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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)."
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
SCO purchases a Canopy company with newly created shares at a nominal value (yes they have provision for a massive share expansion). The Canopy shareholders - ie Noorda and Yarro then sell the SCO stock at its market price and make a killing.
A worthless Canopy company has been turned into a fortune in cash and the suckers who have been paying through their nose to buy SCO stock have been defrauded.
So it goes.
And where do you guys think they are getting it from?
The GPL'D! Linux kernel.
Im putting money into that bet.... FSF, its time to go in for a BIG class action lawsuit now that they still have their money.
Think about how they see this thing.
"Linux is ours, so we can use it as we see fit"
They are switching SCO *ix to Linux, thats how they are getting the cool new features.
B A S T A R D S
NO SIG
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.
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).
Disrupting SCO's road shows won't do the Open Source community any good. The best tactic is simply to attend and report. Maybe one or two pointed questions during Q&A, but anything more than that will get in the way of the attendees coming to their own conclusions. No need to interrupt your enemy when he is shooting himself in the foot.
Simply put, I think this article ultimately tells us EXACTLY why they're embarking on this legal insanity. They have no viable product, they're hopefully behind technologically, and falling further behind every month, and their vendors are getting restless. So they're throwing a hail mary and hoping they can sue their largest competitor into nonexistance. If Linux goes away, they suddenly have a market again.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.