Slashdot Mirror
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!"
Yeah, they still are not going to use linux :)
This is a relief to see that the PHB-types are not buying into the FUD either. I wonder what logic Sontag would come up with to explain that statistic...?
....or something to that effect.
"All Linux users are thieves to begin with, we will crush them with our mighty IP!"
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
What are the other 9% thinking? Does anyone out there believe that SCO's and IBM's contractual dispute can do anything to make Linux liable in any way?
(Event SCO itself said that Linux users are not going to be liable in any case).
Its sad that some people are actually buying into this Microsoft-backed FUD.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I'd be more interested in the 9% of people who said the suit *is* affecting their decisions. What are the reasons behind that response?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I guess that goes to show you - 56.2% of all statistics are untrue.
That survey is of course meaningless unless we can link it to peoples pre-existant deployment plans. If they weren't planning to deploy linux anyway, it doesn't mean much.
Just an obvious point - it's still better than a lot of people saying that they plan to stop using it.
Here is a one line synopsis of the article:
If SCO wins, we'll worry about changing our approach. Since this hasn't occurred, we're not going to act like it already has.
Why would they do anything else? Let's start laying our developers and support teams off because SCO MIGHT be able to shut us down.
Even if SCO wins, the Linux corporations will likely find another path to offer what they've offered in the past: a quality software alternative to windows.
Is this really news?
If a Fortune 500 company is using Linux and SCO prevails, you don't think that's going to prompt the PHBs to dictate a change in OS? Yeah, the geeks in the trenches don't care, but tell that to the company's law department.
BTW, yeah, yeah; If SCO wins, there will be an appeal. However, the damage is already done. What business is going to wait and rely on a higher court overturning the ruling?
... we've been much to busy uninstalling AIX to worry about linux.
That other 1 company is a Microsoft/SCO/Evil company of the week Puppet!
Slashdot really does get around!
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
we're rolling out MORE Linux! Hey, thanks SCO!!
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
To the attention span and the attention to detail :)
that the kind of manager that would implement an
open source solution for a problem would possess.
It's obvious that when you are dealing with a
company already smart enough to pursue a GNU/Linux
solution for a problem, they are going to be smart
enough to see through SCO's obvious bullshit.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
In public SCO will say you should never use Linux . In court, sued for defamation, they will say their advice had no effect.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My company is currently porting our flagship product to Linux (just runs on one commercial Unix based OS at the moment) this is due to overwelming requests for a Linux version from our bluschip client base. The SCO issue has not had the slightest effect on our plans or our clients.
----
of that %19, %100 said noone noticed, even when the SCSI disks gave a last, belated whine and emitted the magic smoke.
another %6 answered that, after numerous beers on a friday night, they had actually urinated on their last remaining SCO server.
of those %6, %35 admitted to accidentally hitting the power supply.
of that %35, %15 said it was the best thrill they had in the past year. The other %65 just clutched their genitalia while answering the question.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
91% will not change their plans.
That means that 9% WILL.
It's probable, based on the nature of the case, that they will not be changing their plans in favor of linux.
Also, of the remaining 91%, how many of them planned to not use Linux at all? If only 9% of IT managers planned to use Linux in the first place, and now 9% of them are changing their minds, then that would indicate that Linux is about to get wiped out. That can't be the case either, but it's one possible interpretation of the figures.
Bottom line: Statistics can be used to make convincing lies. Most surveys are unscientific in the extreme. And SCOX is still a bunch of bastards.
We are decommissioning Unixware boxes and replacing them with Linux as fast as we can!!!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
...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.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
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.
And you shouldn't either. Anyone who makes their business decisions like this based on what SCO has said deserves to lose.
SCO
Linux
Lawsuit
Furthermore, SCO, SCO, GNU/SCO, IBM, Unix, Linux, patents, damn patents, damn the patents, let them eat patents. In other news:
Horse assaulted posmortem
Red cross finds new hemoglobin source in rock quarry
The real message when you read between the lines is one we have all known for a long time. SCO is killing themselves with this suit. Animosity is all they will win whether the case is in their favor or not. They have pissed everyone off.
I am also guessing someday we will find that Microsoft offered it's legal department to help SCO with this. They lose nothing, and COULD eliminate two competitors with one stroke.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Another online survey at Slashdot says 'Fully 24% of People beleive that .NET is the largest threat to humanity.'
In other news, Slashdot editors still insist that if you're using these numbers for anything meaningful, you're insane.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
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...
karma capped
People making REAL business decisions. Not the mythical cave and under-bridge dwellling creatures that tend to inhabit that web site destructive land we call /.
One of my current projects involves moving some old code from Siemens off of SCO boxes, and moving it onto Linux boxes so that we can permanently get rid of SCO. Muahaha. I felt so dirty after touching that SCO machine yesterday though. Eww.
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
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.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
... that CEOs and Presidents will read this article and see that (despite what the /. crowd thinks of statistics) an overwhelming majority isn't changing their plans in responce to this. Keep the CEOs interested and the IT department can play whatever cards it chooses.
Expanding on Jeremy Gross' point, are there any domains in which a purchaser/user of a product which has (allegedly) incorporated others' IP can be held personally liable?
If I buy a CD recorded by a musician who has "sampled" another's song and incorporated in his track, surely I cannot be held liable for this, or even required to return the CD.
If my copy of the New York Times includes and article which the author has plaigarized from another source, I doubt any legal authority is going to "recall" my newspaper, or prosecute me for my quarter investment.
These seem more directly pertinent than the Mazda-Ford analogy, as a Linux distro seems more like a publication than a physical product, though the same principle, I would think, applies.
Perhaps the issue grows slightly murkier in the case of a downloaded copy of Linux; in this case conceivably the argument could be made that the user has personally copied a copyrighted chunk of code. Maybe for thorough self-protection, Linux sysadmins would be best advised to buy an off-the-shelf distro of Linux, to point at if the lawyers ever show up.
If this threat/argument from SCO ends up being found baseless and/or absurd, aren't they in the position of having interfered with the business of several thousand companies via their letters, baselessly and in pursuit of money, i.e. "extortion"?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Man have we been busy... Ever since SCO revoked IBMs license, the PHBs have been freaking out. They gave us 30 days to make the move, we argued that it would probably take two years.
The PHBs got together to discuss it and agreed with us and gave us 30 + 2 days to get it done. We then had to explain the differences between 'day' and 'year', which took a long time because to explain 'day', we had to first get them to understand the difference between 'light' and 'dark'. Boy were they excited when they figured out there actually was a reason behind wearing their stylish wrist devices!!
Then we tangented off to several meeting about finding a reason for the stylish things they tie around their necks. Never were able to figure that one out, even with all us techies there to assist.
But, we are now allowed to come to work naked as long as we have a stylish wrist device!
We now have 13 days remaining to make the switch from AIX. We are simply moving everything to Linux, but putting up a custom message that says "SuperOS" instead of "Linux" or "AIX" and they seem nice and calm again.
Stupid fux...
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.
My
Limekiller
I'm the network tech manager / sysadmin for a small city govt and we had been planning for over a year to migrate away from our present NT4-based network and go to Linux and Samba, but the FUD from this lawsuit has instead convinced the city administration to stop our Linux project dead in its tracks and allocate nearly $100K to "upgrade" (sic) to Windows 2003 instead. It gets even worse... we were also just about to buy a new RS6000/p630 6C4 machine to replace an aging H50 server that runs Oracle, but instead our IT dept is now being micromanaged-ordered to move all the Oracle databases off AIX and onto a Windows box instead, which is going to be real fun, since the financial apps that use those Oracle databases have tons of ksh scripts imbedded in them and I'm going to have to figure out how to port all that stuff to run on a Windows server environment instead. I just hope that the Cygwin environment and bash shell will allow me to get me there.
SCO is literrally the spawn of Microsoft, twice removed on its mother's side. :)
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.
"Note: I'm flaming, but not at you personally."
Woah, I thought that the Internet was supposed to be relatively anonymous... I don't need to know your sexual orientation.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Again, I'm asking for actual legal precedent or trends of this for any domain to which copyright applies.
Continuing my original analogy, despite the fact that recent copies of the New York Times have (as I recall) demonstrably contained plaigarized material, I do not believe the original copyright owner even can demand that I give it back or cease to "use" it. Nor does this make any of the millions of readers outlaws.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
(Appropriate alternative lyrics to "Buddy Holly" by Weezer)
What's with these losers threatening us
Why won't they get a clue
Why are they wasting those legal fees
Instead of inventing something new
Ooh ooh, IBM they dissed
Ooh ooh, now they're really pissed
Ooh ooh... They picked the wrong foe!
SCO: what a bunch of fucking morons
Oh oh fuck their bogus IP claims
I don't care what they say about suing
i don't care 'bout that
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
I know we have plenty of great advocates. Let's welcome another: /. guys are about spelling ...)
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
David Ihnat, consultant, Chicago, IL:... I will never buy an SCO product again; I will never recommend an SCO product to my clients; and I will actively promote replacement of any SCO products I encounter at client sites. And I'm not the only person I've spoken with who feels this way.
So this guy's talking to himself now? These days are dark.
I have just one thing to say to that...
h ah ahaahaaaaa!
Bwhahahahahaahahaahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahaha
FreeBSD alive. What a joke.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I figure a fat penguin is too busy eating fish to do much damage to my precious hardware. A mischievous daemon, on the other hand...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10