Slashdot Mirror
SCO Sues IBM for Sharing Secrets with Unix and Linux
bstadil writes "The information is still sparse but the expected lawsuits from SCO over Unix/Linux patent infringements has been filed."
SCO is asking for a billion dollars. News.com and Forbes are also covering the story.
conflict of interest?
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
When they hired Boies, you knew they meant business. But they are sueing someone with very deep pockets. I wonderhow deep SCO's are?
SCO/Caldera sells Linux, this lawsuit is may have a chilling effect on Linux sales...why is SCO shooting itself in the foot?
If they had an idea about things, they would donate said IP to Linux/GNU, and reap many billions of Dollars of good will and karma, and I would go out and buy their distro to support them if that is what they had did.
When companies litigate instead of innovate, you know they are probably not long for this world.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
More like: if you can't beat Linux, and no-one will buy it from you, make sure you destroy the Linux and Unix markets. Better to fuck up everything and hand it all over to Microsoft than to admit you're a worthless company.
"Some claims, though, have more potential merit, Eunice said. One is that creating Unix on Intel processors needed expertise that SCO developed but IBM lacked, Eunice said."
(this was from the news.com article)
If IBM lacked it, which I doubt, I guess we can all be thankful that Linus had the expertise needed to create a Unix on Intel processors. What an idiot.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Good one Caldera.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
MS are happy campers. Mucho "IP hassles when chosing Linux" fodder for the Sales bots and white paper writers. If I was a paranoid, X-Files watching geek I'd wonder how much extra MS paid SCO (Caldera) to pull this crap when they settled thier civil anti-trust lawsuit?
Back in reality I think this is SCO's attempt at getting bought at a premium. Lets face facts, IBM can probably bitch slap them with their own IP, but I bet SCO thinks that buying out SCO is cheaper/easier than the time and effort (not to mention the FUD damage to IBM's linux/AIX biz) IBM would have defending this.
"IBM is affirmatively taking steps to destroy all value of Unix by improperly extracting and using the confidential and proprietary information it acquired from Unix and dumping that information into the open source community," the suit said. "IBM's tortious conduct was also intentionally and maliciously designed to destroy plaintiff's business livelihood and all opportunities of plaintiff to derive value from the Unix software code in the marketplace." - hopefully IBM wins this one and shuts SCO the hell up.
/. with AIX team working on GNU/Linux, does anyone else remember? This is going to be a tough battle, I hope Caldera loses it.
Linux's rapid maturity--for example, growing up to work on large multiprocessor servers--is evidence of the presence of Unix intellectual property, the SCO suit said. "It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code, methods or concepts to achieve such performance, and coordination by a larger developer, such as IBM," the suit said.
- cool. I guess these allegations have only to do with what IBM has been adding to the GNU/Linux code. Will it be possible to prove that there was no contamination, especially if the former AIX team was working on Linux software? I remember, maybe a year and a half ago, there was an interview on
You can't handle the truth.
I totally agree. Every experience I've had with Caldera/SCO products was horrible... granted, it was their Linux products (I know nothing of their Unix).
Caldera's OpenLinux wouldn't install on newer hardware, I can understand that because it's pretty dated. So then I try the new SCO Linux (based on United Linux) and it wouldn't install on the older hardware that I had OpenLinux on.
If they can still afford it after losing this round.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
IBM has tens of thousands of patents. Suing IBM over patent infringement is almost 100% guaranteed to be a terribly bad idea, because IBM will just turn around and recite the litany of IBM patents SCO is infringing. Stupid stupid stupid.
Linux's rapid maturity--for example, growing up to work on large multiprocessor servers--is evidence of the presence of Unix intellectual property, the SCO suit said. "It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code, methods or concepts to achieve such performance, and coordination by a larger developer, such as IBM," the suit said.
First thought that came to mind while reading the article: SCO has seriously underestimated the brain pool of tens of thousands (at least) of open source porgrammers. Unix advanced to where it did technologically because some really smart people knew what they're doing. Isn't it possible that Linux got to where it did because a helluva lot more really smart people knew what they were doing?
Intellectual property lawsuits booming
Intellectual property litigation appears to be on the rise in the high-tech industry and for good reason: The settlements or verdicts are often quite lucrative.
Intergraph, which once made workstations but now specializes in software, got $450 million from Intel in two separate suits in the past year and could receive $150 million more from the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker in an appeal on one of the actions. Intergraph's income from operations in 2002 was $10 million, but net income including legal settlements came to $378 million.
Perhaps I'm not paying attention to the news enough, but didn't it seem like these business-to-business lawsuits started cropping up en masse when the economy tanked? "We can't earn an honest dollar, so let's sue somebody and take theirs."
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Given that project Monterey was about developing a commercial UNIX for Itanium, and given that IBM abandoned SCO and produced AIX5L for Itanium and discontinued it shortly thereafter, I really do not know what SCO's beef is.
Project Monterey had nothing to do with x86. So what if IBM is pushing Linux on x86.
Now if IBM produced its own Linux distribution for Itanium, and SCO saw some of its Monterey source in the distro, SCO might have a claim.
Your second sentence answers the first.
At least some of the claims just don't pass the sniff test.
When AIX came out in 1990 or so, it was so different from SVR4 that competitors cried "AIX isn't UNIX". IBM really did a huge amount of kernel work and had all sorts of administrative features borrowed conceptually from the mainframe that were lacking in UNIX at the time. Journalling filesystems, logical volume management, etc. just for starters. The toolset for managing AIX was (and still is, to some extent) quite different from other UNIXes. I think IBM kept the SVR3/4 APIs but re-wrote
most of the code below it back in the late 80s.
You know you have a weak argument when you start seeing claims like this:
Added Sontag [SCO SVP], "When they (IBM) started utilizing the same engineers that worked on the Unix System V source code and the ultimate derivative of it in the form of AIX, they have
effectively been applying our methods and concepts, even if there isn't a single explicit line of code" that shows up in Linux.
Believe me, there are a lot of methods and concepts that UNIX (System V/VII,SVR4) stole from predecessors, and continues to steal! Where's the suit from the MULTICS guys against AT&T? Citing executive's handwavings generalizations about leveraging UNIX expertise makes for a pretty weak legal case (and PR case imho). Monterey always had too much hand-waving for me to get enthusiastic about.
However, the issue of IBM allegedly re-creating versions of SCO libraries using SCO's actual code sounds interesting. SCO binary compatibility is actually something somewhat valuable that SCO should fully defend if it was unlawfully infringed upon via trade secret leakage rather than cleanroom reverse engineering. Still, if I remember correctly, most of the SCO/Linux binary compatibility stuff was done by some guy at SCO (Avi Tevananian or something like that? I'm butchering his name, sorry.) SCO was working on Linux binary compatibility before IBM even knew Linux existed. So to speak.
As far as infringing on how to run Linux on Intel, clearly Linus managed that without anyone's help. Now running Linux on IA-64, or perhaps some particular acceleration technique used by SCO might be grounds for a decent case depending on the particular evidences involved. I guess we'll see.
With revenues less than Red Hat, and a business model going nowhere, a legal approach makes sense for SCO. IBM can afford the lawsuit and probably route around it better than, say, Intel could route around Clipper chip infringements in existing products. If it lays clearer guidelines for Linux IP, so much the better. I guess that's what I'm hoping for. As a betting man though, I wouldn't bet on SCO for this case. Unless there are more rabbits in that hat.
--LP
SCO doesn't have any assets worth buying. They have SCO UNIX, and i've never met anyone who likes that. They have Caldera Linux, which while I know that had some proponents, has never been anything more than a second-tier or third-tier linux distro.. and as of late they've fallen off the news map. I've never even met anyone who used caldera. They have a public reputation that is downright horrid-- SCO bashing was a fun and not uncommon pasttime *before* this patent nonsense started-- and is now effectively mud. They have... the original UNIX source copyright, and some submarine patents. Okay, cool, but that isn't worth $26 million.
Why buy them out when there's a simpler solution: IBM simply pulls out their massive patent portfolio and massive lawyer box, countersues for infringement and barratry, and demands $26 million in damages. Or maybe not even demand damages, but make sure the lawsuits drag out such as to keep SCO alive long enough to bleed money through lawyer payments and the fact they just alienated all their customers... until SCO goes bankrupt.
This way, the assholes at SCO don't get an ounce of money, as opposed to one hundred million dollars they did nothing to deserve. Instead, they can't get jobs anymore, since who wants to hire the ex-CFO of SCO, the company that failed at everything it tried, even its last-ditch, exit-strategy attempt at being a submarine patent warehouse (which is probably the most boneheadedly easy business to succeed at, so long as you follow the simple strategy of DON'T SUE IBM)?
But perhaps it's just a ploy by the executives to bring about just that outcome: after all, they must hold lots of nearly worthless stock and stock options. If IBM tries to buy them, it drives up the price and gives them a buyer, and they make at least some money.
Ray Noorda (who bought DR-DOS solely to sue Microsoft) needed to find a new business model other than suing Microsoft for IP that his company didn't create. But we cheered him on because he was fighting the good fight against evile Microsoft.
No contradiction here. Just good solid reasoning.
Excerpt from the News.com article:
Linux's rapid maturity--for example, growing up to work on large multiprocessor servers--is evidence of the presence of Unix intellectual property, the SCO suit said. "It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code, methods or concepts to achieve such performance, and coordination by a larger developer, such as IBM," the suit said.
Firstly, it appears as though they are referencing the 2.5 development tree. If this is the case, they do not distribute a development kernel that I am aware of. It is possible that I'm wrong. Second, whatever happened to different means to a similar end? Or rather, "There's more than one way to skin a cat." Could it be that perhaps the IBM developers know what they're doing?
Excerpt from the Bloomberg article:
Caldera's business has been hurt by the free Linux software that IBM has been supporting, Dow Jones said, citing Darl McBride, Caldera's chief executive. Linux is a variant of Unix and isn't copyrighted.
I guess they were fooled by the "Copyleft". Hmm, maybe if they caught on that GNU is Not Unix.
If only a legal leg was all that was needed... the world might actually be a bit better place.
...
Whether it is wheelbarrows full of patents or money to drag it out forever, IBM probably has what it needs to 'win' this case.
HOWEVER, I suppose it may also turn out that IBM looks at it and says, well it doesn't look too good, it's worth $X million to just settle. Then where does that leave SCO? With a 'win' to back their next battle? Only vaguely, as surely IBM won't settle out of court AND admit guilt...
I type this every time.
Nah, I'd rather see SCO get crushed in court. If people find out IBM basically paid-off SCO by buying them out, you'll see all kinds of nutcase lawsuits coming out of the woodwork claiming "patent infringment" by people hoping to get money thrown at them to go away.
The line needs to be drawn.
No contradiction here. Just good solid reasoning.
Way to sarcasically ignore the point. The IP laws are stupid and wrong, in the cases of both Noorda and SCO. Yes, many here cheered Noorda and many here now vilify SCO. Using a stupid, wrong law for a 'good' cause as opposed to a 'bad' one doesn't make it any more or less stupid or wrong.
But then again, I suspect that IH just BT, and IH probably L.
You know they call 'em fingers but I've never seen 'em fing. Oh, there they go.
Suing Red Hat may have been the one way to get Slashdot geeks off their ass and actually physically protesting somewhere. A giant PR disaster is not a good way to cash out on a dying company. Suing a megacorp in hopes of winning a modest settlement is. A company like IBM has money, but suing them for 1 billion is really throwing down the gauntlet. They could've settled for a couple of million, but IBM will make an example of Caldera for this insolence.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
My feeling is that this is an MS-inspired shot over the bows to scare VCs and IT chiefs away from Linux. In one case it really doesn;t matter whether SCO/Caldera wins or loses, it just hast to leave a suspicion in these people's minds.
This mean's that not only must IBM win, but they should win 'loudly', i.e., so those people who may be worried about Linux realise that they shouldn't be.
I feel sorry for the poor Troll Tech folks, they have had enough pain from yours truly, and they fixed all of the problems I was complaining about, in good faith. Maybe they can fix this one too.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I wouldn't do that just yet. Qt is under GPL. If Canopy/Trolltech starts blackmailing the community, THEN move to Gnome. Right now, Trolltech has been more than nice towards Open Source community.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
It doesn't even matter anymore whether or not they actually have a valid claim... asking for one billion dollars just makes you a money whore and shows just how greedy and desperate for money you are. If nothing else, they've lost my support because of all of this. I honestly think they are overstepping their bounds with this one. One billion dollars....
But this is a fraud, "intellectual property" is not a free market property right.
You might have had a point in the day when the cost of manufacturing a product vastly outweighed the cost of designing it. In the beginning, car designs were very simple, but it didn't matter, because no-one without vast amounts of capital could afford to build a factory, so the design was safe.
Nowadays, the cost of designing a product - be it a piece of software or a new drug - vastly outweights the cost of manufacturing it. Software in particular can be duplicated very cheaply. Therefore we need a structure that makes it possible to obtain a return on investment - and note that I said "possible" not "certain" - in development of a new product. That's what the patent system was designed to do.
But there is an attitude among free software people that can be summarized as "I freely choose to make no money from my software work, therefore everyone else must be denied the right to make money from software". That's the thinking behind the GPL. It might work from the ivory tower of a MacArthur Foundation grant at MIT, but it isn't viable in the real world.
Remember, IBM makes it's money on hardware. It doesn't care about Linux on ideological grounds, it merely wants to cut the cost of shipping hardware.
Sun can play both sides of the street. Since they paid some ungodly sum to buy full rights to Unix SVR4, they're out of SCO's reach. Even if SCO gets its way (which I doubt, but assume it for the sake of argument), Sun's Linux offering would be unaffected by SCO's suit (but see next paragraph). I know who I'd bet on in a matchup between Sun and SCO...
Of course, SCO's claims are completely incompatible with the GPL, so if they win, Linux would be stopped dead in its tracks until it can be somehow be made "untainted" by SCO's IP. And that's the real danger here. BSD was stopped dead in its tracks by a similar legal situation in the early 1990's; it almost certainly would have been stronger competition against commercial Unixes if that hadn't happened. SCO might even be attempting to duplicate this, and slow Linux down under a legal cloud for a few years even if they ultimately fail in court.
Of course, I hope IBM hits them like a load of bricks (and I expect they will). But don't expect it to blow over very quickly.
They're suing over breaches of NDA and License to Unix code that SCO claims IBM had with them. Patented stuff- in the Linux kernel (Otherwise why would they be harping about SMP systems?).
And, they have the unmitigated GALL to say that Linux systems purchased from them have no issues because they have the license bundled in with their distribution licenses. That is a GPL violation, pure and simple. Either there ISN'T a patent issue or there is- if there is, then the patented stuff has to go bye-bye or have a GPL compatible license. SCO's not claiming to have licensed the alleged tech that way in their press releases.
No, this is SCO commiting corporate suicide in the most public, painful way possible. Picking an IP fight with IBM is not one of the wiser things to do- and to set the stakes so that IBM HAS to do something about it rather than settle simply and easily is downright insane. IBM is all about IP and is pretty much anal about IP handling- with theirs and their partners'. If they don't countersue with their own infringement suit (thus getting the whole mess dropped- SCO can't afford a legal battle on two fronts...) they'll prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's nothing to SCO's claims. And that's just the lawsuit part of this whole mess- the bad blood they just earned with the community just torpedoed themselves, UnitedLinux, and anyone that associates themselves too closely with SCO.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I haven't yet read all 300+ comments here, but so far I haven't seen *any* supporting SCO. Do any of you really know what's going on here? It is quite possible that IBM did rip them off. If SCO shared proprietary code with IBM under contractual restrictions, and IBM went ahead and violated those restrictions by putting that code in other products, then IBM is in the wrong. It doesn't even matter if the code is covered by patents or not, all that matters is what the two companies agreed to on paper.
I for one hope that whoever is truly at fault gets nailed, be it IBM or SCO. I believe that agreements should be honored. That's something that corporate America cares little about, especially if a buck can be made by ignoring an agreement. If IBM truly blew off a legitimate agreement, then they should fry. If IBM really believes SCO has no rightful claim to the intellectual property in question, then they should not have signed an agreement with SCO. It could well be that SCO is lying/embellishing/hallucinating, but maybe they're not.
On an aside, back in the 80's and early 90's, I worked on a port of SCO Unix to a proprietary platform. What people have been saying here about SCO's "quality" is true. Their OS was crap. I can't count how many bugs in the kernel we had to fix. We even had to completely rearchitect whole subsystems. When we were done with it, it was fairly passable, but it took man years. The most appalling thing about their code was the third party SMP implementation they bought from some other company. It was truly horrendous. I believe it did improve over the years as the product matured, but obviously not enough to keep them alive.
SCO was a popular platform for Unix on Intel. It was a private company, microsoft had a 20% shareholding, but it wasn't quoted on the stockmarket. It had been like that for years.
Suddenly (about 1995): they announced that they wanted to float on the stock market, all sorts of reasons given but one side effect was that it meant that the major shareholders (the directors) would be able to 'cash in' on their shareholding by selling to Joe Shareholder. Quite unfortunately for the new share holders, Linux started to bite into SCO profits soon after float and it never really recovered.
I have no doubt that the SCO directors had no idea that this ''new phenomenon called Linux'' would have any effect on the SCO sales & thus share price; they were only involved in that sector of the market and so would never have heard of Linux, and even if they had they would not have been able to predict the future effect on the SCO share price; it is quite coincidental that they sold their shares to the general public just before the value started to crumble.
In the begining cars designs were not very simple, but their construction was fairly crude, and venture capitalists were coming out of the woodwork to pour money into "the next big thing," and thus literally hundreds of car manufacturers sprang up virtually overnight and IP wars ravaged the land and stunted development for years because whatever one of these hundreds of manufacturers made the other could duplicate in matter of days.
You are falling into the false premise that the way things are today is the way things were back then, when cars weren't made in factories but by a few skilled men in barns. Kind of like Apple was in the early days.
For the most part things take millions to develop and thousands of man hours these days not because it actually takes that, but because the men and dollars are available, so they get spent. If these men and dollars were *not* available pretty much the same work would get done. The main difference is that it would get done faster and cheaper by a few skilled men instead of the hundreds of mediocre ones, and the attendent layer upon layer of middle managment sucking out most of the dollars of any project.
Eli Whitney's cotton gin was "stolen" and in production by copycat companies before Eli had even gotten it out of the demo phase.
Eli never patented anything again in his life, believing that some ideas were simply "to valuable to be owned."
He was right.
KFG
sPh
If most (or all) software were Free, then redundant development would occur more rarely, and only when the programmer thought he could do a better job, not just an equivalent one.
Do you work with many programmers? All of them think they can do a better job, and all of them will try to reinvent the wheel from scratch on every project, if you let them. I remember we once left a programmer alone for too long, he invented a whole new language to script his bit of the application! Now he could have embedded TCL (which is what TCL was designed for), he could have exposed a COM interface and used VBA, he could've reused something else, but he didn't.
No, it's not a conflict of interest. Holding corporations often hold companies that have diverse businesses, even ones that butt heads. Furthermore, the individual companies are usually given pretty free reign to do as they wish, as long as they're putting up enough profits to satisfy corporate.
Probably the best example is Sony Corp - which owns both Sony Electronics and Sony Music. At the same time Sony Music are asking for stronger protections in consumer electronics due to alleged piracy, Sony Electronics is fighting against any additional protection measures due to increased cost and reduced consumer satisfaction.
As Mr. Perens states, if IBM takes this really personally and decides to cut business with the holding corp as a whole then they just drop the contract with TT. And encourage their partners to do the same. Which is a whole lot of partners.
The whole concept behind gpl and open source development, is people volunteer and collaborate, costing not much more than their time. This type of development *is* the future of not just software development, but a future on how productive forces will work in other areas. Kiss markets and IP laws down the trash, this world will not be ruled by a bunch of money grubbing control freaks!
Yeah, Stalin thought so too - the collectivization of Soviet farms actually resulted in mass starvation. Same thing happened to Mao in China, and again in North Korea and it's happening right now in Zimbabwe.
Remember, everyone who writes open source has got to eat, live somewhere, pay bills, etc. How many open source developers support themselves wholly through open source? 1%? Less? I'm not counting the IBM types who are really in the business of selling hardware.
Let's see how many "volunteers" you get to work in the fields so some geeks can sit in air conditioned offices all day. Let's see if you can get your groceries for free because you wrote a device driver in the web server back in the company's head office. Let's see if you can hack code on your landlord's PC instead of paying the rent.
Open source works because it's funded by people's day jobs. If those day jobs don't pay, Open source will simply disappear.
The slavery part was not overboard if you got the point. It wasn't a comparison of the morality between the two, it was a raw example of a period of time where something that seems so obviously flawed was still perpetuated. Any arguments for avoiding or changing the practice sadly end up only being accepted in hindsight for the majority of people.
Anything I say about IP being bad doesn't go over well with business people, especially the attorneys I work for, but after the 'revolution' comes and the world is freed from the oppresive groups in society... sure, thatll happn... it will be a perfectly acceptable view for anyone to take, just like modern day views on salvery.
People are used to certain ways and won't think twice about it unless they are forced to. Laziness, that's the American way.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Open source works because it fixes something that somone thinks needs fixing.
There are many companies that hire OSS developers these days. To start with you have the distros then you have several embedded companies. Intel and AMD both have staff dedicated to open source.
Apache was and still is developed by people who needed a better webserver do do their job.
That %1 may be accurate but only because of the huge number of minor projects people do because they feel like it. The only project I either work on or monitor where I'm not outnumbered by developers payed to work on the software is Acidblood and that's only because it's a hobby project with no buisness use whatsoever.
The problem now is that people are claiming property to the very IDEAS being used to create particular products. Amazon's One-Click Patent is a wonderful example of this.
Now, Amazon could very easily protect and license their overall software package that is used to support their one-click check out. They could sell as many shrink wrapped licenses as they want and use Copyright to protect their "IP" from misappropriation.
The problem is when they try to claim ownership to the very idea that they're implementing. Especially when it's not a terribly innovative one. Now it doesn't matter how you implement the idea, you have to go to Amazon for a license.
You then go on to horribly mischaracterize the GPL. The GPL is not "no one is going to make any money off of software" the GPL is about creating a strong commons that everyone can build off of. Being able to get Apache and Tomcat for free doesn't mean that you can't make money building e-commerce sites for people. It just means that you have access to high quality tools for very reasonable rates. In addition you can even improve those tools and thus return them back for the other programmers to use in even better condition.
Finally, IBM makes its money on SERVICE, not hardware. Sure it doesn't fully embrace all of the principles of the GPL, but they don't embrace all of the principles of proprietary software either. They embrace the principles of "let's get the customer's job done."
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
So far everyone seems to have posted that this suit is a bad business move on sco's part or that it will destroy their ability to sell unix.
They don't care. They aren't in the business of selling software.
SCO is owned by Caldera. Caldera bought Dr. Dos from Novell so it could carry on the law suit against Microsoft. Caldera reportedly settled the suit for north of a billion dollars.
Next thing you know Caldera buys sco,renames itself sco, makes a couple of half hearted attempts to revive the product and then goes back to suing.
Caldera/SCO is not in the software business its in the lawsuit business. You can be very sure there will be more of the same from these people.
Crash
Linux also unifies pretty much all of IBM's hardware. It demonstrates much of what Java promised... write once, (compile and) run on any hardware platform.
So a small shop can develop a web commerce site on a $500 Linux machine and cleanly scale it up to an AS/400 without redeveloping.
TCO is a bizzare figure in this arena, the costs of the services are better compared to the cost of downtime and the track record at stuff like reliability, failover, disaster recovery etc.
Maybe when you're dead, the prospect of being buried doesn't look so bad.
-- this is not a
Do you work with many programmers?
Yes.
All of them think they can do a better job,
Untrue. That statement works as a punchline for a comic strip, nothing more.
Sure, everyone occasionally feels he could do a better job than the implementer of some library he's using. The more "Freedom" he has to see and modify that library, the greater the chance that he'll either learn he was mistaken, or incrementally improve that library, rather than rebuilding it entirely.
if you let them.
That is a more specific problem- management that is insufficiently engaged, or insufficiently informed.
Back when that guy was proposing his idea, his boss should've made him explain why it was better than each of those alternatives.
However, had he been forced to justify the cost of a reinvention, his case would've been doubly strengthened because of the prevalence of proprietary software:
A) "We can't use those things, they are owned." Whether or not that's true in a particular case, people make those assumptions, and think less about reuse than the might. Even the TCL webpage doesn't explain that it's free to use on the first 2 layers of links.
B) "We shouldn't use those things, because then we wouldn't own our changes." "Hey boss, a proprietary scripting language, all our own- won't that be an asset for the corporation?". Many organizations put too much weight on the value of restricting their code. (And even if that is beneficial for those corporations, it might not be the best for the world at large)
Look, Canopy Group is an investor in several technology companies. One of those companies is out of control, and should be penalized. However, going after ANYONE that has an investor in common with SCO is out of control.
Trolltech is a privately held company, but they likely took this investment prior to SCO's decision.
As a previous poster mentioned, Canopy owns 5.8% of Trolltech. You're going to attack the other 94.2% of Trolltech shareholders because of an unrelated business's actions happens to have as an investor someone that owns 5.8% of their company?
I have a lot of respect for you as one of the leading intellectuals in this movement. However, as a small business owner, I'm terrified of what you are saying.
My company has small holdings in several of our clients. They OFTEN take courses of actions that I don't like. If you were to attack another of my clients because of what one of them did, because I was a shareholder in both? I don't think that you are being at ALL fair.
If you believe that the Canopy Group is behind this behavior, than I would suggest an announcement that ANY privately held company that takes investment capital from them (from this point, not retroactively), will be shunned. However, Trolltech did NOTHING wrong, other than take an investment from a company whose other investment did something that you don't like.
I have a third party with an ownership stake in my company. The relationship had been rocky, but quite frankly, I couldn't afford to buy them out, even if they were willing to sell. If you organized a boycott of me because of something they did, I'd be floored.
Unless you are prepared to coordinate the fundraising to buy the Canopy Group out of Trolltech (and any other company that you are prepared to boycott in your crusade against this venture capital firm), back off. You're being extremely unfair to Trolltech, who has done nothing but provide amazing software to their commercial clients (of which we are one, albeit for only one developer) and FREE software to the open source community.
Your imagination about Canopy attacking GNOME is fascinating, but they are a MINORITY shareholder. They cannot cooerce Trolltech management. Deal with Trolltech based upon Trolltech's actions, not the actions of a third party.
Imagine if you were being held personally accountable for the actions of a second cousin through marriage? I don't imagine you'd like that. Same for Trolltech and SCO.
Alex
You settle out of court
The settlement includes cross-licensing of both companies' IP
Because IBM is providing far more cross-licensed IP than you can, You end up paying royalties to THEM!
Nonsense. Trolltech has bent over backwards to comply with the wishes of the open source community. Not only have they done an excellent job of doing so, but we have all benifitted tremendously as a result of their coding efforts.
Let's not practice guilt by association.
Isn't The Canopy Group a venture capital firm, and aren't the companies that you list companies that have received investments from Canopy? It may be tempting to lash out at these companies, but these companies probably have nothing to do with the SCO-IBM lawsuit, and in some cases (such as TrollTech) the linux community at large benefits for the contributions of these companies. To try to punish them would be like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Uhh, the LGPL gives more freedom then the GPL.
The LGPL allows linking of commercial, closed
source applications, where you cannot do that
with the GPL. Read before you post.
They all have names for it, it doesn't mean that they necessarily act as management. Any angel/venture investor will take a board seat to advice the company. Depending on the ownership, they may hold multiple seats or other way to manipulate the situation.
I'm not disputing the Canopy is pulling the strings here, but I wouldn't be certain. SCO Managment is responsible. I can't figure out how to cut through their BS and figure out how much Canopy holds... Remember, SCO is a public company, anyone can buy shares of SCO...
I really can't tell how much Canopy owns of SCO. My guess is that they funded Caldera, and would likely have had between 20% and 50% of Caldera, and diluted down with the merger. However, they are likely the largest (or one of the largest) shareholders.
I would suggest that before you attack companies that took capital from Canopy Group before it became "blood money" (which we still don't know, who knows who pulled the trigger).
I think that Canopy may or may not be involved, but we should find out what happens before we open fire one anyone that took their investment. I think that with your stature, you should come out and take a stand in defense of Trolltech, given that their are idiots in the thread that saw a few mentions and are screaming and yelling about Trolltech.
Otherwise, you're going to hurt a LOT of innocent bystanders by this mistaken belief that companies can simply buy out investors because they don't like the actions of other companies.
Alex
A privately held company, if their corporate council had an ounce of brains in preparing the legal agreements that allowed them to sell equity, does have the option to demand the return of shares at a fair market value if the holder of those shares is taking actions the company believes is not in its own best interests. To do otherwise is the insane action - just as they had the choice of deciding who those shareholders were in the first place.
Canopy is taking an action that irritates, and if they are legally successful, will damange the ability for Linux to advance. Every company that is involved with Linux in any fashion needs to recognize this and assess the impact to themselves. Those companies that are involved with Canopy in some fashion are the ones that will be especially sensitive to any damage this suit may do, as their other shareholders realize that this suit poisions the well their customers visit. NO CUSTOMERS MEANS NO COMPANY.
Don't believe me - talk to your corporate counsel.
The free market cares nothing for the best product at the best price. That may be the end result, but just because it *causes* something does not mean it *promotes* it.
If you let someone use your land, you are losing USE of that land for that purpose. In the example of letting someone walk on it that use is very minor since you are only losing the ablity to occupy the same space that that person is currently in (but let's use renting as an example). If you rent your property, you are giving up some of your use of that property. The laws of physics enforce that, if nothing else. If I tell you one of my ideas, I do not lose the ability to use that idea in any way. If I wish to enforce restrictions on your use of my idea, some sort of regulation is required, it does not happen automatically.
But look at IP from a profit point of view. With a few favorable laws on my side, I may make money off of one of my ideas FOREVER without any additional investment, risk or loss of use on my part. No other means of making money works like this. I'm not saying it's not justified, but it is entirely different from the nature of everything else, and acting like it's just like everything else is a huge mistake.