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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.
Yeah, and I am asking SCO for a unix that actually runs reliably, but it ain't gonna happen, buddy.
No, really. SCO should worry less about suing over linux and unix and secrets, and more about putting out a product that doesn't suck so badly.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
When they hired Boies, you knew they meant business. But they are sueing someone with very deep pockets. I wonderhow deep SCO's are?
Clearly I was a fucking retard. They're fucking evil. Ban them. Send them emails which politely, yet firmly state that they smell like a llama's anus. Sick the Channel 7 ProblemSolvers on them.
Seriously, there's just no excuse. As a nation, we must rise up against this evil, and destroy it once and for all.
today sco also announced they are moving their centre of operations to a hollowed out volcano, and branching out to the lucrative area of 'fricken sharks with fricken laser beams on their fricken heads'
*pinky finger to mouth*
"It's a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company," said Jonathan Eunice, an Illuminata analyst. "Really what beat SCO is not any problem with what IBM did; it's what the market decided. This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can't get by winning in the marketplace." - Best and most accurate quote on SCO/Caldera ever imo.
Seriously tho, IBM says nothing for linux to fear but FUD itself (literally). Caldera/SCO dropped every single ball they've EVER been thrown, so much so that every thread ever started or ended here is basically a litanny of their mistakes. Sun makes UNIX, they're still alive, IBM still makes AIX, they're certainly alive, poor SCO is dead in the water so they sue.
My guess is the next thing they'll do is sell all their IP to microsoft, and microsoft will use it as a giant club against other vendors. So it's in our best interests to see them stay afloat, otherwise some other patent-abusing, money hungry group of corporate bastards with more money will have all of their "intellectual property" and will actually have the cash to use it. IBM has the cash to hold things up in court long enough to A> Have the costs of the settlement (if ever reached) be deferred by inflation and B> Have the underlying patents they're being sued for actually expire.
Plus, IBM is the former evil empire, they have no qualms whatsoever using their vast horde of defensive patents to counter sue someone into the ground.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
IBM probably has more technology patents than any other company on Earth (and possibly other planets, too early to tell). I'm willing to bet they can find hundreds of violations in SCO's product lines and bury them.
Either way though, you just know this is going to become a bullet point on Microsoft's next Linux FUD page ("see, use linux and you can get sued).
Finkployd
my immediate question is, Ford runs linux? on what?
and second question is, isn't SCO like... Caldera?
aaaanyway; I guess linux is taking away the marked share of UNIX boxes a lot more than it's headway into the desktop (windows) arena. fighting the wrong crowd, I'd say...
maybe microsoft will file a suit that says "we want damages because linux makes our business model un-profitable."
My life in the land of the rising sun.
If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em. What a wonderful philosophy.
Yeah, Amazon is planning to file suit against SCO for violating its patent covering the process of suing someone for patent violations.
Of course, just as I post my story submission to slashdot on this, no sooner than I reload the page after submitting it when the story appears from someone else. Doh!
Seriously, though, I think I'll repeat a comment that I made in my story submission. Does anyone else think that SCO has bitten off more than they can chew? I knew that they were going to make a move, but I thought for sure they were going to pick an "easy" target, like some small Linux distributor. About as big a company as I suspected they would hit was Red Hat.
Suing IBM was a huge mistake. Or more accurately: suing IBM first was a big mistake. They should have done what other companies have, which is take on the little fish in the pond hoping some will roll over and pony up the dough, before attempting to harpoon the whale.
Not that I'm unhappy about this turn of events, mind you. IBM, which has had more experience in dealing with IP rights and patents in the little finger of one of their lawyers than SCO has in their entire company, will pound them into the dirt. The sound you are now hearing is that of the death dirge for SCO.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Can IBM take over (buy) SCO, effectively cutting this lawsuit off?
"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.
SCO has a market cap of $25.68 Million. IBM could buy them for $100Million and save %90. Or RedHat maybe.
Actually, someone with a clue should buy them now before, ummm, someone with an interest in seeing Free Software set significantly back figures out that the UNIX IP is pretty much a sitting duck...
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
"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.
From News.com:
p 82597b.HTM)
- "creating Unix on Intel processors needed expertise that SCO developed but IBM lacked"
- "It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code"
Apparently they didn't notice that IBM owns Sequent, which has been shipping 32-processor Intel boxes since the mid-90s... (e.g. http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/s
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.
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
I haven't read the filings yet, but it sounds as if SCO's main claim is that IBM (and perhaps others) violated their non-disclosure agreements by allowing employees who had seen the Unix source code to work on Linux. However, Linux was developed first on the Intel i386 processor family, way back in 1991, at least five years before IBM took an interest in it. Linux follows MINIX, an even earlier published-source-code system that very clearly isn't derived from Unix - its architecture was very different.
SCO claims that Linux could not have become ready for the enterprise so quickly without use of art originating in Unix. They seem to ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have been educated in operating systems programming, and that very healthy communities of scientific research exist for systems design, and that most of the enterprise-ready features originated in research operating systems and only later were ported to Unix.
They claim that the Linux libraries could not have been produced without input from Unix. But these libraries are written to a printed specification called POSIX, published by the U.S. government and available to the general public. The GNU C library, and many other Linux libraries, existed long before IBM's involvement. We also had printed "man pages" for Unix available in bookstores without restrictions on implementation of the documented facilities, and shelves of published documentation on Unix in every technical bookstore.
So, I think the claims I've heard are specious, and not enforcible in court. Why, then, is SCO doing this? They want to be purchased. This is the exit strategy for their investors, Canopy Group. IBM can buy them just to shut them up. Or Microsoft can buy them to use them to FUD Linux. And Canopy Group management figures they'll play the two against each other to drive up the price. But IBM management is smart enough to poison this particular well, by bringing counter-claims against SCO.
SCO is also party to the GPL, which invalidates their patent portfolio for any of their patents that happen to have been used in a Linux system that they distributed. Under the GPL terms, if you distribute your patented practice in GPL software, you must grant a license to everyone to make use of that patent in any GPL software, for any field of use. This is why SCO's initial claim seems to be focusing on an NDA rather than patents. And of course, the fundamental patents that apply to Unix would have expired some 15 years ago.
SCO can't claim that IBM (or anyone else) was hiding the Linux development from them, since Linux source is available and is part of SCO's own Linux product. They have been distributing the source code that they claim violates their own NDA as Caldera's main product for years. So, they are going to have a very small chance of making this case work.
We in the Free Software developer community must make it clear that we will not tolerate specious intellectual property claims on our software, even if those claims are directed to a user or industrial partner rather than an individual developer. The obvious first step that would occurr to any of us would be to shun SCO - not to do business with them, not to recommend them in our jobs, etc. SCO must have known that they'd be shunned for these shenanigans, and they went ahead with them anyway. This means they're writing off their entire software and operating systems business. SCO is owned by Canopy Group, I guess those folks are writing off their other software businesses, too.
I look forward to getting a look at the court papers, and being a witness for the defense or amicus curae in these cases. I'm sure I'll be joined by a lot of you. In addition, we may have our own infringement claims to make, if the SCO filing violates the GPL terms. I doubt there will be much left of SCO at the end of this.
These folks could have been good partners. Other people in industry were, and beat Caldera and SCO in the market. Canopy Group, their venture firm, were the real managers of SCO and Caldera. Front-men like Ransom Love were not the ones making real decisions. Their business failed, and others flourished, because Canopy Group never understood how to be our partners. They've chosen to screw us one last time on the way out the door. Let's do our best to turn it back on them.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Dear IBM,
Please spend the $US25.68 million it would require to buy out SCO, and then fire every single member of their management and legal department.
Thank you,
A Linux user.
with thanks to whoever posted this script, and with great annoyance at whoever decided that Slashdot posts with low average line lengths are a bad thing, and so need to be offset by pointless filler like this to bring up the average -- apologies while I pad this just a little more, and please feel free to disregard this last paragraph so that the average line count goes above, apparently, 30. Two things you can apparently never include in this news for nerds sites: program code (you can talk about open source, but you can't share it here!) and, apparently, movie scripts. Go figure.... Anyway, this should be enough padding, pretend this whole last paragraph is wrapped in a <!-- sorry --> block :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
(kind of ontopic) In addition to the groups organized to freely redistribute systems built around the Networking Release 2 tape, a company, Berkeley Software Design, Incorporated (BSDI), was formed to develop and distribute a commercially supported version of the code. (More information about BSDI can be found at http://www.bsdi.com.) Like the other groups, they started by adding the six missing files that Bill Jolitz had written for his 386/BSD release. BSDI began selling their system including both source and binaries in January 1992 for $995. They began running advertisements touting their 99% discount over the price charged for System V source plus binary systems. Interested readers were told to call 1-800-ITS-Unix. Shortly after BSDI began their sales campaign, they received a letter from Unix System Laboratories (USL) (a mostly-owned subsidiary of AT&T spun off to develop and sell Unix). The letter demanded that they stop promoting their product as Unix and in particular that they stop using the deceptive phone number. Although the phone number was promptly dropped and the advertisements changed to explain that the product was not Unix, USL was still unhappy and filed suit to enjoin BSDI from selling their product. The suit alleged that the BSDI product contained proprietary USL code and trade secrets. USL sought to get an injunction to halt BSDI's sales until the lawsuit was resolved, claiming that they would suffer irreparable harm from the loss of their trade secrets if the BSDI distributions continued. At the preliminary hearing for the injunction, BSDI contended that they were simply using the sources being freely distributed by the University of California plus six additional files. They were willing to discuss the content of any of the six added files, but did not believe that they should be held responsible for the files being distributed by the University of California. The judge agreed with BSDI's argument and told USL that they would have to restate their complaint based solely on the six files or he would dismiss it. Recognizing that they would have a hard time making a case from just the six files, USL decided to refile the suit against both BSDI and the University of California. As before, USL requested an injunction on the shipping of Networking Release 2 from the University and on the BSDI products. With the impending injunction hearing just a few short weeks away, preparation began in earnest. All the members of the CSRG were deposed as were nearly everyone employed at BSDI. Briefs, counter-briefs, and counter-counter-briefs flew back and forth between the lawyers. Keith Bostic and I personally had to write several hundred pages of material that found its way into various briefs. In December 1992, Dickinson R. Debevoise, a United States District Judge in New Jersey, heard the arguments for the injunction. Although judges usually rule on injunction requests immediately, he decided to take it under advisement. On a Friday about six weeks later, he issued a forty-page opinion in which he denied the injunction and threw out all but two of the complaints. The remaining two complaints were narrowed to recent copyrights and the possibility of the loss of trade secrets. He also suggested that the matter should be heard in a state court system before being heard in the federal court system. The University of California took the hint and rushed into California state court the following Monday morning with a counter-suit against USL. By filing first in California, the University had established the locale of any further state court action. Constitutional law requires all state filing to be done in a single state to prevent a litigant with deep pockets from bleeding an opponent dry by filing fifty cases against them in every state. The result was that if USL wanted to take any action against the University in state courts, they would be forced to do so in California rather than in their home state of New Jersey. The University's suit claimed that USL had failed in their obligation to provide due credit to the University for the use of BSD code in System V as required by the license that they had signed with the University. If the claim were found to be valid, the University asked that USL be forced to reprint all their documentation with the appropriate due credit added, to notify all their licensees of their oversight, and to run full-page advertisements in major publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine notifying the business world of their inadvertent oversight. Soon after the filing in state court, USL was bought from AT&T by Novell. The CEO of Novell, Ray Noorda, stated publicly that he would rather compete in the marketplace than in court. By the summer of 1993, settlement talks had started. Unfortunately, the two sides had dug in so deep that the talks proceed slowly. With some further prodding by Ray Noorda on the USL side, many of the sticking points were removed and a settlement was finally reached in January 1994. The result was that three files were removed from the 18,000 that made up Networking Release 2, and a number of minor changes were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add USL copyrights to about 70 files, although those files continued to be freely redistributed. 4.4BSD The newly blessed release was called 4.4BSD-Lite and was released in June 1994 under terms identical to those used for the Networking releases. Specifically, the terms allow free redistribution in source and binary form subject only to the constraint that the University copyrights remain intact and that the University receive credit when others use the code. Simultaneously, the complete system was released as 4.4BSD-Encumbered, which still required recipients to have a USL source license. The lawsuit settlement also stipulated that USL would not sue any organization using 4.4BSD-Lite as the base for their system. So, all the BSD groups that were doing releases at that time, BSDI, NetBSD, and FreeBSD, had to restart their code base with the 4.4BSD-Lite sources into which they then merged their enhancements and improvements. While this reintegration caused a short-term delay in the development of the various BSD systems, it was a blessing in disguise since it forced all the divergent groups to resynchronize with the three years of development that had occurred at the CSRG since the release of Networking Release 2.
My first thougth was "what idiot suit at SCO thinks they can make a case for AIX being SYSV-derived?"
The logic(sic) they are asserting seems to be: AIX is based on SYSV that SCO acquired from AT&T, and that IBM's moved those ideas into Linux.
Nice fantasy. AIX is based on the Mach microkernel from CMU, which in turn is BSD-derived. Even at that it is very much re-implemented, using such intersting magic as an O-O system configuration database, and the first widely available journalling filesystem for a *nix.
People think of AIX as being SYSV because it implements a SYSV *interface*. IBM is all about standards and AIX achieved System-V (and later versions) standard compliance *and* BSD compliance wherever that did not conflict.
So no, SCO hasn't got a leg to stand on on this aspect. I wish them luck they are toing to need it.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
We used SCO's Unix in 1990 or so to teach Unix students for a while, but after noticing that we'd had to plug in GNU software for almost everything to make it work, we finally switched to SunOS, and later to Linux. But that's not the interesting part. What is, is that Iremember the SCO's original Unix booting with the horrifying sight of Microsoft's copyrights on the Unix flavor underneath.
:-)
You might say, "What? Microsoft did Unix in the 80s? No! That's insane!".
Apparently Microsoft had been working on Unix in some respect for a while, until Bill had decided it had no future (or perhaps, just not a proprietary enough one), and (or so I infer) sold it or licensed it to the Santa Cruz Operation.
This would make for much irony if SCO won their little suit, but then Microsoft bought them to try to reassert control over what Bill once thought was irrelevant, and now clearly -is- the future.
The comments in the suit about IBMs AIX and its claimed collision with the Unix patents is pretty funny, since apparently one of the miseries of doing AIX design was going before a little review board that would judge the odds of your perfectly good code intersecting known non-IBM patents, and then making you break it until it didn't - or so goes one unfortunate's tale.
All of this is, of course, hearsay, so if you were there, just tell us what really happened, yes?
...oh, wait, we already are. Nevermind.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Did they get their Buzzword Bingo set in the bargain bin? Those descriptions are just pathetic. Then again, wasn't Ray Noorda the guy who ran Novell into the ground?
sulli
RTFJ.
No doubt this will be modded flamebait but I have to speak my mind on this one--
Caldera/SCO is one of those companies which I have absolutely no good will towards. Sure, someone had to sue Microsoft over the antocompetitive actions against DR DOS, but Caldera didn't even really pretend that the product was a real addition to their product line. They only bought it to sue Microsoft and after they settled, they sold it to Lineo.
Then they bought SCO and became the SCO Group. BTW, this was after they were sued by their shareholders for inflating profits before Enron broke.
Since they dislike the GPL, and can't find a good way to pretend that Linux is proprietary, their business model seems to be:
1: Buy dying products
2: Sue other companies
3: Win or settle
4: Profit
5; Sell dying product line to other companies
6: Profit again
If they were ethical, I would support them.... but I can find no ethics, or any other virtues....
Lets hope this is dismissed soon..
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
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.
Okay, so it didn't say all of that. But it could have.
SIGFEH
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
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
WHO IS RAY NOORDA? I'll tell you...
.COM run-up to the peak of January/February of 2000.
Ray Noorda was the primary driving force behind the initial success of Novell. Novell was founded in 1979 as NDSI - Novell Data Systems, Inc.. It had a Motorola 68000 based network server box for MP/M and CP/M client machines, and sold everything as a high priced package.
In 1983, the VC forced a reincoporation as just "Novell", and forced Ray Noorda on the founders as "adult supervision" (the VC in question was Safeguard Scientifics).
Ray Noorda changed the business model, and the product line, targeting the newly created IBM PC as both server and client hardware.
Ray Noorda was almost singularly responsible for the success of Novell.
Ray Noorda personally intervened, after the purchase of USL, to get the USL/UCB lawsuit settled. I spent a lot of time talking to him and Mike DeFazio, then VP of the UNIX Systems Group, a legacy executive from AT&T who came with the USL purchase.
Ray Noorda encouraged an executive to move on, after he issued a statement that he didn't like, when that executive stated that Novell/USG was "de-emphasizing UNIX on the desktop". I asked "If not UnixWare, what _Novell_ Operating System will computer users be running on their desktops?" His answer was "None. They will run Windows.". Ray Noorda stormed from the room.
Ray Noorda was to Novell what Thomas Watson was to IBM. He was its strong leader, who forged a stunningly successful company from ashes and raw clay.
Novell was incredibly successful under Noorda. It's stock split 4 times from 1987 to 1992, reaching a high of almost $60 a share before the last split. The closest it's come to that after Noorda was almost $50, in the
The one really big mistake he made was the purchase of Word Perfect; he did it because he believed that Microsoft was the enemy, and he needed to match product lines against them.
The mistake was in letting the Word Perfect founders know how he valued companies, when they were looking for an exit strategy after the incredible mistake of trying to turn technical support into a profit center. To maximize their "valuation", which Noorda based on PPE - Profit Per Employee - they threw all people not essential to the operation of their base business overboard. All the R&D people working on pen computing, all the human factors and other people who were working on ensuring the product was competitive with Microsoft Word, all of the people who worked on the VMS and UNIX versions of the product. How do you raise PPE? Increase "P" or reduce the number of "E"'s. And that's what they did.
What about funding Caldera? Caldera was funded by Canopy, a VC group answerable to The Noorda Family Trust, *AFTER* Noorda left Novell, *AFTER* Caldera was a going concern, *AFTER* some of the Novell/USG engineers, so fed up with the NIH of the USL side of things, started a "skunk works" project using Linux, and Mike DeFazio, VP of Novell/USG, and dyed-in-the-wool USL, got it shut down because it risked cannibalizing the UnixWare market. Rather than let the idea die, they left Novell and formed Caldera, funded out of the pockets of the two founders: Brian Sparks, to my knowledge, sold 50 acres of family land to fund it. Noorda came in after that, with additional funding from the NFT's Canopy venture fund.
Ray Noorda would not have approved of the cancellation of the Linux project inside Novell (while it was in house, we jokingly called it "LinuxWare").
Ray Noorda had a philosophy which Novell pays lip service to today, but which they no longer really follow: coopetition.
Coopetition is a word coined by Noorda as a combination of "cooperation" and "competition". It was realized in Novell by having 2 or 3 groups working on solving the same problem, and then letting the one that produced the best solution "win", and taking that product to market.
Having a "LinuxWare" project compete with UnixWare, and may the best product win, was the *very essence* of coopetition. Ray Noorda would have approved of it greatly.
When Noorda left as president, remaining on the Board, Novell ran on for a time on inertia, with an "office of the president". But the three people who were chosen for this task lacked sufficient vision, and couldn't carry off the duties of that office in keeping with the same philosophy and corporate culture. They were bean counters, which isn't bad in itself, but they didn't know the heart and soul of Novell.
Blame Caldera, if you must; I don't think that's exactly fair: they started with a good vision, and they got an incredibly bad rap when they initially didn't release source code for some things that they *couldn't* release source code on, because they were licensed from third parties. Yeah, this stuck to them, but I believe it stuck unfairly. I don't believe the people I knew who started the company would do this.
Blame SCO, if you must; I don't think that's exactly fair, either: my first job out of college was developing and porting communications software to around 140 different UNIX platforms, DOS, Windows, Mac, VMS, CP/M, etc., etc., and by far, SCO was always easy to work with, both as an OS, and as a company, and as people. I've had a number of very long talks with Doug Michaels, over the years; some one-on-one, some with one or two people, like Esther Dyson, present, and I hold him in *very* high regard. I don't believe the people I know at SCO would do this.
Blame USL, if you must: personally, that's my chief suspect. But SCO also has Microsoft investment, Microsoft code in their OS, and Microsoft board members. There are plenty of real villains to go around, and plenty of pseudo-villains who are likely just fighting for their jobs and their investments of money, time, and self.
But don't blame Ray Noorda.
PS: Novell, if you are reading this, you can have your soul back any time you want; it was never sold, only pawned.
PPS: IBM, if you are reading this, realize that, unrelated to this case, your soul is sitting on the pawn shop shelf next to Novell's; you can reclaim it any time you want, too, by internalizing your customer-facing philosophy.
-- Terry