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SCO Gives Friday Deadline To IBM
bcisys writes "Reuters is reporting that SCO is planning to revoke IBM's license to Unix this Friday unless IBM settles SCO's claim that parts of its Unix code are being used in Linux. 'If we don't have a resolution by midnight on Friday the 13th, the AIX world will be a different place', SCO President and Chief Executive Darl McBride told Reuters News. 'We've basically mapped out what we will do. People will be running AIX without a valid license.'"
It's pretty clear that SCO is trying to get IBM customers to pressure IBM to settle this. However, it frankly seems pretty absurd. The bottom line is that, as a customer, I am not responsible for IBM's alleged failure to maintain a proper license for UNIX. IBM's license is a license to *copy* UNIX software, and copying is the only activity that could possibly be prophibited. Given that IBM's customers already HAVE copies of AIX, unless IBM's license from SCO has some very odd language in it it seems extremely improbable that customers could lose the license they already have.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, and they don't want it to go to court. That's why the extortion. I'm assuming they know they don't actually have a choice, they're just trying to scare IBM. I don't think they have a chance, and I don't think IBM is going to scare.
Wham, come Saturday June 14 thousands of boxes with AIX all over the world would suddenly shut down.
Now tell me why DRM is a good idea and explain how it will never be misused or abused.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
IBM has done something about that already...
We always talk about SCO, SCO, SCO but I realized I have no clue about what IBM's response is...
Anyone ?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
All,
Several thoughts have come to my mind concerning this issue.
Please keep in mind that IBM:
1) backs Linux on a large number of it servers
2) believes that it's license with SCO is perpetual.
3) has spent billions hyping Linux.
IBM will likely take action on Friday or perhaps sooner in a pro-Linux fashion, given the above facts.
Suppose it is shown that in the completion of LKP (Linux Kernel Personality) that SCO did incorporate GPL'd code into it's kernel (as suggested by an article on linuxtoday.com) and it is shown that, according to Eben Moglen, that "SCO gave up rights to the code when the released their version of Linux".
If SCO licensed any of this code to third parties for inclusion in their products, it is possible that *all* of those products will be *required* to be released as Free Software under the terms of the GPL.
This is perhaps why SCO is being so loud about this. Is this the fact that they want to hide under all of this legal rangling? Also, don't forget that Microsoft made a public showing of buying a license from SCO, which according to the recent news from Novell, ONLY covers the copyrights which, if the above is shown, would be subject to the GPL.
The implication here is very clear. Many companies which have incorporated the disputed code would need to release their code under the GPL.
Could the GPL set the industry on it's head?
I, for one, hope so. I am not a lawyer, just an engineer.
Later, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I've been watching this whole fiasco unfold and I've been fascinated. The reason is because I was a Caldera employee up until just over a year ago. I worked in IT, and IT at SCO is still made up of some of my best friends. So, I have the unique opportunity of getting the inside scoop on their feelings of what's going on, and the feelings of the company in general. I also have an interesting internal battle with where exactly I stand on the issue. Being that I learned about the things that matter most there (Linux), I can tell you that the early days of Caldera (right when it went public) were EXTREMELY exciting! We were all going to make money doing stuff that was cool and fun, PLAYING WITH LINUX!
/. community rejected Caldera. "You can't make money with Linux, you leeching bastards!" was pretty much the common attitude from /. users. We tried, we really did. But not only did no-one think they had to PAY for anything, they bashed and made fun of Caldera. Keep in mind that most of us WERE LINUX GEEKS and we LOVED LINUX. Our job was more than money, we wanted to be part of the OS community. People made fun of the logo, the company, the products, and it hurt. I wondered many times what we possibly did to deserve the scorn that was thrown at us CONSTANTLY.
/. persecution since the lawsuit: "Well, there's deffinately no love lost between SCO and the OS community. Things are no different now than they were before the lawsuit."
Something happened though. The
I was laid off about a year ago, and I've since moved on to much better things. Ransom was replaced, and the name was changed back to SCO because OBVIOUSLY there was no value left in the Caldera name after you guys were finished with it.
I've been using Red Hat ever since I was laid off, as Caldera's Linux distro pretty much fell by the wayside. I look back on those days with fondness and wish it could have turned out differently. I am horrified by SCO's actions as of late, at the same time I can't help but think that you guys kinda created this fiasco in the first place. You guys have been poking this dog into a corner for the last several years and now, when it turns around and starts fighting for its life, you seem to be amazed at how angry and irritated and frusterated SCO is. "Will they stop at nothing?!" you all ask in amazement? Of course not, cause they are going the ONLY ROUTE THEY HAVE LEFT. You all seem to be proud of yourselves for boycotting their products... sheesh, that's a rediculous notion since you had all boycotted them WAY before the lawsuit ever happened. I'll quote my friend who still works there when I asked him about how he felt about
I'm rooting for IBM. I think SCO are going way too far. It makes me angry that they have become such a mindlessly self-centered company. SCO is not at all what Caldera used to stand for.
But when you think about it, they really don't have anything to lose and a whole possible pile of cash and revenge to gain if this thing pans out for them.
And the ironic thing is that you are all, to some degree, the ones that helped cause this. You can bet that if they do prevail, they are going to make you suffer as MUCH AS THEY CAN with no remorse, since you all have had no remorse for them in the past.
This is not meant to be a troll. I only wanted to present a unique viewpoint of the whole situation.
The other quote that I can't get out of my head is from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, where the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto explains his reservations about attacking Pearl Harbor as ordered by the military junta: ...it was hard to tell them that their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get really pissed off and annihilate them. Substitute "IBM" for "Americans", and you have my feelings exactly.
God, I love that book.
T3? That's sad.. (hehe)
:
/24 from WestNet, who has the two /16's containing that block.
/24's owned by ShreveNet in Louisana, which is part of 4 /16's owned by UUNet.
:)
:)
Most of the bigger lines I've delt with, it's a fixed rate for connection itself, a dedicated bandwidth amount, and a burstable amount.
Like, we're dedicated to several Gb between our various facilities. That's what we pay for every month, if we use it or not. If we exceed that amount, we pay a higher amount for the overage. If we use less, well that's our tough luck.
If they're in a colocation facility (like most good companies are these days), they probably have multiple lines coming in from different providers, and have at least a 100Mb/s uplink. That's the prefered method these days. It saves a whole lot of money in actually keeping a physical room going at your facility, and having copper or fiber run to you.
A little research can give you a hint of where they live.
sco.com
216.250.140.112
nameservers:
ns.calderasystems.com 216.250.130.1
ns2.calderasystems.com 216.250.130.5
c7ns1.center7.com 216.250.142.20
nsca.sco.com 132.147.210.253
MX:
mail.ut.caldera.com 216.250.130.2
calderasystems.com is 216.250.140.125
216.250.128.0/20 (everything but nsca.sco.com) is owned by 'NFS", which has nameservers of:
ns1.canopy.com 216.250.129.1
c7cs1.center7.com 216.250.142.20
c7ns2.center7.com 166.70.45.162
c7ns3.center7.com 216.250.142.14
166.70.0.0/16 is owned by XMission, which has the nameservers of:
ns.xmission.com 198.60.22.2
ns1.xmission.com 198.60.22.22
ns2.xmission.com 207.78.169.150
The 198.60.22.0/24 block is owned by Xmission, who only has the
The 207.78.169.0/24 is one of two
My guess would be that SCO lives with Center7. If you go to http://center7.com/, you'll see a whole lot of PR crap, that sounds like every other colo provider's crap. They are nice enough to say that their connectivity is an OC-48 from XO Communications, and an OC-12 with Qwest (which is what I see on my traceroute to sco.com), and two T3's that aren't active. They also say something to the effect that their customers are attached "at 10-100", which I'd take to mean ethernet (like, duh).
I'd have to say that xmission.com is just someone being nice enough to provide a home for a nameserver.
I wouldn't expect that too many people can flood their OC-12 off the net, unless it's already fairly utilized. Since I've never heard of Center7, I wouldn't suspect that they are.
The best, and most likely to hurt them is if there was 100Mb/s of traffic filling up their ethernet connection to Center7's switch.. So, don't try to push 600Mbs in, it only takes 100Mb/s..
I know, I know, there are possibilities that they are rather reinforced. What if they have some spiffy hardware in front of their server? They could be doing all kinds of wild load balancing. But if I remember right, this was the company that was hurting for money and this is their last-ditch effort to make get IBM to buy them. Honestly, it looks like an old Linux box that no one ever bothered to update Apache on.
user@home (/home/user) telnet sco.com 80
Trying 216.250.140.112...
Connected to sco.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET ? HTTP/1.1
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 06:06:47 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.0.3pl1
It would seem to me that any of a few thousand script kiddies out there with a few exploits could get in, or anyone in control of a few dozen DDoS slaves could make their site rather quiet.
Now my disclaimer.. I don't suggest doing it.. It's no fun to have your pager go off at 4am because som
How do you NOT develop for SCO? They are POSIX, and have a GNU toolchain..
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."