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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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
... 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?
One example I was given was oral sex.
Who's giving this example, where do I sign up, and do I have to sign an NDA?
Read, L
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...
Note: I'm flaming, but not at you personally.
These are people responding to an internet poll. It doesn't matter what sort of business decisions the respondents control. Polls taken over the Internet have zero scientific validity. They can be rigged. They can be stuffed with ballots. People who vote will forward the poll to people who see the issue the way they do.
Above all, they aren't taking a random sample of the relevant population. People self-select. Even barring all the other problems, this one alone destroys the validity of the poll.
If you're trying to use this poll to figure out how SCO is doing in the court of public opinion, you may as well fall back on tea leaves.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!