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FSF, GCC, and SCO Compiler Support
Ancipital was one of several who noted that a
special patch is going into GCC. The file is README.SCO, and it is a short writeup about the SCO situation written by the FSF. It stops short of demanding that GCC developers strip SCO support from the compiler, and says more will be announced before the next compiler release.
They should have just removed the support. I don't see how it would harm normal people, as they can keep on using older compilers.
Anyway, this is the right direction. I just hope projects can strip out SCO support without breaking much good code.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Of course, the output of this compiler is not executable code. It produces lawsuits instead.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
SCO don't care about GCC support of their OS, they do not are a software company anymore but a litigation company.
Stripping SCO support from GCC will only harm SCO's old customers who don't have anything to do with SCO evil.
it threatens to remove support for SCO Unix, then says it won't.
what's the point?
shameless karma plug for the coward:
The FSF has asked me to check in this file on both the branch and the
mainline.
Please direct any questions or comments to the FSF.
--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
2003-08-03 Mark Mitchell
* README.SCO: New file.
===
As all users of GCC will know, SCO has recently made claims concerning
alleged copyright infringement by recent versions of the operating
system kernel called Linux. SCO has made irresponsible public
statements about this supposed copyright infringement without
releasing any evidence of the infringement, and has demanded that
users of Linux, the kernel most often used with the GNU system, pay
for a license. This license is incompatible with the GPL, and in the
opinion of the Free Software Foundation such a demand unquestionably
violates the GNU General Public License under which the kernel is
distributed.
We have been urged to drop support for SCO Unix from this release of
GCC, as a protest against this irresponsible aggression against free
software and GNU/Linux. However, the direct effect of this action
would fall on users of GCC rather than on SCO. For the moment, we
have decided not to take that action. The Free Software Foundation's
overriding goal is to protect the freedom of the free software
community, including developers and users, but we also want to serve
users. Protecting the community from an attack sometimes requires
steps that will inconvenience some in the community. Such a step is
not yet necessary, in our view, but we cannot indefinitely continue to
ignore the aggression against our community taken by a party that has
long profited from the commercial distribution of our programs. We
urge users of SCO Unix to make clear to SCO their disapproval of the
company's aggression against the free software community. We will
have a further announcement concerning continuing support of SCO Unix
by GCC before our next release.
...all programs compiled with the -sco flag will now start with a nag screen urging you to pay $699 to legalize your software?
The only thing better than stripping out the support would be generating code that would execute slightly wrongly when run on an SCO OS. Adjusting small decimal numbers just a bit, corrupting a database here and there... every 3 years.
;-).
Talk about Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I do not believe this is the right way to approach the issue. Let them work this ugly legalese - in courts. How are we any different from Microsoft, if we happen to "exclude" some support from projects because we do not like the receipient? I do not say "let's all develop code for SCO support", but please do not remove any *existing* code.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.
The README suggests that removing support for SCO unix from GCC would hurt SCO's users, but not SCO. I disagree: If SCO's users can't develop software for their chosen platform anymore, then they will likely choose another platform, and SCO will be the one hurting in the end (which is the desired effect). Of course, there are other compilers out there, but the best ones are limited by platform (icc comes to mind) or can't very well just be a drop in replacement for gcc (everything else).
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
Exactly that attitude is what the FSF had to have had when they decided to write this "patch" Let the Stone throwing begin. Everyone knows SCO is full of shit why cripple GCC's support for SCO's Unix just because it can be done? Is this going to become a standard practice you done did us wrong now its your turn?
Any chance we can stop giving this corporate protection racket so much free publicity?
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
There is no reason to continue to support SCO. In fact, I think this action is immediately necessary to let potential licensees of SCO know that they will NOT have a free compiler if they buy SCO/Unix.
There is no reason not to defend the free software community against the illegal actions of SCO. This aggression will not stand.
SCO has profiteered off of the goodwill and charity of millions of programmers across the world. How are they repaying you? By suing you into oblivion and STEALING your code!
This is not the time to be benevolent and charitable. This is the time to be assertive and not let them bully you around.
I strongly urge the likes of the FSF and RedHat, who has already established a legal "defense" fund to also establish a legal "offense" fund and start fighing SCO for violating the GPL and the Copyrights of every developer that had their code distributed by SCO in violation of the GPL.
Everyone is so worried that the GPL won't hold water in court. If you're so worried, than it won't. The time to test the GPL is NOW, so that any weaknesses can be found and corrected.
SCO needs to be taken seriously no matter how irrational or stupid their claims become. Remember that the people they pack juries with are usually just as stupid and irrational.
SCO-support?
;)
this should be an OPTION!
why did they remove NetBEUI support from linux?
why not keep it and leave it as an other feature/option?
we should start archiving antic stuff, just so our kids won't programm NetBEUI from scartch again (example).
i guess this is the down-side of having a monolithic kernel. but then i can compile in whatever i want to use and get a mini-monolithic kernel
www.sledgehammer-tactics.net
Might cause SCO's clients to put some pressure on them in regards to the current action SCO is taking...
- 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
- 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
Does this mean the FSF is no longer open source compatible? For the knee-jerkers out there, this is not a troll, it is a serious question. The issue is that Free software should be free, warts and all. Unintended consequences aside, you can't just remove the right to use GCC of any organisation that uses SCO software, it's not right....The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
SCO doesn't have any developers anyway and they certainly don't need to have a good c complier. Let them eat AT&T.
Instead of striving for the best possible compiler and tools for the open source community, it's better to engage in a pissing match with SCO? Wouldn't it, perhaps, be better just to keep things moving forward?
We must take the higher ground and turn the other cheek, lest we threaten the very trust upon which Open Source is built.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Why is it an achievement to "cripple... ...the BSDs"? Not that they have been. And when was windows crippled? Is this a magical post sent back from the future to save mankind?
Do like for your neighbor's dog to come over and crap in your yard? If you let it go every day for a week and they try make it stop, you will have a tough job. If the first dog feels free to come over and poop away, then other dogs will start to feel that they also have the right to use your yard as their own personal pooping grounds. How long before you can't freely use your own yard because it is like a mine field?
You wait just as long as you like to speak up about what SCO is pulling, but shut the fuck up about people that know they need to speak up now to protect their rights.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Seriously, this is exactly the type of thing that will make people look at open source / free software and scream:"Look, they are against making money! Scumbag Communistic hippies!!"
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
...and maybe they won't notice? (-: deem g/d/r included :-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
... is this SCO's property, too?
No, it's just "we don't like SCO at the moment, but might make it harder for SCO's userbase to use our tools - but not just yet."
Well, he could release a new version of the kernel with only code in it that Linus wrote, and then change the licence. But that would be a lot of work. (rewrite most of the kernel)
So, to release under a new licence, he would have to ask permission from all contributors to change the licence. There are simply too many contributers to do that.
First of all, what fucking battle? Secondly, who's "we"?
While "we" are at it, why not cripple all the open software so that it will not interoperate properly with those evil, nasty companies? Surely that will coer... eh, help people to "get it" and migrate to free software.
Oh, wait. Wasn't that exactly what Microsoft is being accused of doing?!
BOO! TERRO
Looks to me like they are raising the issue to see the upshot before they actually do it.
I wish they would. It would be quite appropriate in this case. SCO is certainly pressuring companies to drop free operating systems for their product, let's play the game their way for a bit. Nothing to be ashamed of there.
I have a feeling this will cause more longterm harm for SCO than this lawsuit, since this cuts SCO off from many of the GNU software packages out there. For that matter, things like Xfree86, KDE and GNOME won't compile either. They could use older compilers - for a while. Ultimately this will force most businesses to reconsider keeping SCO in any way, shape, or form.
I imagine they could either use something like Intel's compiler, or hack up their own, but either solution would be a big problem for them. I am thinking support costs and ensuring compatibility with common packages.
I don't see this as any negative whatsoever. Keeping the support is playing 'nice guy' when the opposing party is pulling out all the stops to screw over OSS. It's just plain foolish.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The GPL explicitly forbids that. ANYONE can use the code.
But GCC shouldn't remove SCO support for reasons of pique or spite. As other posters have said, it won't hurt SCO one bit, but to do so would make GCC, FSF, and the entire free/open software community look petty, and perhaps untrustworthy. GNU software has a long history of running on unsupportive or openly hostile platforms (i.e. windows) and its continuing to do so gives users of those platforms an incremental upgrade-path to freedom. Any action like this, however justified it might feel, would do much more to harm innocent SCO customers and the entire free software community's reputation.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
Just a question.
say SCO is right, and all infringing code is revealed. Once that code is replaced, is anyone (or company) still liable for the previous infringement?
I just don't understand their motivation (other than money of course..) for suing first before actually co-operating to get the infringed code removed.
this README dosnt say to strip support at all.. it just says its been urged.. and as such the README states this will only effect the end users not SCO..
moo
The FSF need not (and should not) remove SCO support from GCC. Indeed, as pointed out in this comment, it would be against FSF policy. The announcement itself, however, spreads fear, uncertainty, and doubt. One can argue whether the FSF should engage in FUD tactics at all, but it is worth noting that no action beyond the announcement itself is necessary.
Yeah, but I'm not so sure that SCO actually want customers anymore. They know that their market share is falling, acting the bully isn't going to change that. I reckon all this lawsuit stuff is just their dying throes, in which case hurting SCO users won't really have any impact on SCO.
gcc is still Open Source. They would not be placing any additional restrictions on the use of gcc, so anybody could create a patch for gcc to make it work again. They would simply be choosing to remove support for SCO Unix from the mainline gcc source, so it would no longer work "out of the box". Besides, they havent actually removed support yet, though they have hinted they may do in the future if SCO continues its behaviour.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Your problem is with the officials, not the inhabitants. All you would achieve is to turn sympathetic users of GCC into your sworn enemy. At what gain?
Many companies use proprietary technology. Some misappropriate Free Software, others allow it to mingle with their own. When a misappropriation takes place, our action need to be litigation, not misguided populist sentiment.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Seriously though, the one thing that surprises me about this SCO thing most is the fact that I'm still interested in even more stories. Why is it that I'm not yet bored? Apparently many other other slashdotters too are still interested, judging by the number of posters for each news item.
I see your point. However, it could be that it's because SCO is seen as being in violation of the GPL themselves - by charging users for using the Linux kernel.
Perhaps this is a question for good 'ol Bruce. :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
This bluster on the part of the GCC developers serves only SCO. Cutting support would make them into a victim in the public eye.
Better to let them die on their own, and keep your own hand free from the blood.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Saying they're not removing support for the time being is "childish"?
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
...aggression against our community taken by a party that has long profited from the commercial distribution of our programs.
What's wrong with commercial distribution? Isn't one of the benefits of free software the right to charge for it as a commercial product if you darn well please? Red Hat makes a pretty good business doing that, and no one would call them Evil.
I think better wording may have been proprietarization of the free software.
Best read in good ol' Monaco 9 point.
KDE 3.2 came out with all the new goodies. Mr Mcbride tried to compile it.
l @uware:$ tar xzjvfaocm kde-3.2.tar.gz
darl@uware:$ wget ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/3.2/kde-3.2.tar.gz
dar
darl@uware:$ cd kde3.2
darl@uware:$./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
checking architecture... i686
checking for compiler... GCC 3.4
checking for Operating system... Unixware
*** Fatal Error ***
GCC 3.4 no longer supports Unixware for legal reasons. To obtain a licence to compile on Unixware please pay $699 for a licence from the GCC foundation.
You could stay with kde 3.1 and gcc 3.3, but you would miss out on all the goodies such as Keramik 2, hyperkaramba, Fast OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 and Gimp with CMYK support
*** End fatal error messsage ***
darl@uware:$ rpm -e gcc-3.4 kde
darl@uware:$ rpm -Uvh twm.rpm gcc-1.0.rpm
This goes against what I believed was the reason for gcc in the first place: choice. This is a standard Micro$oft strategy, keeping developers locked by limiting choice. Even despite SCO's evilness, why punish developers/users who are innocent?
It also kinda plays into SCO's hands, i.e. if they were smart enough they could market their own compiler with plenty of "useful", platform specfic features... But I suppose they'd have to prove their OS worth first.
What's next no support for Windoze, because MS believe Open Source is un-American?
"Ceilean Súil an ní ná feiceann..."
Why not, as an interim measure, simply comment out a vital portion of code in a header file. Cause GCC to fail when run under SCO systems, until the user reads the README.SCO file, and uncomments the code. Repeat the warning in a comment in the header file, at the point where the code was commented out.
This way, SCO users will not have to be punished, and GCC will not technically be providing support for SCO out of the box. When the user makes the proper change to allow GCC to work under SCO, they'll learn about the crap SCO is pulling.
Want to put a warning shot across their bow? This would do it.
Visit Lockjaw's Lair. He won't bite.
Saying that we are going to waste time removing support that already exists because we do not like what SCO has done would look childish to many observers. The message seems like 'you cannot play with us any more'. It would not disturb SCO in the slightest, as any customer crazy enough to buy a SCO license (or SCO maintenance contract) now would not be deterred by the fact that they cannot use leading edge features of the GCC compiler. All it would do is make FSF look unprofessional.
s/long profited/generated revenue/
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
SCOs customers are a miniscule source of profit anyway. Their customer base is tiny and shrinking. No one with half a brain has bought it in years, there install base is mostly very old installations that are only there because no one wants to break a working system.
Trying to coerce people like that usually backfires. The people still using SCO, all 10 of them, are already working on installing Linux or *BSD instead. No need to antagonise them. They didn't file the lawsuits, and they didn't buy from the company calling itself SCO in the first place anyway - they bought from what is now Tarantella and while you might not like old SCO either, they're certainly on a different plane from Darl & Co.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Sounds like a technological fix to a legal problem. Not good. Makes it worse.
Suck it up and remember we are Ghandi here, not Hitler.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Well that depends on whether or not SCO's operating systems are a part of their business plan any more. A lot of people would argue that they are just a lawsuit company now.
There's a big problem with this proposed action though. What message does it send to people who happen to be using SCO, and decided upon Free Software (GCC) for their compiler? Essentially, they are getting the message "you are using an operating system we don't like, so we'll leave you high and dry". It's Free Software, so it's not as bad as when a proprietary vendor drops support, but it's still a big business risk.
We don't want to give the impression that you can't depend on Free Software unless you buy into the whole philosophy and only use FSF-approved operating systems. I think they have done the right thing by making a public issue out of this before actually doing anything, it lets people plan ahead in case this goes ahead, and it gives end-users a chance to talk to SCO about it (if they aren't already).
I've seen a lot of messages here advocating doing something that 'would hurt SCO' like removing support for SCO systems in the GCC compiler. Besides the fact that this is stooping to their level, it would also have no effect on SCO at all.
Why? Because SCO is no longer a technology company. Their entire business plan is now built around forcing, via the courts, businesses to pay them for software developed and distributed by others. I really doubt they are planning much revenue from sales of their current products, much less continuing to maintain and improve those products in order to maintain their market position.
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
In point of fact, paying The SCO Group for a licence makes your software illegal, since applying their licence contradicts the GPL the software is distributed under.
BTW, how much am I bet that the Fortune 500 company in question is Microsoft?
Maybe we should also add a --borg flag which triples the size of the binary, makes it crash randomly every day or so, causes it to repeatedly try to contact servers in the messenger.hotmail.com and msgr.hotmail.com domains, add lots of N's and X's to any webserver logs it can find and open an RPC listener?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
To the humor impaired, please read the dates :)
/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --
/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --
SCO Announces Availability of Intellectual Property License for C++
Monday April 1 2006, 4:15 ET
LINDON, Utah, Apr. 1
The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX), the owner and licensor of C++, today announced the availability of the SCO Intellectual Property License for C++. The run-time license permits the use of SCO's intellectual property, in binary form only, as contained in C++ distributions. By purchasing a SCO Intellectual Property License, customers avoid infringement of SCO's intellectual property rights using C++. Because the SCO license authorizes run-time use only, customers also comply with the General Public License, under which GCC is distributed.
SCO announced in March that it had registered the copyrights to C and C++ with the U.S. Copyright office and that it would offer licenses to cure the SCO IP infringement issues for GCC and C++ compilers. Beginning this week, SCO will start meeting with commercial C++ customers to present the details of this right to use SCO intellectual property binary licensing program.
Pricing and Availability
SCO will be offering an introductory license price of $699 for compiling a single C++ source file through July 15th, 2006. Pricing for multiple source code files, C programs, Java programs and C# will also be available. C++ users who are interested in additional information or purchasing an IP License for C++ should contact their local SCO sales representative or call SCO at 1-800-726-8649 or visit our web site at http://www.sco.com/scosource.
For more information on the SCO Intellectual Property License for C++, contact SCO by calling (800) 726-8649 or visit the SCO Web site at http://www.sco.com/scosource/gcclicense.html .
About SCO
The SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX) helps millions of customers in more than 82 countries to grow their businesses everyday. Headquartered in Lindon, Utah, SCO has a worldwide network of more than 11,000 resellers and 4,000 developers. SCO Global Services provides reliable localized support and services to partners and customers. For more information on SCO products and services, visit http://www.sco.com .
SCO, IBM, Red Hat, Linux, UNIX, C++ and the associated logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of The SCO Group, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other brand or product names are or may be trademarks of, and are used to identify products or services of, their respective owners.
SOURCE SCO Group
SCO Files Lawsuit Against FSF, ISO, ANSI and Bjarne Stroustrup
SCO files trillion dollar lawsuit for misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract
Monday February 1 2006, 4:15 ET
LINDON, Utah, Feb. 1
LINDON, Utah-February 1, 2006-The SCO(R) Group (SCO) (Nasdaq: SCOX), the owner of the C++. Linux and UNIX operating systems, announced today that it has filed legal actions against the Free Software Foundation (FSF), ISO, ANSI and Bjarne Stroustrup in the State Court of Utah, for misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract. The complaint alleges that the defendants made concentrated efforts to improperly destroy the economic value of C++, particularly C++ on Intel, to...
Meanwhile, SCO wonders why they should care that someone is taking a basketball away from a baseball match...
And, in other news, RMS threatens to hold his breath until SCO does what he wants.
Depends on what you mean by use. Anyone can use it 'binary only run only' like SCO is claiming to license. However, modifying and distributing are different situations. Since SCO is openly in breach of the GPL, they have long since lost all legal right to do that. As I understand their products contain substantial cut and pastes from GPL sources particularly in the Linux compatibility sections, they can and should be sued for that.
They can still 'look at' GPL code, but if they copy it they're violating copyright.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
May I suggest you post about things you know something about next time, instead of talking out of your ass?
So, should they remove support for Windows as well? I don't think so. Let's behave like adults here, not like SCO!
"SCO: We're moving the software industry into the future, one subpeona at a time"
"SCO: From open source to open court"
"Orkin does bugs. We do penguins"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
SCO do still have some developers, right? THey have the source code to gcc, yes? So they can just engineer in or out the bits unique to SCO and release their own version of gcc, binary and source code. That's why the GPL was developed after all. It'd be a hollow gesture, time to move on.
did the submitter even read the README?? it says no such thing, and i quote:
If you are really intent on developing code for the SCO platform, you probably have already shelled out the money for a true developers license. This includes cc making gcc unnecessary.
You raised a valid point, which can be very easily refutted: The GPL is what guarantees non-discrimination; that means, any recipient of the SW can do anything they want with it (as long as they comply with the distribution terms), including adding SCO support. The fact that the developpers and maintainers of GCC remove SCO support does not in any way limit the freedom of any group. If SCO zealots want GCC to support it, they can keep a branch for that purpose. That will not be the official GCC version, but they can do it nevertheless. They will have to publish the changes if they want to distribute the version, though. This is the same problem arising when your SW is used for purposes which you do not desire (terrorism comes to my mind). Although you are not allowed - under the terms of the the GPL - to forbid the use of your SW for a specific purpose, this does of course not imply that you have to actively provide support for terrorists. If they want your SW to do specific things, they will have to fork. To avoid trolling: and then justice comes to put those in persons in prision.
Thank you, Mr. Rumsfeld of the Open Source commomwealth, for your awe inspiring words. Your doctrines of escalation, pre-emptive aggression and eye-for-an-eye retaliation - if adopted - will surely change the world.
But just let me ask you this. Who appointed you? Who made you into the Defender of the Faith and the Lord Protector of the Source? From which divine source (if you'll excuse the pun) do you receive these crystal clear truths you speak of?
Men who are convinced that their cause is just and righteous, dare I say holy, are the most dangerous men of all since nothing they do seems wrong to them.
BOO! TERRO
Yes, but they'd have to actually make that fork. I doubt they have all that much technical staff left, since they've shifted focus from production of code to production of lawsuits.
And, as changes are made to gcc in the future, that fork will have to be kept up-to-date as well if it's to be used in the same situations the main branch of gcc is. That's even more programmer time.
Whatever alteration is made to the gcc code to break compatibility on SCO systems, it needs to be one that someone can't just find and comment out in five minutes.
.... I was thinking that BLOWME.SCO is appropriate in the current situation.
-A.M.
Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
You should look at this bug which was filed, PR11842.
People calm down, this is not really big news as FSF has done this before with Apple and other people so this should have not come as a big surprise.
I guess that's why the comment was moderated Funny rather than Inciteful. No, BSD is not crippled, especially not when compared to Linux ;-)
And when was windows crippled?
I think it was born that way... Or maybe it was when they started stealing BSD code...
I don't think any open or free license forces somebody to put something into their product they don't want to. These licenses only permit downstream recipients to put it back if they so wish.
After all, these criteria apply to licenses not software.
In the end, I don't think that this is going to be a serious blow to SCO users. For one thing, SCO comes with a genuine AT&T derived cc which if anything was closer to what most C programmers in the world would have considered standard until the mid/late 90s and probably compiles a lot of major OSS fine.
Even if it could only run software ported to SCO in the early 90s, that would be fine for most SCO users, presuming they had some cheap linux boxen around for running their OSS utilities. People don't fork over good money for SCO Unix to run Apache or perl; they do it to run Oracle and other proprietary software compiled under the regular Unix cc, and in-house apps that haven't been ported to Linux yet. Legacy stuff. SCO's technical forte back in the day was running SMP on cheap x86 processors like the 486. This was significant in the early 90s; you could run a credible departmental Oracle 7 server on a relatively cheap dual 80486 box. Now of course the SMP x86 space is completely occupied by Linux in the nonproprietary end of things and Windows on the Microsoft end.
There are no future "killer apps" that are going to target SCO Unix until they have been running for some time already on Linux and BSD. The handwriting has been on the wall for proprietary Unix for years now, especially x86 based Unices. Only the most gullible investors could have believed the optimistic spin the old SCO put on their future. It's hardly surprising that SCO's assets were acquired by a "technology company", since there is no future growth potential.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Since when did SCo wait to wokr it out in the courts Friend?
..this action woudl not be required!
If SCo would have kep tthe mouths shut until they had their day in court
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Not that it's suggesting dropping SCO support, but dropping SCO support wouldn't hold much truck.
Both SCO Unixes (OpenServer & UnixWare) have prebuilt binaries of the majority of GNU tools shipped as SkunkWare with the base O/S media(Incidently, anyone here who actually has to develop on SCO noticed how flaky the GNU tools shipped with OpenServer 5.0.7 are? conspiracy?). The base point being that very few SCO users will go to the lengths of building gcc on their systems since there's no need.
If GNU dropped SCO support, SCO (SkunkWare) would have little trouble dropping it back in (particularly in the case of UnixWare), not that they will, so it's largely irrelevant, anyway. Ho hum.
Irony or intentional? SCO's website banner - http://www.sco.com
If you have nothing left to lose, and are considering suicide or something similar, why not do the world a favour: kill Darl McBride, while you're at it. Come on, most of us on Slashdot are pathetic human beings, there has to be someone ready to die. Why not bring an evil fucker with you?
The removal of support for SCO Unix in GCC may indeed hurt its end users and developers to a greater extent than SCO itself, but, isn't it already common practise to remove deprecated/obsolete systems (I noticed they just removed a pile of old CPU architectures in the previous release). I don't think anybody will argue that the future prospects of the SCO Unix operating system are looking rosey at the moment. Indeed, in a few months, it maybe along side those old CPU's in the annals of computing history.
Furthermore, the process of eliminating support in future versions of gcc, does not detract from the fact that current versions *do* support SCO Unix. As such, couldn't current SCO Unix users simply use the older versions in any case?
I'm all for the impartiallity in the development of software as important and necessary as the open source compiler, however, there is a point where we, as a community, must take the stand. There is an acute difference between impartiallity in our work, and allowing those whom wish to assimilate it, walking all over us.
First Line:
/* #ifndef SCO */
#ifndef SCO
Last Line:
#endif
SCO stock is falling since Redhat filed a suit and even more since IBM response... :)
It'll be interesting to see how FSF is good at this game
"Markets open in 40 minutes."
Eh? How could FSF "demand" anything of a developer? Aren't all of us absolutely free to port Free software to any platform we choose, provided we distribute in accordance with the license we received the original under? I don't recall a "But Bad People Made the Platform" exception.
All's true that is mistrusted
The availability of GCC and other free software on OpenServer and UnixWare may make it easier to eventually migrate off of those platforms. If a user has a compiler, he can build Apache, MySQL, and PHP, in preparation to migrate from SCAMP to LAMP.
As tempting as it is to excommunicate a platform for political reasons, it's a bad idea. OpenServer and UnixWare support may eventually die due to bit rot, but don't remove it out of spite.
At the risk of sounding like Dr. Stupid...
There is no reason why GCC support should be removed from SCO's operating systems, when support exists and is being maintained for a far more evil platform: Windows.
Free software is everywhere. Just because you are working on an evil platform from an evil company doesn't mean you shouldn't benefit from it. Just the opposite.
Besides, developers who run SCO operating systems (maintainers of old filePro databases and the like, I guess) won't be SOL if they need to write something in C: they'll use the proprietary C compiler. (Does UnixWare still come with its own C compiler?)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
It stops short of demanding that GCC developers strip SCO support from the compiler
It does nothing of the kind. It merely states that they have been urged (by whom?) to drop SCO support, but they have decided not to for the time being. And, if you ask me, they never will, because that would be the exact opposite to what the FSF fights for. But they could have been a bit more diplomatic about it in my opinion... Most people should be able to see the obvious.
Cig? No, thank you.
IBM alleges that SCO is violating no less than 4 IBM patents. Infringing products are alleged to include both SCO Unices.
The FSF has a duty to support the law, including patent law.
By GCC supporting SCO Unices, they may in fact be abetting a patent infringement, namely SCO.
It is therefore a matter of urgency, that GCC support for SCO Unices is removed.
If SCO is cleared of patent infringement allegations, then GCC can reinstate SCO support if they so choose.
For a long time, Stallman strongly urged everyone not to develop to Apple's platform either, because of the GUI lawsuits against Microsoft. It was a pretty effective campagin IIRC; for a long time it was nigh unto impossible to find emacs for the Mac and I'm sure that discouraged a lot of developers from going to the platform.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Actually, case matters. GCC thinks .c is C and .C is C++ - likewise, .sco is CSound Score and .SCO is A Message For The Evil Company.
The FSF used to boycott Apple in exactly the same way they have now decided not to boycott SCO, namely by removing (or refusing to add) explicit support for Apple configurations from their software.
The Apple boycott was motivated by Apple's "look and feel" lawsuit against HP. If look and feel was copyrightable, the GNU projeect itself was threatened since GNU very much look and feel like Unix.
Evcantually, the FSF dropped the boycott with the reason that it was not effective, the Apple management didn't care if they even knew about it.
I believe the same reason will apply to SCO, their management no longer have any interest in their own products, they are solely a litigation company these days.
I consider boycotts a legitime weapon, despite that it also hits innocents. Nobody have a moral obbligation to buy or support anything. However, such weapons should only be used when they are effective.
I don't care about the open source definition, GCC is not open source, it's Free Softweare DAMNIT!! I will KILL YOU, KILL YOU!!
RMS would probably love it if FSF is no longer Open Source, that way he would not be the ony person to give a damn about the distinction
By the way? What's a zealous zealot like RMS doing not posting on slashdot... he would have karma coming out his arse since everybody would love to hear his opinions (albiet maybe not agree with them). The same would go for Linus Torvalds
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
when absolutely nobody ever does :-)
Why withdraw all specific SCO Unix support ? Come on.Not only in GCC but everywhere there is SCO specific material.SCO is not our friend itislitterally the enemy and should be treated as such.
This is no joking matter.They are trying to torpedo all the work that has been done by the Linux community.
Do react and more strongly than writing a few lines.Im totally for destroying those who seek
to destroy us by all legal means available to us.
Time to shake off the fleas , growl and bite !
FuzzyTheBear
SCO cutomers have a lot to do with this.
Without them this farse would stop instantly because SCO would be out of money in a second. I suggested something like this in a previous comment and the author of nmap have allredy dropped all SCO support. Aparenly the "DROP SCO NOW" movement is gearing up.
Remember, we dont have to support SCO. We do it only because we are nice. And if they don't want to be nice, well.
Maybe its possible to drop IP-packages if they originate from a SCO-machine if you dont have to relay it. Maybe its possible to drop mail and news messages if they have been relayed through a SCO-machine. In this case i think every SCO-unix machine will be replaced within 6 months from now and SCO a thing of the past.
Instead of removing SCO support in gcc, change it so that it prints that entire message on every invocation when run under SCO. I'd add just a bit more to it:
This gets the point across and doesn't hurt any users.
To bring it in to kernel suit terms: you have ONE company (which by legal definition is one person/entity) who has IP rights (and lets not argue IP rights for sake of this question), on the other side you have THOUSANDS of other IP contributors in the kernel. Would it not make sense that by ruling in favor of the ONE company, you would be disenfranchising the THOUSANDS? It would stand to reason that the THOUSANDS contributors pose a greater good.
Add to this the fact that SCO have refused to adequately back up their assertion over IP theft (NDA's don't hold much water IMHO). As a matter of legal process, is it _normal_ in tech cases to sign NDA's during the discovery period?
Some things to think about at least.
-Bob
don't worry if it's cubs will go hungry.
This is a life and death battle. If you don't fight, there's a slim chance that some moron judge will side the wrong way.
SCO has the audacity to attack linux, and hence, Free Software. How many GCC developers run linux? How many of us do?
I'm completely looking forward to the linux revolution that's creeping in. This is our chance to prove how strong free sofware really is. We can't seem meek, because if we do, and just barely squeak by SCO, microsoft or someone else with a bag of cash is gonna crush us. We gotta give everything we got.
It's sorta like a prison movie. Either kick someone's ass the first day or become someone's bitch.
We need to pull out all the stops. No survivors. lay them of them to the man. cut up their credit cards. Throw the board of directors in the electric chair. If we hold back, there will be dire concequences.
Unfortunately all of my software is pretty simple, and there's no way of removing support for SCO since there's none to begin with.
Yes, This will hurt SCO users, but then again, they can always complain to SCO and notice that SCO doesn't give a damn about them. Perhaps they'll consider moving to another platform.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
Does that mean gcc will drop linux support now it is owned by SCO? : )
Every argument here thus far has been either to strip the SCO support, or not to. Mostly as a symbolic gesture, but have all of you forgotten how open source works? Even if you do strip SCO support, they (SCO, people compiling under SCO, etc ...) can readily use their old versions of GCC, and even put SCO support back into newer versions and create a different branch.
Quite honestly, I don't see where the harm comes into play, other than this being a symbolic gesture.
--LordKaT
The README suggests that removing support for SCO unix from GCC would hurt SCO's users, but not SCO. I disagree: If SCO's users can't develop software for their chosen platform anymore, then they will likely choose another platform, and SCO will be the one hurting in the end (which is the desired effect).
SCO as a OS is dead, there is no meaningful revenue made from selling the SCO OS or supporting software/services.
SCO, the company, knows this and this "Linux licensing" fee nonsense is just a way to try squeeze some milk from a dead cow. But the cow turned out to be pretty rotten and everything SCO is getting is foul smelling hands.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Hi all,
I work for one of those unfortunate companies that are still using SCO OpenServer. I really hope the GCC team does not do something so petty as dropping support for SCO.
Being able to use GCC to compile such things as bash and GNU tar is the only thing that makes SCO liveable, and we are stuck on SCO for at least another 2 - 5 years.
Due to our legacy code base, it would be prohibitively costly to move off of SCO at this time, though we are working on purchasing new software that will allow us to get off of SCO, and have been since even before SCO went ballistic.
--LeBleu
If you're reading this you're part of the mass hallucination that is Kevin the Blue.
Its the license, not the software that may not discriminate.
But I doubt that not supporting or removing support could be defined as "discrimination", when anyone can just add the missing code right back into the source.. That's just one of the beauties of "Free software".
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
If you look at GCC's MAINTAINERS file you will see that SCO's Kean Johnston is the OS port maintainer for SCO's platforms. If you search through gcc-patches, you will see that he still is actively contributing, using his @sco.com address. So they seem to allow this to happen.
Oops, now that was off topic
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
If you are really intent on developing code for the SCO platform, you probably have already installed lots of GNU software. This includes gcc, making shelling out money for a true developer's license unnecessary.
Quite frankly, it seems like a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to me. Do you think it will hurt SCO if GCC removes support? Not in the slightest. Will it hurt the users? Probably not in the short run, since they will be able to continue using older versions. The message should be "let's show the users that we're on their side", and not "fsck SCO" -- granted that the users aren't immediately being hurt, but the perception from the user's perspective is the same.
Thats a really messed up analogy.
Its more like the contruction workers in the neighboring GNU county refusing to do road work in SCO county because SCO county council members have demanded $699 per person in GNU county, for a reason that GNU county member dont believe is true. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
SCO county citiziens will be fine untill the old roads start to be inadaquate for their new cars. They will have plenty of time to move to a new county before then (Even to GNU county if they wish).
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
A better change to GCC and/or Binutils would be whenever you generate an ELF binary for a SCO system have the first three characters in the binary be "FUD" instead of "ELF". Of course in Readme.SCO tell the user where to change "#define SCO_FUD 1" to "#define SCO_FUD 0", so that the compiler can generate runnable binaries.
No no no.
Any private user of SCO should get rid of it immediately.
Any user of SCO in the workplace needs evidence LIKE THIS to bring to their bosses to show them that SCO is soon going to be unsupported by a variety of applications.
We need to pull together to remove SCO unix support from the face of the earth.
The shoe on the other foot:
Microsoft tries the same exact thing to get people to use Windows instead of Linux.
I would expect that every Win32 app on SF be taken down immediately.
The free software is one of the biggest selling points of any OS. By killing support for a specific branch, the likelihood someone would buy it would drop. We need to kill SCO the only way we can - by refusing to support it and to bury it in our own FUD.
I keep reading comments here about how SCO should be punished for their behavior. The behavior which seems to be the source of most complaints is the lawsuit against IBM and the various claims of contract/patent/IP/etc infringement regarding IBMs contributions to Linux. This is also seen as directly threatening Linux.
I am curious. If it turns out that SCO is right, and that there was a massive breach of its rights, will the same people calling for SCO to be punished then turn and call for the punishment of IBM, Red Hat, SuSE, etc.? Somehow I doubt it.
SCO can just patch support back in should something like that happen. What would be more effective is if developers and project maintainers coded in checks to their programs that prevents them from compiling or running on SCO systems. That would be far more effective as it takes a LOT more time and energy to patch hundreds of programs than it is to patch GCC.
-Z
FSF did boycot Apple A/UX back when Apple and Microsoft was fighting in courts about look & feel.
This made life as an A/UX admin much more difficult. Not that GNU software didn't run, they did, but you had to port it yourself.
I think this actually contributed to Apples decision to discontinue A/UX. Other reasons for the decision was that Apple had its focus elsewhere. Just like SCO have changed focus to become a litegation company instead of a software house.
I'd say don't just drop support in gcc. Drop it in the entire product line.(emacs, autoconf,...) After all it is free software and SCO users can port it if they like.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
In the first seconds of reading the readme.sco-file I thought all this would be given up by the FSF for a revenge on sco. To make it clear: I do not like what sco does there with all the PI-issues but would this be a reason to give up main principles of the open source community just for a "REVENGE"?
I'm very glad that it did not happen...
Love, Gery
The answer is yes, me.
.... that users of SCO products shouldn't be deprived the right to use things like GCC. It's not the person at the sharp end (e.g. fellow geeks, techs, developers) that would suffer NOT SCO.
What _may_ be affective (if its possible) is to, for the time being initially, revoke the GCC licence for use of SCO - so SCO cannot package it up on their systems (nor use it inside SCO to copmile products - i.e. stopping development at SCO until a new "GCC" style compiler has been written that _DOESN'T_ use FSF/GCC code), but allow individuals to do this.
Also, if SCO release ANY product, state that they _must_ be using copyrighted code illegally, and report them to the appropraite people and then, possibly, sue them!
Might have an effect.
JaJ
If you get rid of GCC on SCO, then you get rid of a cross platform migration utility.
:).
Oh, and I'm forced to use SCO at work because of a ton of legacy code and proprietary applications that SA refuses to port. We hate it, but what are you going to do? The cogs grind slowly
# gcc hello_world.c
Darl McBride sucks Satan's cock
#
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
This will surely piss off all three SCO users.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I don't understand why people would have any problem with this. The GCC developers are likely the best that the Open Source world has to offer. They perform an incredible amount of work to benefit others. Anything they want to do with GCC is fine with me. If there were any concept of ownership of "free" software, then GCC belongs to those who contribute to it.
Hey, if Mark Mitchell wanted the GCC logo blinking pink and blue every time the compiler was used, that would be fine, too.
Dig around and you'll find RMS in the past saying essentially "Don't write software for the Mac because Apple is a bunch of litigious assholes" for more or less the same reasons that RMS is now saying essentially "Don't write software for SCO Unix because The SCO Group is a bunch of litigious assholes."
I see pattern developing here: RMS doesn't want anyone who will listen to him to write software for litigious assholes, especially (but not necessarily) when the people getting the business end of the lawsuits are major FSF contributors.
Quick, how many FSF programs run on pre-OS-10 MacOS? Think about how long it would take to implement a Cygwin-like Unix compatibility layer for the Mac before you answer that question.
Microsoft, for all their faults, has never acted like a bunch of litigious assholes. It is one thing to do everything you can (including a legally acceptable amount of cheating, and total indifference to the impact of your own community's improvements on the members of some other community) to improve the lives of members of your community as much as seems to be possible, as Microsoft does. It's another thing to launch a direct attack against individual members of another community because yours isn't so nice to live in any more, as SCO does now and Apple did in the past.
#endif
-- I avoid spam by accepting only OpenPGP encrypted or signed email at this address. Clear-signed, RFC2015, heck, even
GCC is not the licence. GCC doesn't work on my ZX81, but that doesn't make the GPL discriminatory.
I see no reason the community should continue to support the company that is trying to destroy that community. Under the GPL SCO can continue to support a branch of GCC that works on SCO Unix; the difference is that they are doing the porting work instead of the community.
Agreed, this will affect users of SCO Unix. But only for code that is dependent on future releases of GCC, because all current GCC releases with SCO support will still be usable. That means nobody's software that is working today will suddenly stop working today. No planes will fall out of the sky, and the world won't implode. But if the next release of SCO SomethingWare needs GCC 3.(next release, whatever that is), then SCO are going to have to add compiler support in themselves, or make sure it works with GCC 3.(current release, with SCO support).
openly hostile platforms (i.e. windows)
hehe, I like that. Most would say microsoft is the agressor, but no. I've developed for windows and I think the OS itself is openly hostile. It just feels like you'r trying to get a monkey to behave, and for the most part it does, but every now and again it lobs fecal matter in your direction. I never really thought about it before, but I suppose a platform can really be hostile...
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
I'm serious about this--why are the open/free developers and those who use the software they produce so determined to act like a bunch of bratty kids on a playground throwing rocks at each other (or the nearest corporations)?
Yes, there are times when you have to man the ramparts, defend your turf, go on the offensive, etc. But the open/free community seems to be utterly clueless when it comes to figuring out which battles are worth fighting, which to ignore, and the optimal way to fight those few that are in their best interest to pursue.
As I've said many times before, every time something like this comes up I can't help but imagine MS handing printouts of the all-too-public arguments to their customers and saying, "Do you really want to trust your mission critical data to these people?" That argument might not carry much weight with the average /. reader, but it's very influential for IT decision makers in large organizations who have to bet their careers on product choices.
Would someone please, PLEASE go to http://www.petitiononline.com/ and start a petition for HP to sue SCO? I can't seem to "start a new petition". I've also talked with a few colleagues who're in talks with HP to ask them to sue SCO if HP wants to continue doing business with them.
I think it is a good idea to strip all support for SCO and other violators of the free software spirit. Sort of an IPDP (Intellectual Property Death Penalty).
Should they scramble back on their knees, the support can be added back in.
They haven't changed the license. What they changed is the code.
The GPL is still OSD-compliant as far as I can see. OSD says that you don't prohibit anybody to use/modify/redistribute your code. You removed SCO support? Fine. Anybody can take your code, modify it to reimplement SCO support and then redistribute, because the GPL explicitly allows that. What's incompatible?
I agree with the previous posts that discontinuing SCO support from GCC would accomplish nothing useful.
* SCO management obviously could not care less.
* SCO unix seems to have lots of obsolete parts so forcing an old version of GCC would not make much of a dent.
* SCO or SCO users could maintain a SCO-compatible fork. I don't know how packages are managed on SCO unix, but I suspect most users do not get their GCCs from ftp.gnu.org anyway.
* Having free software and especially GCC on non-free systems such as Windows is Very Good. As someone put it, it is a first step for many towards a move onto a free system.
* Getting into the mudwrestling party would make the FSF look bad.
That said, I think it would be a good idea to make SCO unix a truly obsolete platform by getting as many SCO users as possible to switch to Linux or if they are buying into the SCO story, to the BSDs. Selling the free systems on technical grounds should not be too difficult.
WILL mark this as non-free. This is not a troll.
Read the debian free software guidelines.
NO SIG
"What message does it send to people who happen to be using SCO, and decided upon Free Software (GCC) for their compiler?"
Put a message that GCC is developped by a community that SCO is deliberately trying to hurt after having lived from its work for years and as a result that community refuses to spend any more energy to support a company that tries to hurt them and, should they need support for this platform they should seek it from a SCO reseller or SCO itself.
Nothing stops SCO from supporting their own products and nothing forces us to support their product.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Any company using SCO can have all the source for the last SCO versioion of GCC, and can use that forever. It just happens that either SCO or the company itself needs to continue to provide support and add features, instead of the community at large.
Thus, if SCO releases an update and GCC is used by many customers it now falls on thier head to make sure GCC will work with that release.
SCO has decided to take what everyone has worked on and claim all of it as thier own. Fine then, everything really should be thier own - including maintenience of every program in the system. Good luck.
Now, what would be wrong is adding something to the GCC source that you know for sure will break SCO. Instead, it's enough to cut them loose. I would love to see this happen with just about every free backage out there, including the vast array of GNU utilities (like the fileutils).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who are responsible then. Search engines like google should remove sco.com matches from their search results. If you are a system administrator, block them at any router, DNS server and mail relay you are managing. Modify all your software, free or commercial to disable and remove itself if run on any machine within their IP address block. On a web server, reject requests from any browser running on their OS.
Ideally, office supplies companies (that might be running Linux!) should refuse to do business with SCO. And the city of Lindon, Utah can revoke their business permit for distrubtive behaviour and literally run them out of town.
I remember installing gcc and gmake from sunfreesoftware into Solaris 8 so I could actually compile stuff and have it work.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yeah, great idea- burden anyone working on Free/OSS with adding and removing software every time some organization goes one way or another. Great! Now we can all spend time doing this on our existing version of software without actually adding anything or otherwise moving forward.
Every ChangeLog:
3.1.2 Added support for Mac OS XI. (8/14/2005)
3.1.3 Removed support for SCO, again- wow, what assholes (9/1/2005)
3.1.4 Removed support for Mac OS XI.1; Steve Jobs said he preferred a Mac/PPC box to a Linux/c86 (9/28/2005)
3.1.5 Added support for SCO (11/3/2005)
Where do we stop? Add a clause in the GPL to accomodate legally not allowing some company or entitity to adapt or port a FSF project? Not only could SCO support be removed, but this clause could be used to legally prevent SCO from using it anywhere. When someone RMS doesn't like is elected president of the States, not allow the US government to use FSF software? PATRIOT Act limits our Free speech etc etc- the Bush family and current administration can't run Linux on their desktops?
The minute we start abusing this kind of shit is the minute the Free Software Community is destroyed.
That said, part of this Free Speech, is that the GCC project can do whatever the hell they want.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Rather than strip support from GCC, there are many more effective tools which could have more persuasive effects. How about this:
1. Persuade the BIND developers to add a patch such that when someone looks up *.sco.com, it either returns "does not exist" or a random IP address.
2. Have SPAM Assasin bounce all +5 SPAM to sco.com.
3. Have SMTP not deliver email to sco.com Then claim this was done to helping sco out by preventing the SPAM from reaching them.
4. Squid redirects sco.com to random web page.
As other Fortune 500 companies support them through buying licenses, maybe they could be added to the list.
Things like this would send them back to the preInternet age. And also make the point of what the open source community has given them for free. What happens when it is taken away?
The point is that the Open Source community controls quite a bit of its own IP in a decentralized way which happens to be critical infrastructure of the Internet. Maybe if the community treats them as they are being treated, they would be willing to come to an agreement.
Sorry, I have no actual mod points. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Childish... One reason for using GCC is it's cross platform nature... to reduce that for any reason *sigh*... As for SCO: Consider this... they have NOTHING to gain from showing the Linux kernal issues now! And waiting for a court ruling on the IBM case is a SMART business move on their part. REMEMBER: SCO is a competitor in the Unix industry, they are only further harmed by telling the OS Linux community what needs to be fixed, while SCO themselves remain tied up in court! And honestly guys... if SCO is spouting so much FUD why is everyone so worried about what code needs to be changed... after all there isn't any is there?
The Linux community as a whole is looking pretty sweet so far. SCO is attacking us through IBM. Let IBM defend us (along with Red Hat). In the end, the appeal of a free, advanced Linux community will appeal over those who charge you (SCO, Sun, M$oft). If FSF recommends any type of action, it will only drag us into the muck that SCO already is in.
You have to know when you have the moral high ground and stay there. Let SCO tarnish the pay-me OS'es. Don't be a monopoly, don't be a tyrant.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
CNet writers and editors: don't bother writing yet another biased article about this one, I saved you the trouble! Article follows:
/. readers: sorry, venting some frustration here
Over the hot debate over whether or not Linux can steal SCO (SCOX)'s IP, in a childish move, developers of GCC threaten to pull SCO support unless SCO withdraws its lawsuit. A Microsoft (MSFT) representative was quoted as saying, "Our customers can count on us to provide consistant support for all the platforms we currently support in our compilers. Additionally, Windows Server 2003 provides a consistant and robust solution for all your server needs. Buy Office XP today too."
It would be doing a favour to SCO users to find that GCC support will be dropped in a few months, and now is the time to migrate to Linux.
Is there any software running on SCO that _won't_ run on Linux?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Its even on the fortune. Well, it was once anyway.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
A lot more quotes of this great man can be found with google.
I can not say if it is right or wrong to remove support. Its ok if its not funny to write support for it. After all, its opensource, and many do it because they like it.
However, they had to do something, and putting a README seems just right to me.
errera hunamum ets
Political Reasons Is the source code an appropriate place to put a short, relevant political statement? My answer to that is YES. We're not talking about a manifesto here. This is a short relevant statement that becomes part of the "history" of GNU. Good place for it.
Discontinuing SCO support--Why do it?
Legal Does including SCO support in gcc undermine the legal position of the gcc developers and users w.r.t. the SCO situation? (My guess is NO). And even if that was true, would acknowledging the fact there MIGHT be a legal issue further undermine that position? (Again, my guess is NO). Legal Reason: No
Logistical Does continuing to include SCO support in gcc cost an unacceptable amount of resources--(developers time)? I know that after SCO has pissed everyone off, some would say that "One second of developer's time is unacceptable." That's a different issue. We'll get to that farther down. My guess here is SCO support does not delay gcc releases a whole lot, but the developers can answer better. Logistical Reason: Probably Not
Design Do developers sit around saying "Dammit, if we didn't have to support SCO, gcc could be twenty percent faster/smaller and we could add all these features people have been wanting." My guess no, but again, ask the developers. Design Reason" Probably Not
Retribution Did SCO offend the community who has worked so hard to develop the GNU they use and (used to) distribute? Yes. Does that community now have the opportunity to abandon SCO (and all the users unfortunate enough to be dependant on SCO)? Yes. Is Retribution against SCO a valid reason for the gcc project to modify their code? Ask the developers. Only the people doing the work can say what they want their role in this community to be.
Social(Don't Tread On Me)--Would discontinuing support for SCO send a message: "If you stand before the community and falsely accuse and harass us, you should not expect the community to continue to support you. You are now outcast." Why would the developers care how they are perceived?
Explicitly Removing SCO support--Why not do it? IF it is a good idea to discontinue SCO support, why not remove it altogether? What's the cost?
Functionality--What does removing SCO support break?
Logistics--How much time and effort do the developers want to commit to excising this code?
Collateral Damage--Who else would be hurt by the gcc project's retribution against SCO?
Social(...thine Enemies)--Would the gcc developers be perceived as vindictive for removing SCO support? Why would the developers care how they are perceived? How would this affect future collaboration?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Godwin's Law
I know you were joking, but I want my Karma, so I'm going to reiterate your post in a serious tone.
Linux and Stallman are staunch representatives of the freedom to code and share your code and have show this during many years with deeds, not words.
SCO, you know who they are, they are trying to hurt our freedom to code and share that code, with evil deeds, not only words.
Any contribution coming from anybody related to SCO should be seen with extreme paranoid suspicion and skepticism. This guy may be contributing on good faith, but the safety of GCC is owrth alienating one guy if you ask me.
You don't need to have contributed a single line of code to GCC in order to arrive to this conclussion.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
SCO is pretty much a dead platform. We should let SCO support GCC with patches. But how would dropping SCO (for political reasons or not) be really much different than dropping support for any other deceased platform (like Opus M88K or something like that).
SCO UNIX is all but dead. There are a few places that still use it. But it is pretty much legacy. It was never a very good platform (tehcnically) to begin with.
So I'm all for it, reguardless of political issues. GCC shouldn't need to be chained to dead architectures forever.
Besides, I'm still miffed that ROMP is no longer officially supported.
During one of the conference calls, a reporter asked Darl McBride: "Is SCO turning into an IP licensing shop"?
McBride didn't like that question. Eventually he pulled some answer out of an orifice to the effect that SCO was simply defending their products and services from unfair competition.
The more that SCO'S potential "SCO License for Linux" customers perceive SCO as litigous bastards, the less likely they are to roll over and pay out $$$.
That's why it's valuable to remove support for SCO operating systems from as much software as we can.
This is extremely simple. Don't wait, yank the code. SCO must and should be attacked simultaneously from all sides. It should be made extremely clear that their type of behavior will not be tolerated. What's more, the best part of this strategy is that it does in fact hurt what few SCO customers are actually left. Hopefully, they will also become a vocal weapon to berate SCO into submission and to end this rediculous lawsuit. If SCO users are not made to be responsible for the indecent actions of their software provider, there is no incentive to resolve this properly.
The reality is that SCO is now a criminal company by violating the GPL and the copyright of the thousands of developers who have written GPL'd code. Whether or not any SCO intellectual property was infringed remains to be seen, but what is certain, is that SCO is now infringing the intellectual property of the other 99.9% of the IP included in their SCO linux distribution by adding this rediculous SCO license on top. That's prohibited under the GPL. This is really more akin to a software license audit by Debian or OpenBSD. If SCO is not free, it should not be supported anywhere, period. Take it all out.
This thread is OVER!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Damn, I was hoping for t-shirts, coffee mugs and toilet paper. All that site has is crummy news stories.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Surely "to who are you going to speak it?"
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
You would cutoff your nose despite your face... or something like that.
You gotta ask yourself, Who benefits by having free software written for a certain platform. I believe SCO does benefit by having GCC work on their platform, but, I believe when someone uses GCC on SCO free software benefits more.
It doesn't even directly insult SCO. It insults SCO users for deciding to use SCO. Those users may be trying to pick a side and now they have to choose from one side with questionable ethical practices and another side who insults them just for picking SCO in the first place. I'm not so sure I would pick either side (Linus anyone?)
The README.SCO is not FUD. It is a lawyerless equivalent of giving SCO a "cease and desist" letter with regard to violating the GPL. IANAL, but a cease and desist letter tells you to stop a current behavior or you will be liable to future remedies and actions. That's all the README.SCO has done. It just does it without making a lawyer rich in the process.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Of course the never added support of OS/2 to binutils, even when the patches were there. They are ASSHOLES when setting arbitrary policies.
If you run a SCO system or a SCO Linux system you are guilty by association. Providing them with money for support is like paying them to sue responsible members of the community. I for one will make a exception in any source that I distribute forbidding execution on a SCO system.
Got Code?
The company said "we are going to disengage with you" has a worldwide reputation for "adult behavior" in the computer industry. Indeed, it's a cliche that no one ever got fired
for buying products from them.
Feh. I submitted this story the day it happened, with a better writeup, too. I forgot my name's in the auto-rejector. Anyhow...
This was discussed on the GCC lists, and rejected. The obsoletion procedure (announce deprecation in release X, remove support in X+1 if nobody steps up to maintain it) would be completely inappropriate for this case. The SCO platform is still actively maintained. It would also turn the obsoletion rule into a political one, instead of a purely technical one like it is now.
Okay, fine, you may say, then don't use the obsoletion rules, use new ones. But the obsoletion rules are, at present, the one ones which permit the GCC maintainers to drop support for platforms wholesale. It's the FSF who makes the political decisions, not the maintainers.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Re: Deprecate dwarf and mdebug support, delete nlm?
Some facts:
SCO pays at least one employee to maintain gcc and gdb for SCO operating systems.
SCO's supported version of gcc is gcc 2. They are working on upgrading to gcc 3 but are not planning to support gcc until gcc 3.4.
SCO's gcc generates dwarf-1 debugging format (not dwarf-2). I've researched this, and the only dwarf-1 compilers I sighted were proprietary compilers from Diab and Absoft and the SCO version of gcc. All other versions of gcc in the field use other debugging formats now (dwarf-2 and stabs+, mostly).
My opinion: disengaging from SCO would hurt SCO's version of the gnu toolchain materially. Which would be good.
The FSF should not be jerks just because the owners of OpenServer (OSR5) and UnixWare (UW7) are. Leave the SCO support in. Not only leave it in, but make GCC a product that is better than the official C compiler for OSR5 and UW7, just to show them up.
The geek community is stronger than SCO (and their puppet master Bill Gates) think they are. Let us show just how strong we are!
Because SCO has always been our enemy. Just like Iraq has always been our enemy, and Russia has always been our ally.
For those of you who have been reading your Corrected History books, pull your heads out of your ass and look at actual archives. The port maintainer in question has been contributing code for a long, long time. In good faith. With a smile, even. He has the same copyright assignment on file as the rest of the GCC contributors, which means SCO signed a disclaimer that they would not try to claim ownership of the code he contributes, just like every other software-related company whose employees contribute code to GCC.
Fortunately, nobody has to ask you, because you're wrong.
(People bitch and moan about GCC contributors being required to get assignments and disclaimers from their employer. This is one of the reasons why it's done. It's different from other open source projects, but /. has overlooked that fact)
No, but you do need to be completely ignorant of the rules by which GCC operates.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Linux[sic] and Stallman are staunch representatives of the freedom to code and share your code
Stallman is definitely a staunch proponent of the freedom to code. By contrast, the interviews I've read with Linus suggest that he (Linus) really stays out of politics and confines himself to the role of an engineer making as generally useful a product as possible. There is some overlap between "freedom to code" and "general useability", though they're not the same. Linus' advocacy of "freedom to code" goes as far as his licensing linux under Stallman's GPL, and not much further. Stallman's commitment to "freedom to code" includes non-stop lectures and appearances designed to educate the public about such issues, meticulously upgrading the GPL, and even butting heads with Linus over actions by Linus that may call code freedom into question, e.g. use of bitkeeper (and Linus generally dismisses these confrontations with statements to the effect of "I've got work to do").
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
SCO's opinion of the GPL:
... the FSF holds the copyright to my work.
... will indemnify FSF for all losses if the claim [of adverse ownership] is not spurious ...
From their filing of 2003-03-06:
"80. Any software licensed under the GPL (including Linux) must, by its terms, not be held proprietary or confidential, and may not be claimed by any party as a trade secret or copyright property."
SCO denies that any GPL software is the copyrighted property of anybody. This means that SCO denies that the Free Software Foundation owns the copyright to gcc.
That's SCO's interpretation of copyright law. You don't agree with it, and I don't agree with it, but in the hands of an expensive lawyer such as David Boies, it could cause a great deal of grief to the Free Software Foundation.
You think so, and I think so. SCO thinks that nobody holds this copyright. Which would leave the status of a copyright assignment in limbo.
Can you cite any recent public statement from a SCO officer that says otherwise?
As far as wanting help goes: my copyright assignment with the FSF says that I indemnify the FSF in case I contribute any code that contains other people's intellectual property.
Developer
I'm curious -- is that clause in your copyright assignment?
Which means, given SCO's litigious behavior, that I won't even be reading any contributions from any SCO employees in the future. I don't want to be the target of an SCO lawsuit.
I'm really tired with all this SCO nonsense.
This is not troll, but can't the FSF just keep its politic out of my software? I can care less!
From what I understand this means that they are being informed they are under investigation. Anyone have any info?
Help fight continental drift.
This is my enterpretation of the SCO corporate logo
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
You claim that the scope of this lawsuit is a dispute with IBM.
sCO has sent thousands of letters to Linux end users warning them of legal liability. SCO publicly stated that Linux cannot possibly work on enterprise systems without illegal code theft from SCO. And Darl McBride said last week: "What is at issue is more than SCO and Red Hat. What is at issue is intellectual property rights in the age of the Internet." (Conference Call, 2003-08-05).
So don't even try copping that "this is about IBM, why is the community so upset?" line. SCO says that it is about the community and attacks the community repeatedly in their conference calls and legal filings.
What really is Free Software? After reading the responses to this article, I can see that some people are severely divided on what exactly Free Software is. The first group of people talk about Community. The Open Source Community, The Free Software Community. They speak about Free Software as if it exists to make a certain group of people happy. And when somebody attacks that perceived community, the community should respond to protect itself. As you can see, the "enemy" SCO is supported by "us", because GCC includes support for their products in their own? Hardly. The other group believes Free Software is a tool, just like any software. It is to be used and improved so that PEOPLE CAN USE IT, as opposed to making a certain group of people happy. Me, I tend to side with the second group. There is no such thing as the "Open Source Community". Open source is not an exclusive group in any way. There are simply tons of programs, whose individual authors have decided to release the project source under certain conditions that warrent it being "free". There is no community to fight for. There is no community to protect or defend. Software is a tool. Free software, open software, is a BETTER tool. But it is still a tool. The sooner we drop these religious I art Holier than Thou arguments, the sooner we will all get to doing what we like: coding.
What's really weird is pondering why anybody would run emacs on a Mac in the first place.
This question would seem equally relevant to both people who hate, and people who love, the (old) Macintosh.
A Good Intro to NetBS
SCO deserves this. Fyodor removed SCO UnixWare support from nmap as well. Why bloat the compiler with support for a shitty OS from a crap company that does what it does?
One clarification: Linux is a program--a kernel commonly used with the GNU operating system. Did you mean Linus Torvalds here? Either way, that is quite incorrect. Linus Torvalds does not champion the freedom to share programs, he is a pragmatist who chooses whatever program he feels suits his immediate needs (for example, Torvalds' continued use of the non-free Bitkeeper program to manage his fork of the Linux kernel). Long-term considerations of software freedom seem relatively unimportant.
Richard Stallman (RMS), by contrast, founded the GNU project in 1984, years before Torvalds began working on Linux. RMS is the founder of the Free Software movement, and one of the authors of the GNU GPL, the most widely used license in free software. RMS wrote an informative essay about Linux, GNU, and freedom which explains his take on the matter.
Digital Citizen
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Don't fool yourself.
:)
SCO is not just attacking IBM, but the GPL as well. They're going after the whole idea of open source, trying to convince IBM to step back from the GPL, etc.
This is an attack on the open source way of life and an attack on the friends of GCC. This is an attack on a community.
Not only that, who do you think makes GCC? This whole FUD and anti-GPL campaign strikes directly at the ideals of the FSF.
This is more than just a strike at IBM. Don't you read Slashdot?
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Emacs is a great text editor. It's the first real programmer's editor I ever used, and my favorite. Of course I want to use it on whatever computing platform I'm on.
That said, all Mac OS X systems ship with emacs and gcc now. Amazing how the wheel turns, sometimes.
Stallman was POed at Apple for look-and-feel copyright lawsuits against Microsoft. I agree that look-and-feel isn't something you should sue over, but maybe the world would have been a better place if Microsoft had been knocked down a peg or two by this. I think Stallman, and the FSF in general, picks and chooses which things to get morally indignant about -- specifically, if something runs contrary to his agenda.
While it may or may not hurt SCO to yank GCC support, it will make the FSF (and Open Source advocates in general) look infantile. It's about as infantile as denying FSF products to the Mac platform (old or new) because Stallman has a beef with one of Apple's political stances. I think, therefore, the Open Source community should take the moral high road and continue to support SCO's OS products with GCC, while perhaps also including the README.SCO to educate users and administrators about the current situation.
"...and has demanded that
users of Linux, the kernel most often used with the GNU system, pay
for a license."
Hm, is this true? How many Linux kernels are out there? How many Mach (OS X) kernels are out there?
but maybe the world would have been a better place if Microsoft had been knocked down a peg or two by this.
Huh? You're kidding, right? You're saying it might be a good thing if Apple had won established IP rights on critical GUI elements? They would have shut down more than Windows if they'd won the suit. The X Window System would have been next on the list to shut down.
We'd all be living in a happy smile Apple owned GUI environment now. It's scary just to contemplate.
Microsoft did the world a favor by slapping down Apple in the look-n-feel suit. Microsoft does many things that are wrong. Spending the money to establish a legal right for people to adopt similar user interface elements was NOT one of them.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, "to whom are you going to speak it?"
If I were in your position, my home dsl line would be carrying a steady outgoing stream of copies of my resume.
The FSF is right to bring attention to this matter. It surely can't hurt to remind users of highly proprietary software that they are not guaranteed the full benefits of the free software community if they don't mend there evil ways ;-)
However, the community would be very unwise to drop support for any system that is not utterly obsolete. I, for one, have found the fact that gcc is the most portable compiler to be an excellent way of getting free software into large businesses.
Problem getting the same software to compile on Solaris and Irix, no problem, let's just use gcc. Hey, we'll need gnu make to install it. Compatability problem with blah, no problem, we'll use gnu blah on both platforms. A couple of years later, hey, seeing as we are using gnu everything, wouldn't it just be easier (cheaper) to use Gnu/Linux instead? Worked for me!
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
Nope, not kidding. Just speculating.
Then Microsoft would have either had to cease shipping Windows, or redesign it completely, or pay royalties or other licensing fees to Apple. This would recompense Apple for all the hard work they did in human factors research; after all, the Mac GUI wasn't a one-for-one duplicate of the Xerox GUI that inspired it. I might also point out that Apple didn't steal; they paid Xerox, partially in Apple stock IIRC.
Of course, since Apple was claiming a look-and-feel copyright, they'd have an essentially perpetual monopoly on the concepts behind their unique look-and-feel. This could be a really Bad Thing, because everyone who wanted a GUI in their product would have to invent brand new metaphors, and there would be no standardization in even the most general areas of GUI design. This was Stallman's fear; I remember when, as an MIT undergrad, students recruited by the FSF handed out leaflets warning of the evils of this lawsuit. The leaflets showed the logical extremes of this kind of thinking. Imagine a world where every manufacturer produces a keyboard with a different layout of keys. You couldn't transfer your typing skills, you'd have to re-learn how to type every time you switched equipment vendors.
Yes, it is, in that we'd be living with a monopoly. Of course, the situation we're in right now is so much better. (And yes, that's sarcasm.) I hate using Windows, but I am forced to use it at every job I work at. I am constantly derided as an owner of Apple equipment. I live in fear that my OS of choice and my UI of choice will be stomped into oblivion by the Redmond Giant. And it galls me to think that Apple helped make Windows what it is today, by doing all the hard research and acting like the technology leader it is.
So please forgive me for having a flight of fancy in which I dream of a different outcome of that particular lawsuit. Perhaps the result would have been terrible. Perhaps not.
It's not as though companies don't still sue each other over copying UI widgets -- the only difference is, they're now doing this with patents (e.g., Adobe's recent spat with Macromedia). The benefit here is that patents expire, so eventually (within a decade), anyone can implement the widgets in question without paying a fee of any kind.
To tie this back to the original discussion of GCC compiler support for SCO, I'll reiterate what I said before: I think the FSF picks and chooses when to take the moral high ground. I personally think Richard Stallman has the emotional maturity of a small child, and I bet he's one of those clamoring to yank SCO support from GCC. I mean, come on, this is the same guy who was telling KDE developers that they had to beg forgiveness from their GNOME/FSF counterparts due to his beef over the licensing of Qt and the cooption of GNU code into KDE versions of applications.
I thought the same way until I was making my own Linux distro with the Linux From Scratch project and noticed that almost every other file apart from the Linux kernel itself is GNU.
0 6. html
http://lfs.130th.net/view/4.1/chapter06/chapter
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
those who do not respect SCO's copyrights should have their work stolen and given away for free. So when you do contract work for someone else, they get your work for free!!! woo, i'm all for that.
gimme proprietary src for free!
I think the reality check has bouced.
Take a step back and ask yorself "Who is thie really going to hurt?"
SCO? No, not really. Do you really think that the management and legal types at SCO give two hoots about gcc? Of course they don't. They sell their own compilers.
The people who get hurt here are the END USERS who happen to be using it on a SCO system. You know, the folks who are more than likely ALREADY ONSIDE!!!
Removing support for the SCO platform is petty and against the spirit of all that I have come to believe that the FSF stood for.
Tp.
Sounds more like a Royal Proclamation.
Perhaps should have been signed:
Richard R
Every Mac ships with GCC now.
You're new here, aren't you?
Obligatory question which Kean can't discuss: has everybody in SCO's engineering sold 100% of their stock yet, or just Opinder Bawa?
I hope you start emacs and get your ass kicked because you cannot exit! That is the Stallman monster and what a work of wonder it is. Just try to compile linux without gcc you moron! Stick with Microsoft you ignorant ass.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A/UX was just a plain SVR4 port to the Mac, and FSF software tended to work just fine if you configured it as such.