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Why SCO UNIX Is A Bad Idea
Ashcrow writes "SCO UNIX has long boasted its 'true UNIX' code base, but is that really the case? A story running at The Jem Report looks into SCO's claims and holds it up to other UNIX variants to try and find validity for SCO's claims." The author has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but worth reading for the comparison of various *nix's.
The article is missing the single largest UNIX distribution in terms of licenses shipped, OS X. Of course this begs the argument made on Slashdot before, but given that I run much *nix code on my OS X boxes, many with a simple recompile, it's UNIX to me.
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This article has one of its most important facts wrong. In the list of UNIX operating systems, there's no mention of IRIX, which is a UNIX98-certified and Open Group approved UNIX operating system.
I quit reading at that point. If the author can't be bothered to get the most basic (and trivially verifiable) facts right, why shoudl I waste my time reading what he has to say?
SCO didn't have a hand in any of the code in question; they bought it.
That's an important point, IMHO.
If this lawsuit was about AT&T suing IBM for their misuse of UNIX technology, I wouldn't mind so much; AT&T gave us Unix, and they'd (hypothetically) just be looking for a little compensation. I still wouldn't like it, but at least I could understand "where they were coming from", so to speak. But because it is SCO doing the sueing, I am not at all impressed.
Basically, SCO is a company that has done nothing good; they having not done any hard work, they have not contributed anything noteworthy to society, they just haven't done anything positive, and now they're looking to get paid for it.
Perhaps if SCO had actually done some innovating, instead of just whining like a little baby, I might be a little more compassionate for them.
That is more or less why I hate SCO.
There is something else of import in this. Back in the days of the at&t/bsd debacle something interesting happened. Apparently Novell asked for the details of the findings to be sealed. What could this mean? Why would novell do that? I have my suspicions, if a may wax conspiracy for a moment...
Its known that whole pieces of 'cloth' were taken, we really arent sure how much, but as the settlement fell out, it seems like a lot. My suspicion is that the judgment was sealed to keep the customers from knowing how much of what was begin sold was really available for free. Why would the BSD crowd allow this? I also suspect they wanted to have their project left well enough alone and couldn't care less about what the other guys passed off to their deep pocketed clients.
So we are kind of left with a mystery. How much of SCO unix is really unix.. and how much ( if any) is BSD? Does it have any effect on the claim? If it does will it turnout that SCO/Caldera bought a load of goods, so to speak? Tainted by thievery in the past? This plot twist could make this from messy into a cesspool.
AT&T took a lot of code from BSD and stripped off the copyright notices off, and incorporated it into there codebase. There is conjecture, that the clean "rework" of UNIX that BSD did ended up getting a lot incorporated into AT&T's UNIX. BSD at some point, removed all of the original AT&T code they licensed. It's my understanding that the court agreement was there were 8 files that didn't get re-written. That's way BSD 4.4Lite is, it's the BSD source, with the 8 files removed. 386BSD is the BSD that caused the original lawsuite. It was picked up and turned into FreeBSD after the original maintainer just stopped responding to communication or releasing stuff. I'm not sure which code base NetBSD started from, and OpenBSD forked off NetBSD when Theo had his spat with the NetBSD core.
Thus it might be that SCO owns the tube of toothpaste, that the BSD guys squirted all the paste out in the early 90's. Novell could have asked to seal all the evidence, that the toothpaste is all gone. It's mostly based on urban legend, and rumor. There might be some truth to it, who knows, the documents are sealed.
I believe that's the conjecture he's talking about.
Kirby
I did not believe anybody on Slashdot had read the scifi authors who extrapolate the human consequences to technnology.
I avoid posting to the "stories" about best fiction, because they tend to honor people like Ian McDonald. I am reading his books now, and they remind me of early C.J.Cherryh, before she learned that the story is more important than the setting.
Heinlein extrapolated the consequences of technology very well, and wrote entertaining fiction about them. The problem with reading his stories today is that he miscalled the future of technology. "The Roads Must Roll" is a great story, but we bypassed the tech. His first sale, "Lifeline", was written in 1939 about the corporate reaction to new technology, and is relevant, even if the particular technology has (still) yet to be invented.
Asimov did the same, but the Slashdotters seem to prefer the Foundation series, where technology (psychohistory) learns how to control people, rather than the Robot novels where people are adjusting to technology (robots).
IMO, Robinson is the best writer of this type of fiction today. "Melancholy Elephants" was written in 1984, and summarizes the entire case against perpetual copyright in just over 20 pages. I kept wanting to scream at the posters and legal people who are arguing about copyrights while avoiding the main point. Did Lessig submit this story as evidence?
Art is about discovering pieces enjoyable by humans, and humans have serious limitations on types of input. Eventually everything likable will be discovered. But humans need art, and if we do not allow the repeat of discoveries, calling anything reused to be "derivative" and illegal, we will lose a major part of being human.
The problem is new, since the ability to record art is new. The printing press is 500 years old.
- Recorded music is around 100 years old. New generations have learned to like new instruments (electric guitar), which has helped. But if "On Top of Old Smoky" was not public domain, we could not have the theme to "Chariots of Fire".
- Moving pictures are younger, and the combination with sound is very new. Yet Disney is busy reusing the old stories because there are not that many stories that will appeal to human beings.
Even Spider Robinson is moving away from discovering new ideas and spending more time telling stories. His short story collections of early work are incredibly full of new ideas. He even found a new twist on time travel. Now he spends less on finding original ideas and more time telling each story. "Callahan's Key" milked one more out of the Callahan series (Thought-provoking AND funny: read them all!). "Free Lunch" took one cool concept (living in an amusement park) and filled a book. He is living proof of the concepts in "Melancholy Elephants".
Anyway, this is all off-topic and will probably be moderated to oblivion. I may repost it the next time we discuss copyrights.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
The question in my mind is, if the findings of the AT&T/BSD case are relevant--and I suspect they are-- does that mean they can be unsealed for this case?
Can we finally find out that bit of history?
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
In looking over these tables, one can't help but wonder why SCO's UnixWare and OpenServer are even mentioned. They offer nothing over GNU/Linux, *BSD, BSD/OS, and Solaris, yet UnixWare is astonishingly more expensive than its competitors.
In every single instance that I've seen SCO installed, it's been running a vertical market application running on unibase. The single biggest factor driving SCO sales has been a varitable legion of programmers and resellers who are making money from programs that were written 10 years ago when SCO made some amount of sense.
Given that the programs are unique to Unibase, and given that Unibase runs just fine under Linux and has for some years, SCO's market (which is small businesses that are just large enough to spend a few thousand on a computer system up to ~$50M/year businesses that aren't large enough to buy a real Unix system) is running to Linux. I've seen a few VAR's holding out on SCO, but very few and dwindling.
I have one client still using SCO, and they're doing all they can to leave it. I've been out in the real world as a consultant for 9 years now and in that time I have never (not even one time) heard of or observed a new SCO installation, nor have I found anybody who has even considered it.
SCO was basically dead a long time ago, I guess nobody bothered to tell them.
Do you have ESP?