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.'"

Comments

Open sourcing Unix

[MoonFog]

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.

Re:Open sourcing Unix

[fm6]

Either I'm missing something or you are. When Love says that Unix is "full of other companies' copyrights" he means code that says, "copyright xyz, used by permission." Caldera/SCO has the right to use this code, but not the right to give away the right to use it. To do that, they'd have to get permission of every copyright holder. Even if they could get everybody's permission, doing it would cost a fortune in legal fees. Another reason to regret the death of fixed-term copyrights.

This is different from Linux, where SCO is claiming that copyrighted code was used without permission. So the paper trail consists not of a bunch of copyright notices, but of alleged similarity between the two code bases.

Incidentally, lot of that third party code was contributed by Microsoft, during their brief flirtation with Unix. Somehow I doubt if they'd cooperate in any attempt to make Unix open-source!

Short term investors

[Ralph Yarro]

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.

Re:He sold his stock!

[Anonymous Coward]

>> 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!

Not hardly; they're still selling, deliberately waiting until after the price increased due to the lawsuit. RL totally divested when the lawsuit made the news.

New tactics

[Nucleon500]

With this interview and IBM's most recent counterclaim, SCO fell about 20 precent. But I have a feeling they will bounce back.

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.

Insider Trading

[Zo0ok]

The Nasdaq site tells how many trades there have been in SCO(X) last 3 months / 12 months.

Last three months: 12 sells, 0 buys.

I wonder why ;)

In your face, Darl!

[jvollmer]

Statement must've come out around 11:00.
SCOX is down 17% since then.

If it's not Consolidated Lint, It's just fuzz!

he's right and wrong

[dh003i]

The GPL might be questionable in court, but for what Richard Stallman intended, it's not flawed at all.

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.