Slashdot Mirror
Notes From The SCO Roadshow's First Stop
compactable writes "Just got back from the first half of the SCO roadshow's first stop in Toronto. No unfurling of IP, no NDA, however an interesting view of what's running this litigious blip of a corporation. Full details at my weenie write-up (feel free to mirror the contents so that my ISP doesn't kill me)."
FM: First Mirror :-)
http://farcaster.net/sco.html
It's great when they look at people's old operating systems and tell them how much they owe SCO.
"Well, this is running Linux kernel v2.0.3. You owe SCO $327. Please pay on your way out."
"This is nice, Linux 2.6 exerimental. You owe SCO a full $699, plux a future tax of 10%. Please pay on your way out."
Notes from the SCO Road show
... it may be worth putting yourself on the list for future stops of the show ...
...
I decided to go to the SCO "City to City Tour" (%s/City to City/Farewell/g) out of morbid curiosity - what did SCO say about itself? I was especially interested to see if the time allotted to "roadmap" would even mention shippable product (o; It was interesting - not exactly as I expected, but interesting nonetheless. Highly recommended.
And apparently easy to attend. 64 seats, less than 20 attendees. Considering that when I applied I went to a waiting list, I was expecting a higher turnout
Grandest cheese at the presentation was VP of Marketing, Jeff Hunsaker. He started out with an hour the company's report card & backgrounder. Here's the view of SCO painted: 330 employees, 2+ million deployed units (no mention of OS breakdown - would be interesting to see what % of that is Caldera Linux), target market is small-ish business. Reference accounts seem to be franchised fast food & drug oriented. Think Pizza Hut & Wallgreens (Arnold Clarke & Argos were UK references, Shoppers Drug thrown in for us Canuks). Nothing IT-intensive. Avaya & Lucent were mentioned on the laundry list, however no detail was given, and I cannot imagine descendants of AT&T paying too much to some guys in Utah for hideous product (searches on their sites for SCO only brings mention of their "Special Customer Operations" group).
Oddly enough, market cap & stock price were mentioned extensively (who'd have thought?). Reference was made to using their capitalization as a means of acquisition; however no details were given (assuming there were any details to give). The fabled '2 quarters of profitability' was also mentioned. The name Caldera was dragged through the dirt, as they were never profitable. From the slides you'd think SCO had roots much, much deeper than the MS Xenix junk they spawned from. In fact, the analogy they whip out is that of Harley-Davidson (HD was purchased by AMF, went to hell, then arose re-branded as the mega-label you know today). I refrained from pointing out that pre/post-AMF Harley produced respected product, and did not send threatening letters to Yamaha owners
Mention of the legal battle? Nothing technical. Representatives were up-front about their lack of legal knowledge, and inability to comment. It never got past the mud-slinging stage. Same old, same old. Their interest is in protecting their IP. This is about a breach of contract. Linux 2.4 code review shows Monterrey-esqe code relating to memory-access that must have come from AIX 5L. Caldera Linux customers are indemnified against legal action. Blah blah blah.
Interesting bits?
Their definition of IP (I've never seen a formal definition, and so some of the things on the list amused mildly): Copyright, Contracts, Methods, Trade Secrets, and Know-how (Know-how? How about "stuff we have" - can that be a IP subject too?). Their mention of McBride making some soon-to-be-published "top 5 influential executives list" (that'll be a keeper of an article). And heavy mention of HP's support. Reference was made to their web site removing their logo, however they emphatically associate SCOs current operations and HP's approval. Nothing to substantiate, however.
Really interesting bits?
The crowd. I was expecting Linux zealots. It was mostly a room full of SCO resellers. And they were not too big on having a love in. Nothing hostile, however not one positive comment for the morning's session. During the "we be so profitable" section of the spiel, one reseller in the crowd asked "where does the money come from?" The response was largely a pointer to the SCO source initiative. The response? "What you are profitable in will not make me profitable.". Wow. That was good. One raised the points that this quibble is hurting his business. SCO's stance is that they'd love to settle this tomorrow (har
a world in progress...
mirror
what is the draw for the average consumer?
I mean at least have a decent sideshow or something.
Like, Hilary Rosen juggling piggy banks of 12 year olds.
then again...
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
What? Only 20 people attened? What about the hordes of Linux users that were going to go and put the screws to those primitive screwheads?
Hopefully the next city will be more into it than this one. geez!
The best part of this whole thing is watching this poor guy's site counter shoot up. Was at 131 when I got there - now at 584 two minutes later. I'm watching the Slashdot effect in action in front of my own eyes!
Found this old source code in the attic. Grandpa claims it's his source for visicalc which he claims he wrote in the 50's. What's it worth?
Their mention of McBride making some soon-to-be-published "top 5 influential executives list" ...And recently Linus Torvalds made #5 on the list of most influential people. Perhaps they are saying that because he became influencial by virtue of "Their Work", that they, by proxy, have the world's most influential executive?
Ryan Fenton
Oh my god. This is all they have? hahahahahaha
All you long term sco investors better sell tomorrow are you can say by by to your $$$.
Mention was also made in the road map of ... SmallFoot, which is a "Retail Hardened POS solution" (their words, not mine).
...or the other thing? :)
Since it is SCO, should we assume that POS stands for "Point of Sale"...
Now I'm really mad that my brokerage account lacks the enourmous amounts of money to sell short. I'd make a killing on these small minded fools.
mirror
You know, for Piece of Shit, I'll stick with my Win 98 box with my games. For Point of Sale, I like the IBM system we have. I think I'll keep it..don't tell SCO
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Please learn to use the BLOCKQUOTE HTML tag...
text spanning from end to end of the window/screen is just ugly...
Unfortunately for SCO, Darl heard the word "Pam" and had been looking for Pam Dawber of "Mork and Mindy" fame for the past several years. Apparently, Robin Williams wasn't returning his calls.
If this article confuses you, don't worry. It was posted yesterday in a much clearer fashion.
Actually, Harley claimed to trademark the distinctive "potato,potato" sound of its engine and threated legal action when either Yamaha or Honda introduced an engine with the same cylinder timing and sound.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Australian Mirror.
I made it to number "Could not write to counter file: /docs/cgi-bin/Counter/data/dcarpaneto.dat".
Wow.
;-)
Looks like someone runs a counter that dislikes massively overlaped updates.
My favorite line, while not creative:
The 80's called, they want their features back.
heh...
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Sounds like I had more fun and got more concise and well presented information at that Timeshare seminar I went to. And I came out feeling far less ripped off, too.
Maybe SCO should take some lessons from Hilton?
Oh, wait, Hilton has an actual product to sell. Woops, my bad.
Raoul Mitgong: Unhelpful.
Notes from the SCO Road show
... it may be worth putting yourself on the list for future stops of the show ...
...
I decided to go to the SCO "City to City Tour" (%s/City to City/Farewell/g) out of morbid curiosity - what did SCO say about itself? I was especially interested to see if the time allotted to "roadmap" would even mention shippable product (o; It was interesting - not exactly as I expected, but interesting nonetheless. Highly recommended.
And apparently easy to attend. 64 seats, less than 20 attendees. Considering that when I applied I went to a waiting list, I was expecting a higher turnout
Grandest cheese at the presentation was VP of Marketing, Jeff Hunsaker. He started out with an hour the company's report card & backgrounder. Here's the view of SCO painted: 330 employees, 2+ million deployed units (no mention of OS breakdown - would be interesting to see what % of that is Caldera Linux), target market is small-ish business. Reference accounts seem to be franchised fast food & drug oriented. Think Pizza Hut & Wallgreens (Arnold Clarke & Argos were UK references, Shoppers Drug thrown in for us Canuks). Nothing IT-intensive. Avaya & Lucent were mentioned on the laundry list, however no detail was given, and I cannot imagine descendants of AT&T paying too much to some guys in Utah for hideous product (searches on their sites for SCO only brings mention of their "Special Customer Operations" group).
Oddly enough, market cap & stock price were mentioned extensively (who'd have thought?). Reference was made to using their capitalization as a means of acquisition; however no details were given (assuming there were any details to give). The fabled '2 quarters of profitability' was also mentioned. The name Caldera was dragged through the dirt, as they were never profitable. From the slides you'd think SCO had roots much, much deeper than the MS Xenix junk they spawned from. In fact, the analogy they whip out is that of Harley-Davidson (HD was purchased by AMF, went to hell, then arose re-branded as the mega-label you know today). I refrained from pointing out that pre/post-AMF Harley produced respected product, and did not send threatening letters to Yamaha owners
Mention of the legal battle? Nothing technical. Representatives were up-front about their lack of legal knowledge, and inability to comment. It never got past the mud-slinging stage. Same old, same old. Their interest is in protecting their IP. This is about a breach of contract. Linux 2.4 code review shows Monterrey-esqe code relating to memory-access that must have come from AIX 5L. Caldera Linux customers are indemnified against legal action. Blah blah blah.
Interesting bits?
Their definition of IP (I've never seen a formal definition, and so some of the things on the list amused mildly): Copyright, Contracts, Methods, Trade Secrets, and Know-how (Know-how? How about "stuff we have" - can that be a IP subject too?). Their mention of McBride making some soon-to-be-published "top 5 influential executives list" (that'll be a keeper of an article). And heavy mention of HP's support. Reference was made to their web site removing their logo, however they emphatically associate SCOs current operations and HP's approval. Nothing to substantiate, however.
Really interesting bits?
The crowd. I was expecting Linux zealots. It was mostly a room full of SCO resellers. And they were not too big on having a love in. Nothing hostile, however not one positive comment for the morning's session. During the "we be so profitable" section of the spiel, one reseller in the crowd asked "where does the money come from?" The response was largely a pointer to the SCO source initiative. The response? "What you are profitable in will not make me profitable.". Wow. That was good. One raised the points that this quibble is hurting his business. SCO's stance is that they'd love to settle this tomorrow
Hilarious! SCO is its own worst enemy.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
nice. 16 posts so far, and one's a mirror and 5 are cut / pastes of the article.
Would have managed a more potent marketing ploy considering that they really don't have any product to be selling. They needed to be able to field technical questions, in detail, and were unable to. This hurts their credibility with those who oppose them.
They needed to secure the support of their resellers, without whom they have no income, however basically it sounds like they snubbed them to their faces.
And as a final pedantic note, we all know UNIX is in Linux. In case they forgot, they released System III under a BSD-like license, and Linux subscribes to many of the UNIX philosophies. (Do one thing and do it well). This isn't even an interesting point.
I still remain unimpressed by SCO.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
...ther are still a bunch of stops on the tour that will be going on. Admission is free, and there's more information here. They'll be all over the US, as well as in British Columbia. Maybe someone can stop by and say "hi" to the SCO folks. :)
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
There's no need to mirror this thing. It's one page of text.. There's no multi-meg images or videos. There's a reason it's still up for you to download and try to mirror: it doesn't need to be mirrored more than it has already!
Their definition of IP (I've never seen a formal definition, and so some of the things on the list amused mildly): Copyright, Contracts, Methods, Trade Secrets, and Know-how (Know-how? How about "stuff we have" - can that be a IP subject too?).
Well, they can define "intellectual property" however they want to--the term has no legal significance. "Intellectual property" is merely a collective (and misleading) term to refer generally to certain intagible rights. Copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets each have a specific legal status, specific obligations, and specific enforceable rights.
The term "intellectual property" is actually quite misleading (and this is no doubt a deliberate choice by many of the people using the term) because those rights work very differently from other property rights. For example, they expire. You should think of them more as a temporary contract between you and the government, a kind of non-renewable "lease".
The counter has died now. It was getting about a hit a second. Impressive!
A blog like any other.
Sympatico being the largest Canadian ISP, I've always wondered if one of their servers could survive the /. effect. I guess we'll find out!
(searches on their sites for SCO only brings mention of their "Special Customer Operations" group)
S(anta|pecial) Cr*u(stomer|z) Operations*
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This is not possible with the exception of companies already owned by the Canopy group.
Any company has a fiduciary duty to their stockholders even privately owned.
Any company that accepted this POS (Not Point of Purchase) will open themselves to lawsuit. Any Due diligence will not pass muster.
There is nothing for the acuired company to be gained. The shares can not be sold, their non Legal business has all but disapeared so no synergy and the like can be had, Nothing as far as I can see.
Help fight continental drift.
.. "against legal action". That's what they state. Well, legal action of SCO perhaps but not of, say, the FSF or Linus for breaching the GPL.
IIUC, they waivered their IP claims (not copyrights) when contributing to Linux, notably on or around the technologies that have been named so far. So if they don't abide the license or claim it's void that would immediately force them to face copyright issues with the Linux kernel and any other GPL package they've had in OpenLinux or UnixWare.
So where's the GPL license revocation? Someone's gotta move the first (real) pawn. So far all we get is air and it's humid and smelly. Yet we all snore it up so far. And SCO says Ho and the stock goes Woo.
Ever noticed how Darl McBride resembles Kenneth Irons of Witchbalde memory ? Just a thought... (thank god McBride does not have *that* kind of cash :-)
--- "I didn't think anyone would understand it" -Prof. Bob Muller
"The 80's called, they want their features back."
All of SCO's executives, from King Darl on down, just keep charging forward, as if everything they're doing and saying makes perfect sense. It's almost like some sort of wierd Saturday Night Live parody of a business.
And here I thought they weren't charitable :). We can all now laugh at their future 2 billion dollar webservices without infringing on their IP.
Hitler and Stalin named two of the top 5 influential political leaders of the 20th Century.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
I should have mentioned earlier that it's good to hear SCO resellers being very sceptical.
Brains are not easily engineered into WOC (Wake On Command) luckily.
what bone/s did they throw out to convince these guys they were (still) on a good thing?
I mean, the resellers are business people - they must be hearing grumbles from their customer base and getting worried as a result. At least some of their customers must be making noises about going somewhere else for their systems.
What nice story did SCO have to tell them? "We're suing everyone" doesn't help those guys a bit
The story section is called Caldera. There is no OTHER Caldera that we would be talking about. If you do not like it, go mess witih the clicky box in your user profile. kthxbye.
By watching, one could presume, it's with your eyes; as well, in front of them. You win the blue ribbon for being doubly superfluous.
mirror
Also of note was the volume of OpenSource software in the box - OpenSSL/SSH, Apache, Samba, CUPS, Gimp-print, bash
Isn't most or all of that released as GPL? The "invalid" license? Does SCO intend to claim that the GPL's alleged invalidity means the software is "license-free" and therefore they can do whatever they want with it? Perhaps they assume that nobody associated with free software can afford to sue them for copyright infringement...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
leads to Dude: What in the world is wrong with having a margin?
... because it only fuels the share price pump up. /. want to aid and abet this fraud?
This means that the innocents of the world will lose even more money when this particular worthless 'House of Cards' inevitably comes tumbling down. In most juristictions of the world this SCO lark is considered illegal. Why does
Hmmm poor attempt at trolling by you...
I have zero problem with people trying to defend their Intellectual Property Rights, however to do so they should actually *own* them first.
> Perhaps they assume that nobody associated with
...
> free software can afford to sue them for copyright
> infringement...
I keep waiting for that to happen - the author of some piece of OSS suing SCO for licence infringement.
There must be at least one OSS author that's reasonably wealthy and could afford to do this, with or without the backing of e.g. the EFF. Chance has to be good that at least one OSS person made a fortune somewhere, somehow,
As you would know if you'd read the article properly, the resellers themselves sounded pretty pissed at SCO by and large; "what is making [SCO] profitable is not making [the resellers] profitable". They seem able to see that this lawsuit is join jack all for them.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Phew! Thanks for posting this. I'm not sure if we all could have read the article considering the
TEN PLUS OTHER DAMN COPIES OF THE ARTICLE
already posted.
Thanks again
I always thought mcbride needed some stool softener...
I did read the story properly - I don't quite believe that all the resellers heard was "SCO's going to make money by suing people".
They must have given them something else to cheer them up - what was it?
I think Hitler and stalin were highly influential on the History of the 20th Century. I think the term I am looking for is 'learn from somebody elses mistakes'.
Mr McBride, on the other hand, seems simply to want to profit from a lot of other peoples success - and after the lawsuit, we can hope that others learn from his mistake too.
The mistake you made Mr McBride? You tried to fuck with the penguin. Do you know anything about charging Penguins, Mr McBride? No? Well, you are about to learn...
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
No, because are those of us who have busy, complicated lives who enjoy the occasional belly-laugh.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
n/t
those rights work very differently from other property rights. For example, they expire. You should think of them more as a temporary contract
Temporary? Trademarks registered in the USPTO don't expire as long as the holder keeps filling the meter, and neither do trade secrets. Copyrights will not expire in the United States as long as The Walt Disney Company continues to use proceeds from home video sales to pay off legislators. In other words, only patents expire.
Will I retire or break 10K?
He's using his personal webspace on Sympatico. I dunno what their transfer limit is today, but when I was them as my ISP two years ago it was only 25MB/month.
Thank you!
I've been saying this all along: the worst thing that SCO for themselves could do is render the GPL invalid. They'd IMMEDIATELY open themselves up to a million lawsuits of death from irate copyright holders, a few of whom do have the money to kick the snot out of SCO (IBM, RedHat, and SGI come to mind).
"The GPL is invalid!"
"That so? Stop shipping my code. Now. I wrote that code, the copyright reverts to me."
"Uh, we own it! The GPL is invalid, and therefore, all GPL'd code belongs to us, because we said so!"
"I think not." (lawsuit filed)
Take that last line, multiply it by a million, and you'd see what would happen to SCO if the GPL was declared invalid. These people have honest-to-G-d, actual damages to claim. The GPL might die, but a dead SCO would be put right on top of its body.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I think its a six hour drive to the one nearest to me, but I should go just to ask pointed questions. I'm more or less enjoying my eighteenth year of Unix use (BSD on Vax 11/780
I doubt if most
SCO ignored what people needed for a long, long time, and agreeing to be the punching bag in M$'s proxy war against Linux is the last gasp of the last for pay unix workalike on intel hardware. BSDi went quietly, Sun & SGI are going to kick and fuss
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Mention was also made in the road map of a new online update service (big whoop), and SmallFoot, which is a "Retail Hardened POS solution" (their words, not mine). When did "you want fries with that?" become associated with the five 9's of reliability?
I know that a lot of IT workers are out of touch with the retail industry, but this seems a little arrogant.
Designing a stable, reliable point-of-sale system for long-term use (because retail corporations tend to replace POS systems on the order of once every twenty years) is a huge challenge. I'm involved with a project like that now.
Cash registers are where the money comes into a retail corporation. If they're broken because the designer figured that 80% reliability was good enough, then you don't take in money that day, or you use a notepad, pen, and manual credit card imprinter. A lot of your customers will walk out your door and down the street to someone who bought a better system.
The POS system we're replacing was bought in 1983. The servers are the size of washing machines and have 8.5" disk drives. They're still running. How many of you are working on systems you expect to last that long?
I'm not saying that SCO's system is any good, just that I've noticed a tendency for tech geeks not to understand why making a good POS system is a challenge, and something you'd want to mention as an achievement.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
It is at 3990 for me. That works out to be about...
81 hits/min
or
1.4 hits/sec
That's assuming no hits were lost when the counter was AWOL. Pretty impressive.
That's odd, I was roughly all of 1100-1500 and the counter workded fine then ;)
The words may be the same, but if you read them all carefully you'll see that the tone and emphasis are subtly different in each one.
http://www.dodgethis.org/~skyrider/sco.html
In Soviet Redmond, software programs you!
If anyone's going, I'd be interested in hearing their response to a particular question. When they start talking about the new color printing features provided by Gimp-Print, and their inclusion of Apache HTTPD, Samba, CUPS, and OpenSSH/OpenSSL, ask the following:
"You are stating that you will be including a lot of open-source software within future versions of your operating systems. SCO is on the record for making many statements to the effect that such open-source software is undoubtedly built with stolen intellectual property. If this is true then using an SCO OS puts my business at risk, whether or not you indmenify your customers from direct litigation. What reason do you have to believe that these products are legitimate, while Linux is not?
Probably would best be compacted a bit, but you get the point. I may have to sign up for the Irvine show just to ask that!
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Jesus Christ kill it, kill it!
> The best part of this whole thing is watching this poor guy's site counter shoot up. Was at 131 when I got there - now at 584 two minutes later. I'm watching the Slashdot effect in action in front of my own eyes!
Think how bad it would be if most of us actually read the articles before posting!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"Also of note was the volume of OpenSource software in the box - OpenSSL/SSH, Apache, Samba, CUPS, Gimp-print, bash..."
If SCO is this dependent on OSS software, they are more vulnerable than I gave them credit for. A cohesive effort to remove support for Unixware might do them in. Sure...they have the source code and could re-add support, but it would be expensive for them, and they aren't going to be able to maintain that kind of payroll. So how about it - how hard would it be to break support for SCO platforms? I mean, sure, I feel bad for existing Unixware users, but it would almost be doing them a favor to force them onto a modern OS
...and it's loading just fine.
How many hits DOES it take to get to the center of a webserver?
Disturbing Hypothetical Business plan:
1. SCO gets court ruling that GPL is invalid.
2. Now nobody can ship Linux. Bill Gates sez "W00T!"
3. SCO stock falls to 0.01 since they can't ship Linux either.
4. Darl and pals quietly buy all outstanding shares.
5. Mysterious strangers who can't be tied to Microsoft now
exercise previous options to buy SCO stock at $15/share.
Darl sez "WOOT!" and retires to Ibiza.
>;k
did you throw eggs at them? I would have!
I know this is going to sound like flamebait, and if you feel it is then be my guest in using the moderation system to let me, and everyone else, know.
Where SCO press is concerned, Do Not Feed The Troll. SCO are undoubtedly revelling in the fact that every time their marketing droids put pen to paper, their output is mirrored on /., newsforge, linux.com and any number of similar sites. I expect they use this coverage to show their investors how seriously the community takes SCO's business, and how the Linux-using and Open Source Software communities are incredibly worried about the fact that 'they stole SCO IP and used it in their anti-competitive software'. In short, SCO profit from the coverage, and Darl McBride's worth increases with every SCO post on /..
We as a community should not be furthering this action. SCO proved long ago that their statements do very little to reflect reality, and that they are not averse to publishing absurd comments in order to try and gain a few share points. Indeed, at the time IBM showed us what a large organisation of UNIX-types should do in such a situation; they ignored SCO. SGI have since taken a similar approach. However, regular statements by ESR and others, alongside frequent coverage on sites such as this or Newsforge, have shown that the Open Source community cannot help but to rise to a troll's bait.
This may be because of the lack of centralisation of the community, i.e. there is no single mouthpiece from which views are aired. Whereas IBM or the like can carefully control the statements issued by its press department, should someone like ESR decide to express their opinion on a subject, it is erroneously considered to represent the wishes and views of the community as a whole. Now while I'm not advocating restrictions to free speech, I do think that such publications or announcements should be self-vetted to consider whether or not they are helping the very people who wish to harm our winderfully open community.
In summary, as I said at the top, SCO are trolls. Please do not feed them in the future.
In fact, the analogy they whip out is that of Harley-Davidson (HD was purchased by AMF, went to hell, then arose re-branded as the mega-label you know today). I refrained from pointing out that pre/post-AMF Harley produced respected product, and did not send threatening letters to Yamaha owners ...
Another poster mentions Harley's IP debacle over their engine types. However, from the 1950's to the 1960's the Norton Manx 30 M motorcycle was cleaning Harley's clock at Daytona Beach. Harley had the rules of the race changed specifically so that any motorcycle could enter - except a Manx 30 M.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Done. IBM amended their counter claims to include counter suing SCO for violating the GPL.
How can I be -Offtopic, when the follow-up is +Funny?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
that would have made SCO look good
Yeah, wasn't too good of a troll.
I'll try harder.
SCO "City to City Tour" (%s/City to City/Farewell/g)
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
lower horn....removed.
Enough said.
Follow the link to SCO Source, www.caldera.com/scosource/quotes_from_complaint.ht ml
to the last quote: www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28183.html
That article is a followup to:
MS exec rattles sabre, suggests Linux could infringe patents
www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28155.html
And you find an article about Microsoft doing a test run of "indemnification"-FUD against linux and IBM in a smal market (Israel) Could someone who speaks hebrew follow the link and post a translation, please?
Now notice, IBM and Microsoft exchanged patents etc. at the time they co-developed OS/2, so Microsoft can't sue IBM (would be unwise anyway). So they need a little proxy-warrior to do the dirty work. Along comes SCO-Source demanding money for their "IP"....
It's happened. There's this company you might have heard of called International Business Machines that has sued SCO for copyright infringement on their code in the Linux Kernel. They even registered the copyright, so SCO is liable for statutory damages. Interestingly, it looks as though it's no longer possible to download the kernel source from the SCO website, which suggests that their lawyers are worried. (I was going to suggest that people download the sources in order to drive up SCO's liability, but it looks as though they thought of that, too.)
Importantly, though, that doesn't have any bearing on any other software under the GPL. The fact that SCO has violated the license on Linux does not prevent them from distributing any other GPLed software. Otherwise they probably would have been sued by several other Free Software developers. ISTR that the SAMBA team is particularly pissed at them and would love a legitimate excuse for preventing them from including SAMBA in their Unix line.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Dream it. You keep eating taco bell and one day it won't taste like ass, because why would people eat it if it tasted like ass.
Avaya is mostly based out of Colorado and yes, they have SCO on a number of past products. They are also in a hurry to remove it and move forward with Linux, not SCO.
I have heard that Lucent is doing the same from some of my contacts.
That will kill the use of original Unix in the company that created it (ATT).
Walgreens is an IBM client. Last I heard of 2 years ago, they in-house coders were wanting to switch, but IBM was kind of holding them back. Hopefully, now, IBM will push the change to Linux
These are huge accounts for SCO, so it is almost certain that they will lose at least 25% of their business in the next year.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Avaya is a Lucent spin-off. So they may be claiming 2 customers where there's really only one :). Avaya sells interactive voice
response units that are based on UnixWare.
This is their old "CONVERSANT" line. Funny
thing is, they have since replaced that line
with new IVR units that run Solaris/Sparc.
For whatever reason, UnixWare was fairly popular as a base operating system for telephony apps. It's also used by other vendors for similar "appliance" type bundled solutions. Cyberguard, a pretty decent commercial firewall is also based on UnixWare.
I was curious, but they're not coming anywhere near where I live: Durham/Research Triangle Park. They've covered LA and Dallas, but come on - they are nowhere near my other home town - Washington DC (often rated #3 in the nation)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Mirrored at PlanetMirror now: HTTP | FTP.
The crowd. I was expecting Linux zealots. It was mostly a room full of SCO resellers.
:)
We, Mac zealots, are more zealous
theyve always been a sell out company,
most small business organizations my organization consulted we have
moved out of SCO and moved them into legitimate
Linux distributions like Redhat and Suse.
They should have stuck to 'Linux Support' and
even I could have used them....
I am still wondering why we are not boycoting SCO's Unix customers like McDonalds and Poppa John's Pizza? If they started loosing their big customers perhaps Wall street would wake up and notice this scam.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
It's still there and it has the same md5 sum mentioned in this article.
It's something that has really been bothering me lately. Not just about this situation but about much of the shit that is going on driving the world down.
How can people be evil and not care. When I do something wrong I feel bad about it and sometimes even try to make up for what I did. I don't just keep doing more evil stuff. Makes me shake my head.
No, I'm New Here
"When mentioning PAM support his comment was "finally!". A crowd member picked up on this & asked "when you say 'PAM - finally!', who are you implying you are behind?".
Maybe it was my undersexed mind, but I had some image of a desparate SCO exec trying to fuck a girl from behind and then yelling "Finally!" when he actually got it in there. -non sig all your linux belong to us-
Favourite quote: "The 80's called, they want their features back." Heh.
SCO. What a bunch of fools, misguided by a retarded sense of importance...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Sounds like the author passed on waaaaay too many easy opportunities to abuse SCO...
But, if I go to the Dallas session, I'll behave myself and wear something else...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Obvious when you think about it. First, you use the recently discussed security problems of the P2P networking software to fudge the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the illegal file sharers. Of course you use the IP addresses of SCO. This gets the RIAA to start suing SCO. At the same time, you need to fudge the hack so it looks like the real source is running under SCO's distribution of Linux. This gets SCO to sue the RIAA for the license fees and IP (Intellectual Property) violations.
Both snakes are eating each other's tails, and they implode into a black hole. Uglier than the end of the Borg!
Or maybe the real solution is better drugs. For example, they could have a drug that raises your blood pressure when you lie. One good dose and McBride's head would pop like a balloon. (And imagine using it in Washington when asking about "Governator Arnold"...)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I read the title as "Notes From The SCO Roadshow's First post" and thought " wow! they are sending out information through FP!!".
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
When the issue of idemnification came up, he should have asked how SCO plans to idemnify their customers against claims related IBM's patent claims, in the (almost certain) event SCO loses! (Best asked in the presence of as many reporters and potential or current SCO customers as possible) If you can, squeeze in a follow up question about how they intend to deal with copyright lawsuits from the developers who wrote the rest of the Linux kernel, and if they intend to idemnify their linux customers against this as well.
These four patents are something SCO's FUD machine cannot explain away, especially since they are jumping up and down about their own so called intellectual property.
My rights don't need management.
I believe that SCO's position is that software under GPL is public domain. This would allow them to take it, change it, sell it, etc. without having to keep it open. AFAIK, it's the only way attacking the GPL would work for them. Otherwise, they're in deep shit, like you say.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
In other words, the resellers are completely unaware just how far behind SCO UNIX is the state-of-the-art.
It sounded to me that reseller was completely aware of how far SCO is behind and was trying to get them to admit they were copying Linux (and Solaris, but SCO copying Linux has more impact).
How can you be "anti-linux"? I can understand if you don't like it, but its not a monopoly, its not under investigation from the justice department, its not raising prices.
I personally don't use it, but that's different from being anti-Linux.
I find the only people who don't like it are generally folks who have something invested in MS, like an MSCE (or whatever they're called); they seem to be threatened by a world that isn't MS-centric.
I suspect you use it at your high-school currently and you don't understand why everybody doesn't just use it.
That's okay; when you see actual businesses and enterprises, they'll you'll understand it a little better.
They're nowhere near Washington DC.
That's interesting because the DC area is one of the biggest consumer of IT services in the world due to the federal government (which is vast) many well-off local governments, many government contractors.
The Baltimore area is now melded into the Washington area, so that's an entire other major city.
Every major IT corporation in the world has a large presence here.
Fascinating that SCO won't stop here.
Look, the real question is how are they going to indeminfy if they are bankrupt?
And why did they arrange to have a small loan from canopy group secured with ALL of their IP?
And why are they busy selling off shares now if they expect to win 3-5 billion (over 100 / share).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Can't live without my Philips Milk of Magnesia for all those Hardened POSes... Off to Walgreens!
:)
Funny or Troll, it's a tossup
Hmmm. I get my prescriptions filled at Walgreens. Perhaps I should go elsewhere, and let Walgreens know why.
I think it's pretty clear that the sellers aren't happy about this. (Though they don't particularly like Linux either.) Check out comp.unix.sco.misc.
Litigious bastards
OpenSSH, OpenSSL and Apache are all released under BSD-like licenses. By BSD-like, I mean you don't have to distribute the source of derivative works. Dunno about the other stuff, didn't feel like checking. :)
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
It appears that HP is still sponsoring SCO's roadshow. Here is a discussion at Groklaw about a guy who called SCO's Blake Stowell to confirm this:
HP is sponsoring the road show
Sincerely
Vice President
Dan Quayle
Help fight continental drift.
Congress passed outrageous protectionist tariffs on imported bikes in the 80s, to benefit the death-deserving HD. Honda/Kaw/Yam/Suz worked their butts off for years, getting better all the time, competing like gonzo. All that time, HD did jack zero on their bikes. Ooh that pissed me off.
If you attend some of the future SCO roadshow maybe ask a few of the ones that they have come up with
Second: If you have any questions that you think needs to be included post it over at Groklaw.
Help fight continental drift.
between Open Linux, AIX5L and UnixWare and that they were actively trying to unify the two.
It's all horse manure, but I suspect they know that.
!Squalus
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
> They must have given them something else to cheer them up - what was it?
Why do you persist in believing SCO gave their resellers anything to cheer them up?
Why do you believe SCO still cares about its resellers? Resellers aren't in the current (litigation-based) business plan.
Obligatory "I'm no lawyer" but that's going to be one stupendous arguement to make that GPL=Public Domain. Assuming they can somehow invalidate the GPL that doesn't mean that the copyright is somehow invalidated.
I've always see their trying to legally argue the GPL's validity coupled with their distribution of GPLed software as a damn good sign that they're all bark and no bite. I fail to see how any lawyer, even one who thinks the GPL is toothless, would advise a client to distribute software based on that very same license where there's a non-trivial chance that they'd be distributing software without the consent of the code owner. The potential liability they'd be facing would be *staggering*.
Take that last line, multiply it by a million, and you'd see what would happen to SCO if the GPL was declared invalid.
Hmmm, 2-million installations, 1-million copyright holders, $150,000 per violation. Hmmm, that's only 7-million times the annual GDP of the world.
Yes, that would be one stupendous argument to make.
Remember that this is a war on several fronts. So far, SCO has avoided pissing off the Free Software Foundation too much. There is a README.SCO in gcc 3.3.1, but that is about it.
If SCO starts talking about "GPL code is actually public domain, which means we own the Linux kernel because all those GPL-licensing copyright holders don't count", I think RMS would go apeshit. gcc 3.3.1.1 would come out in about 24 hours, half the other Free Software projects in the world would follow suit, developers would be jumping on the bandwagon to spit on SCO, and SCO's legitimate customers would find a large portion of their software unsupported.
If SCO is so bold as to start issuing invoices to Canadian businesses, does this mean that SCO will have a whopping GST payment to make to the government upon issuing the invoices? Assuming that no one pays the bogus invoices, will this bankrupt SCO?
If I where to find out that SCO shipped anyting that belonged to me I would have already filed a lawsuit. I would probably just opt to defend myself and the measly 10K or so that I would soak them for would not be worth the time. Only a retard would allow them to violate the GPL and not collect on it.
Got Code?
2. Now nobody can ship Linux. Bill Gates sez "W00T!"
It's more likely that Stallman would just finish up work on GPL 3.0, and release it. Then all people who licensed their code under the "invalid" GPL 2.0 would agree to relicense their code under the merely "untested" GPL 3.0, and then everybody would be free to ship Linux again.
We knew that from Linus' comment a while back already.
- 4r0g
I decided to go to the SCO "City to City Tour" (%s/City to City/Farewell/g) out of morbid curiosity - what did SCO say about itself? I was especially interested to see if the time allotted to "roadmap" would even mention shippable product (o; It was interesting - not exactly as I expected, but interesting nonetheless. Highly recommended. ... it may be worth putting yourself on the list for future stops of the show ...
...
And apparently easy to attend. 64 seats, less than 20 attendees. Considering that when I applied I went to a waiting list, I was expecting a higher turnout
Grandest cheese at the presentation was VP of Marketing, Jeff Hunsaker. He started out with an hour the company's report card & backgrounder. Here's the view of SCO painted: 330 employees, 2+ million deployed units (no mention of OS breakdown - would be interesting to see what % of that is Caldera Linux), target market is small-ish business. Reference accounts seem to be franchised fast food & drug oriented. Think Pizza Hut & Wallgreens (Arnold Clarke & Argos were UK references, Shoppers Drug thrown in for us Canuks). Nothing IT-intensive. Avaya & Lucent were mentioned on the laundry list, however no detail was given, and I cannot imagine descendants of AT&T paying too much to some guys in Utah for hideous product (searches on their sites for SCO only brings mention of their "Special Customer Operations" group).
Oddly enough, market cap & stock price were mentioned extensively (who'd have thought?). Reference was made to using their capitalization as a means of acquisition; however no details were given (assuming there were any details to give). The fabled '2 quarters of profitability' was also mentioned. The name Caldera was dragged through the dirt, as they were never profitable. From the slides you'd think SCO had roots much, much deeper than the MS Xenix junk they spawned from. In fact, the analogy they whip out is that of Harley-Davidson (HD was purchased by AMF, went to hell, then arose re-branded as the mega-label you know today). I refrained from pointing out that pre/post-AMF Harley produced respected product, and did not send threatening letters to Yamaha owners
Mention of the legal battle? Nothing technical. Representatives were up-front about their lack of legal knowledge, and inability to comment. It never got past the mud-slinging stage. Same old, same old. Their interest is in protecting their IP. This is about a breach of contract. Linux 2.4 code review shows Monterrey-esqe code relating to memory-access that must have come from AIX 5L. Caldera Linux customers are indemnified against legal action. Blah blah blah.
Interesting bits?
Their definition of IP (I've never seen a formal definition, and so some of the things on the list amused mildly): Copyright, Contracts, Methods, Trade Secrets, and Know-how (Know-how? How about "stuff we have" - can that be a IP subject too?). Their mention of McBride making some soon-to-be-published "top 5 influential executives list" (that'll be a keeper of an article). And heavy mention of HP's support. Reference was made to their web site removing their logo, however they emphatically associate SCOs current operations and HP's approval. Nothing to substantiate, however.
Really interesting bits?
The crowd. I was expecting Linux zealots. It was mostly a room full of SCO resellers. And they were not too big on having a love in. Nothing hostile, however not one positive comment for the morning's session. During the "we be so profitable" section of the spiel, one reseller in the crowd asked "where does the money come from?" The response was largely a pointer to the SCO source initiative. The response? "What you are profitable in will not make me profitable.". Wow. That was good. One raised the points that this quibble is hurting his business. SCO's stance is that they'd love to settle this tomorrow (har har). Stance not bought by aforementioned reseller - the paraphrase
Like what I said? You might like my music
"And heavy mention of HP's support. Reference was made to their web site removing their logo, however they emphatically associate SCOs current operations and HP's approval."
If SCO representatives are claiming that HP supports their actions, and HP does not, this could bring on bigger fireworks than the IBM lawsuit ever would.
Keep in mind that Stallman (well, the FSF) still has ahold of the key to the most incredibly vast storehouse of IP in the world -- control of the GPL. In a worst-case scenerio (and it would take a seriously doomsday scenerio), Stallman would probably just make GPLv3 have a clause stating that SCO and SCO alone may not use GPLed code.
This is the one thing that terribly worries me. The FSF has massive and growing IP control for perpetuity. Now, I happen to think that as long as Stallman doesn't go senile or have a revelation or something, GPL revisions won't be nasty. But what if an FSF member gets paid off to release a "revision" of the GPL that BSD-licenses all GPLed code? Sure, Stallman would argue that such a modification is illegitimate, but who's to say what a judge would rule as being legal? My money would be with Stallman, but it's a thought. If I were Microsoft, faced with losing a monopoly, I might want to try such a gamble.
And what if someone tried buying out members of the FSF with a couple million each for a "legitimate" GPL to BSD conversion? Control of all GPLed software would be a phenomenally valuable asset. Maybe RMS wouldn't be bought out, but he won't be alive forever, and the GPL does nothing but spread. What will happen 50 years down the line?
May we never see th
Impossible. Many may change their mind, be uncontactable, be dead, etc. Do you have the geneaology of every line of code out there? I certainly don't.
May we never see th
>Obligatory "I'm no lawyer" but that's going to
>be one stupendous arguement to make that
>GPL=Public Domain.
Unless you can influence a court decision to be rendered based on prejudice and hostility to a party, it would seem to be very difficult to argue that GPL = public domain without bringing collateral damage that invalidates every other software license too.
Any ruling that establishes precedence concerning the overall validity of the GPL is open to being construed as a rule governing any similar license, which means just about every piece of software that is distributed.
The GPL seems strange, because it is a free distribution model. But that's just about the only unusual aspect of the license, and it hardly is distinct enough from, say, the Microsoft EULA, to make it any more or less "invalidatable" in court.
> mean, the resellers are business people
Some business people seem to thrive while making bad decision after worse.
Other business people go from six-figures to welfare (or prison) after only a single, relatively minor fuckup.
There doesn't seem to be any rhyme, reason, or justice to this.
AFAIK, most of the copyright notices for GPL software go something like "This code is licensed under the GPL v2.0, or any later version if you so choose" or something to that effect.
Granted, not *all* GPL code is released like that.
No, but it's the job of the people who brought the packages into the distribution in the first place to keep up on licensing issues? (And don't say Nobody can spend that much time-- Debian's admins can and do.)
Also, keep in mind that the GPLv2's recommended boilerplate says in part, This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version (emphasis mine). Not everybody code maintainer uses that exact phrasing, but a great many do, and should GPLv2 be found to be invalid but the maintainer is uncontactable or uninterested or unconscious or whatnot, that phrasing gives an automatic out to packagers for whenever GPLv3 (or GPLv2.1, or whatever) is drafted.
I work in a retail chain (not naming 'em, and posting AC for that reason) which runs a POS package called MicroBiz. It runs in DOS - with a DOS TSR version of ICVerify! - on a 386, and is copyrighted 1989.
The software works flawlessly. It manages our inventory as well as tracking sales, credit (accounts receivable), discounts, tax-exempt customers, etc. I've been at the store for 6 years, and have never witnessed a problem. No lockups, no reconciliation discrepancies, nothing. It Just Runs(TM).
I'm more surprised that the hardware is still running.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I just got my SCO goodie bag, nothing much, just an invoice for $600...
First off, even if your assumption here was correct, a case could definately be made that there were damages, 'reputation' may be something of an intangible but it's tangible enough that many court cases have revolved around it.
But, in point of fact, your assumption is not true - the damages a plaintiff can seek under US copyright law, and that of most other jurisdictions, are not limited to actual damages.
In US law in particular, one may sue in cases of copyright infringement for profits obtained through infringement (read, every penny Caldera/SCO has made through selling GPL software, pretty much every penny they've made period, and this is on top of any damages) and one also has the option of seeking 'statutory damages' instead of 'actual damages' - statutory damages being a sum between $750 and $30,000 per infringement, i.e. per copy of Caldera/SCO Linux sold, in cases where the court does not deem that the infringement was proven to be willfull. In the event a court was convinced that the infringement was indeed willful, statutory damages could be set as high as $150,000 per infringement.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I believe that SCO's position is that software under GPL is public domain.
That's not for SCO to say, that's for the copyright holders to say. And the copyright holders have chosen to allow others to use it under the restrictions put forth in their chosen license. And the GPL is far more restricting than the legal definition of the "public domain".
IANAL and all that, though.
Crying desperately for someone to help save there dead OS, and thus soon-to-demise company.
..
:
They might get lucky by buying some small-business somewhere
and here's a hint to the SCO Cry-babies
Make Sure it's someone WHO KNOWS HOW TO CODE UNIX SYSTEMS!
Only they will be able to save SCO!
Man, I thought after all that crack they've been smoking it would be
"SCO bad trip show"
Ricardo da Silva Lima
Hitler was "influential"...
I mean before this all they could look forward to was a small executives salary working for a dying company. Now they can make themselves a nice nest-egg from all the money people are throwing at a dancing corpse.
Winners - SCO : Losers - investors
I would like to urge those of you that are in a position to do so to add a clause to your conditions of copyright (e.g. GPL) that excludes SCO from participating due to it's posture against the GPL.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
ISTR that the SAMBA team is particularly pissed at them and would love a legitimate excuse for preventing them from including SAMBA in their Unix line.
Perhaps the SAMBA team could add a clause to their grant of copyright that excludes SCO. Is this posible with the GPL?
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
obviously suffered some kind of severe child-hood truama's. It's them definately crying for help!
The management needs to see psychologist, and not sue the entire linux movement.
These SCO people SERIOUSLY need psychological help!
If you do go, and they spout the "I can't comment on legal matters" line, be sure to ask them "WHY ARE YOU BRINGING IT UP IF YOU CAN'T COMMENT?"
If SCO includes open source software such OpenSSH, Apache, Gimp-print, and bash in their Unixware distribution, does this make it Unix derivative code and they now own it? It did for JFS, XFS, NUMA, etc.
As far as RMS is a spokesperson for these groups, there is clear "indication that they are calling on anybody to exercise power to stop anybody else from doing anything..." Is it censorship? No.
But let's not pretend the FSF and the GNU project aren't calling on the government to exercise its power to change law. With RMS at the helm, they most assuredly are calling on the government to change copyright law. They are most definitely lobbying the government to exercise its power to stop everybody from doing one thing in particular: distribute software under closed-source licenses.
Now, as a developer, I presently have the right (granted to me by law, that is) to make that choice for myself...to open or close my software. I like open source. I like sharing and helping others and receiving their help in return. But I like having the choice to do it another way if I like.
Whether I ought to have that choice or not...that is one of the debates RMS (and by extension the GNU project) is embroiled in. He is quite clearly on the side that no, in fact, nobody should be given that choice. In his opinion, it is not a god-given right that software I develop is mine to do with as I please. (I base this on a history of his public statements...I do not purport to be a mind-reader.)
I am undecided on this. I have had this right under current law. And as I said, I *enjoy* having the freedom of choice in the matter. Yet, I am still on the fence as to whether I really deserve to have the freedom to make that choice. But I lean towards, yes I do.
On a somewhat related note, this week IBM is holding their annual CASCON technical conference in Markham, which is a few minutes north of Toronto. I wonder if that had anything to do with SCO's choice of city?
And here's some other thoughts:
IF SCO can successfully say that LINUX is a *NIX variant and thus owes them money, what about the commercial counterparts of the "OSS" clones? Could Adobe come around and fight with Corel over who gets to sue distros who distribute The Gimp? MS over Evolution (after all, without Outlook to clone and "copy" and without a feature-set to match, where would Evolution be?)? If you can successfully argue that by releasing a product with a set of API's or easily cloned interface that you now "influence" any product that dares to compete with it later, then fuck, man. This rabbit hole could go deep.
Fortunately for us (in CSS and OSS worlds), I don't think they'll be able to argue that successfully.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Are there others? It's almost as if the majority of "conservatives" are either too stupid to understand what being conservative on the various issues means, or are so desperate, they'll support this bizarro Republicrat (Who's worse than most democrats) rather than conceed to symbolic political failure.
Do you think we'll possibly be seeing an end to neo-conservatism with the Republican party so depedent on the Christian/rural vote?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Nah. This was probably just the warning that they're about to go after Apache and OpenSSH users next.
For the most part, the coverage of SCO's actions have been largely confined to the technology press.
SCO is hoping this road show will generate enough interest to get the mainstream press to pay attention to them. Their case is weak, so they have been braying loudly to anyone that will pay attention to them, hoping that the pressure of increased media coverage will induce IBM to start responding publicly...this can only help them.
As long as IBM keeps their comments confined to the courts, SCO's momentum dies and so does their stock. This road show is the "pump" in "pump 'n dump".
True enough, but they got a protectionist tariff imposed on imported motorcycles of 700cc and above. The tariff expired some years later.
It was heavy-handed to the consumer because you had no choice but to pay the fee on a large bike. With SCO, you can ignore their license fee.
One of the things that struck me as interesting was seeing the SCO laptops were all running some flavour of Windows. One of the audience members (sitting in the back row) had a laptop running RedHat. In other words there were no SCO boxes at a SCO event...
Of the under 30 people there, two I know to be working with/for not for profit/charities that are SCO free and I was just there as a Linux centric consultant to try to understand the SCO mind (bit of a wasted effort I'm afraid...). In other words over 10 percent where non-SCO clients/resellers, and people who are unlikely to become SCO clients.
The seemed to be some question regarding the availability of source code for some GPL'ed software, with one of the resellers asking where to get the source for such programs as the SCO version of Apache, and the SCO people not being sure where or if the source was available.
Everyone present got a T-Shirt that on the back read:
---
[GOT UNIX IN YOUR LINUX?]
FACT: SCO OWNS THE LEGAL COPYRIGHT TO UNIX SYSTEM V.
FACT: SCO OWNS ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF VIOLATIONS BY UNIX LICENSEES.
FACT: SCO HAS PROOF OF DIRECT COPYING OF SYSTEM V INTO LINUX.
I SAW IT FOR MYSELF AT SCOFORUM 2003
---
I did get some extra copies of this T-Shirt and think I will put them them up for sale at an upcomming Toronto Linux User Group meeting (for use as target practice?).
For food SCO put on a breakfast and lunch for attendies. The breakfast was lame, pastries, fruit, tea/coffee/fruit juice. Lunch was quite good, several kinds of salad, rice with veggies, spicy noodles with tiny shrimp, and/or chicken with veggies with tea/coffee/pop.
So whoever your political favorite is, congratulations, you are at least far more politically educated than most.
(oh, and to answer your question: the short version is that the Conservatives back Bush because they've been taught to thinking anything Democrat is Evil and Communist. So as long as Bush is preaching the opposite of the Dems, he's therefore Conservative. (Orwell would be proud))
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Just found this article. The mainstream press is not blindly swollowing the SCO party line:
CNN on SCO
They state that the stock-dumping is of a noticeable scale and that it's very risky to buy any of that stock.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
But then it wouldn't make it into Debian..
Reading your web page, I felt like I was there. I hope my accounts of events I attend read as well and are as entertaining. The only thing that would have made your site better for me is if you spelled out most of your acronyms.
Thanks for attending, thanks for sharing.
Timeshare, eh? So did you opt for the free boat or the mystery box?
I've put up another mirror at this site. Just in case everyone else is Slashdotted.
This is not part of my post. It's my signature. I bet you're disappointed.