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SCO's Plan Examined
kevin@ank.com writes "In the best expose I've read since the original Halloween documents, Groklaw has links and analysis of Renaissance Ventures' rationale for investing in The SCO Group. Among other misrepresentations, SCO convinced Ren that SCO owned the root of the entire UNIX tree, and that Linux was just one branch of that tree. Linux gets a SCO tax... forever; or worst case, if Linux gets killed in the process, then so be it. Renaissance also estimated that IBM would have settled with SCO last April under the strength of SCO's claims, and the threat of terminating their UNIX license. Oops."
We have a vested interest to ensure that SCO does not win in its attempts of litigation. We have created a shadow company that hosts our Linux servers. So if someone gets sued by SCO it will be the newly-formed company which will simply fold and we as the customer will be able to get to our data and purchase UNIX or Windows servers to continue the work.
Which is nice.
...when the SCO buble finally "bursts" and angry investors go back to institutions like Ren, Ren can say "we were deceived", and maybe we will yet get the fraud trial that the executives of SCO deserve to live through.
OK, I am confused. This chart seems to indicate that there is a direct link from Unix to Xenix to Minix to Linux. Now, based on Linus Torvalds own writing, the original codebase had no Minix in it. The only relation to Unix was in its look and feel. He wrote Linux because he thought Minix sucked. I am trying to figure out how they rationalized this one out! BTW, a history of Linux can be found here.
I see two lines running from Linux to Unixware, but none in the other direction.
If Ren says "we were deceived", then Stimpy can just say "We sure were, Ren!", and... wait, somebody's already done that one.
Where does accountability for gross incompetence come into the equation though? Since IANAL, I can't begin to address this in a legal sense, but if I tell you "kicking your little brother's head in will make him smarter and transform him into Megatron" (which has a lot more backing it than SCO's claims, from what I hear), then you do it and he dies, obviously I'm a bad person for filling your mind with utter lies. When do you become liable, though? You either have to be lying when you say that you didn't expect the kid to die, or a complete idiot to have believed me. Well, Ren is kicking their kid brother (by telling investors that SCO is a good investment option, really!) and when the kid (the investor collective) dies a horrible death, it seems like the same thing to me.
If they honestly say that they were deceived, they're much too dim to be in business. If they can't say that honestly, they're crooks. Would you like to be a thief or a mouth-breathing moron today, sir?
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
I won't lie and say I've completely kept up with this SCO thing, but I was always under the impression it was a handful of lines of code in question - like maybe IBM put them there by accident. SCO is telling Renaissance that all of Linux is a branch of UNIX. So is SCO really alleging that there's tons and tons of lines of UNIX code? Or was that just a lie for Renaissance, and they're giving a different story as to why they need $699 from everyone?
Schnapple
doesnt look like it worked.p ort.html? compid=2007676&national=Y
http://www.saltlakecity.bbb.org/commonre
BBB Membership
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This company participates in BBBOnLine, and the Membership Identification Program. This means the company has agreed to use special procedures including mediation and arbitration if necessary to resolve complaints.
Nature of Business
This company sells and distributes unix and Linux software.
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Assuming this anecdote is true:
-- It will expose them for what they are and it's going to end in a PR disaster.
-- They won't be able to use apache or sendmail and such in SCO's Unix which would make it worthless. So it would imply an MS only environment. If anything, it would be the ultimate argument to go fully non MS instead.
So I'd say, good, let 'em bring it on.