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.

Comments

Newsflash!

[Rogerborg]

All for-profit companies will ultimately become dumb and/or evil. Were we under the impression that it was otherwise? With cross licensing and horse trading over patents and IP, any rot that sets in will quickly spread to pollute everyone in what is, after all, a small and incestuous industry.

And you Red Hat users can wipe that self satisfied smirk off of your faces, because you're next. Yeah, "defensive" patents. Good job Red Hat will never run out of money or get bought out by someone less scrupulous, eh? That'll never happen, because, uh... the Magic Linux Pixies will rally round and stop it.

Look, for those not getting it, here's how it works. If you have code that you wrote with your own hands on your own time without copying anyone else, then that belongs to you. If you have code that you obtained rights to through a mutually agreed contract with a tangible transfer of benefit in the other direction, then you're probably all right in the short term - assuming that the rights belonged to whoever you obtained them from.

Under any other circumstances - open source licenses, commercial EULAs without an explicit mutual contract, code obtained from a third party, code "based on" someone else's - you're only borrowing it until the original owner wants it back, and comes knocking with his lawyers to get it. Go ahead and use it for hobby projects, but if you try and build a business on it, be aware that you're on borrowed time.

Look at it this way; if you were to buy a pure linux distributor tomorrow, what would their assets be? What do they own? Their office hardware. Their installer, maybe. The contents of their knowledge base. Their logo. Goodwill. That's it. Most Linux vendors have the same assets as Napster, i.e. a name and maybe a smattering of easily replicatable technology. They do nothing that Sun or IBM can't do bigger and better if they see the benefit to doing it.

You'd better believe that I know what I'm talking about. I work for a tech company that's set up to be sold, either as a going concern, or to one of our rivals in order to kill us (hey, the money is the same colour either way). We perform regular audits on our code base and tools to ensure that nothing - nothing - written outside the company or not unambiguously licensed through contract has got in there. As we're reminded over and over, the company is the code base. That, plus our reputation, is our sum worth, and the reputation is only a way to bring bidders to the table. The code base is the chest of gold.

Sun gets this. Microsoft gets this. IBM pretty much gets it, and is arguing out the details with SCO, who definitely get it. Upwardly mobile outfits like Red Hat get it, which is why they are desparately trying to obtain some IP leverage of their own. Little penny ante outfits (by which I mean every other linux distributor) can either get it, or get swatted when one of the big boys gets tired of them buzzing around their head.

I know that's not what linux hackers want to hear, but it's the brutal truth. Don't get too attached to any particular pure-linux distro, because their days are numbered. There might only be room for one or two linux distributors, and that might be Sun and IBM, not Mandrake and SuSE.