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Ransom Love, Caldera Co-Founder Interviewed
rootmon writes "The interview focuses mostly on Ransom Love's views of SCO Group's current dispute with IBM and the Free/Open Source Software Community. It also provides some insights on why Caldera purchased the UNIX business of SCO and their joint Monterey project with IBM. In summary, Love's view is 'My belief is that Unix and Linux should co-exist and should look and feel the same to application developers. Fundamentally, I would not have pursued SCO's path. You see, the challenge is building business. Litigation, no matter what side you're on, tears down businesses. Only the attorneys win. Companies should focus their energies on building their businesses, not on lawsuits. I don't see any positive outcomes.'"
That must be one of the most bizarre names I've ever heard.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Maybe this won't be a positive outcome for anyone's bottom line, but it very well may be that this is the best thing to ever happen to the GPL (assuming the courts don't ravage it).
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Indeed, at first we wanted to open-source all of Unix's code, but we quickly found that even though we owned it, it was, and still is, full of other companies' copyrights.
And now this company is suing others for copyright violations. It becomes more and more clear that SCO will have a hard time documenting where the code lines in question originated, that they actually have and has always held the copyright on them.
Has anyone noticed that there are SCO Days on Slashdot, when all the stories (such as this one) are about SCO, and then there are RIAA Days, where all the posts are about the RIAA?
Today's a SCO Day, making up for all the RIAA Days we've had lately.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
When news of the IBM lawsuit broke, I sold the last of my stock.
Sounds like the same game plan as Darl and the other SCO insiders!
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
His parents must really have hated him.
Ransom Love?!
The name's so funny, I can't even think of how to make a joke out of it.
and so do those that sell stocks at the right time. stock scam
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
how bout old darrel and his boys making press releases from a jail cell for a few years?
The idea was to enable developers to write for both Unix and Linux with a common Application Programming Interface (API) and common Application Binary Interface (ABI).
I thought that we already had that, and that it was called POSIX. Am I missing something here?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Calling someone a fool and idiot might be true or untrue but it is not a joke.
Please keep this in mind AC'hole
Abort, Retry, Fa... *poof*
Okay.. we've finally done it.. that's a first.
Two SCO stories SIDE BY SIDE on the FRONT PAGE. With no buffer.
And to top it off, they're *both relevant*, and neither are reposts, and as far as i can tell weren't even rehashes of links posted in previous articles' comments.
I am amazed. This is some kind of cosmic convergance. I await the falling of the stars into the sea.
"I, however, no longer have any investments in SCO. When news of the IBM lawsuit broke, I sold the last of my stock. I no longer have any relationship with the company."
Too bad you didn't wait a few months, ehh Ransom? Could have made a pretty penny.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
When it comes to IBM and SCO, there's no love lost. Just ask Ransom Love
So just how did Intel prevent Unix from going open source? What can they do? Did they threaten to beat Ransom Love up if he GPLed it? Break his kneecaps? Type "rm -f -r /" as root on his mp3 machine? He sounds disengenuous on this.
This bit Ransom says seems very mysterious:
I think Caldera investors who wanted a quick return pressured the management. They seem to think that short-term, possible gains are more important than long term ones, which is unfortunate.
I wonder who these short term investors could be. Seems they're the villains in all this.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
They are the establishment. Fuck the establishment. The next great thing will come out of some libertarian's garage.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
well that certainly was dramatic
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Is this the same Ransom Love that led Caldera to sue MSFT for the DR-DOS stuff? Not that I'm pro-MS, but this guy needs to get his story straight.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Those comments seem pretty consistant with what Mr. Love has said in the past. Here are some other interviews he's done:
e .php3
LWN at Comdex 2000: http://old.lwn.net/2000/features/Comdex/RansomLov
Linux Journal, Aug. 2000: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406
It's fairly obvious that the old management respected copyright law and other companies' wishes, rather than believing in extortion and barraty as the ultimate business practices.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
IBM's legal department?
"Eat Flaming Death - Caldera Mongrels!"
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
How about "make certain any endeavour which he would partake in fail miserably". That would scare the shit out of me, coming from a giant like Intel.
Whoops, that should be in this story : IBM Adds SCO Counterclaim Charging Copyright Infringement .
and as far as i can tell weren't even rehashes of links posted in previous articles' comments.
commenter got there first
SCO is taking on water. Looks like Wall Street finally figured out that investing in SCO == big loss. Check http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=SCOX"
With regards to the quote..."Only the attorneys win. "
Reginald Broughton, the Senior VP of SCO, has made approximately $1,493,650 since June 20, 2003 in stock sale.
Man, I wish I had the balls/money to perpetuate this scam. The worst they'll get is a slap on the wrist. If the Enron execs have gotten as little punishment as they have, what makes slashdotters think that the Federal SEC is gonna give a crap. Especially since it's a puny company perpetuating a stock scam based on a computer OS barely anybody outside of the technical realm has heard of.
Not trolling, but at least it makes a lot of publicity for Linux in the business world and no publicity is bad publicity.
-non trolling sig- You're already read this...it's too late not to finish.
"...it's not the path I, or our group, would have gone down."
"Not my idea, I told them it was a bad idea, I warned them, I had nothing to do with it, I wanted no part in this abortion of a business plan, please don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player." That scrambling sound you hear is everyone fleeing the foxhole as the grenade lands at their feet.
Yeah, never mind, I'm just cynical.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
we quickly found that even though we owned it, it was, and still is, full of other companies' copyrights
So can all those other companies' line up to sue GNU/Lunix?
personally i wasnt aware that IBM had backed out on its deal with the IA64 and the OS to run on it....
i'd be pissed too...
probably not enough to sue for IP infringement, but maybe a flaming bag of shit on IBMs doorstep....
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
How about "make certain any endeavour which he would partake in fail miserably".
Based on Love's track record, Intel wouldn't have to do anything except idly watch to make that happen.
I say Love is blowing smoke here.
POSIX provides only source-level compatibility. Writing POSIX-compliant code, together with some autoconf sorcery can make you as compatible as it goes these days, but sometimes source compatibility just isn't enough -- most commercial applications do not come in source format.
There was binary compatibility module called iBCS (an Intel initiative for cross-compatibility between Intel-based Unix OSs) which failed to take off because vendors kept adding extensions to their Unix which never made their way into iBCS. And of course, running something in a different platform than its original one may require tons of runtime support (check FreeBSD's Linux binary support).
/usr/games/fortune: command not found
What we need is to group the "bad" news together. Suppose IBM filed a counterclaim, RedHat did something interesting, SCO lost something overseas, and several open source leaders made more papers (and actually publicized them). The idea would be to get the stock as far down as possible in one day. We would keep a little news in reserve to drown out their PR responses the next day. Maybe by forcing the stock price down, we'd convince speculation buyers that the house of cards is falling, and perhaps get some of the private holders to pull out.
Litigious bastards
Heh Heh Heh, It's funny cause it's true!
</Homer>
It's fairly obvious that the old management respected copyright law and other companies' wishes, rather than believing in extortion and barraty as the ultimate business practices.
Suge Knight owns SCO? Maybe Tupac is writing code in the back.
America is still top of the heap. You don't see too many people in this country telling pollsters that they want to live in other countries. A survey conducted five years ago in Britain had 48% of respondents say they would live in America for the rest of their lives if their relocation was paid for them. Look all over the world and you'll see similar attitudes.
America, my friends, is #1. That's all there is to it. If you don't want to be here, perfect -- we don't want you as it is.
Take care.
Let me give you some insight. The Canopy Group and more specific:
Ralph Yarro
http://www.canopy.com/aboutus/ryarro.htm
Always interesting to see people flame from behind curtains... why don't you let us know who you really are...
Quit trying to get oral sex from the teenie-weenies you fag!
Does Darl know you've found his stash? If these functions were implemented in Perl, they would be guaranteed to look different than the System V!
This Comment was generated with the Comment-O-Matic for SCO Stories.
Litigation, no matter what side you're on, tears down businesses. Only the attorneys win.
Unless of course you have stock in the company, and you sell off blocks of it after every press release.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
Last three months: 12 sells, 0 buys.
I wonder why ;)
ELF isn't even enough to specify an ABI. ELF simply gives you the linker and loader format.
You still have to deal with minor issues like:
- Which way does the stack grow?
- Which register is the stack pointer (not always dictated by the hardware, especially on RISC chips)
- Which register is used for globals? How is global data accessed? (TOC and GOT are two techniques; load-time address mapping is another one.)
- How are structure members laid out in memory? Padding and alignment requirements are influenced by the hardware, but that doesn't always mean the ABI is the most obvious interpretation of the hardware specs.
- What function arguments are in registers, which are on the stack? How are "ellipsis" functions handled? How are K&R argument promotions handled? How are aggregates passed? Are small aggregates (such as char[4]) are passed in a register, on the stack, or by pointer. Same with large floats, is a quad float passed by address or value?
- Setjmp/longjmp, how do they work?
- How does a stack frame look? If this isn't standard, exception handling can't unwind the stack, debuggers can't do a backtrace, and so on.
- Where's the heap? Register pointer, fixed segment, what?
While it is possible to have an ABI that is common across operating systems on the same CPU architecture, it is impossible to have the same ABI across CPU architectures. You just can't use R31 as a stack pointer on IA32; there isn't one. You can't use SPARC register windows on PowerPC. And so on.
Mullah, is that you?
off topic i know, but i could care less because this whole sco thing is a diaper load.
has anyone noticed that the old caldera logo looks a lot like the top and side of mickey mouse's head? i wonder what disney would have to say. maybe sco claims IP over mickey's head too.
Ray Noorda, Novell CEO said after Novell's acquisition of USL that he would rather compete in the marketplace than in the courts.
I remember Project Monterey.... and quickly forgot about it till this article. Love gave some interesting insight. Seems like IBM pulled a fast one on SCO well before this all started.
As much as I think SCO is heinous for their current actions. Iam sure that IBM's hands arent pristine either.
business + money = lying, scum sucking, sons a bitches.
The two can piss on each other all they want, and the saddest part being the lawyers will just laugh all the way to the bank (and back again for more).
Did he get his surname first and forename second ?
Maybe -- just maybe -- it's redundant relative to the other 25 posts in this article commenting on Ransom Love's name?
SCOX is down 17% since then.
If it's not Consolidated Lint, It's just fuzz!
Obviously somewhere where the destitute are reduced to selling their children to you for your prurient pleasures.
If your not from here you have no room to talk. And the US does not have the highest crime rate per capita in the first world. That honor goes to Great Britin. As for the biggest consumer of the world's natural resources, wrong again. That would be China. A white male may be President but since blacks make up only 10% of the population they are over represented in government. Most minorities are well represented in their respective geographic locations, the the second highest office in california is held by a hispanic. Women are the ones behind power curve, yet they are a hell of alot better off than in countries like china and the middle east. No system is perfect, I notice you didn't have the guts to say where you are from so that we can air your dirty laundry. After 9/11, I fully support any action that will protect our citizens against those who would do us harm. Two thirds of all Iraqi's think that the ouster of Saddam was a positive thing. This man's regime killed more people than the actions the US has been involved in since 1972. This man has killed hundreds of thousands of people since he took power. What is going on their now is Iran & Syria are trying to take over, by trying to make us give up. It won't work.
Please don't feed the trolls.
Michael wrote:
"from the not-as-idiotic-as-he-usually-sounds dept."
That was my immediate impression, too, and I think I know why; now that he's not the frontman for a corporation, Love doesn't *have* to be full of shit any more. That, in turn, really makes you realize that McBride's bluster is just that; Love even refers to "posturing for the suit" in the interview (although he does so subtly, without mentioning any names).
The second half of that statement is completely correct: for spreading FS-software, the GPL is the perfect tool.
The first half is complete bullshit. The GPL is not in any way questionable. It is probably the most solid license in existence. The GPL is unquestionable in court because it *grants* rights not given by standard copyright law. To over-turn the GPL, you'd have to find copyright laws unconstitutional for providing too many restrictions.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Details just in:
He was visiting an elementary school when he detonated the bomb he had strapped around his waist.
But that's actually the same thing. Now look at SCO. Get a life, asshole. Shooting babies is funny. Why wouldn't they use Linux? They own it, don't they?
This Comment was generated with the Comment-O-Matic for SCO Stories.
Ransom Love.
My belief is that Unix and Linux should co-exist and should look and feel the same to application developers.
It's pretty silly that people still espouse this viewpoint. Every flavour of proprietary Unix is quickly dying. Linux and BSD have become technical equals and there is simply no more need for the remaining non-free "true Unix" relics. (nor is there any real money left in maintaining them) Expensive proprietary unices are why Microsoft won the desktop and was poised to conquer the server as well, had the free alternatives not risen up to save the day.
Proprietary "Unix" is dead. End of story. There's no need to co-exist. Out with the old, in with the new. That's progress.
Those comments seem pretty consistant with what Mr. Love has said in the past.
Which is the obvious reason he isn't with the company anymore.
People who make self-consistent remarks have no place in SCO management.
some people care more about ethics than profit.
You see, the fact that IBM is willing to countersue SCO indicates how seriously they take SCO's claim on Linux....
I'm just waiting for it
Anyway, back ontopic. Ransom Love's article is well written. It makes some valid points and it also shows that no matter what, in 2004 we will not hear anymore about Sco (I will rename myself ILoveLove when it will happen... well... nope, it's too stupid as nickname :D).
The part that please me most about this article are: :() and his final words about the lawsuit devastating the company as a controlled fire gone wrong are clear and actual.
The quick recount about Project Monterrey's failure (tough it has foregone that Monterrey wasn't only a Sco and IBM venture... there was a third company in there... Sequent? Compaq? Can't remember who
The only thing that gets my perplexity are the fact that even under Love, Caldera was reknown for some stupid, anti-gpl errors (do you remember the "closed-source with NDA beta"?) or a mostly anti-opensource community stance (Caldera was the first distro not to have a public release... there must be a reason if today Redhat, Debian, Gentoo and Mandrake are the most known linux distros)... anyway... we can't underestimate the importance that Love's Caldera had in the Linux scenario.
At least because with the Sco buyout demonstrated that Unix is a dying operating system that will be surpassed by linux.
Too bad that SCO is prey of a venture that is going to play the inflate-the-price, divide-the-company, sell-the-pieces. Just like Commodore in the past...
+ + + + :(
I didn't find it
The trollpost I was telling you before stated more or less this... (now don't mod me down because of this...)
Subject: what is the difference between Bob Goatse and Darl Mc Bride?
The first HAS the widest asshole on earth
The second IS the widest asshole on earth.
"I am slashbot, hear me roar!"
Every settlement and "executive step-down" always leaves more money in their pockets than any fines. Richard Grasso is not giving back his $140MM, The Big-4 accounting firms settled for much less than what they took from their dotcom shenanigans, and SCOX will continue to profit from their actions. Nobody will do anything about it and beyond that, I wouldn't be surprised if it was legal anyway.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Well, the proprietary Unix implementations need to stay around until we get Linux/BSD running reliably on machines with several hundred CPUs. (and please don't point to clusters, I mean one machine with a buttload of CPU's like really high end Sun and IBM mainframes.) Thankfully we have IBM working on making Linux work in this role, but it's not there yet.
I keep picturing The Ladies Man sitting there with his Courvoisier talkin' love to linux and unix.
I'm slightly surprised but I'm willing to take his word for it.
Caldera *did* have a good business oriented linux distro back when (1998ish). TFA really shows how things got to where they are now with only the spinmeisters left at SCO (and IBM for that matter).
Sorry folks, no excuse to not RTFA this time, it's too good to miss.
Yeah...or maybe they're really sick of the stuff they've been putting up with dealing with SCO and decided that 1. IBM is in the right and 2. they're gonna make SCO pay big time.
What is your Slash Rating?
Not to mention it does just cover the very basic things. It does not say anything about e.g. hjow to talk to an LDAP server. It doesn't specify an API for snmp, or pam, or.. etc..
The idea was to enable developers to write for both Unix and Linux with a common Application Programming Interface (API) and common Application Binary Interface (ABI).
I thought that we already had that, and that it was called POSIX. Am I missing something here?
(In addition to POSIX not specifying an ABI, as has already mentioned in another post.)
Linux has a few deviations from the POSIX standard.
Some of them are accidental: Linus didn't want to shell out for the expensive POSIX document while a starving grad student hacking for his own enjoyment.
A very few are deliberate: For instance, there's at least one place where Linus thinks the POSIX standard is dangerously fouled up and needs to be done slightly differently.
And there may be other classes of differences.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Football player, sorority sister (they always get red in the face when I call them that ;>,) mostly braindead... you know. For his caste he's pretty smart, but you shouldn't be surprised it took him a few years to figure this stuff out.
It looks like he finally started to really get it, just before he got replaced by the new BBDG. Give him credit, though, it does look like he finally got it, and his book may turn out to be a major contribution to help others get it.
"Ransom Love" sounds like the pseudonym for the frontman of a heavy metal band. Surely it can't be his birth name; it's too cool for that!
Cooler than "Vin Diesel"? You bet your ass.
yeah, or maybe, just maybe, those 25 other posts are redundant since this one predates them?
look up redundant again, you stupid fuck.
See Linux. See Linux compile Solaris source. See GCC choke. Bad code, GCC, bad code.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
Maybe it is brought up every fucking time there is a story with his name in it.
... not hate Ransom Love.
-pyrrho
Every flavour of proprietary Unix is quickly dying.
I don't think that's a very fair comment. In actual fact, Solaris is dying at a relatively moderate rate.
Not entirely. Things like Java bytecode and .NET CLR are ABIs that are portable across CPU architectures, and even OS's. Both of them, however, severely limit what forms of access you have to the machine. Writing a driver in either of them would likely be nearly impossible (if not completely impossible on some types of systems).
The other problem is, even as simply an API, the POSIX specification leaves quite a few things up to the implementor. A function may do the same type of task on two different platforms, but perform it differently enough that a program written for one fails on the other. There are numerous combinations of parameters that have undefined meanings according to POSIX, and they may work just fine on some platforms, and completely bomb on others. In fact, Linux 2.6 changed some of this 'undefined' behaviour compared to 2.4, and broke some stuff (it had to do with combinations of O_TRUNC and O_RDONLY in open() calls). Things like this can be a bigger problem than even ABIs.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
If they get that one in, the execs are guilty of criminal activities (i.e. Criminal Infringement of Copyright)- which could land them in at least Club Fed for 5-20.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
> there must be a reason if today Redhat, Debian, Gentoo and Mandrake are the most known linux distros
Caldera got a bad rap. Back in 1994, Novell was the only big tech company showing any interest in Linux and they were basically treated with suspicion and FUD from the individualist Linux users of the day.
Consequentally, Caldera was ALWAYS behind the 8-ball. They never could "prove" themselves to be a trustworthy member of the Linux community to anyone's standards. Sure, they fucked up the marketing here and there, but basically they were treated like crap by Linux users, despite the massive amount of development they put into Linux.
But then when IBM, one of the worst and uglyest tech companies ever appears, Linux users welcome them with open arms. The same IBM that had fucked over SCO with Project Monterey.
So, it's no suprise that after being the first on the boat, and only recieving a big shit from Linux users, that SCO/Caldera got sick of it and decided to turn around and shit back.
(PS: It was COREL, not Caldera, with the NDA beta, FUDster.)
in the Netherlands. Yes the age of consent is 16, which also happens to be the closest to the standard age of consent on the planet.
BTW, screwing teenagers under the age of consent (when one is more than 2 years older than them) is carnal knowledge not pedophilia.
Pedophilia is screwing people under 13 (again when one is more than 2 years old than them)
The school bus driver's surname was Richard, and yes he did have a cousin or something named Richard.
On politer grounds, know a great bloke named "Peter Rabbitt"; his wife introduces them as "Hi, I'm Lynn Rabbitt and this is my husband, Peter". For a few months I worked at Myer's computer department while they were merging with Boans. We sold business computers (well, distilled three or four Olivettis as delivered into two or three that worked), and our corresponding department in Boans sold toy computers, Atari, Commodore, that kind of thing. The Boans' computer section was managed by Frank Spencer, his wife's name was Betty, and he had red hair. A deli in Vic Park used to be run by a couple named Ken and Barbie (both of them were named before the dolls existed).
However, the most embarrassing name I can remember hearing was Moon Unit Zappa, Frank's daughter.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Derivative works of the GPL are based on GPL'ed code-base, with a few modifications. It's pretty obvious that that's a derivative work.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
under copyright law is that you *do not* have permission to distribute copyrighted works from the author. The GPL grants you those rights under certain terms, thus it gives you something you the legal right to do something you would not have had the right to do if you just found the software without a license.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
You have some very quaint notions as to how easy it is to prove a crime. Maybe you think they concoted their evidence, and maybe I even agree with you. But where's the proof? You have to show not only that the evidence is bogus (and even that's controversial) -- you have to show that they know it's bogus.