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OSI vs SCO
the jackol writes "As expected, the OSI's just given the SCO vs IBM case a bite with this position paper. "SCO has never owned the UNIX trademark. IBM neither requested nor required SCO's permission to call their AIX offering a Unix. That decision lies not with the accidental owner of the historical Bell Labs source code, but with the Open Group.""
open-source advocate Bruce Perens:
g =f d_nc_1
http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-1007758.html?ta
He doesn't outright say it be he is almost implying that certain monied interests (M$?) could be indirectly funding the whole SCO effort to spread FUD about Linux.
smd4985
Considering the history of SCO in the mid-late 80s, you have to wonder how closely MS and SCO remained linked at the executive levels. Gates really liked UNIX and MS had their hands in the mix in that time frame. Gates is technical and understands why Unix/Linux is powerful and he actually liked working with it. SCO took over all the MS aspects of their initiative (sort of) back in the 80s/early 90s.
I suspect that their is more here than meets the eye in terms of collusion between MS and SCO. I could see MS picking up SCO if they can damage Linux in the process.
To spell it out, here is what I'm suggesting (IMHO): I suspect MS and SCO execs are acquaintences. I suspect that MS execs tugged on the SCO execs to make some troubles for Linux (starting with the IBM thing whenever). I suspect that they have a big bag of such issues with which to harass Linux vendors. I suspect that MS will enter the Linux/Unix arena in the next 3 to 5 years, possibly through an aquisition of SCO.
Question: Was SCO part of the anti-trust suits and related suits against MS? If so to what degree?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Nope. This is wrong, and keeps cropping up again and again here and elsewhere. *Caldera* did their own Linux and released it under the GPL. SCO (the original) produced and sold commercial UNIX under several names. Caldera then bought SCO (again the original) and it's IP, and still under the name Caldera helped to start the United Linux directive. Up until this point, under the leadership of Ransom Love, Caldera "got it".
It would then appear that Ransom Love left and the lawyers took control, which is the point where they "lost it". Caldera became the current SCO, and the dubious comments about UNIX vs Linux started to fly around. The comments then became more legally inclined, finally culminating in the suit against IBM.
I'd guess that SCO started to come up with the prospects of the lawsuits after Ransom Love's departure. As they built up their "evidence" (which has yet to be publically documented in a satisfactory manner), the comments grew in the level of vitriol and FUD content. Presumably this increase was as the lawyers became more confident they could pull off their intended plan. Whether that plan is simply to be bought out, or they actually believe they can successfully sue IBM is a matter for speculation. As far as I can tell, all we can say about SCO's current plan is that it seems to be:
- Piss off pretty much the entire *NIX community with threat of lawsuit.
- ???
- Profit!!!
What step 2. is, remains to be seen, and I really hope it doesn't lead to 3.On an unrelated note, what I want to read at this point is a frank positional summary by Ransom Love who is becoming somewhat conspicuous by his "absense" through all this mess.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
This paper is a gem. It provides a good history of unix and unix-like OSs, and in my mind it establishes that SCO has no claim to the UNIX trademark. SCO willfully misrepresents itself as a much bigger player in the enterprise market than it actually is, for the purpose of claiming bigger damages. My favorite quote:
Examination of SCO's 10Ks reveals that, even were we to assume that every dime of their revenue came from the enterprise market, their 2002 share could not have exceeded 3.1% [5] This is at the level of statistical noise.
"SCO has never owned the UNIX trademark. IBM neither requested nor required SCO's permission to call their AIX offering a Unix. That decision lies not with the accidental owner of the historical Bell Labs source code, but with the Open Group."
Well, this is quite true, but it's a trivial offhand swipe at SCO that has nothing to do with the court case. SCO are claiming breach of contract and copyright infringement, not trademark infringement.
The OSI position paper is actually pretty good, and almost any sentence picked at random would probably have been more relevant than that one.
How about:
SCO alleges (Paragraph 57): "When SCO acquired the UNIX assets from Novell in 1995, it acquired rights in and to all (1) underlying, original UNIX software code developed by AT&T Bell Laboratories."
SCO neglects to mention that those rights had been substantially impaired before its acquisition of the ancestral Bell Labs source code. [...] ten years ago at a time when Linux was in its infancy, the courts already found the contributions of other parties to what is now UnixWare to be so great, and Novell's proprietary entitlement in the code so small, that Novell's lawyers had to settle for a minor, face-saving gesture from the University of California or walk away with nothing at all.
Or:
SCO's claim to own the scalability techniques certainly cannot be supported from the feature list of its own SCO OpenServer, a genetic Unix. The latest version advertises SMP up to only 4 processors (a level which SCO's complaint dismisses as inadequate), no LVM, no NUMA, and no hot-swapping. That is, SCO is alleging that IBM misappropriated from SCO technologies which do not appear in SCO's own product.
I am not a legal expert, but if you are proven to be negligent about any business data, last I checked, you are at fault really. For example. If I listed all of my customers on my website, I could not sue an ex-employee for using my customer list to do sales, since I make it public and available to all.
I do not see how SCO could claim proprietary information on something they released under GPL.
However, this country seems so corrupt anything is possible.
photoplankton
The title kind'a get you thinking... "The Fear War on Linux". It seems pretty clear that the only one who might benefit from this is Microsoft. Really fitting for their strategy of FUDing Linux out of existence. Is this just a convenient turn of events for the Redmond guys, or a truly Machiavellian charade orchestrated by them since day one?
Btw, could someone explain these clearly out-of-context quotes?