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SCO's Other Investor: Sun Microsystems
Vicegrip writes "Apparently Sun not only bought extra licenses from SCO, but also obtained the option to buy a nice stake in the company: 'The pact, signed earlier this year, expanded the rights Sun acquired in 1994 to use Unix in its Solaris operating system. But there's more to the relationship: SCO also granted Sun a warrant to buy as many as 210,000 shares of SCO stock at $1.83 per share as part of the licensing deal, according to a regulatory document filed Tuesday.'" A reader points out Ransom Love's 2000 Linuxworld keynote speech.
you should also note that the only reason for the expansion of the license was to allow sun to do intel hardware drivers under Solaris..soemthing they could have adpoted from Linux without any costs what so ever..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
No, how about I pay you $100,000 for something you have with a market value of $100,000. Now, let's also throw in the moon clause. OK, there's the position Sun is in.
Read. Comprehend. Post.
Even the largest companies who need big iron systems rarely go to Sun anymore.
What are you talking about?
I happen to do business with some of the largest companies on the block, and I've seen their server rooms, and I've seen their Sun Ultra 15K's. Sun isn't selling big iron to the largest companies? Yeah, right!
Well yes, they aren't making "Sun Linux" any more. However it was just Red Hat under the covers. Now they just call it RedHat. Move along, nothing to see here.
Coincidence?
yes
Except they announced nothing of the sort. Sun announced that they were going with 'Industry Standard' Linux distributions on the X86 servers they are shipping as customers weren't really interested in the Sun specific distribution that was 'Sun Linux 5.0'. On the Intel based kit they now sell you can buy and get support for Red Hat directly from Sun, or you can go with Solaris x86 and obviously get support for that too. Otherwise you are free to put whatever you like on the boxes.
No. They just droped SUN Linux, which was a rebadged redhat (because people didn't want another distribution). Sun's linux program still runs, and they've recently released more intel servers running linux.
In other news senior VP bails from SCO, demonstrating a likely opinion of advanced technologists there about the merits of the case and the future of the company.
This post was not intended to be funny, but only off topic, since I have been repeatedly unsuccessful with story submissions that actually contain significant new interesting information about the case.
That Sun was trumpetting their status as a SCO licensee of Unix in disregard for any solidarity with Unix or Linux vendors or users was obvious, and this "revelation" was not a suprise in the least. It just means that Sun gave them a small amount of money a bit more recently.
The Ransom Love Linuxworld speech where Caldera explicitly states that it is donating code to Linux so that it can scale for high-end business uses and that Caldera was committed with IBM to making Linux scale to 64-bit as part of Project Monterey and IA-64 Linux is evidence where I come from. It's evidence that SCO has filed legal documents that it knows explicitly are false.
No. It would require you to buy all new boxes from Sun which is exactly what Sun wants you to do anyway!
AIX itself wasn't bad, but the bank had a bad case of management consultants who told them that Sun was in fashion. Now it seems that Linux is in.
See my journal, I write things there
Sun have grudgingly accepted that linux has a place in the datacenter (where the bulk of Sun's market is these days), they sell 1U boxes as web server
I'd say that Sun have the money to burn to license the IP and avoid being hit next by SCO (remember, Sun contribute to lots of open source projects and they distribute GNOME with Solaris), AND get to poke IBM in the eye with a burnt stick
This actually IS available on Linux systems, albeit by a third party (Well, there's a couple of companies I can think of off the top of my head - Veritas and Bakbone).
Before you read too much into this, you should read the article. Sun needed to purchase new licensing rights to some x86 drivers in order to run Solaris for Intel on their new Xeon servers. That's right, Sun now sells Xeon servers. These kind of licensing agreements happen all the time between companies that need hardware compatibility with the latest and greatest devices.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
The linked source is for a linux kernel. The code in contention is Unix System V.
That's how. One code is GPL (Linux), another is not (Unix).
Linux != Unix
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
when doing a careful examination of the SCO Group's SEC filings, at the end of March, these people purchased at $2.07 per share:
HUNSAKER (VP SALES) purchased 100,000
MCBRIDE (CEO) purchased 200,000
OLSON (VP) purchased 50,000
BENCH (CFO) purchased 100,000
BROUGHTON (VP INT'L SALES) purchased 50,000
now, between June and July, here's more activity:
HUNSAKER sold 10,000 shares at around $11 per share,
BENCH sold 14,000 shares at around $11 per share,
OLSON sold 6000 shares at around $9 per share,
BROUGHTON sold 15,000 shares at around $11 per share.
now, things are a bit more clear, are they not? this stock is going for a plummet, and most of the officers of SCO Group knew that it was going to be a quick, PR ride to the top and back down again.
they loaded up, and let it go.
now, they were able to do this at the expense of running Linux thru the gutter a bit.
here is where this is going: i don't know much about investing, and even less about 'shorting' a stock. could someone here on Slashdot with experience perhaps give me (us?) a clue on going about this? i firmly believe that this stock is on it's way down, and it would be nice to profit a bit from all this built up anger i've had regarding this fiasco.
I don't think so. You can distribute any GPL product with your OS without making it open.
They would have to make public the modifications they did on the driver itself to integrate it to the kernel, but not the kernel itself!
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The code in contention is Unix System V.
Is that a fact?.
I suppose someone ought to tell the guys at SCO that, because they seem blissfully unaware.
SCO has made allegations that Linux contains SCO intellectual property. As SCO is distributing Linux, and the GPL only allows distribution of GPL code as long as all parts of the combined work are distributable under the terms of the GPL that means that any alleged SCO intellectual property included in Linux is distributable under the terms of the GPL. Otherwise SCO would be in violation of the GPL and engaging in copyright violation because they would distributing Linux without permission.
It has no bearing on the SCO vs. IBM case, but it means that SCO's allegations with regard to Linux are irrelevant.
It also means that Suns claims as far as their Unix license would affect their Linux distribution are also irrelevant. Sun can have as many licenses as they wish from SCO to distribute SCO IP in Sun Linux, but the GPL itself does not allow distribution of Sun Linux in that case, unless the whole is distributable under the terms of the GPL.
>>Sun made this deal before SCO whent nuts
Timeline:
December: SCOX started claiming that their code was in Linux. Suggested they may start charging Linux unsers $99 per CPU.
January: SCOX insiders gave themselves a buttload of options for $0.001 each.
February: SUNW starts secretly supporting SCOX, and gets a buttload of warrents.
March: SCOX officially files a lawsuit against IBM.
May: MSFT starts supporting SCOX's efforts.
June: SCOX is now leagally able to make good on their threat to cancle IBM's UNIX license. SCO could go to court and ask for a temporty immediate injunction that would forbid IBM from selling AIX. SCOX does not do this. Instead SCOX claims that as far as they are concerned, all versions of AIX are illegal.
Perhaps that is why SCO's Senior Vice President of Engineering and Global Services,
appears to be bailing out.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
ummmmm that is incorrect. Why do people keep turning the GPL into something its not. It is not against business. Richard Stallman said that himself. You can use a GPL'ed code in proprietary you just have to acknowledge that you are using the GPL'ed code and have that "portion" open source. Linksys uses a version of the linux kernel in their wireless router. That doesnt mean they have to open all the source their firmware.
Read Richard Stallmans book, Free Software Free Society and you will understand the GPL and the GNU better.
75% of all statistics are made up!
For me, that would be the equivalent of dinner and a movie, not a new home in the Hollywood hills and a new Hummer.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
2001 - 18,250M
2002 - 12,496M
2003 - 11,500M (consensus estimate)
Meanwhile their stock has plummeted from 65 (Aug '00) to under 5 now.
Yes, Sun is hurting badly. And competition from Linux and AIX may be an important factor. But that is no excuse for this underhanded behavior! If SUN had had admitted to purchasing the license and come out against SCO FUD, I could forgive them. Instead, SUN has been milking the bogus SCO allegations for all they are worth. Sun even took out a full-page add in the Wall Street Journal casting aspersions at Linux and AIX. Now we find out that they had yet another ulterior motive for this - a secret agreement agreement with SCO allowing SUN to cheaply purchase and then sell FUD-inflated shares!
Here is another article that just came out regarding the SUNW/SCOX partnership. It offers more silly quotes from SCO's Blake Stowell whining that IBM "is continuing to ship AIX, and ignoring the fact that we've terminated their rights to it." Poor little SCO! Mean IBM is ignoring them!
Well that is debatable. Any software that is derived from GPL'd code must be put under the GPL license. The question is: If your code links to a piece of GPL'd code does that mean that the GPL'd code has become part of it and therefore your code is derived from the GPL'd code?
Drivers must link with the kernel so most feel that they must be GPL'd. There are companies that put out proprietary drivers NVIDIA etc. If you use these drivers they "taint" your kernel. Most people don't care.
I am of the opinion that exceptions need to be made for drivers. If the Linux community wants companies to support their kernels then we need to allow proprietary drivers to link with the kernel.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!