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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
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.
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."
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
Quoth he
"It's all academic anyway..."
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 miss the old days of coolshit days...
when all the stories were new releases of cool software, or space projects, or garage tech projects people have done, or the latest-greatest walking robot to come out of MIT labs.
*sigh*
The tech world sure has changed.
no comment
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.
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
....and then the economy when down the shitter. Now it's going to be nothing but lawsuits for the next 4 years.
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.
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
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.
SCOX is down 17% since then.
If it's not Consolidated Lint, It's just fuzz!
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
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.
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!"
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
"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.
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.