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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.
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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.
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.
It's hard to tell if they're right when they won't talk about what parts of Linux they have a problem with.
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.
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. ;-)
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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.
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