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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
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."
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.
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
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"...
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...
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 &
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.
"The 80's called, they want their features back."
Damn. I was interested in seeing the /. in real time... that's why I put a counter there ...
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
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
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
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)
> 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
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.
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.
It's still there and it has the same md5 sum mentioned in this article.
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.
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.
As someone who's worked on SCO systems, I'd say that would be the best thing anyone has ever done for SCO users. There isn't a single SCO application provider that hasn't already started supporting Linux.
People joke about the ancient feature-set of current SCO products, but even the stability and reliability of what's SCO offers is something out of the mid-nineties. (As in, mid-nineties *Microsoft* software)
Most of SCO's customers, being small-scale retail/manufacturing, generally have little or no IT support and only know as much as their (overpriced) SCO crack-dealers tell them. I'd bet that most of them are still running serial terminals.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"