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SCO Threatens Red Hat and SuSE
Guy Smith writes "CRN reports that SCO will target SuSE and Red Hat with lawsuits after they are finished with IBM (providing that IBM allows them live). To quote Sco, "There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done." They seem bent on destroying the Open Source community and they deserve to hear the community's opinion on the matter."
Ya think? As you may or may not recall, SCO had ties to Microsoft back in the day, when it was called XENIX. So I guess it's still in it's blood to threaten the other operating systems on the block.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Someone should remind SCO that their United Linux offering is built on SuSE. Hell, SuSE is United Linux. Everyone else in the group is just along for the ride.
Believe me, all the feedback in the world won't matter to the SCO folks. They want attention. They want everyone up in arms. They want this to hinder the adoption of Linux in business.
Why? They want to be bought. SCO figures that if IBM's linux related sales start to drop (and IBM makes a fair amount of cash on linux related sales) IBM may just buy SCO to shut them up and end the lawsuit. It's pretty slimy on SCO's part. It's downright microsoftish.
I'm not saying don't send SCO feedback. I'm saying that whatever you send won't matter to them. They're not interested in using linux for anything other than making a quick buck and exiting the market. They're like LinuxONE was, just a lot more insidious and poisonous.
Who has a business policy of pissing off your customers by going after your competitors? A day of reckoning? SCO has always been angry with RedHat. And now that SuSE is all about AMD Opteron, they are a threat to SCO in the heavy duty 64-bit space.
samrolken
Call their bluff. Delay. Befuddle. Use the legal system to drive SCO into the ground in the same way SCI is trying to burn everyone else. The legal system rewards the richest litigant, and that is not SCO. IBM should draw this out until 2010 and let SCO die a slow agonizing death at the hands of their own legal fees.
Ya this indeed looks ugly.
SCO appears to be trying to change their primary source of revenue to be that which they get from lawsuits rather than actually selling services like they used to be doing. I don't know how viable of a business strategy this is, but even if they were to successfully sue every linux company into bankruptcy (hypothetically) they would eventually run out of people to sue and go bankrupt themselves. It's like a virus that feeds on other living cells until it has no more hosts. Once it runs out of hosts, it must itself die.
What if some substantial (either quantity or quality) amount of their proprietary code has made its way into the Linux source? If IBM put it there, should they not be punished for doing so? If RedHat et.al are making/made money from it, shouldn't they pay royalties? I know that SCO is the popular bad guy right now, but what if they have a point, does this still make them bad?
What on earth do they hope to accomplish? Getting rid of Linux vendors? That's futile, since the source is already available on the net for free. Chunks of cash from Linux vendors? That would be stupid too. If they are awarded a settlement, it would likely result in bankrupting the targeted vendors. But that wouldn't remove them from the marketplace, since the distributions are, once again, already available on the net for free. Do they think that former customers will suddenly come to them? That's arrogant. The hackers would find out through the course of the trials what parts of the Linux kernel, if any, violate patents, and re-implement such that it's no longer in violation. The only thing SCO can hope to do is temporarily dispose of popular Linux vendors and piss off the very demographic that might ever be interested in their product.
it seems like a very viable business strategy...for about 5 seconds...just look at what happened to rambus
Let's see the evidence. If there is no evidence, or the evidence turns out to be bogus, then you can accuse them of trying to destroy OSS and flouridating our precious bodily fluids.
But even if they're right, licensing won't be the answer. The infringing code will have to go, instead. Well, unless the license they have in mind is the GPL, which I kind of doubt. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Obviously, they have to be claiming that some of the code within Linux wasn't originally GPLed. Which code is that? Are their complaints legitimate? In other words, can they point out the code that was lifted from them, and then provide documentation to support their claims? If so, then they're actually in the right, whether or not everyone happens to think they're a bunch of goatse's.
Is that even if the source code is theirs (which I don't see how it could be), the BUSINESS was never theirs. The popularity that IBM and the likes enjoy was never SCO's nor will it be if they try to eliminate Linux, at least in the not-underground corporate world.
We should consider the possibility that SCO is right, as well. They're undertaking a billion dollar lawsuit against one of the largest technology corporations on the planet. Everyone says they're stupid, but it looks to me like they know something we don't.
I wrote SCO, but I couldn't tell them that they should stop because they're wrong, because we just don't know that. We want them to be wrong, but we really can't say. They should stop because they won't get anything with it except general hatred from a very large part of the IT world. SCO was never popular or "poised" to take the X86 server market. MS stole more "umph" from SCO's strategy than Linux did. Blaming Linux is just a convenient way to explain their company's loss.
System V is the basis for all operating systems outside of Redmond
Huh? What rock has this guy been living under?
OS/360, VM/CMS, MVS, Z/OS, OS/400, OS/2, and several others are all operating systems developed in-house by IBM. Mythical Man Month was written about the OS/360 project IBM had during the 60's. None of these owe any heritage to Redmond or System V. Many of the concepts used in modern operating systems first appeared on "big iron" like IBM mainframes: symetric multiprocessing, NUMA, clusters, failover, fault tolerance, transaction processing, pre-emptive multitasking, virtual memory, journaling, etc.
There are others such as VMS or Mac OS9 that have no connection to System V or Redmond as well. I do think it is safe to say that much of the technology used in modern enterprise operating systems was invented at IBM and first appeared in an IBM mainframe OS.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
No, just portions of it that were added by IBM. In an earlier article i read that SCO thinks the only reason Linux matured so fast is because IBM took AIX code (which is based on code from the origional AT&T UNIX that SCO now owns) and added it to Linux. Meh, wouldn't surprise me either way, but i still see no PROOF that SCO IP is in there. "Probable" is not supposed to be good enough in court.
But if there is significant proprietary code in open source that the owner did not put some type of open license
Which is exactly what sco themselves does when distributing OpenLinux. Any claim they may have had on any part of the code is uninteresting now since they themselves (as copyrightholders) have distributed the source under GPL (and other lisences).
If they never themselves ditributed linux they might have had the snowball's chance, now they haven't even got that.
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
It doesn't matter if it is bankrupt in two years. It is a publicly traded company. The board and management have no interest in it's longevity. They are only interested in the keeping the stock high, negotiating deals that transfers maximum company assets to their pockets, and making sure that their pensions are safe, in that order. Also, by that time, all the well connected investors will have had time to cash out, and losses will be fall to ever abused middle class.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Argh! I'm late to the rant party. I suspect this will never get read by anybody, but here's a thought for you:
Let's say IBM chooses to fight this (this seems to be the plan), and let's say some idiot US judge actually sides with SCO, and let's say SCO looses on appeal. Won't this really end up meaning that all Linux development will happen outside of the states? (a whole slew of it does already.) Think about Alan Cox's "I can't describe this security patch because it's a violation of the DMCA." Think about how open source cryptology was developed when encryption was considered a munition. Remember poor Phil Zimmerman?
I figure if they do win, they'll only be screwing over those of us who live (and program) in the states. Will China care? Especially two years from now when Red Flag Linux has gotten that much better. Will Europe care? (It's not like there is a whole lot of love between the US and Europe these days.) I suspect the rest of the world will shrug their shoulders at the silly Americans and their inane legal system and that will be the end of it.