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

Ransom Love?

[CausticWindow]

That must be one of the most bizarre names I've ever heard.

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!

He sold his stock!

[floppy ears]

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!

Re:He sold his stock!

[Sandnor]

What you failed to mention is that he sold back when this mess first started. He sold when it was far below even it's current downward level. What you've just witnessed is someone with at least some moral fibre left. For that I applaud him. In a day and age when profit seems to be the driving force for most in America, he gave up a rather good chunk. This is not to say the man didn't make a profit, as I'm sure he made a butt load during the IPO/Post-IPO days. But it's far better then the current members of the company and their pumpers who are robbing the stupid blind. It's a rare find in this day and age to someone pass by profits in the name of moral high ground. Credit where credit is due.

Huh?

[El]

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?

Re:Huh?

[weston]

I thought we already had that, and that it was called POSIX. Am I missing something here?

Yes. Whatever standards compliance POSIX brings to various operating systems, it doesn't necessarily mean you have commen API/system calls, and definitely doesn't guarantee binary compatibility across systems. You've probably noticed that apps don't always make/compile across *NIX systems (let alone other POSIX compliant systems like WinNT) -- hence the need for autoconf and its ilk.

It sounds like their initial goal was to open up the UNIX stuff they got from SCO, building a better Linux in the process. When they found they couldn't do that without IP encumbrance, they changed their goal: to create a UNIX product which had whatever edges they thought they'd inherited but would also run Linux apps on IA32/64, no problem.

And when their plans with IBM went awry -- and it sounds like Love thinks IBM wasn't ethical -- they stopped, and the current folks decided to pick legal fights with IBM and the open source community.

Re:Huh?

[dthable]

POSIX isn't a binary specification. I can't take a program compiled on Solaris and run in under HPUX. POSIX attempts to make a basic set of items the same on all *ix machines so I can compile the code on different platforms....even that's asking for a lot.

There's bound to be a number of issues with binaray compatability cross a number of chipsets.

Re:Huh?

[AuMatar]

POSIX doesn't require the OS interface to be the same. It specifies a set of functions that a programmer must be able to use, and a set of userland programs that must exist. How those functions are implemented differs greatly. Many of them don't actually exist in the OS, but are created from simpler primitives by the libc library.

Re:SCO Day?

[gothicpoet]

You forgot to mention the Microsoft days and the Verisign days. =)

ASDF!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

consistant

[YouHaveSnail]

Those comments seem pretty consistant with what Mr. Love has said in the past. Here are some other interviews he's done:

LWN at Comdex 2000: http://old.lwn.net/2000/features/Comdex/RansomLove .php3

Linux Journal, Aug. 2000: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406

Re:Ransom says Intel prevented Open Source Unix ??

[Frobnicator]

What can they do? Did they threaten to beat Ransom Love up if he GPLed it?

You should read the line right before that statement. It says we quickly found that even though we owned it, it was, and still is, full of other companies' copyrights.

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

Speaking of Stock price...

[Erik_the_Awful]

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"

Bullhonkey...

[fuqqer]

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.

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.

Re:ABI issues

[greed]

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.

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.