30 days, so if your cluster fails over you have to wait a month before you fail back, and run your cluster in non-redundant mode for that month. So the non-SA versions of Server 2008 are crippleware because they can't do HA. Way to sell product by subscription! These reality enhanced individuals have no idea what their competition is doing to their value proposition. And even if you buy into that they only support VMs that run Windows and their Novell Linux lapdog, SUSE SLED. Ubuntu? Redhat? Mandrake? Oracle Unbreakable Linux? BSD? Debian? Never heard of that stuff.

For those who are paying attention, Software Assurance is the incredible deal where you pay Microsoft every year 1/3 the price of their full software stack and in return you get to use the useful upgrades they come out with every twelve years for FREE. Isn't proprietary licensing great? There are other rules too. You wouldn't believe what obscure rules in the license agreement these tards pulled up when they were trying to drive Ernie Ball out of business. What they got instead is that he paid them, deleted their software, and became a Linux fan.

Suing your customers isn't the best way to win friends and influence people.

http://www.sco.com/company/jobs/

They're actually hiring someone! I'm tempted to send in a great resume just to see if anyone responds.

http://www.sco.com/successes/

How true indeed...

What their brief really shows is that there are groups of people who believe that Copyright exists as a copy protection system. For that matter, the same is true of Patents and Trade Marks insofar as they're often used to restrict how people use what they protect. In short, they believe that Copyright exists to make the works protected by copyright proprietary.

This isn't the first time this has happened. In the early days of the SCO/IBM lawsuit (Dec, 2003), Daryl McBride declared that the GPL was unconstitutional because it tries to make intellectual property non-proprietary which is contrary to the purpose of Copyright.

These people sincerely believe the only use for Copyright is a proprietary use. They also lobby governments.

What we need to do, is to assert and evangelize our belief that Copyright is the limited right to choose the terms and conditions under which anyone can copy, redistribute or derive our works. And we should defend our right to choose either proprietary terms, non-proprietary terms or something in between that balances the benefits of both. We should explain the benefits of non-proprietary licensing. We should also not be hypocrites and demand others respect a non-proprietary license, while at the same time, disdaining and circumventing proprietary licenses.

Not really...

You forgot litigious bastards, or is that just the SCOundrels who are litigious bastards?

Silly me. I thought the price was $699.

They must have got a slamming discount for volume.

s/LiveScript/LiveWire/g

Sorry, my memory is a bit rusty on that point. Here's a fun developer's guide to make up for it:

http://docsrv.sco.com/INT_LiveWire/CONTENTS.html

(Can you believe that it's still on SCO's servers? I thought they'd finally divested all of that nasty business of owning assets and whatnot. :-P)

sadly yes:

http://www.sco.com/products/openserver6/

If company expansion (in terms of hiring new employees) is an indicator as to how much a company is worth then sure enough they're not doing too well: http://www.sco.com/jobs/

This isn't the first time they've done IP trolling.

$699 licensing fee you cock smoking teabaggers.

SCO and Mandrakesoft Achieve LSB Certification

"This is an important milestone for SCO," said Darl McBride, president and CEO of The SCO Group. "SCO is very dedicated to the development and promotion of standards. We see standards adherence as central to the growth and progression of the Linux industry, and are committed to again being LSB certified when we release SCO Linux, powered by UnitedLinux, this fall."

The rulings did not discourage them from offering Linux licenses at $699 a pop. Go to their website, click Legal, click Software Licensing Information on the right, click SCO IP Protection Program on the right, and you will end up here: http://sco.com/scosource/license_program.html

SCO http://www.sco.com/

They are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the moment. The next stage is Chapter 7 hopefully when Kimball's ruling comes through. Then the Government through the agency of the Delaware court will terminate them.

Honestly, I wonder why nobody followed the thought train of "Hmm... my life's wasted now anyway. Why not blow up the joint and go out with a bang?"