Few Companies Change Linux Plans Despite SCO Suit

gaurab writes "A survey on Internetweek says 'SCO's Linux lawsuit and threats seem to be having little affect on IT managers except to make them angry. Fully 91 percent of people responding to an InternetWeek Reader Question said they will not change their Linux deployment plans as a result of SCO's actions.' The article is also available at Yahoo!"

Comments

just ask the RIAA

[noah_fense]

RIAA: ignored music piracy until it was too late. now is trying to regain ground.

SCO: Missed the technology boom, now trying to regain ground.

How do EITHER of these mindless organizations think they will succeed?

-n

Some code is bound to look the same?

[GillBates0]

Eric Wright, Unix systems architect, TLS, Annapolis, Md.: "Both Unix and Linux are based on the C language. The C language only has so many methods of doing things. Some code is bound to look the same. The fact that a line here or a line there looks the same only tells me that both the programmers may of had the same teacher in college. Who knows?!

Not to troll, but if he's referring to typical for(i=0; ;i++) loops and the like, I'm pretty certain SCO's not dumb enough to claim such one-liner code fragments are theirs.

You can claim that there are only a limited number of ways to do things only for small parts of code, but SCO was claiming it for large functions, etc...for which his argument falls through.

This doesn't mean very much for the SCO suit...

[Krapangor]

...some people are smoking cigarettes even if it causes them cancer in the end.
Just because many companies sticking to Linux won't give us any victory over SCO.
We all know that IT managers are often reported to understand both technical and legal issues very little. Many of the might not have realized the true extend of SCO's claims - Linux as a derivative work of AT&T unix belongs to SCO - and the possible implications - if SCO wins they can eliminate all Linux licences.
I doubt that SCO will be successful but a suitably fucked court ruling can surprise us all. You must admit that the missing reliability of the US legal system has reached a point at which the ruling a relatively random and useful as e.g. a court decision in Liberia. The most annoying problem is that in Liberia you can circumvent these issues by either bribing the judge or bringing your collection of AK-74s to the court which is still rather ill advised in the US.
Therefore I would never trust any sensible outcome in the US and with a responsible position in IT I would switch to FreeBSD as soon as possible. Most Linux software runs on FreeBSD anyways, so no real problem there.

How to Present It.

[Anonymous Coward]

When dealing with the PHB's the real issue is probably a matter of presentation. A good script might look like this:

"At this point you KNOW you'll have to pay Microsoft. You only have to pay for Linux IF SCO first manages to beat IBM's lawyers in court, which is unlikely and will take a minimum of five years, AND if they are then successful in suing whatever Linux company we purchase services from, which is also unlikely, because during discovery, kernal maintainers will learn which code SCO claims is theirs and re-write the offending bits."

Know what you're going to say before you're asked the question.

No more unixware

[snake_dad]

Nice to see this story now, because today we started looking into replacing UnixWare with Linux, on the main systems of one of our biggest clients. Support for Unixware by hardware vendors is getting less and less...

Flood fill

[Moderation abuser]

Linux is a bit of a flood fill phenomenon. You get these high profile vocal hold out areas who will suddenly not be implementing their large top down projects.

In the meantime, Linux will just continue quietly flood filling in the background, eating up everything, almost completely unnoticed by the management.

SCO are irrelevant, Microsoft are irrelevant, IBM are irrelevant, RedHat are irrelevant, SuSE are irrelevant, large top down Linux projects are also irrelevant, they make up a tiny tiny percentage of Linux usage.

Re:9% is a lot

[bninja_penguin]

Well, it's not like I am a manager or anything, and I already run Linux on my PCs, but my Linux plans DID change when SCO started their campaign. I now tell everybody they should consider switching TO Linux, and I tracked down some old versions of it that run on Macintosh 680x0s with hardly any RAM. (I have 32 Macs, most are like LCIIIs, or the like, not many Power PCs) so I can get every single system of mine to run nothing but Linux. I have an Alpha box w/ a dead power supply, but I have a distro of Linux ready to go on it. I've got some Amigas, an AS/400, and enough PC parts to build probably 20 more systems, which, before SCOs thingy, were just sitting in the garage, but now are being assembled, just so I can put Linux on them. I got four systems at work dual booting, and three running nothing but Linux.

Before SCO brought up their little vendetta against Linux, I had two PCs at home running Linux, and one at work dual booting.
So, yeah, it did change my plans. I was content to use my lowly three systems of Linux, but by the years end, I'll have at least 55 running Linux, all but 4 will be NOTHING but Linux!
What do you think about that, Daryl??

Re:Where I work...

[peterprior]

Interesting, where I work (SuSE Linux), we have had people switching to our Enterprise Server from AIX because they are worried about the SCO mess.

Read the Stat The Other Way

[limekiller4]

Not to rain on the parade here but I read that as "9% of current-or-soon-to-be users of Linux are changing their plans about Linux because of SCO. That translates to many, many thousands. That isn't good at all.

Re:Funny

[ajs]

I've read many comments here and in other forums complaining about clients and bosses citing the SCO mess as a reason to put off Linux implementations/rollouts/development

Yep... don't go around thinking that 9% is tiny... it's not!

That means that if there are 100,000 companies considering Linux, 9,000 of them have bought the SCO FUD and are running away screaming.

Where I work, we sit back and watch, because we all knew the day would come when something and staggeringly brilliant as de-commoditizing software was going to have to go through the courts. I see this as stage one in a long series of legal battles over every aspect of the licensing, contractual obligations of contributors, waranty, etc, etc.

I'm not worried, and I continue to work with Linux. In the end, some cases will be won and some lost, but the important ones will be settled out of court or result in corporate buyouts (where I think SCO is aiming to go with this one, but they will fail), and thus leave swords hanging....

I look to this case as a great opportunity. If Open Source gets a big, decisive win, it gains much credibility to weather the next few rounds. If Open Source loses, it gains a small amound of credibility for its ability to rip out code, re-write, re-release and go on with life.

I read it a bit differently.

[theolein]

I see that a number of the respondents are indeed worried about the SCO FUD and are adjusting their perspectives accordingly....

to one of the BSD's.

Note BSD, not microsoft, but *BSD.

I find it quite ironic that the *BSDs, which lost a lot of time and energy and publicity due to the USL suit in the '90s, which ended up favouring Linux, may be the favoured ones in this round of FUD attacks by dead_but_sueing_to_swim crowd.

Re:And the other 9%?

[Laur]

Nope. Because of the GPL, they can't sue a group and not another. And since they won't sue their own customers, Linux users (and distributors) are safe.

Sorry, but this is incorrect, SCO can choose NOT to sue whoever they like while retaining their right to sue others. To use a car analogy (the whole world can be explained with car analogies, right?) if I have two cars, and they get stolen by different people, I can choose not to press charges against one of them while still retaining my right to prosecute the other. I believe that SCO merely said that it wouldn't sue its customers, not that they had a legal right to use the (allegedly) stolen code.

SCO & Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if anyone's noted this yet (I'm too lazy to read through the replies) but SCO's site runs on Linux, and somehow that makes me think they have little faith in their own offerings. Maybe if the court case goes well and they manage to pay off a judge or two the CEO can get away with enough dough to live an affluent, happy life far, far away.

Good man

[DugzDC]

I know we have plenty of great advocates. Let's welcome another:
From the linked article:
Eric O'Dell, senior systems and database administrator, Visionary Networks, Portland, Ore
This is just a sad case of a mismanaged company without any talent or innovation of its own using lawyers to parasitize the IT industry.
Well done sir. Very ballsy, and spot on. Now added to my favourites (sorry, a Scot, so I use the 'u' - I know hot picky you /. guys are about spelling ...)

Re:9% is a lot

[sharkey]

I've seen projects canned for even sillier reasons than that, believe it or not.

I believe it. I was told that I couldn't even test Hot Dog Pro as an HTML editor, because the name is too silly. (Sausage is also a silly name for a serious company) Dreamweaver was the choice, chosen before testing, because it sounded more "professional", and had magazine ads and reviews.