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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
mirror
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...
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
...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".
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.
You generally haven't been able to short much of it because there are more people who want to short it than stocks in the brokerages. Most of the shares are owned by either the Canopy Group of a few other folks. The short interest is *insane* on that stock -- as in maybe 15% of the shares out on the open market and not covered by the Canopy Group and such have been short-sold.
Gentoo Sucks
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.
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)
Temporary? Trademarks registered in the USPTO don't expire as long as the holder keeps filling the meter, and neither do trade secrets.
Copyrights are also temporary. The Constitution says so. The fact that corrupt politicians keep changing the meaning of "limited duration" doesn't change that.
Trade secret protections are very limited and temporary, but of indeterminate duration: they disappear pretty much as soon as the secret fails to be a secret anymore. Most of the remedies are against the persons originally violating trade secrecy.
You observe correctly that trademarks are renewable. However, trademarks are not a big issue in the SCO case and they are generally not a problem for open source.
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.
It's still there and it has the same md5 sum mentioned in this article.
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