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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
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
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.
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
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
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!
>>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.