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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.'"
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
Those comments seem pretty consistant with what Mr. Love has said in the past. Here are some other interviews he's done:
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LWN at Comdex 2000: http://old.lwn.net/2000/features/Comdex/RansomLov
Linux Journal, Aug. 2000: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406
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.
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.