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Sun Rethinking Linux Strategy Over SCO Lawsuit
manyoso writes "Sun is waisting no time taking advantage of the SCO lawsuit against IBM. They are making statements trying to play up Solaris as a safe harbor for worried Linux and IBM users. John Loiacono, VP of Sun's operating platforms group, "For people looking at the issues at hand, we are a safe harbor. We have absolute rights to our technology ... We're changing our strategy around Linux (but) we're pausing because we're trying to figure out what the implications of this are going to be". So, this begs the questions... What are the short term implications for the new Linux based desktop we've been hearing about from our fair weather friends? How will the SCO lawsuit affect Sun's long term strategy with Linux and Open Source?"
They'll be bought out by IBM or Oracle within a year.
Wasting. With one 'i'.
...so I can say this: SCO are absolute motherfuckers.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
I always kind of wondered where SCO/Caldera fit in. I wonder if that settlement for OpenDOS was really just a buy-off to make Caldera microsoft's lap dog.
It would seem that SCO's current actions are very much helpful to microsoft in the end.
Just a thought...
This lawsuit doesn't mean a thing in the long term. Either SCO will end up (finally) dead or as a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. They figured out that selling something available for free didn't work, and now they're about to discover that trying to gouge former customers for license fees doesn't work either. And it's about time.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
they could be WASTING time.
would be interesting to see them caressing the waist of SCO or IBM though..
First SCO turns its back on Linux. Now, Sun. We're watching the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Sun had no future before the lawsuit. They have no future now.
SCO will achieve nothing. Actually, this lawsuit will backfire them big time. Sun Micro., which being a little troll here, will come back to Linux once SCO gets its nose bloodied. Speaking of Sun, I don't really see where its heading. I've heard that they'll be introducing blade-based (a la Cisco 6509, but withs server gear not switch gear) chassis soon with a load-balancer and stuff. Will Sun be a next SGI ? Hope not...
When their stock rises 40% on a worthless lawsuit. You just gotta ask yourself, what the hell value did they have before, when worthless adds 40% to them?
It's like David and Goliath - sure, David beat Goliath... once. Who's taking bets that SCO won't be the one killing the giant that is IBM?
Sun had better not gloat too much - they may as well be the next ones on SCO's list of people to sue for making something remotely resembling UNIX.
-Erwos
They have their own Solaris flavour of Unix that they worked so hard on. I don't think anyone's taking this SCO lawsuit that seriously. So I guess perhaps they are taking the chance to downplay Linux and beef up the image of their proprietry Unix.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
I found this in the alt.folklore.computers news group.
Zoid.com
Maybe Irix, AIX and Solaris may end up using the BSD corebase instead of UNIX to avoid futures trials too.
What happens between SCO and IBM is not really important. This will slow down Linux for sure, and I suspect that's what SCO wanted.
This is just FUD... plain and simple.
"PROFANITY is the inevitable literary crutch of the inarticulate MOTHER FUCKER." -- some PC user
Sun paid Novell $82M a few years ago for a license to the SVR4 code base, which I assume means a royalty free license (who pay 82 million for the right to pay royalties after all). So Sun may genuinely be in the clear on this point.
The suit has no merit anyway though, so the point may be rather academic.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
SCO suddenly finds itself high and dry and needs something to shoot at Linux but, with the United Linux uinitiative their diecision is like striking an axe on their own foot or is it a scheme to push united linux way back we used to use sco unix in college i remember. I dont understand is it purely a copyright infringement case or some hidden agenda behind. Sun's once dominant Solaris platform is running thin and thus I guess they do yet dont do yet dont want to enter the Linux bandwagon fully strange but with all HP IBM United Linux I dont know . . . Solaris can not revive itself stiop concentrating on OSs Sun and focus on faster VMs.
But IBM has major cash now and can flex its muscles through this ; Big Blue is hitting back against SCO's charges that it misappropriated Unix trade secrets and used them in Linux.
SCO must have it in their list of patents, presumably they've also mentioned which patent is being infringed in their lawsuit, isn't that publicly available information?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
From the article ...
"I would expect they will bring out the A-team of lawyers and aggressively defend themselves against this and potentially assert their own intellectual property."
And if that doesn't work, we'll sic Alf and Friends on them.
"There's a fear that SCO is using this as a means of either selling the company or desperately attempting to find some other business model as an alternative to their current software business," Weiss said. "I would advise SCO (Unix) users that they should have a contingency plan or migration plan to an alternate platform."
Ya think?
I would assume that any organization that hadn't already received that message years ago must have some pretty intense clue-shielding in place.
Sun wishes it was Microsoft. McNealy probably dresses up in Bill Gates clothes when he's at home.
.. they are wrong this will have a big impact.
This plain sucks. Sun is selling us out without even owning us.
Don't underestimate the gravity of this move by Sun. This is a MAJOR blow to linux, because Sun holds large clout with big companies who worry about Linux's stability and support issues.
Further, most people think this SCO thing will have no effect on Linux's adoption
Something to think about as we're doing nothing.
From Sun: We're changing our strategy around Linux (but) we're pausing because we're trying to figure out what the implications of this are going to be.
From where I stand, the implication of you pausing is that you're embarassing yourself worse than SCO. I'd never buy a product from a company scared that SCO will somehow take IBM for $1Billion, or somehow stop Linux development.
At least we can understand that the lawsuit is SCO gasping its dying breath. Sun just looks stupid.
I had heard Sun was going to make blade servers alright; I just pulled one from my back!
but i won't be buying them in the future. if they're happy to burn one bridge, how do i know they won't burn a bridge that is critical to my company?
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Sun's big contribution to Linux is OpenOffice. Their efforts on Linux proper have been pretty limited anyway.
Honestly, though, I don't think will effect their Linux strategy either. It's just a short-term marketing/PR stunt.
Despite what they say, I really doubt that Sun thinks they can keep people on Solaris long-term. They're just not that dumb. More likely they're trying to keep customers from defecting for a few years while they work on improving the upper layers of their environment (Java, SunONE). Then they can switch the bottom layer to Linux but keep some proprietary advantages.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
"We bought our Unix license out....We are unencumbered for all things," including Sun's version of Linux, he said.
How is does that quote imply they're a fair-weather friend?
Based on what I've seen Sun do in the past, I expect them to start a subtle FUD campaign against linux. They probably won't do it overtly out of fear that it may backfire.
It is intersting to note that they mention that Sun Linux is covered by their licensing portfolio. So does this mean that Sun will have the only Linux that can implement the high-end features demanded by many customers?
It's is a contraction of it is moron.
Solaris is exposed to the saem lawsuit potential as IBM from SCO..
Read the lawsuit SCO is suing due solely to their deisre to be bought out by IBM and claims that IBM's marketing in LInux sphere breask agreements they had with SCO cncerning AIX..
If SUN made any cliam fo trasnfer of ideas from Solaris to their Linux distro then SCO would also be suing SUn as well..
I am beginning to wonder here if the actual story posters on thsi site actually read something before they post..or is just a knee jerk reaction that commercial media has trained you on?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
SCO (Caldera) has a market cap of $25M. IBM bought Rational for $2B. Linux is more core to IBM than Rational's tools business. So expect IBM to pay 2X SCO's market cap to end this discussion, then harden Linux and rip Sun apart.
Hmm, I wonder if anyone here can detect the cycle here:
Sun/SGI/HP/IBM all make big, expensive, customized Un*x-based platforms, that are huge cash-cows for a long time and get people to buy in on the promise of "open standards" while all the while working to "differentiate" their platform enough to keep customers from switching.
Meanwhile, IBM hedged it's bets on a low-end platform cooked up in Boca Raton with a crappy OS and a ridiculous licensing deal with some kid out of Seattle.
Ten years later, the gloss is starting to fade on the Un*x side (mostly due to lack of innovation broughht about by lack of real standards and a serious lack of competition) while the PC side is about to get into the fast track with 32-bit CPUs and a REAL OS co-written by IBM and the slimeballs from upstate Washington.
On the other side of the planet, a smart young CS student is whipping up a bit of the ole black magic, and with a little help from some GNU friends, will soon unleash the original Unix concept back onto the masses (Portability - what portability? This is UNIX my boy!).
Another ten years pass, the PC is ruling the roost once M$ screwed IBM, and the big Un*x guys are all searching high and low for a raison d'etre. The smart ones (read: IBM?!?) figure out that the kid from Finland was really on to something, and they'll never have to pay Redmond a damn cent for it, so they go whole hog. Those that keep fighting, start to die the slow death of ignorant luddites (can you say SGI boys and girls -- I knew you could! Gee, I wonder where 3Dfx and nVidia got all those engineers from!)
Ok, so who's still left out of our wrap up? SCO, who's failed attempt to corner the market on Un*x on Intel (haha, Open Server my A$$!)? Looks like tricky lawyering is truly the last bastion of the dying corporation (right up there with sneaky accounting tricks 101 on the VC Top 10 list).
What about poor Sun, who went from knowing the network was the computer before there even was a network, to being the dot in some dumbass VC plan, to being a wishy-washy half-way cover-our-asses supporter of all thing not-M$. Geez, the enemy of my enemy and all that, but Larry E? Come on guys. And now this? Forget the purple PC, and forget the Slowlaris "better TCO and long term stability" crap and contribute what you have to the one true Open movement - Open Source! IF Sun spent 1/4 of the $$$ they have on FUDding Slowlaris vs. Linux on porting theyr fantastic sh*t to Linux, they could be a real force to be reckoned with (hello IBM? Wannt do the enemry-of-my thing?).
All I know is they all better watch out, because once the Chinese start mass-producing cluster machines made with Godson-2's onto 1U racks running Linux, the game's up for those who would be king!
Just my $0.02...YMMV
-- People who think they know it all, really annoy those of us who do!
"So, this begs the questions..."
No it doesn't. Like many people today you believe that "begs the question" means "leads to the following question." It doesn't. To beg the question is to assume facts not yet proved.
The classic example of begging the question is the question, "When did you stop beating your wife?"
This begs the question, "Did the guy ever beat his wife?" Begging the question always refers to an unasked prior question, not a logically subsequent question.
Yours for clearer communications,
Windowpain
Insert witty sig here.
This just goes to show you- it's not about commercial viability - it's about the freedom. Conditional support is worse than useless.
They're a business, like most. Of course Sun is going to try to capitalize on this, I would, so would/has the Linux community.
When it's in Suns' interest to support Linux again they will (if they're still around).
Unix infighting has already cost the entire industry money. Every time one Unix vendor goes after another Unix vendor, Microsoft makes the argument that with Windows you don't have to put up with Unix vendors going after each other. This happened in 1992, and it is happening again now.
Sun should have focused more on hardware, and SCO should have focused more on overall solutions. Linux can help them both more than it can hurt them. If anything, having a Sun certified Linux distribution would help Sun AND Linux and would have hurt Windows.
As it stands, M$ is going to laugh all the way to the bank, again.
This is my sig.
Solaris is dead on the low end. Sun knows it, their customers know it. The only place where Solaris still has a spark of life is in medium-to-large servers, say 6800-to-E15000 level, and even then the lower end of that is being pounded into sand by IBM.
Sun has to realize that it can't hold back the tide, but it seems that they've this weird King Canute obsession that forces them to keep on whuppin' that corpse, long after the horse has taken the Big Ride into the Sky (to mix a few metaphors).
Please Read This to see what YOU Americans owe France for their help in YOUR war of independence.
My favourite piece?
Remember this, the next time you take the pledge of allegiance - If it wasn't for the French you'd all be singing 'God save the Queen'.
Toodle pip
I don't think I'm very happy. I always fall asleep to the sound of my own screams.
Speaking of Davids, SCO has hired David Boies to prosecute their case. Nice choice. Lost the DOJ case against Microsoft. Lost the Gore case for the White House. At this rate, he is going to be the Dan Marino of law - a great, but never could win the big one.
There's a lawsuit going on with potentially large implications for Linux, but it's not clear at this stage - Sun say they're looking at the implications. How exactly does this make Sun 'fair weather friends'.
Have they dropped their Linux strategy, Linux blades, stoppped supporting the various Open Source projects, dropped their 100% Unix background and started selling NT boxes like Unix' other 'fair weather friends'? Thought not...
So, this begs the questions...
/. get's miffed when the media use "Hackers" to mean "Crackers". Well, same thing here.
/. grammar
You know how
"Begging the Question" does not mean "Begs us to ask the question." It means you are making a conclusion based on information that is in still in question.
--
-2 Pendantic -3 Correcting
The headline quotes "has a impact on Sun's shifting linux strategies". Since it doesn't give a lot of context it's a bit hard to know exactly what is ment by that. What happened is that days before it was anounced that Sun is considering striking up partnerships with mainstream Linux sellers such as Red Hat and SuSE (dated march 6). However a day later (march 7), the news breaks that The suit could affect SCO's relationship with Linux seller SuSE, whose version of Linux is the foundation of the UnitedLinux products SCO uses. Plus ofcource the posible implications for Linux patent violations at large such as forinstance the ELF binary format (SCO claims its a derivative of COFF), and other area's of linux..
Thus sun is in the mess that they decided to investigate how and if they should dive into the linux pool, but the day that news breaks, the pilar of their company (Unix servers, OS, etc) and the company they licence rights to use this from gets into a fight with linux and their bigest threat in the large-server-space.
It's gotta be shitty to be Sun to be in that position, they can't really afford to alianate either camp (openoffice, gnome2 and mozilla are contributed to or owned by them and linux seems to be a way to go for the future) but their current income comes largely from selling & maintaining large servers and they can not afford to give out the slightest impression that that market could be in any trouble, because customers buy them for the 'five nines' dream (99.999% availability)
To deep in either way to get out.. they'll have to do a switcherland if you ask me
Of course, if it wasn't for us and the Brits (and others) during World War II, France would be Germany South right now. I think that we are at least even.
"I think that when you become a Republican, you don't get to score any more." -- Butt-head
Thanks for reminding me. Now I remember the last time the french were a major player in world politics.
The Germans are coming....the Germans are coming...lets give them Paris and maybe they will be nice.
If SCO has a valid claim and IBM does indeed buy them they'll be in a stronger position to do all the things people in the linux community are worried about doing with linux. IBM is developing even stronger ties with Microsoft. Microsoft seems to be able to use it's partners now to buy off and kill competing technology instead of doing it directly. I wonder if that is what they are hoping IBM will do.
Sun needs to talk up it's OS. It's a good platform, it's been around for a long time and is in heavy use in mission critical applications. Unfortunately some of Sun's alliances are turning on them and Sun has it's own big mouth to deal with.
It's a shame. All this bickering among the big guys winds up hurting the end users in the long run.
We keep hearing everyone talking about open standards but then they add too many proprietary features, or try to destroy the competition so they are the only option.
While Sun get's a lot of flack for holding on to Java so closely, they are doing a pretty good job of keeping it "pure" while still allowing people to extend it.
Solaris is a great operating system for certain applications. It is more mature than linux and is better supported. That doesn't mean linux doesn't have it's place and won't grow.
When people were deploying NT they thought it would be cheaper. Now organizations are scrambling to consolidate they're server farms since they had to have every major application on it's own box (as recommended by MS). Now after a few years they determind it's ok to put more than one application on a box if you're running win2k. In the meantime people have spent billions of dollars for a cheaper solution. Talk about false economy. Now watch for a lot of IT organizations slimming down (as they already have been) and a lot of Windows Server admins getting the boot.
You can run on a single Sun box what you are running on a dozen windows servers. And now with the AMD and Intel 64 chips crawling into the marketspace sun hardware might become cheaper.
My biggest problem is the division (annimosity) between Unix vendors and Linux. Linux is nowhere near the status of traditional Unix OS's. It's usable in many cases and the transition between the two is fairly seemless as there are a lot of similarites. People say Linux is like unix but I'd argue it's currently more a light unix. Any arguing between these sectors is counterproductive to both. They really should be working together and it seems Sun (at least some people) are making an effort to embrace linux for some entry level devices.
Sun and Linux both want to take away (reclaim in Sun's case) market share from Microsoft. It would be great if they could work together, even though linux is cutting into Sun a bit.
Sun is trying to do it all, which is part of it's problem. I wonder if they spun of javasoft completely if it would be better for them or if being merged is the only thing keeping them alive. IBM wants to kill Sun's hardware business as Sun's unix servers have always been beeting IBM and are even cutting into some of their high end servers. IBM though has a lot of investment in Java that can't just go away in any short time.
The whole thing is like one bad soap opera except there are no hot, half naked women being paraded as eye candy along with the headlines.
Caldera bought SCO, renamed to SCO then sued IBM. If you think back a few years, you'll remember Caldera buying the rights to DR-DOS and suing Microsoft - but that time everybody cheered.
I guess you can say what goes around, comes around.
Why all of the anti-SUN attitude?
/etc. Probably the only way I could feel good with it on the server was if we developed our own internal-dist. Maybe I'll go back to my old Slackware 1.0. ,a simple intialization procedure, a sane disk layout, and exellent support that doesn't require me to run
Sun has also done quite a bit more than OpenOffice.
Try : NIS,NIS+,RPC,NFS, & Java,just for starters.
I could see it if it were Microsoft, what has MickeySoft ever done for us steal the code and tell everyone it was crap until brought into NT.
As for keeping people on Solaris. I don't think that will be hard. Linux is awesome for the desktop but I won't put it on another server again until the kernel VM is fixed and the directory structure and boot procedure is made somewhat sane. There are too many versions of Linux out there each comes with 5-9 CDs and none of them are laid out on the disk in a nice easy sensible manner. Granted the code is good, the code is there but it is a product obviously developed with little communication between the other developers. A simple example on RedHat 8.0 here I have 627 directories under
Give me a Linux with a mature kernel ( pre-emptive, multi-threaded etc... )
up2date -u on a test box on an almost daily basis before moving it into production. Then SUN/Solaris will need to get worried.
I know it pains you folks to hear the truth, but SCO is going to win their lawsuit. The patents are clear and Linux is in violation. Linux is about to become illegal "warez". The only place you'll be able to get it will be "warez" sites or pay for a license to use Linux from SCO which will probably cost more than you can afford to pay. With all of the primary usages of Linux (DVD piracy, hacking, DoS attacks, HDTV piracy, DMCA violations, etc) it's no suprise that the source code to Linux is illegal as well. Expect it to be outlawed soon and the developers of Linux to go to prison
So, this begs the questions... What are the short term implications for the new Linux based desktop we've been hearing about from our fair weather friends?
KDE
Actually it doesn't really beg those questions at all. It might lead you to ask them though. Begging the question is more like "beggaring the question" in that it makes an unspoken assumption that really should be challenged.
simon
home page
Wow, that's news to me. It seems like Sun is playing with Linux like Microsoft is playing with open standards. It's all lip service IMHO.
This is SCO's last deep breath before the long sleep. Sun and Microsoft will also learn that you must move or get out of the way when a disruptive market mover is coming. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Read the article. CNET points out the Sun's strategy around Linux has been changing, Sun made no such comment.
Any vendor wanting to buisiness in and around Linux better take a long hard look at this lawsuit. Which is exactly what the Sun rep said.
Don't put words into someone's mouth and then react.
I would say that "our" friends and enemies will be made known by their reaction to the specious suit SCO has filed against IBM. Someone is making a list, right?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
You know, it's all well and good that the phrase "begging the question" has traditionally meant what you say, but if you look at it as a normal sentence and NOT as an expression, it's components could be used perfectly well to mean "leads to the following question" as well. If anything, the definition you label incorrect makes MORE sense; you just call it wrong due to a tradition that never should have been started in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, there are two measures of validity in language: logical consistency with the rest of language, and the number of people that conform to a usage (this one can suck if a lot of people don't conform to a sensible usage, e.g. "could care less"). But in any case, using "begging the question" to mean either of the discussed definitions seems perfectly valid to me both ways. Wow, that felt like a pointless message. :)
Read the damn articles... Sun isn't stabbing any one in the back.
SUN is free to develop it's Sun Linux without any fear of lawsuits. A Linux like Sun Linux or IBM Linux would make it easier to bring linux into the corporate arena.
The open source community should really embrace Sun more, which is hard based on some of the things they say. But Sun has been working with open standards for a long time. Even it's CPU's are based on open standards.
I'd be more weary of IBM.
Someone else suggests that it is based on trade secrets, but it is difficult to imagine how code can be widely licensed for the creation of derivative products and still remain a trade secret. Even if the licenses have language about requirements to maintain the trade secrets, SCO would have to prove that it was IBM who actually let the cat out of the bag. This is particularly weak since AT&T routinely allowed for academic access to the UNIX source (very openly before the break up, and after that as well). I may still have a copy of the version 7 sources that was published (i.e. printed form). There was restrictive language relating to actually controlling the distributed copies, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to get access this way.
Well, I'm looking at this as a good thing.
If SCO actually had a leg to stand on, I'd feel differently. But since this is a cross-court buzzer throw at the basket, I'm not too worried.
Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
NO WHERE in the article did they say they were stopping Linux support.
The original poster of this article makes it sound like Sun's just going to drop everything now that the lawsuit is happening to other folks, and THAT IS NOT WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS.
So many people are shooting from the hip, proclaiming the death of SCO, Sun, et al. Some consideration should be given to the consequences for Linux if this suit is successful.
I guess I am going to have to Rethink Sun. I purchased over 60 workstations from them in the last year. I have to purchase another 20 soon. Maybe I might just go with IBMs.
I didn't use the preview button, so get over it!!!!
Mike
manyoso writes "Sun is waisting no time...
Dude, a waist is what you strap your pants around, and worry about it growing larger. The word "waste" or "wasting" means to expend carelessly or thoughtlessly. This is what you're doing to the english language.
Even if this was manyoso's error, that is why there are editors that edit the published content before they are published.
Perhaps /. can take up a collection to send Taco back to grammar school.
- passion
If this was the old IBM, I would think that this 'attack' from SCO might actually be orchestrated by IBM. They would fight it for a while, and in the process spread a considerable amount of FUD, then buy SCO -- at which point they would own the corporate Linux market. The old saying was that you never got fired by buying IBM -- if there was a taint on other corporate Linux systems you might push people to buy IBM.
I do think that IBM has changed their spots to a large extent, though, and I'd be surprised if this was the actual strategy.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Things just can't get any better for IBM as far as it public images, can it?
With the $1b it spent on Linux a few years ago, it got the view of the great savior of linux and the rebel with a cause.
Now look at this suite and what half the linux community is seeing, its now the great defender and the motherly figure.
Thought it couldnt top itself before. Got to love IBM.
forget it.
So what did my fellow Slashdoters expect? We all know it is Sun that is feeling the effects of Linux taking off.
It's been reported time and time again that it is Unix venders that feel the effect of losing sales to Linux rather than Microsoft. Microsoft does lose some sales to Linux, but not as much as Sun, HP, or IBM.
Sun would like Linux to go away so they can retake the low end and mid level markets, where Linux dominates.
Linux O Muerte!
I have always gotten a kick out of brand names and trademarks which don't translate so well ... always wondered how many British jokes went out on Sun being the full stop in dot com...
Infuriate left and right
I don't think this neccesarily has to be some sort of MSFT scheme.
If it is, Gates, Ballmer, and their entire legal department are far more incompetent than I had thought. Consider the following:
1: Microsoft licensed UNIX back in the day and produced Xenix. They then sold this to Santa Clara Operations (SCO). I would be *highly* surprised if *none* of the original Xenix engineers are still at Microsoft. So this suit could affect them too. And Caldera/SCO has a history of sueing Microsoft.
2: This whole thing is extremely bad for Shared Source. It may be bad for Open Source if it wins, but it would be far far worse for shared source.
Great business model, isn't it? You don't need to make a profit selling anything, just sue those who do.
Have you actually talked to the Caldera sales reps? They are either clueless about the licensing of RedHat or SuSE.
The business model of SCO seems to be based on an idea that since proprietary software is the most common way of developing corporate software today, that Linux should be put into that box. They think that customers need support and don't need the flexibility that open source offers.
In this view the GPL is bad, and Randsom Love's comments to this effect make sense. But it ignores the reason *why* open source is gaining in many markets-- becuase if I run a network, I can roll out a pilot database server using Linux and PostgreSQL with no licensing overhead. Sure, I will have to get approval for the hardware, but that is it (assuming the improbable, that the management understands the licensing). It is the flexibility that this sort fo thing offers a company that is important. If I want I can deploy now, test now, and then get support when I am ready to make it official.
So Caldera is not happy with the GPL, is not focused (as I think RedHat and SuSE are) on helping companies *use* linux. They are instead trying to sell it like NT.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
And embraced BSD had BSD reached a IP agreement with the UNIX IP owners. Guess the lawyers weren't making the decisions.
Instead Sun and others are rushing to 'sell Linux' - a $0 price point proposition, cutting each others throat to get to $0.
Its the UNIX(tm) wars of the late 1980's all over again.
Richard Stallman's desire to see $0 software is comming true.
I don't think SCO has a chance:
1 - First, IBM has too many patents to counter-sue SCO.
2 - Second, I think most the stuff that IBM has been bringing to Linux, like their journaling file-system and LVM is very recent software, that was develloped by IBM staff and not derived from the ancient Sys-V.
3 - Even if we have to remove the parts developed by IBM from the current Linux kernels, we would still have sevaral alternative implementations.
4 - Evern if SCO has patents that cover some parts of the Linux kernel, they (SCO) have also been distributing Linux under the GPL. Consequently, they have offered permition for everybody use it.
5 - SCO can also be sued for using the Linux trademark: remember Linus owns the Linux trademark.
Finally, this shouldn't be a major concern to the open source community, becvause even if we couldn't use the Linux kernel, we could allways move to HURD or a BSD kernel.
For most aplications, users wouldn't see almost any change.
BSD has already had a batle in court and won.
In the end, we will be stronger than now.
Whatever. Sun is so schizophrenic it's amusing.
"Sell Solaris Computers" "Let's sell Intel computers running Linux." "Wait, uh, let's sell both" "Buy StarOffice" "Open Source StarOffice" "Uhh Whoops. Let's close source StarOffice again" "Whoa! This nanotechnology freaks me out. Maybe we should stop innovating altogether" "Java this. Java that. Java is great!" "Let's sue Microsoft and force them to include the latest Java on their desktop" "Strange, we don't seem to be using Java very often, I wonder if Microsft was on to something" "Whoa. SCO's suing everyone. Maybe we shouldn't be involved in Linux, after all."
Conceptual patents are doled out daily.
And licensed trade secrets are the stuff of lawsuits every day too. Really.
...that we actually /.'d the all-powerful google?
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Doubtful, but funny to think about.
SUN is a multi-million dollar company with a crack-team of lawyers and strategists. Even if you were a lawyer there'd be a slim chance you'd be in an area of expertise that would be relevant to what you are commenting on so how can you just sum up their supposed liability when you do not have access to the history/details of Sun/SCO's licensing agreements?
I assure you that SUN's lawyers were consulted before the FUD statement was made. Also, any company can find themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit so that part of your statement is correct but your reasoning for why SUN may find themselves targetted by SCO is uninformed at best.
I believe Sun's taking a cheap shot for now. It's called Defensive Marketing or spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) into the market. The writing on the wall, Linux is here to stay and Sun needs to learn to play in a new world of cheaper servers.
I've attached an amusing email I recently got, titled "What is Marketing"
You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, "I'm fantastic in bed."
That's Direct Marketing.
You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says, "He's fantastic in bed."
That's Advertising.
You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and get her telephone number. The next day you call and say, "Hi, I'm fantastic in bed."
That's Telemarketing.
You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink. You open the door for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her a ride, and then say, "By the way, I'm fantastic in bed."
That's Public Relations.
You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says, "I hear you're fantastic in bed."
That's Brand Recognition.
Some additional marketing knowledge from the brilliant minds at Kellogg...
From: Swapneel J. Ekbote
You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says, "I would like to see how fantastic you are in bed."
That's Purchase Intention.
You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl. You say to her, "The guy you just met is dud and by the way, I'm fantastic in bed."
That's Defensive Marketing.
You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, "I'm fantastic in bed. But I'm also good on any other household furniture."
That's the Fighting Brand Strategy.
Although I don't believe that this will really damage the Linux movement, it certainly warrants each of us, as Linux supporters, carefully analyzing what this is all about, and just what it is we are working for.
I've played around with computers long enough to have been a part of the garage days of the early 80's, where the introduction of the personal computer turned everything everyone thought about computers upside down. The heart of computers before that time, the stuff you would have seen written up in national newspapers and in Wired magazine, as we did ad nauseum during the heady and ridiculous 90's bubble, was room sized mainframes sold at truly absurd prices from IBM. It was universally agreed that only the most wealthy corporations and governments could afford to use computers, and the technology remained safely ensconsed in the top 1%. Then a couple of idiots built one out of wood in their garage. I'll spare the historical details from here becuase the point is that the PC revolution put complex information tools in the hands of everyday people. This is what it took for computers as we know them now to come into being. This turned IBM from a 20's style all encompassing megacorp to an important but surpassed purveyor of technology as they are today. This was a shocking, powerful, important change that we need to keep in mind in todays age of mistaking computer science for what takes place in posh Silicon Valley campuses among people wearing Armani suits. Computers went for nearly 20 years in an environment of very big money with very professional researchers, programmers, and engineers working on them without becoming a revolution. Certainly, almost all of the important technology that makes up computers today, TCP/IP, the GUI, C, etc., were developed in the top 1% environment that I described, but when the day is over and the history is being written, what you know is irrelevant. History is a record of our actions. And history does not care how long the Chinese used magnetic compasses to build according the the laws of feng shui. Compasses began to matter when people starting using them to navigate ships. Similarly, computers started to matter when you and I started using them.
This history continued through the implementation of the Internet among those personal computers, the open source movement, and now through what I believe will be the next step in this new information revolution, which is the development and use of advanced peer to peer networks which will make information sharing completely uncontrollable. None of thse things, especially the last two, were envisioned, pioneered, or wanted by people like Microsoft, IBM, or Sun. I know we see IBM and Sun as friends, but we need to remember that their support of Linux is part of their business plan, and they are doing it because it damages Microsoft and puts them in a position to compete with that company. As this event demonstrates, corporate friends are fair weather friends.
What does all of this mean to us? It means, in short, that we need to remember that the computer revolution is and has always been about US. They are the ones who are marginalized (by history, not by RMS style activism), so it is wrong for us to believe that anything we do depends on their recognition, esteem, or money for it to become important. Furthermore, as this affair demonstrates, we need to be continually suspicious of their involvement, because their goals are not our goals. They will shove Linux into the underground through patent law just as quickly as they will spend money working on big open source projects if they believe it will make them money.
The last renaissance did not require a business plan. There is no need to believe that this one will.
Oh, and support Gnunet and/or Freenet. You may be downloading your ISOs from them before long.
I agree. SUN has an image problem that they need to deal with right now.
Clearly Solaris' days are number in all but their most expensive enterprise systems, so they need to get their Linux based OS up and running soon.
It will be of tremendous disservice to their sales force to have to badmouth Linux one month and tout it the next. Yes probably most of their customers won't remember the Linux bashing but if I were running the company I would want to have a more consistent message. So not getting involved in this SCO nonsense is probably best for them in the long run.
They might however believe that they are big enough to talk out of both sides of their mouth and get away with it, but based on the backlash I see toward Microsoft when they act in a hypocritical fashion, my take is; the bigger you are the less you should act like a whore
I'm completely in awe of the mentality some people take that Sun is in some way a "threat" to open source.
Linux is an operating system, Sun is a hardware company. At this point each can benefit from the other.
Even if Sun didn't embrace Linux 100%, it still promotes open source software (sendmail, samba, apache). So there's no need to act like the jilted girlfriend.
Like it or not, big companies prefer to do business with big companies. If Sun went away, Microsoft would happily fill that void.
All this garbage can only hurt the public opinion of OSS in general..
While *we* know the truth, the media will not, thus the mass pubic, which is who we need to continue on with the cause.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What was Sun's huge commitment to linux? You mean buying Cobalt and taking over their generic Intel boxes? Big whoop. Or do you mean adding the "Linux compatibility" to Solaris that will allow broken open source code to compile under solaris, so Solaris users could get access to 600 window managers and maybe a Commodore 64 emulator.
... yea, they don't keep it up to date. But not bad! Much better than that horrid sun freeware site. IRIX is forever. Ditch the duck!
SCO is out of the game. Their reliable systems that were implemented in Point of Sale systems worked too well -- they still work and get the job done day to day. IBM will embrace Linux, as long as their consulting services get to take care of the boxes. IBM is about money, not hippy freedom of choice movements! Don't kid yourself.
And for those that haven't visited it recently, take a look at http://freeware.sgi.com
*IF I RULED THE WORLD*
If I ruled the world,
I'd kill all the Suns.
It'd be IRIX time in the world,
If I ruled the world.
Tux roasted and served,
chaotic development and dependency worse than DLLs,
FreeBSD only thing left -- on x86.
Microsoft faded like Enron, WinXP EOL
Bla.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
This lawsuit is humbug, and business, FS, and OSS communities all know it. It will have no -- or only a marginal -- effect on the adoptation of Linux. Sun isn't going to squeeze much out of this dry well.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Many (including me) is thinking that Msft is behind this. But what if it's Sun that buys out SCO (or having done so already). :-)
Makes complete sense to me, as a reasonable conspiracy theory
SCO has always sucked... it's just great how they have to go and do something particularly stupid. This hurts the image of open source dramatically in the eyes of business people, and that's not good.
Usually I'm all about supporting the little guy, but for this, I hope to see IBM make SCO look like fools in court. Clobber them into the ground.
SCO: YOU FAIL IT
Why bother.
This is propaganda of the most disgusting kind.
"There's a fear that SCO is using this as a means of either selling the company or desperately attempting to find some other business model as an alternative to their current software business," Weiss said. "I would advise SCO (Unix) users that they should have a contingency plan or migration plan to an alternate platform."
Heh. heh. WhatdidItellya. This is the equivalent of a "primal scream" by SCO (quite similar to the sorts of tactics the North Koreans are doing right now). Buy us off or we'll pepper you with baseless lawsuits! Great way to drum up good will.
The press release might be from today, but the message is older. I am fairly sure I heard Scott McNealy made pretty much the same claim at ERC 2003, a conference for education CIOs, three weeks ago. Since he went directly from there to the analyst meeting down the street, I'm sure he said the same thing there.
Wow, that tells me absolutely nothing new.
...and as he almost always does, this posting from one of the two key figures in UNIX posted his comments to Usenet using Microsoft Outlook Express. His postings to comp.lang.c are also generally done via a Microsoft platform.
Why doesn't he use a UNIX (or Unix-like) operating system?
Ewe no, it doesn't make cents to me why eye waist so much thyme trying too reed these posts witch the slashdot editors (sic) can never adequately proof reed first. It's fine if ewe use a spell checker, butt at least try too do a quick check for grammar mistakes two wen you post.
Now, I understand that 99% percent of Slashdot readers are sitting at home with a copy of RedHat, and as far as their concernced, Linux is the future and Sun, HP, IBM and SGI are just lumbering dinosaurs of the past who are desperately trying to jump off the ship before it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
... you're just outright stupid. There, I said it. Sun is the leading vendor in the highest margin segment of the server market. When you sell servers to banks or military departments for $5,000,000... let's just say, you're not going out of business anytime soon.
Of course, these people don't have real jobs in real data centers where real high availability and high performance computing needs are the biggest priority.
In these situations, Sun, HP, IBM and SGI are not just a choice for dinosaurs... but instead, the only REAL choice. I admin a few Linix boxes, and frankly, Linux is coming along very nicely. I still remember the old days (pre-shadow passwords and such), and compared to then, Linux has made leeps and bounds ahead.
But to compare Linux to Solaris regarding servers and finding Linux to be a better alternative for high end deployments is just being ignorant. Solaris is a battle-tested, highly scalable operating system running on a battle-tested, highly scalable platform (SPARC) with thousands of support personel and thousands of years of cumulative experience behind it.
Any company can crack out an operating system to run well with one or two CPU's (just look at those guys in Redmond), but it takes the likes of Sun, IBM, HP and SGI to crack out operating systems that scale up to hundreds of CPU's in a single enclosure with hundreds of gigagytes of memory... and make those systems work just as reliably as their low end boxes.
We have database servers with 16 CPU's and 32 gigabytes of memory. The database processes themselves are currently using 20+ gigabytes of memory and are processing complex summary queries in the range of 1500-3000 qps. This same work load would literally send smoke shooting out the back of a Linux box with a few Athlon MP or Xeon CPU's in it.
Now, Opteron and Itanium2 may eventually change this, but let's not forget that the keyword there is "eventually"... right now, and at least for the next few years, Sun and the like will still reign supreme at the high end.
Oh, and to anyone who says "Sun is dying out"
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Only if you are a Saddam (D-Baghdad) loving frog.
mainly, where is the Open Group in the midst of all this?
C|N>K
sucks.
The point is that this looks like FUD, and the PR folks should know how it come across. It looks like Sun is backing away from Linux, if only temporarily, and it wouldn't surprise me if some of the high placed "Solaris bigots" took this as an opportunity to make a political move against some of the Linux forces. Whether or not this is, in fact, the case, it only does harm to Sun's image to make this announcement this way. If they want to fix this, they should make at least a guarded statement of support for Linux, or they will lose a lot of cred in the community.
Similarly, they would be a lot better off if they made Java a lot more open (in terms of the specification and certification processes in particular). Languages and interfaces are not property and to the extent that they are treated that way, the value is reduced. It's just another way they appear Borg-like rather than penguin-like. The effects of all of this are very long-term, so it is hard for the control types to understand how and why it works.
Considering how many web host run Sun Cobalt (running RH +/- ) it a little late for Sun to be "rethinking" Linux business plan.
It seem to me that should be jumping all over SCO, after all Sun sold a product for which they didn't have technology liciense for? Of course they same coulc be said of Linux developers which is SCO postion.
Please, please, stop begging the question. It's only a logical falacy. Stop begging, pretty please?
Maybe it is too late to save this phrase from its death at the hands of the Internet, but to "beg a question" has nothing to do with the idea of "this makes me want to ask the question". Begging the question is a term in logic. It means "To use the point one is trying to prove as an assumption in one's argument." It is very important in that context not to dilute the specific meaning, because it is one of the most important fallacies which occur in bad arguments. This is a plea to technically inclined journalists: spend some time learning about the English language. It would do better by you if you did not ruin it by habitual misuse. Note: this is not aimed at CmdrTaco specifically. Posters on ars technica and elsewhere misuse this particular quote frequently, owing to the nature of their medium. However I begin to suspect that Slashdot is a major contributor to the problem.
Stand back. I've got a brain and I'm not afraid to use it.
Let me start by saying that I work for Sun but I'm not any sort of spokesperson for the company. I do however have opinions and what follows is my opinion on this post and some of the comments from the /. community.
Sun has a basic business strategy that has worked well for over 20 years:
* give a customer a technology choice that doesn't create a proprietary "lock-in"
* and you'll likely grow as a leader in a standards-based market
* where there is no standard, create one
* and push for it's widescale adoption
Conventional business wisdom has predicted Sun would fail to grow and they have been proven wrong repeatedly w.r.t Sun. Sun typically gets criticised on two fronts:
* Sun can't keep customers without a lock-in
* OR Sun is over-priced vs OS systems
Both arguments put Sun in the middle of two compelling forces. If the market for open systems continues to grow and Sun maintains a strong marketshare then the contradictions apparent are mitigated effectively. Choice and flexibility as features win deals, repeatedly in a large percentage of cases. Sun is just focusing on added value around quality, support and services to maintain a leading position with this approach. For Sun it's always a "call to execute" on the basic strategy because any competitor can adopt the same approach. This is good however because it increases the choices the customer can evaluate and grows the market. Grow the pie and maintain a significant slice... Grow at 20% per year and Wall Street will get it too. We're NOT seeing huge pie growths currently but we have some sins of excess as a market to pay for before we get back to fundamentals on purchasing patterns and excess system inventories being recycled in the market. Those trends seem to have bottomed out. The newer systems offer better value over recycled systems from the Dot Com era. Especially, if support contracts are needed.
This approach has worked with Unix (as Solaris), NFS, X Windows (begrudgingly due to the NeWS system, distrust of Motif, etc) Java, lots of TCP/IP standards (DHCP, SNMP, etc).
Sun's strategy gives customers choice and increases the likelihood that as a market grows Sun will get 15-30% of the product sales based upon that market. It's a solid growth model vs the MS model which leverages customer lock-ins on their technology.
Specifically on Linux... Sun would like to win some percentage of the Linux-based systems sold but that market is driven by price/performance and very tight profit margins. As we've seen a lot of companies have found the competitive pressures of the Linux systems market to make for high volume and limited profits.
Linux OS as a business has also been challenging for Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake, etc.
Programmer's will tell you that Solaris and Linux present very similar software targets for code. It's close to trivial to move a source object between them... As a result, growth of Corporate Linux use could help Sun sell more Solaris systems where the system requirements exceed those offered by the Linux-based systems (grow the Unix-based market and Sun grows too).
Sun has announced the intention to ship Linux based systems based upon feedback from customers that buy these systems. Those customers want Linux to be stable and supportable. What is the shortest path to Linux stability and supportability given that it's hard to offer Linux software, support and systems that are profitable? I think you just let the "bazaar model" work... Lunix gets enhanced, distributed and tested on new hardware with the Open Source model and the efforts of thousands of engineers and scientists. As Sun learned with the System V situation (when they cut a deal w/ AT&T) you can't control Open Standards and see them prosper. It makes customers nervous and makes ALL your competitors gang together in opposition (see OSF as an example).
So Sun would like to selll something that aligns well with the growth of Linux... systems, software, support services, professional services. Sun is not aggressively fighting Linux adoption but Sun is competiting at various points in an IT architecture with compatible offerings based upon Solaris (SPARC and x86). It would be counter to Sun's Business model to do otherwise because Sun wants a reasonable percentage of the IT budget and to give customers the perception that there's no lock-in stragtegy behind Solaris, Java, SPARC, or key network Standards used (LDAP, Project Liberty, etc).
Expect Sun to keep working with a Linux strategy that offers customers choices and some large percentage of those choices lead to the sale of sun products or services. Otherwise, Sun has truly lost it's vision. There is profit to be made in selling Open Systems and even Microsoft can see the logic of NOT getting blocked by a standards committee.
Users, industries, governments and vendors need to follow the lessons of the Internet to build markets. Widely adopted standards increase the value of networks exponentially to all involved. Linux just needs some aggressive standardization around key areas and it will grow exponentially. Sun is NOT preventing that from happening with some proprietary Linux strategy and we should all approve of that and let the best solutions succeed without leveraging patents of other "barriers to entry".
Just wondering.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Dennis Ritchie uses windowz to remotley login into a plan9 CPU server.
reason: Plan9 mail proggy SUCKS (I think he wrote it himself...)
IMHO, Linux has showed that information has more value when shared, than when controlled. I don't think it is a coincidence that both SUN and SCO have wraped themselves in the flag of "intellectual properties". They are dying companies chained to a dying idea. "Intellectual property" is no more a property in the information age than slaves were in the industrial age. It's just gotta go. The fact that some people don't have incentives, and that others call it a property, is irrelavent. Or to paraphrase the CEO of SUN
today as...
Oh heck, you know the rest already.
You have a very good point. But here is the issue:
RedHat, Caldera, SuSE, Mandrake, etc. are all basically distributers whose value added service is generally the QA, regarding the distribution as a whole. As a result, the distributor *should* be the single point of contact regarding support of anything that came with the original distro. Same thing happens with Solaris too.
But-- you are right-- the issue is perception. Solaris x86 last time I tried didn't even come with a web server (for the free version).
My point is, proprietary UNIX is expesive becasue R&D is pricy and few enough units are sold that it has to be sold at a high price. If IBM wants to push Linux, it is because they want to be able to sell servers for less because there would be less research and development that would need to be provided by IBM. Sun is a dinosaur who's hatred for Microsoft has led them to pursue sometimes self-destructive business strategies (FWIW, Microsoft has nicely done the same to Sun).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I use Linux because the girls dig the penguin.
...Or is that only when they are against M$? *nix brought this on itself.
:-)
First I think that this lawsuit is a good thing. While I fully hope and expect that IBM squashes SCO/Caldera into little tiny pieces, there are some interesting things about this case.
If SCO settles, as I am sure they are hoping to (by blackmailing IBM over licensing, it will have a sizeable warchest to sue everyone else. But more likely this tactic will force IBM to countersue brutally in order to ptotect their ability to sell servers.
Anyway, the real issue is that when SCO loses, it will make it easier for everyone else
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Other than the lame-ass PC gamers who are basically too stupid to either buy a PS2 or Gamecube? Oh yeah there's also the Amiga/Be retards who're still fighting a war over Windows Users that most Unix people quit caring about years ago.
He uses both Plan9 and Windows NT. Like a lot of us, he isn't a fanatic, so uses what is, in his view, the best tool for the job.
I like Windows and UNIX, but I almost always use Windows as my desktop platform, and run the UNIX apps I use over ssh/X. My preferred news reader is also Outlook Express.
Believe it or not, you can use a UNIX-like OS without hating Windows, foaming at the mouth or bowing down to Saint Ignucius. You can also like UNIX and still believe Windows is a better desktop platform.
I said this before, in another thread...
Sun had that free Solaris offer. I signed
up, which required giving Sun all my personal
information (name, address, phone, e-mail,
etc.), and was sent a message that I would
get a copy. Sun began sending me "offers"
via e-mail (ie, SPAM). Then I was sent an
e-mail saying I would NOT be getting a copy.
I was then required to request being removed
from their e-mail contact list, but they still
retain (I imagine) my personal information
somewhere in a database. Bad Sun, Bad! You
can NOT trust a spammer. Fair weather friend
indeed!
Working the tire off, huh?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Sun would like Linux to go away so they can retake the low end and mid level markets, where Linux dominates.
If Linux went away, the low and mid level markets would be inherited by the BSDs and Microsoft. I don't think Sun could fill the niche vacuum this would create very well at all. Sure Sun solutions scale and are reliable but they are expensive and they make most of their money on the high end.
If Linux went away, that would just give more oxygen to MS and embolden them to step up their attacks on the rest of the server industry. I think Sun just might start wishing it had Linux back if that happened.
Sun is one of the best corporate partners open source developers can have. If we just look at StarOffice, the cost of buying, rengineering then forking it over to OpenOffice is huge in and of itself. Even if they did keep part of the changes to themselves. A sophisticated Office suite that is compatible with MS Office products is what Linux needed as a shot in the arm for wider desktop acceptability. This alone is a major contribution. In addition Sun has hundreds of people working Gnome, Mozilla, JXTA, Tomcat, Netbeans (Another bought and open sourced project), Grid Engine and more. The only backstabbers I see are you people that go off attacking Sun after reading something that's been misquoted.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
If we just look at StarOffice, the cost of buying, rengineering then forking it over to OpenOffice is huge in and of itself. Even if they did keep part of the changes to themselves. A sophisticated Office suite that is compatible with MS Office products is what Linux needed as a shot in the arm for wider desktop acceptability. This alone is a major contribution.
In addition Sun has hundreds of people working Gnome, Mozilla, JXTA, Tomcat, Netbeans (Another bought and open sourced project), Grid Engine and more.
They're damn chip architecture is open, available for free without royalties. The have shared source Java and working to open source it.
Sun has the most popular Unix package around, they have been in this space for decades. Linux can benefit plenty from Sun and Sun is becoming more and more willing to help.
The only backstabbers I see are you people that go off attacking Sun after reading something that's been misquoted.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Whether SCO is successful against IBM will depend on the specifics of the contract that they signed with IBM. We don't know the details of that contract or whether it has any particular similarity to the contract Microsoft has when they developed Xenix. To suppose that the two are legally parallel however is a massive leap and probably incorrect. So it could very well be that SCO has a basis to sue IBM and not MSFT. We just don't have enough info to judge.
If IBM or Sun or someone else who has deep enough pockets would just buy the stock of those SCO cry-babies they could make this problem go away. Who knows, the SCO stock might cost less than legal expense of this worthless lawsuit. Have you read some of the "facts" in SCO suit? The only issue of any legal interest is if they can PROVE that IBM gave away or otherwise re-distributed SCO/UNIX source code or other propriety technologies. SCO makes noise that amounts to "since AIX is an licensed copy of UNIX, then anything IBM calls AIX is automatically the property of SCO". Which is nonsense as all of the IBM value added stuff does not belong to SCO and AIX is IBM's trademark, not SCO's. SCO is on their last legs and is trying to squeeze blood out of any rock it can find. And how about their asertion that their code is so special because it can run on the formerly underpowered Intel x86 chips? I guess they forgot about XENIX and Solaris 86 and QNX etc. I guess they forgot the fact that UNIX has been portable since it was rewritten in 'C' back in the dark ages and ever since the 80386 Intel chips have had what it takes to run a full fledged version of UNIX. With their revisionist view of history, SCO ought to relocate from Utah to one of the few communist countries left.
I'm scared of world leaders who think locally and act globally.
SCO may have some ELF related IP ownership. But GCC is one of the core project of the FSF and the adoption of the ELF binary format is a big deal.
Given this I find it highly unlikely that ELF was adopted without much discussion and agreement that it is implemented in a way that will not create legal issues for the project.
The ELF binary format has been the default format produced by GCC longer than I have been using Linux, which is longer than IBM has been actively lending development muscle to Linux.
It seems likely that the only benefit to SCO in metioning it is to add to the noise, and create FUD surounding Linux.
If they are looking to be bought out they may be attempting to pump up their percieved value.
In the event SCO actually thinks thay can win the lawsuit or force IBM to settle then SCO could be using this lawsuit to inflate their claims about ELF for use in future lawsuits.
Later, Seeker
I wish i had made it to all of these articles earlier, because everyone... every single poster is missing the point of this suit. It's about Itanium! Remember when SCO and IBM were collaborating on "Project Monterey" - the amazing new UNIX that was going to run on the new 64-bit Intel processors and blow everything else away? Well, the project died when Intel didn't get their act together with the processor... But since then IBM have been developing for Linux, and SCO believes IBM might have injected code that was shared under NDA during Project Monterey into Linux. It might be worth noting that IBM have never developed a UNIX for Intel chips, whereas SCO have been doing it since the 1980s.
Sun needs to realise without the free unixes they currently would be in a very poor position right now. Windows would own the less than 8-way market. Sun would be religated to the high end with Windows slowly creeping up (and don't talk to me about MacOS. Without the free unixes Jobs would still be faffing around with the next generation MacOS until it also gets canned, just like the 4 before it).
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
It certainly comes with a webserver now. And an awful lot more to boot.
Sun has committed to providing the entire Sun ONE software stack on Solaris/Sparc, Solaris/Intel and Linux/Intel.
I also believe that as the details of Project Orion come out we'll see a lot more interesting stuff in that arena.
By the way, I am happily running Solaris 9 on a on old P90 notebook (with all of 40mb memory).
Tp.
GCC didn't "adopt" ELF. The GNU toolchain (GCC, gas and binutils) supports many different OSes, including those based on SVR4 (Solaris, OpenServer, etc), and many different executable file formats. Now suppose that SCO holds a patent that covers ELF. I think GNU would be in the clear because the ELF support is useful to SVR4 users who already have a patent license. Distributors of the Linux kernel and GNU tools would need to get a license, though.
However, this all a lot of speculation based on something that ESR dashed off and which clearly doesn't quite make sense as written. I don't see any mention of ELF in any news reports, or of patents.
"Begging the question" is also known as "assumes the answer".
So to people who understand what you said as opposed to what you meant you sound as stupid as if you had said:
So, this begs the questions I.E. SO,THIS ASSUMES IN ITS QUESTIONS THE ANSWERS IT SEEKS: What are the short term implications for the new Linux based desktop we've been hearing about from our fair weather friends? How will the SCO lawsuit affect Sun's long term strategy with Linux and Open Source?"
Reminds me of an E.E. co-worker who used "per say" for "per se".
What's the problem? You PROUD of your ignorance?
How many times do you intend on making the same mistake?
Maybe you lack a proffessional attitude to work?
Maybe you think making gammer mistakes makes you more of a geek?
No?? What then? Tell us, we want to know!
"Begging the question" is also known as "assumes the answer".
So to people who understand what you said as opposed to what you meant you sound as stupid as if you had said:
So, this begs the questions I.E. SO,THIS ASSUMES IN ITS QUESTIONS THE ANSWERS IT SEEKS: What are the short term implications for the new Linux based desktop we've been hearing about from our fair weather friends? How will the SCO lawsuit affect Sun's long term strategy with Linux and Open Source?"
Reminds me of an E.E. co-worker who used "per say" for "per se".
What's the problem? Are you PROUD of your ignorance?
How many times do you intend on making the same mistake?
Maybe you lack a professional attitude to work?
Maybe you think making grammer mistakes makes you more of a geek?
No?? What then? Tell us, we want to know!
If it were a simple matter of "the right tool for the job" then Ritche would be using Macs to connect to Plan9.
MS-DOS and it's decendants have always SUCKED as a desktop platform.
If you still think that WinDOS is a "better desktop" platform, you probably don't have any friends or relatives and thus don't have ot lend them free tech support to deal with WinDOS.
DOS became and remains dominant only because it's what people think "everyone else" uses.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The whole implication of this posting, calling Sun "fair weather friends", and all that, is that Sun is trying to get people to jump to Solaris because of this.
No where in that article is Solaris even mentioned. It even says that Sun's Linux doesn't have the encumbrances because it bought out the Unix license the way HP did.
There are a lot of reasons to take Sun to task for stupid things they've done, but this isn't one of them.
Linux is advancing quickly. NUMA-aware technology is being put into Linux. Sun Solaris is deadmeat.
Well, to deal with the Sun "vulture", we should extend the boycott of SCO to Sun. "Long live the Penguin!"
Open Office does have one of these, nyet?
I suppose it's waisted on the editors.
-Greg
If SCO could mention real, specific pieces of code or techniques that were stolen from their OS (it galls me to call it UNIX) and inserted into the Linux kernel, the kernel maintainers would remove it and humbly apologize. However, I read the entire complaint and did not see one specific allegation of stolen IP. Rather, they argue that Linux is so good that it must be based on their stolen IP.
If the SCO execs were Slashmonkeys, they would claim that Windows 2000 must have stolen pieces of Linux in it because it's so stable. The difference is that the Linux code is out in the open for SCO to inspect; indeed, they were a Linux distributor. They've had every opportunity of finding the specific parts of the Linux kernel that violate their IP, and yet they've failed to do so.
It's as if your neighbor, Bob, brought the police to your place and claimed it was full of his stolen property. When the police ask Bob what things are his, he says, "When sql*kitten first moved in, this place was bare. But now it's all gussied up with furniture, plants and art - he must have stolen it from me!"
So... For example... when you tell your boss that you have this great idea for a in-house app utilizing proprietary technology, be prepared to pay $2000 for each developer before writing a stitch of the code. Oh and you're not allowed to use free-QT to develop then purchase commercial-QT afterwards.
Actually you don't pay a nickel. The GPL prevents you from destributing a mixed app because the other person doesn't have writes to the library (at least according to Debian legal though there is disagreement among GPL supporters on even this). In the case of an in-house app this wouldn't apply since you aren't distributing.
And of course Trolltech has control over genuine commercial development. Who cares? The FSF made the choice to go LGPL on gcc at a point where the free software community was much weaker. As Stallman has said many times, if gcc were being developed today the license would by GPL. Trolltech is less restrictive than a pure GPL license as it allows you GPL or commercial.
There are no ultimate truths we can appeal to when judging actions - we must look at the circumstances, and then come to a conclusion.
when will they pull their heads out their ass and embrace linux like everyone else. (retorical -- obviously never)
;)
this stupid game they play, saying linux is great from one side or their mouth, then looking for any opportunity to trash it from the other is gettin real old. soon, no one will give a shit what they say about anything.
well fuck sun. they have been so arrogant for so long, they can't see out their own windows.
it's only a matter of time before they try to start charging everyone licensing fees for java. that's when we know they are gasping their last breath.
rip fuckers, you have only yourselves to blame!
"... by closing what was open, by enslaving what was free"
Che ? Is that you ? You're alive ?
What I really would like to hear is what redhat have to say about this. I mean SuSE literally said:
"We at SuSE were greatly disappointed to learn of the SCO Group's recent actions......"...."we are currently re-evaluating our relationship with the SCO Group"
I consider this as a threat to UnitedLinux, SuSE is one of the best Linux's around.
The lunatic is in my head
I couldn't come up with a more misleading summary for this article if I tried. Sun was hardly mentioned in this article and what was said would hardly lead anyone to the conclusions the poster made. Have something against Sun?
I think SCO brought it.
-pyrrho
Ha! Sun is as flaky as they get. It's no wonder they are going down the tubes with Solaris. Any respect for Sun I had is suddenly gone.
I must have been working for a different IBM than you. Or maybe it was an IBM in a parallel universe with a high strangeness factor. In my universe, IBM was quite strong making computers and operating systems, and they had stopped making typewriters long ago. Or maybe that was only a dream, I don't know.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
While checking the SCO website, I ran into a "UNIX Intellectual Property Timeline" page.
It's a looong chart of UNIX history including BSD, Minics, XENIX and Linux.
It's strange. If they are not accepting Linux as "UNIX" why is it there? (as one of the thicker lines, labeled as "SCO Linux").
Anyways, here is the link:
http://www.sco.com/scosource/unixtree/unix
Try one of these.
Just picking over a few bones...
Is IBM the most leading edge? Well, yeah. They've got bigger labs producing more leading edge stuff and more IP than any of their competitors.
Are they the coolest? That depends on how you judge cool. IBM's no sony, there isn't an IBM game console, and they don't make mp3 players. They do, however, put their tech in everything from mobile phones to nintendo chips. They put little keyboard lights on their laptops, draw pictures one atom at a time, invent the tiniest resistors and transistors, and figure out how to take Linux to big business. For a company that doesn't make branded consumer electronics, that's pretty cool.
But as you pretty accurately summarized, people don't see IBM as leading edge or cool and that's at least in part because the stuff isn't in their homes (well, it is, but no-one sees it and we don't have little blue IBM lines all over the place). Some recognize that it is still what they want for business, but the cool factor still has an effect on business spending decisions.
- pretzl
what the hell are they doing? it seems like they're killing they're own market for linux. they should be taking a SUN-like approach to selling Unix & Linux together.
why would they piss of the OSS community that they depend on for Linux development by sing them? the smartest thing to do is just Opens Source the technology that Linux is already using, and lock the rest up if they want to into a proprietary Unix.
but don't ever sue your customers. a mistake that Caldera and the music industry will both live to regret.
just because you see an opportunity to take in some profit by suing others doesn't mean you should. earn your money.
they may win a few suits now, but they are killing so much future business it's not even funny.
Evil is the money of all root....
Rubbish. Windows NT/2000/XP is not a descendant of MS-DOS, and many of us who have used both NT-derived systems and Mac OS (both classic and OS X) consider NT a better desktop platform than either Mac OS or OS X have ever been. That's without even considering the better performance (in the common case) and lower costs of x86 PC hardware versus Apple hardware.
The fact that you have to resort to emotional ranting rather than suggesting why you think Mac OS is better (which you're perfectly entitled to do, of course) points to the weakness of your argument.
Mac OS X is a reasonably good desktop platform, but there are several weaknesses which have kept me away from it:
1 Clumsy UI:
The user interface is rather clumsy compared to Windows. For example, a lot of menu commands lack direct keyboard equivalents, where as the Alt key on Windows provides easy access to the full set of menus. I've also found that Command+Tab frequently fails to work in the expected manner, where as Alt+Tab on Windows nearly always does.
A second problem is that the Mac UI is ludicrously designed around the concept of a one-button mouse, which was an interesting experiment in 1983 (when Apple introduced the Lisa), but clearly an error. Any user who's too clumsy to use a two-button mouse probably isn't competent to do anything more with a PC than play games.
2 Consistency with previous versions:
Having had a lot of experience with the classic Mac OS, as well as X (the X Window System, not OS X), NextStep and Windows (NT/2000/XP), I've found the OS X UI to be fairly different from any of the others, but without being better than any of them (in fact, I prefer some aspects of the classic Mac OS UI, and definitely prefer the NextStep UI).
The Windows UI, even in XP, is a fairly clear evolution of the interface that appeared in NT 3.1. The Program Manager was changed into the Start Menu in version 4.0, and the desktop icons were replaced by the task bar, but the concepts are very close, as are the keyboard controls. The XP UI is principally only different in terms of bitmaps used to decorate the UI, with a similar underlying UI to NT4 or Win2k.
The UNIX UIs are even better in some respects than Windows, in my opinion, since there's a wide variety to choose from, and considerable scope for modification. The downside is that apps can choose from a variety of UI toolkits (unlike Mac or Windows apps), leading to inconsistency and poor UIs all round.
3 Applications:
One of the major strong points of the classic Mac OS was constency of the UI across applications. However, while Windows has been getting better in this respect, Mac OS now has the split between the classic and OS X UIs. This compounds the already weak applications support.
The number of applications, esp. quality applications, available on Windows is unmatched on any other platform. When the Interix UNIX subsystem is added, nothing else can even come close. The one advantage of Mac OS is this regard is that it includes a BSD layer running on the Mach kernel in the box, where as the UNIX layer that runs on the NT kernel is $99 extra (but the total system cost is still much lower than a comparable Mac).
At the end of the day, zealots who claim that Macs are really better than anything else, but most people are too stupid to figure that out remind me of cult members. Reason and logic don't come into it because they 'believe' in the rightness of their platform and the wrongness of all others. I'd pity such people if they didn't tend to be obnoxious and insufferable twits on top of everything else.
We don't claim Interactive EasyFlow is good for anything -- if you
think it is, great, but it's up to you to decide. If Interactive EasyFlow
doesn't work: tough. If you lose a million because Interactive EasyFlow
messes up, it's you that's out the million, not us. If you don't like this
disclaimer: tough. We reserve the right to do the absolute minimum provided
by law, up to and including nothing.
This is basically the same disclaimer that comes with all software
packages, but ours is in plain English and theirs is in legalese.
We didn't really want to include any disclaimer at all, but our
lawyers insisted. We tried to ignore them but they threatened us with the
attack shark at which point we relented.
-- Haven Tree Software Limited, "Interactive EasyFlow"
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