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Microsoft Not Underwriting SCO's Legal Fees?
An anonymous reader wrote in to say "Linux Business Week carries this morning a claim that Microsoft only bought a Unix license from SCO Group because there's been a prior development project underway at Redmond that warranted it. "The license was not seen as a way to underwrite SCO's legal fees," says a source within the company. "The idea of getting a SCO license had been under consideration prior to the IBM lawsuit." "
There is no way of either truly confirming or denying this. Microsoft won't, i am prepared to bet, actually say what they are working on, and Very few people trust M$ to be telling the truth. End discussion, really.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
Let's say this is true. Hey, it may well be.
There's still something to be learned from all of this - namely Microsoft's problem with people not trusting them is very real.
In short, Microsoft is not a company that a lot of people would give the benefit of a doubt.
After so much FUD, how can we trust them?
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
What bothers me is not the lie, but the pervasiveness of this sort of attitude. They don't want to admit their true motives, so they lie and the mass media doesn't call them on it.
My question is simple: why are they bothering? They have financial interest in seeing Linux, and MacOS, failing. If Linux's market share expands, theirs contracts. Nothing difficult to understand here.
Unfortunately, that their pathetic lie being allowed to go un-challenged means that otheres will keep right on lying in ever more pathetic manners. Let's have some artistry here, if someone wants to lie to me I expect it to be plausable, not rediculous.
Its rather like the political "doner's" lie: "Oh, no, I'd never bribe a politician. This particular politician just wants to give me special favors because its part of his political philosophy, I'm just giving him money to express my support of that philosophy."
Since that excuse works so well in politics why not everywhere else: "Oh no officer, I wasn't paying that woman for sex, she simply has a philosophy of giving oral sex to strangers, I'm merely expressing my support for that philosophy."
Really, MS, politicians, their lies are just too transparent to be amusing. We need a better class of lies damnit. Either that or some honesty, that would be original too...
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Microsoft has been distributing their Services for Unix software for some time now. If you will remember, the entire purpose they attended LinuxWorld last year was to show this product and even hand out free CD's to try.
Basically, Services for Unix runs on Windows and is designed to replace UNIX servers by offering some similiar services such has NFS and NIS. The idea here is for companies to gracefully migrate their servers away from UNIX and lock them into a MS products.
I just don't understand why Microsoft didn't purchase this license years ago when the Services for UNIX was first started.
They don't need SCO code for any UNIX emulation.m l and I guess they will get actually better support for what they probably want to do
1. They can take (F,N,O)BSD code and get a perfect UNIX(ish) layer.
2. If they want to pay somebody, they can go to http://www.windriver.com/products/bsd_os/index.ht
Just tell me what is the benefit of SCO code from the MS point. I'll tel you - they know SCO was going to do something and now they are covering their traces with smoke.