Slashdot Mirror
SCO Roundup
Time to clear out the bin of the taint of SCO, hopefully we haven't posted these already... The Economist has a piece titled Face Value -- Of Monkeys and Penguins. The EFF is pushing an email campaign about SCO. An anonymous reader submits this completely unverified claim that SCO needs to change the password on their mail server: sco.txt. And another reader presents a theory about SCO's stock performance.
and it was rejected.
I'm not grousing.
The Economist has captured the issue very well, and in a way that any businessman (your boss, your clients, for instance) will understand.
It has also defined the core of this issue, namely the realignment of the IT industry from old to new, with SCO/MS on the old side, and IBM/OSS/Linux on the new.
I never thought I would see IBM on the right side of IT, but there we have it.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
In case the SCO.TXT file gets /.'d, here is a copy of it, along with a rough Czech -> English translation. I will post an exact translation when my Czech buddies wake up :)
:-)
:-)</b>
/ /boot /home /tmp /usr /var /dev/shm
----------
Subject: schvalne jestli ve SCO ctou ceske servery
From: root <root@mail.sco.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 05:59:24 -0600
To: redakce@root.cz
jestli ano,
urcite se budou lepe venovat svym serverum.. a nejen tomu nasledujicimu
<b>if yes,
it will be better to get the whole server.. trace/follow the server
mail:/usr/share # hostname -f; uname -a
mail.sco.com
Linux mail 2.4.19-64GB-SMP #1 SMP Fri Feb 7 16:29:22 UTC 2003 i686 unknown
mail:/usr/share # free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2068160 1997756 70404 0 210712 1527008
-/+ buffers/cache: 260036 1808124
Swap: 2097136 0 2097136
mail:/usr/share # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 2.0G 410M 1.5G 22%
/dev/sda1 99M 10M 84M 11%
/dev/sda8 3.3G 33M 3.1G 2%
/dev/sda6 1012M 35M 926M 4%
/dev/sda5 3.0G 1.6G 1.3G 55%
/dev/sda7 325G 905M 308G 1%
shmfs 1010M 0 1010M 0%
root:6X7liA1zmJhyA:12255:0:10000::::
----------
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
The precedent set in the Berkeley v AT&T decision counters much of SCO's mindless spew. I got the idea that by the time Rob and Eric got to that point in the rebuttal that they got sick of repeating the same point over and over again, resulting in comments becoming sparser.
Can somebody just hand Halloween IX to the appropriate judges so they can dismiss this thing already and focus on IBM's counterclaims? hehe Stupid SCO.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Actually, what happened with MicroChannel was that IBM tried to set a new standard, which actually was much better than the old PC-AT slot standard. It included automatic configuration of interrupts, better mechanical characteristics, etc.
The problems were:
a) IBM wanted to charge a rather high fee for anyone to license the new bus, both to clone manufacturers and to card manufacturers.
b) Card manufacturers found it more expensive to make cards for the new bus, partly because the traces required for the slot contacts had such a tight tolerance requirement.
This spurred the industry to create their own new standard, the VESA bus, which was then superceded when Intel successfully forced the industry to adopt the PCI bus. But that's another story.
Ummm, yeah, you're the only one who thinks that. :)
SCO's business plan:
1. Sell $12 million of UnixWare and OpenServer, at a cost of $14 million. Loss of $2 million.
2. Sell $8 million of "SCO Source" licenses to Microsoft and Sun, at a cost of $2 million. Gain of $6 million.
3. $4 million profit !
SCO has executed this business plan successfully for two quarters now. Read their quarterly earnings announcements at finance.yahoo.com. It's right there. They are already in stage 3 and have been there for six months.
Now, in Step 2, what are Microsoft and Sun getting for their $8 million per quarter? They are getting anti-Linux FUD. Linux takes sales from Microsoft and Sun, and this is a way for Microsoft and Sun to attack Linux without getting their own hands dirty. That's the value-add of using SCO as a sock puppet.
Darl's bragging about the number of press releases from SCO rather than products and customer wins. Well, in my opinion, future "license payments" from Microsoft and Sun may very well be based on the number of anti-Linux press releases that SCO puts out!
Canopy, the parent company of SCO, also has a business model based on suing other companies: $150 million lawsuit settlement from Microsoft, $40 million lawsuit settlement with Computer Associates.
I can't take credit for the research on this one. It's reported on Groklaw, and the research was a joint effort of a couple of people, but mostly Pam Jones (I think that's her last name, it might be "Johnson").
Anyway, the story is heavily linked to the reference documents and Sec filings, so if you are interested you can easily verify the story for yourself there. Pam, aka pj, runs Groklaw and is a paralegel. She started the site to provide information on news stories from a legal research perspective.
When she started the site, the SCO v. IBM story was just breaking, and it became the site's focus. It's since developed a community of tech. and legal commentators who add to the research. If you're interested in in-depth discussions of the details of this case, Groklaw's probably the best resource for it on the web right now.