Gartner Recommends Holding Onto The SCO Money

benploni writes "George Weiss of Gartner has published a paper with some interesting recommendations regarding SCO. They include 1) Keep a low profile and do not divulge details on Linux deployments. 2) Until a judgment in a case would unequivocally warrant it, Linux users should not pay SCO the license fees it has asked for to settle its allegations of infringement of intellectual property rights. 3) Do not permit SCO to audit your premises without legal authorization. 4) For customers of SCO Open Server and UnixWare, an unfavorable judgment could cause SCO to cease operations or sell itself. That could harm future support and maintenance. Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years. There's more, but are the analysts finally catching on?"

Comments

Slow learners

[shystershep]

We believe that these moves compromise SCO's mission as a software company.

No news here if you've been keeping up the story on /., but some good points -- although most are common sense. I knew analysts weren't all that bright or quick on the uptake, but it looks like they eventually do get there sometimes. But what I can't figure out is why they think SCO is a software company . . .

Re:Slow learners

[Anonymous Coward]

No news here if you've been keeping up the story on /.

Well, actually if you've been following the case only by keeping up with /., you would think SCO was at risk simply because they were the Evil Empire, and everyone knows that the rebels blow up their death star in the end

This analysis points out that SCO might be at risk for the much more realistic reason: by the numbers, a law firm will now dictate its business agenda.

But what I can't figure out is why they think SCO is a software company . . .

Uh, maybe because they sell software?

Re:Slow learners

[BigRedFish]

In summary:

• Don't pay invoices presented by companies with whom you have no business, unless/until legally compelled to do so by a court.
• Do not consent to a search of your home/business, especially by a private entity, unless/until compelled to do so by court order.

Thanks, Gartner. That's the kind of hard-hitting, insightful business advice we need in this management-by-Ziff-Davis world. Maybe next month they can do a helpful piece on not paying a parking ticket until you've been issued one, and then only if it was issued by a real Dept. of Traffic officer, and not some homeless guy who wrote the citation on a napkin.

Re:Slow learners

[benploni]

Sure, it's blindingly obvious to techies. But they are not the consumers of Gartner's research. The real effect of this "research note" will be to SCOX:US's stock price - and that's a good thing.

Re:Slow learners

[BRSloth]

I don't know if it would be a good thing. With it's stock prices going down really fast, SCO will show up with some other weird stuff... That kind of stuff that we are all tired hearing again and again... Probably they will show up saying that they could sue Microsoft and Windows users.

Re:Slow learners

[benploni]

I understand where you are coming from, but you're missing some things. For example, Darl's employment contract, and the Bay Star Capital contract. They both have provisions for severe consequences if SCOX:US falls below a set price. It will almost certainly put SCO in bankruptcy.

Re:Slow learners

[Anonymous Coward]

These days, you're lucky if your management understands their own business, let alone the legal issues of a business they aren't involved in (in this case, the software business). For all these people, and the folks who work for them, this is probably useful advice.

Re:Slow learners

[fermion]

It should be obvious not to pay invoices when no product or service has been requested, and not to allow searches unless legally required, but look at the recent reality. Customers are increasingly caving in to increasingly intrusive demands, and vendors are asking for powers once reserved for federal law enforcement. MS wants to compel customers to upgrade on a yearly basis or pay large fees as punishment. Music labels want the ability to destroy physical property on the suspicion of civil violations of their rights. I think in this reality it is quite necessary for a firm with some merit to come out say just don't do it.

Re:Slow learners

[billcopc]

Better yet: don't pay parking tickets at all. We own this fucking land, it is our government. Time to show the world all its broken systems that need cleaning out.

Re:Slow learners

[EvilAlien]

My impression was that that wasn't news if you've been reading their SEC filings, either.

I was prepared to dismiss this story out of hand once I saw "Gartner recommends"... I was even prepared to launch into some sort of snappy "Microsoft's puppet recommends what now?"... unfortunately, I'll have to save my knee-jerk reactions for another post.

D'oh.

Re:Slow learners

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO management obviously falls under the category of not understanding their own business...

Re:Slow learners

[Anonymous Coward]

YOu obviously haven't dealt with a lot of CxO's...

Re:Slow learners

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont know why ive been holding this off, but here goes, I love you, shystershep! I love you with all my soul and heart! I want to marry you and one day, have little shystershep's running around, and live happily ever after!

Please, dont forsake me, I promise to be good!
Will you accept my offer? All I ever wanted to do was to make you happy. Please say yes, if not for yourself, then for all of humanity!

Re:Slow learners

[Anonymous Coward]

So... is there anything legal we can do to help push it into the trash heap where it belongs?

Re:Slow learners

[Anonymous Coward]

Add a filter to your proxy that blocks all stories that mention "SCO"

In other words, ignore them.

Re:Slow learners

[mpe]

Don't pay invoices presented by companies with whom you have no business, unless/until legally compelled to do so by a court.

The fact there are still scams involving bogus invoicing implies that there are companies stupid enough to pay invoices without first asking "did we order this?".

Re:Slow learners

[tiger99]

My memory is not as good as it once was. Are these the same analysts who said IIS was insecure, several years after we all knew that, and after countless very public security breaches, and recommended moving to Apache? If so, their analysis is 100% accurate but invariably too late to be of much relevance, because it lags way behind information that is already in the public domain.

People who need to know, need to know NOW, not when it is far too late to affect crucial decisions. What professional qualifications does an analyst need, and does any professional body oversee their competence? Or could I become one, as of now, bearing in mind that all of my guesses about defective Microsoft products, for example, have been proven correct?

Red Herrings Eat Profits

[dolo666]

"Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years."

Maybe once the plans to migrate are prepared fully, smart employees will push for migration citing the existing contingency plans as existing (hey, we planned to move in 2003), and show how cheaper/better life could be without the SCO. At least with that plan, even the most obtuse managers would see the truth.

Funny how the legal fees of a legal aggressor company like SCO prove that overextending yourself is a bad business model. They're like Rome! But at least they are setting the bad example, so that other businesses with money won't dare go after the Open Source community so readily next time around. I say it looks like we are proving ourselves to the traditional red herring pundits.

IANAL, but wouldn't it be wise for everyone to just wait out the SCO? They are doing their damndest to ruin their own business reputation, so the rest isn't far off anyway. I mean it's obvious, right?

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Remember though, we had a few 800 pound gorillas in the form of IBM and Novell.

Far more Earth shattering was the USL vs. BSD lawsuit. BSD went from being on the ropes to routing USL badly. Rumors are that part of the sealed evidence showed the much of Unix was actually lifted from BSD. Especially impressive because it was pretty much Berkley defending itself. There were no industry players coming to bat.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

novell is more like a heroin addicted gorilla who weighs in at a heft 200lbs...novell 5 years ago would be an 800lb gorilla, but since then his habits have made him a junkie...but he has booked himself into the betty ford clinic (linux)

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[ninewands]

Quoth the poster:

Especially impressive because it was pretty much Berkley defending itself. There were no industry players coming to bat.

... and please explain just how it is that the State of California, acting through the offices of the Regents of the University of California, is NOT equal to at least ONE 900 pound gorilla? Government doesn't need the support of "industry players" in the courtroom.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

overextending yourself is a bad business model. They're like Rome!

The crucial difference here is that Rome was, at one time during its history, feared and respected.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[jimfrost]

Rumors are that part of the sealed evidence showed the much of Unix was actually lifted from BSD.

I think the quote was, "as much as 50%." There is a hell of a lot of BSD in SVR4. That certainly seems to have pushed them to a fast settlement (and they got off cheap!) but there were a variety of other things that probably would have shot them down too -- many of which are still going to be true in a case against Linux.

One of the primary issues, not decided by the judge but hinted strongly at, is that 32V may actually be in the public domain. In that light the decision to put it out under a BSD license was a kind of damage control; if it's out under a loose license then most likely no one will test the validity of the original copyright in court.

This case may well reopen that can of worms seeing as the only case of obvious copying they've pointed out is rooted in 32V.

I rather hope that IBM is doing/has done its own code commonality inspections because it seems highly likely that there is GPLed code in SCO's product (that's the easy way to compatibility you know). If so that would tarnish their case badly, although it's not very likely to be as damning as it was in the BSD case.

One of the things I find most amusing about their claims of open source being lax on IP protection is that it's been my experience that code pilfering is quite common in closed source projects. Certainly we know it happened at least twice in the history of SysV -- once wholesale in SVR4, and again in R5. And I would suspect it happened again when Caldera implemented Linux compatibility.

I kind of hope IBM or some other SCO source licensee does their own code analysis. My bet is that there are many more lines of code pilfered from open source in SCO stuff than vice versa. SCO is really only getting huge infringement numbers by counting whole subsystems as infringing, using theories of "derivative" that are unlikely to hold up.

Go take a look at the BSD lawsuit papers (various links posted around the net). The judge's opinion where he denied the preliminary injunction against BSDI is really quite remarkable.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[BRSloth]

Now just imagine what would happen if they find Linux code inside SCO Unix (and I don't think it's all that impossible). What would happen to all companies that have licenced sutff from SCO? Could they have Linux code on their Unix variants too?

Oh boy! All that unix variants, for free!

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[gnu-generation-one]

"Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years."

Why do they need top publish this advice on a website? Can't they just email SCO's last remaining customer directly?

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[morgue-ann]

explain just how it is that the State of California, acting through the offices of the Regents of the University of California, is NOT equal to at least ONE 900 pound gorilla?

Because the constituents of a state are more nervous about spending money (on lawyers in this case) that might have only long term or no benefits.

Boards of directors and shareholders seem to be more patient and tolerant of risk. They're trying to make money with their money. Taxpayers just want lower taxes & maybe more services.

BSD remaining free as in freedom being a benefit to California college students is a pretty abstract benefit.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

> There is a hell of a lot of BSD in SVR4

I don't think that's a secret. BSD was a research project to advance UNIX and was under a licence to allow AT&T to merge code back in.

I thought the real problem was that UC's copyrights weren't maintained.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

> BSD remaining free as in freedom being a benefit to California college students is a pretty abstract benefit.

Actually, Berkeley Unix and the Internet were and are one of the key building blocks of the Silicon Valley economy. Having Sun Micro HQ'd in your state is a very concrete benefit.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[platypus]

I rather hope that IBM is doing/has done its own code commonality inspections because it seems highly likely that there is GPLed code in SCO's product (that's the easy way to compatibility you know). If so that would tarnish their case badly, although it's not very likely to be as damning as it was in the BSD case.

Surely IBM has inspected the code! IBM and it's lawyers have acted completely clever in this case until now, do you really think they would forget the obvious?
I would be very surprised if IBM hadn't left a lot of aces in their sleeves. Look, they haven't made a lot of noise until now, but everything action of IBM agaist SCO was _extremely_ well dosed. If IBM really felt threatened, they would have a lot of alternatives. They could have bought SCO, they even could have bought Canopy, they could have threatened SCO and/or Canopy with patent lawsuits against them or companies they have a stake in (might still happen, hehe).
They didn't do anything like that, instead they go into a lawsuit, well prepared, and acting like someone who knows he will win.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the fateful red herring. The fastest bird this side of the mississipi. Thats one fast bird i tell ya... one fast bird.

And like a coward we wiped them out! We shouldnt have done that. Animals have souls, and feelings like us homosapien type creatures. What a wonderous universe we live in!

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[fireman sam]

"Can't they just email SCO's last remaining customer directly?"

Nah, they had to take down their mail server becase it was infringing on SCO's IP.

It was determined that the system was running an "Operating System(TM)" and was connected to a power point.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[jimfrost]

Surely IBM has inspected the code! IBM and it's lawyers have acted completely clever in this case until now, do you really think they would forget the obvious?

It may be an obvious thing to try from our point of view, but it may not be obvious that it would help them from their point of view. They might not even be able to do so without discovery because AIX is based on a version of UNIX older than Linux. In order to find such problems they'd need an up-to-date version, and a x86 version at that. Perhaps they have access to that, perhaps not.

In any case, it's not a foregone conclusion that SCO infringing on Linux in general would help IBM in any way. (Actually I'd argue that it doesn't, although it would reflect on the character of SCO.) If they did it it'd be more of a gift to the Linux community. This isn't like the BSD case where BSD had a single clear owner who was already involved in the suit; IBM owns very little of Linux and probably none of the part of it that SCO would have used.

It's one of those things I'd like to see is all.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[KentoNET]

Maybe the submitter IS the last remaining customer, and just didn't get the news yet?

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[syylk]

Especially impressive because it was pretty much Berkley defending itself. There were no industry players coming to bat.

Well... When you have a great Law School around, and you're backed up by the richest State of the Union, you really don't need an industry player coming to bat.

Messing with the Regents is messing with a 1600-pounds gorilla...

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell? What the hell indeed! Many of today's top scientists are thinking about that very same thing, trying to figure out how hell works, and if it even exists at all. While the "Holy Bible is in fact widely believed as true by the populous, most "top notch" scientist say that there is in fact no "God" at all. If I had to decide which to believe, the ignorant populous, or the lucious scientists, I would probably have to choose the lucious, creamy, delicious scientists. Thank you very much, IJFKN!

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[mewyn]

Why do they need top publish this advice on a website? Can't they just email SCO's last remaining customer directly?

Because SCO's last remaining customer has been very careful as not to expose their identity. Think about it, would YOU want to be seen as a SCO customer? ;)

Mewyn Dy'ner

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[Charlotte]

Go take a look at the BSD lawsuit papers (various links posted around the net). The judge's opinion where he denied the preliminary injunction against BSDI is really quite remarkable.

I went out to look for the ruling and found a link here.

I especially liked this part, after the ruling on the preliminary injunction (which was denied):

After reviewing the affidavits of Plaintiff's and Defendants, experts, a great deal of incertainty remains as to what trade secrets Net2 might contain. One fact does seem clear: the header files, filenames, and function names used by Defendants are not trade secrets. Defendants could have printed these off of any of the thousands of unrestricted copies of Plaintiff's binary object code. (Kashtan Aff. at 9-11.) Moreover, the nonfunctional elements of the code, such as comments, cannot be trade secrets because these elements are minimal and confer no competitive advantage on Defendants. The copied elements that contain instructions, such as BREAD and CPIO, might perhaps be trade secrets, but Defendants' experts have argued persuasively that these instructions are either in the public domain or otherwise exempt. As Defendants have repeatedly emphasized, much of 32V seems to be publicly available.

If the SCO case does largely depend on actual code reviews then they'll have to make their case... The experts will inevitably track down and inspect every line of code and see if could have come from the public domain, the programmer or IBM.

Then they'll need to show that IBM did in fact contribute that code and that this infringed the license.

In any case the judge in the BSD places great value on the expert opinions in determining that variable names, structure members, etc need to match header file declarations and that header files themselves are a public interface that is not subject to the same rules as the operational code.

How much code was actually copied and from where isn't really clear to the judge: he calls it an arguments over facts, presumably to go on and on until the facts are known fully and only matters of law remain:

Finally, Plaintiff argues that Defendants have copied 32V in writing the instructions and organizing the logical structure of Net2. Defendants counter that even if Plaintiff does retain trade secrets in Unix, Defendants carefully plucked these secrets out of Net2 and BSD/386. This argument is an argument over facts, and Plaintiff and Defendants have joined it with their experts. At the present state of the record, it seems that the side who gets in the last word wins.

He goes on to say this about BSDI's code having a similar structure to the V32 from Unix System Laboratories (USL), and USL's assertion that the structure similarities could be a violation of the license:

A further consideration is that 32V's overall organization may not even be protectable in the first place. Berkeley's license to use 32V protects 32V derivatives only to the extent that they contain certain proprietary information. If Berkeley excises the proprietary information (as it attempted to do with Net2), Berkeley is free to distribute derivatives without restriction.

So it really boils down to:

1) What are the facts? Unless there was deliberate copying and SCO can point at source lines that were copied and can't be explained by IBM as being in the public domain, there is no problem. Especially if IBM made a diligent effort to remove infringing code. This may take a while and IIRC, the actual trial doesn't begin untill these arguments over facts are resolved.

2) What exactly is in IBM's Unix license? Does it have clauses that limit IBM's ability to make their own code public under the GPL? I guess this will cause a lot of bickering but it will probably be easier to reduce this discussion to arguments of law.

3) The part about GPL not being legal will not even make it to trial unless it's substantiated.

That puts us where we were before, but that's the SCO story for ya :).

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

your analogies suck like teh gheys

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

> Having Sun Micro HQ'd in your state is a very concrete benefit.

Key word: concrete

If theres one thing studying Java has taught me, it is that corporations design programming languages in their own image.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[QEDog]

Can't they just email SCO's last remaining customer directly?

The last SCO's customer can be found in the same place as this guy.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[leonbrooks]

The crucial difference here is that Rome was, at one time during its history, feared and respected.

Whereas The SCO Group are merely farted at and expectorated on?

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[jimfrost]

I don't think that's a secret. BSD was a research project to advance UNIX and was under a licence to allow AT&T to merge code back in.

Anyone can utilize BSD code, based on its license. There was nothing special about AT&T's rights in that respect.

I thought the real problem was that UC's copyrights weren't maintained.

Right-o. They copied wholesale and removed the copyrights. It was so extensive as to make them look like fools for complaining about a few files that BSD had supposedly copied. But they were also negligent in that the BSD folk had repeatedly asked them to vett code so that they could release it, and AT&T refused.

In this case I don't think there will be anything so blatant, however they're starting from a much stronger position than the BSD folk in that Linux was clearly independently developed whereas BSD started out as a derivative.

Anyway it probably won't look too good in court when IBM shows that SCO's idea of infringing code is any code that has "IBM" in it. But I wonder if they even care if they win, or if they care if it makes it to court.

Consider the scenario as it exists today. They made the case very high profile by suing IBM, but have to know they're going to lose that suit. If SGI isn't worried about defending themselves, and SGI's name is all over the code they've shown to date that was supposedly copied, IBM should be in fine shape. But that suit is probably going to take years to work its way through. Meanwhile they're planning to sue Linux users who will be literally unable to defend the Linux copyrights and, arguably, uninterested in a drawn out case to do so. What will the best course of action be for those companies? Probably to settle. In the short term SCO will likely make some money off of this even if they are wholly in the wrong.

Re:Red Herrings Eat Profits

[platypus]

Hey, I'm not so naive to suggest IBM should use shortcomings of SCO unrelated to the present case to defend itself, this is just silly.
There are several other obvious practical reasons for IBM to review the linux sorce code.

Why wait?

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years.

Why wait? Migrate now to something less controversial. Really though, this is a well done paper and really explains it well. Gartner goes into the real dollar concerns of this litigation.

Linux is a commodity and as such can be provided by many companies. RedHat has pretty good support , flames of hellfire not withstanding their decision to go only enterprise. Then again if you're using SCO you're an enterprise anyway.

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Why wait? Migrate now to something less controversial.

You mean windows? Cause linux is just as controversial and SCO Unix right now.

Re:Why wait?

[DarkBlackFox]

What would be considered less controversial? With SCO as the center, they seem to have roped Linux and now BSD into the controversy. Migrating from Unix to Linux wouldn't be a bad idea, but it wouldn't clear you from controversy- on the contrary, if you are an existing customer of SCO and they find you moving away, wouldn't that be more incentive for them to slap you with an invoice for the "infringing linux" deployment?

Of course, it is important to migrate off a sinking bohemoth of a ship, but I doubt it would be any less contraversial given the players involved.

Re:Why wait?

[Carnildo]

ust in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years.

Why wait? Migrate now to something less controversial. Really though, this is a well done paper and really explains it well. Gartner goes into the real dollar concerns of this litigation.

Migrate to what? Unix and BSD are both "controversial", and SCO products are out on the risk of SCO going out of business. Microsoft products are "ok", but I've never seen anyone recommend them for "big iron" machines. I suppose VMS is a possibility, but does anyone still use it?

Re:Why wait?

[jhunsake]

wouldn't that be more incentive for them to slap you with an invoice for the "infringing linux" deployment?

Why tell them anything? Just don't renew the contract. When they call, just hang up on them. The safest route is to never talk to them again, about anything.

Re:Why wait?

[tlayne]

Then again if you're using SCO you're an enterprise anyway.

Only if you define Enterprise in some nonstandard way. SCO built it's former business on smaller companies -- the kind of place that has no idea what operating system they are running because they just bought a turn-key business system from a VAR.

Of course, Red Hat would say that all businesses should have been using Enterprise Linux all along and that Red Hat Linux was only meant for the home user/geek crowd.

Re:Why wait?

[gabriel-dialupusa]

Solaris.

Re:Why wait?

[Newspimp]

Wang VSOS 7.53 seems to be very non controversial. I bet users could get great deals on ProDOS 3.3 for Apple ][. Maybe there are even a few copies of OS/2 3.1 hanging around somewhere? As long as we're at it, I haven't heard a single litigious thing from CP/M lately. Let's use that!

Re:Why wait?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

If you take that line of logic as a given, there are several companies which have valid unix licences. Conversion to any one of these would not be *that* difficult.
People do still use VMS but that would be a crazy way to go - you would be incurring major conversion costs to end up in a proprietary niche system. VMS is also sold for systems an order of magnitude larger than anything SCO have ever even thought of handling, and people migrate *from* VMS to unix systems to save money.
Microsoft would be an alternative, but an expensive one - even though they try and make the migration path less painful.

My conversion plan would involve buying HP equipment and then either moving to HP Unix or taking advantage of that HP offer with respect to SCO and running linux.

If you don't take that line of logic as given, buy HP hardware and migrate to Linux :-)

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they slapped me with an unrequested invoice and they didn't prove anything as of yet in court, well that would be extortion, and I'd give the SEC and nice phone call. Wouldn't that also be a fraud too or is extortion under the fraud category, IANAL, so I wouldn't know.

Re:Why wait?

[bahamat]

Why wait? Migrate

Because of the choices.
Linux - bad, pending litigation
SCO UNIX - bad, company may fold
Solaris - expensive
AIX - expensive
HP-UX - expensive
Windows - expensive, bugs, security nightmare
[Free|Open|Net]BSD - free, legally clear due to BSD/USL settlement

Possibly, the best alternative to Linux is *BSD. The problem is that BSD doesn't get nearly as much support from comercial vendors (Oracle, etc.). If this support is necessary for any particular installation the choices are to wait or to use Solaris/HP-UX.

Re:Why wait?

[pyros]

Why tell them anything?

So that they know, in no uncertain terms, that such conduct is unacceptable and is costing them your business. Tell them, professionally, that you consider their actions to be unethical, and as a result are taking your business elsewhere, and recommending to all clients, peers, and friends to avoid SCO products. Make no mention of technical quality or value of SCO products. Leave no question that you can't do business with a company willing to make baseless claims affecting other companies' businesses, file frivolous lawsuits, and engage in stock pump and dump scams.

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

You left out Minix, the Hurd, BeOS, and (obviously) Multics.

Re:Why wait?

[jhunsake]

Then you would be teaching them something. Why bother? Are you going to do business with them again, if they change their ways? I'm not, so I don't care what they learn, they can keep destroying themselves for all I care.

Re:Why wait?

[pmz]

What would be considered less controversial?

Well, there's controversy and there's risk. Any company can fold at any time (e.g., meteor hitting their headquarters), for example. As far as SCO is concerned, risk might be weighed by which companies are willing to take the heat for their customers. Is there another "indemnified" OS other than Solaris (permanent license) or, perhaps, Mac OS X (Mach kernel)? Even Windows NT/2000/XP could be a target with their known use of BSD code.

Regardless, I think any lawsuit against Linux/BSD/UNIX/Apple/Microsoft/etc. could only go in SCO's favor due to a rediculous technicality, not real merit. And, if that happened, there would be no end to the bitterness felt towards SCO, which would do wonders for destroying whatever business they try to conduct after the suit.

In conclusion, if SCO loses, they lose, and, f SCO wins, they lose.

Re:Why wait?

[RocketSHE]

Gartner is not saying anything about Linux or BSD users making plans to migrate off just in case. "A less controversal OS" in this context means anything but Open Server or UnixWare.

Re:Why wait?

[pyros]

Sun is a SCO licensee.

Re:Why wait?

[edbarrett]

Um, yes they are. Look at the bullet point above the one being discussed:

If high-performance Linux systems are in production, develop plans that would enable a quick changeover in case SCO wins a favorable judgment and requires the Linux kernel code to be substantially changed. Unix systems are the best alternatives.

Re:Why wait?

[RocketSHE]

Hmmm. Maybe I should have read the article? Maybe I could set a good example? Then more posters would read the article. I could make this a better world! Maybe ... Nahhhh. (Apologies to Steve Martin)

Re:Why wait?

[Delirium Tremens]

No, no, you are missing the forest for the trees, my friend.

If SCO loses the lawsuit and stop operations and support for Unixware, then by all means you should prepare a plan to move to Linux since it has been legally proven that it is a legit OS. So, yes, preparing a plan to move from Unixware to Linux is a very good idea. But executing on it before the lawsuit is over is not.

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, MS products are extremely "controversial", there was the SQL Server patent infringement case, there are issues with data-protection law compliance with MS-products in computer systems (I'm in europe), and reliance on windows means reliance on x86, something which terrifies people used to mainframe processors with multiply-redundant cores and so on.

Re:Why wait?

[zelbinion]

You could always buy Linux systems from HP, then HP picks up the tab if you get sued...

Not as cheap as Linux or *BSD downloaded for free, but cheaper than getting sued, and it just might be around the same cost as SCO, only better because it has those 'enterprise' features SCO claims IBM stole but that don't exist in its own products....

Then again, you could just migrate to DOS. No linux code, no BSD code...
er.... very little code of any kind, really...

Re:Why wait?

[spyfrog]

But Darl has promised to go after BSD when he is finished with Linux.
So if we belive in SCO so isn't BSD a safe way either.

Re:Why wait?

[steveg]

Then again if you're using SCO you're an enterprise anyway.

I guess that depends on what you call "enterprise". A lot of doctor's offices use a SCO system as a base for their accounting/practice management software.

I interviewed with a company that wrote software used for a sales management system used by car dealerships -- which ran on SCO. Their new version was going to be non-SCO -- they were planning on moving to Linux. Even a year ago they were having trouble stomaching SCO.

I think SCO is primarily used in vertical markets populated by small to medium sized businesses rather than anything I would characterize as "enterprise". Enterprise customers usually have IT departments with people who are familiar with good Unix behavior and can recognize a poor quality Unix. Smaller businesses don't know any better -- they have heard that Unix is clunky and aren't surprised when SCO proves to be.

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

> What would be considered less controversial? With SCO as the center, they seem to have roped Linux and now BSD into the controversy.

How about Solaris?

Re:Why wait?

[PolR]

When you have tens of thousands of servers scattered in several cities like MacDonald's, it can easily take two years to migrate out of SCO. Gartner is saying only small nimble companies can afford to wait to the last minute. Large customers must get out of there as quick as they can.

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Sun owns UNIX outright and only licences some driver stuff from SCO.

However any IBM or HP UNIX system you buy kicks back to SCO.

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, OS X! You ever heard of that, I hear it's based on UNIX.

Re:Why wait?

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

This is funny actually. Back, two or three years ago, I was working for a SCO house, and we switched our systems away from SCO/Terminals to some ancient version of Redhat to make our offering ( Point of sale software ) more price competitive.

At the time people were saying buying SCO was a writeoff - for most of the stuff people were doing with it, it was too expensive and offered too few advantages over the competition. Pretty much the best thing you got was a plaque saying you were a SCO Preferred Supplier. Glad we got out [1] before someone put a pack of rabid hyenas on the SCO business strategy team.

YLFI

[1] Actually, I'd be quite happy to have seen that place be shot into the sun, so maybe I'm not so glad.

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

All this time we've been thinking it was MS egging SCO on. But Sun is one of the first licensees, and was originally a "secret" one. What if it was Sun pulling the strings all along?

Re:Why wait?

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

company can fold at any time (e.g., meteor hitting their headquarters), for example.

The solution is clear - RAICHS: Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Corporate Headquarters. Which slashdotter will be first to market with this exciting technology?!

YLFI

Re:Why wait?

[XO]

Sure, they have valid unix licences - FOR NOW. Until SCO decides to go after them. IBM had a valid license, right? (well, i'm sure they still do.. but SCO says they don't)

Re:Why wait?

[ealar dlanvuli]

You work in the real world??

Jebus, some of the stuff on here scares me...

Re:Why wait?

[Xenographic]

[Free|Open|Net]BSD - free, legally clear due to BSD/USL settlement
-----

No, SCO is going after *BSD next, according to some of the things they've said (look at some of the recent articles here and on Groklaw.net)

Granted, I don't seriously think, in my personal oppinion, that they have any sort of case whatsoever concerning that. But they do probably intend to go after *BSD simply because all of "their" code that's in Linux is BSD-derived, as far as we can see. Thus, if they can find some way to convince a court they own it, they might have something resembling a case.

That said, I'm reasonably sure that SCO is full of crap, as usual, but that doesn't mean they won't try some of these stupid lawyer tricks in court...

Re:Why wait?

[jxs2151]

The solution is clear - RAICHS: Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Corporate Headquarters. Which slashdotter will be first to market with this exciting technology?!

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those....

Re:Why wait?

[eniu!uine]

Quote:
Because of the choices.
Linux - bad, pending litigation
SCO UNIX - bad, company may fold
Solaris - expensive
AIX - expensive
HP-UX - expensive
Windows - expensive, bugs, security nightmare
[Free|Open|Net]BSD - free, legally clear due to BSD/USL settlement

Possibly, the best alternative to Linux is *BSD. The problem is that BSD doesn't get nearly as much support from comercial vendors (Oracle, etc.). If this support is necessary for any particular installation the choices are to wait or to use Solaris/HP-UX.
end quote.

Just one problem... SCO just announced they are going to go after BSD users, probably in the first half of next year. No one is safe until SCO is dead.--- period

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose there are a lot of people like me, bought linux at the bookstore, and have spent a few years working with it, and now I, and many others like me feel that we know our way around linux. I love making .fvwm2rc's to run on SuSE, Redhat 6x - 7x, Slackware 7 - 8, Mandrake, Debian (Ahh - Debian!).
Now these bastards want to sue the Companies that use Linux, and perhaps leave us little guys without a linux of any sort to work with. Damn the SOB's. I can't afford XP, and I use mostly old equipment. None have processors over 400 mhz. Linux does just fine on these, especially with FVWM2. Why can't they just leave us the hell alone.

Re:Why wait?

[Farmer Jimbo]

As I understand it, you are only indemnified for the cost of your purchase from HP.

Re:Why wait?

[the_womble]

No, SCO might go after OS/2 and anything else that is more recent that System V.

In This interview SCO's VP of OSes said:

We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO's intellectual property)

He also refuses to say that anyone other than Sun is "clean", not even MS.

It looks like they are going after everyone, even MS, even embedded OSes.

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, beowulf cluster of offices imagines YOU!!

Re:Why wait?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the best slashdot handle I have ever seen, BUT - Delerium Nocturn is still better than Delerium Tremens.

My favorite band back in school was a blues act called D.T. and the Shakers.

damn. ... with visions of (pink) elephants dancing in their heads.

Re:Why wait?

[Phreakiture]

Would this former employer of yours have been in Troy, NY?

Re:Why wait?

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

Would this former employer of yours have been in Troy, NY?

Alas, no. This was in Sydney, Australia.

YLFI

How do I apply?

[Chewie]

Man, I want a job at the Gartner group. It seems their methods go something like:

1) Something happens
2) Side with big business and release a paper
3) Wait until popular tide changes
4) Release new paper contradicting old one.

Shit, I could do that all day. Sign me up!

Re:How do I apply?

[sfjoe]

Correction:
2) Release a blindingly obvious paper

Re:How do I apply?

[chill]

Man, I want a job at the Gartner group. It seems their methods go something like:

1) Something happens
2) Side with big business and release a paper
3) Wait until popular tide changes
4) Release new paper contradicting old one.

Shit, I could do that all day. Sign me up!

It wouldn't surprise me if you were now sued for a DMCA violation -- reverse engineering their business practice!

Re:How do I apply?

[Wun Hung Lo]

How about the simple SCO two-step process: 1)Put head between legs 2)Kiss butt goodbye Maybe that's something Darl's actually good at...

Now that's a U-Turn

[Space cowboy]

... complete with handbrake squeals. Is it just me, or does Gartner appear to just write what they think will go down well, rather than really analyse things.

Of course, we like it when it agrees with what we think (and I think they're right to say what they're saying now, but that just makes me no different from (m)any of you reading this :-)

Simon

Re:Now that's a U-Turn

[Zapman]

I'm with a previous poster. I'd love to work as an analyst for Gartner, GIGA, etc. That'd rock.

Short version of how these companies operate:

1) Listen to geeks to figure out what's popular and new
2) push 'new' ideas as the salvation of computing kind
3) write papers, and sell these opinions for insane ammounts of money
4) proffit!
5) Every year or so, get together with your big $$ clients, and have a huge party in some place cool (according to my co-workers, the party Giga threw in Las Vegas was something to behold)

Re:Now that's a U-Turn

[MoonFog]

This paper at least seems like it was put together to draw some attention to themselves. It doesn't really say anything that hasn't been said before.
It tells you to wait and see what happens if you are or want to be a Linux customer and have a backup plan in case SCO wins, and it says to wait if you are or want to be a SCO customer, and have a backup plan if SCO loose..
Basically, it could be said with the simple words "Just wait for the whole thing to end"

Re:Now that's a U-Turn

[uradu]

> Is it just me, or does Gartner appear to just write what they think will go down well

Much more so than you probably think. They came in recently to our company to "streamline" our IS department. The whole process probably went something like "ok guys, how many drones do you want to lose, and which contractors do you want to screw over the most?" Based on that they created a "report" that recommended these figures, and they profitted handsomely. How can you lose?

Re:Now that's a U-Turn

[Anonymous Coward]

> Is it just me, or does Gartner appear to just write what they think will go down well

Much more so than you probably think. They came in recently to our company to "streamline" our IS department. The whole process probably went something like "ok guys, how many drones do you want to lose, and which contractors do you want to screw over the most?" Based on that they created a "report" that recommended these figures, and they profitted handsomely. How can you lose?

I did something similar myself. Source code audit of some bespoke software (which truth be told was actually pretty godawful.. Delphi code using 8 letter (no less, no more) variable names, no structure, etc.) so the company could use my advice to tell the developer to go fuck himself - they knew it sucked and wasn't maintainable, but couldn't bring themselves to tell it to his face, so in comes independent third party advice.

Re:Now that's a U-Turn

[ngreenfeld]

I've been an industry analyst in a firm like Gartner, and I also have a Ph.D. in computer science. So, for my 2-cents (or less) worth:

1. There are good analysts and poor analysts; some know what's going on, others just read headlines and sound good superficially.
2. Analysts have a different viewpoint than most observers -- they have to cover the "100,000 foot" level view for a lot of clients with issues not like normal individuals.
3. Firms like Gartner are a business. They make money by giving clients a warm-fuzzy feeling (that is, a feeling that they are reducing risk for those clients), so they have to be somewhat conservative.

Shhh.....

[DaRat]

Elmer Fudd: "Be vary vary quiet. We're deploying Linux!"

Re:Shhh.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Elmer Fudd: "We wary wary wiet. We're deploying winux".

Re:Shhh.....

[shystershep]

I'm sorry sir, could you spell your last name for me again? Was that F-u-d-d, or F-U-D?

Re:Shhh.....

[IntelliTubbie]

So if Elmer Fudd used Lindows, would he call it "Windows"? That wascally wabbit ...

Cheers,
IT

Re:Shhh.....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Be vewwy vewwy quiet. I'm depwoying winux!"

All 'l' -> 'w', and all 'r' -> 'w'

Dat wascawwy wabbit!

Re:Shhh.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Daffy (to Elmer): Shoot him now! Shoot him now!
Bugs: You keep out of this; he doesn't have to shoot you now.
Daffy: Yes, he does! (To Elmer) I demand that you shoot me now!
Elmer: *Boom*
The smoke from the gunshot clears.
Daffy: Let's... run through that again, shall we?
Bugs: All right.
Daffy (as if reading from a script): Shoot him now, shoot him now.
Bugs (same): You keep out of this, he doesn't have to shoot you now.
Daffy: Aha! That's it, hold it right there: pronoun trouble. It's not 'He doesn't have to shoot you now," it's 'He doesn't have to shoot me now.' Well, I say, he does have to shoot me now. So shoot me now!!
Elmer: *Boom*

Re:Shhh.....

[ebbomega]

Maybe if you renamed it to "Rindows"...

Register.co.uk says:

[KamuSan]

We reveal major UNIX(TM) IP violations

Caldera released UNIX source code back in 2002.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/3410 2.html

Re:Register.co.uk says:

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure you fully trust that story?

So we set about looking for who could perpetrate such a foul violation. And deep on a warez site of dubious origins, we unearthed a highly incriminating statement.

There we found a script kiddie shameless boasting of his crime. The poster claimed that he'd released "... the ancient UNIX releases (V1-7 and 32V) under a "BSD-style" license. I've attached a PDF of the license letter hereto. Feel free to propogate it as you see fit"

Doesn't seem 100% reliable to me.

Re:Register.co.uk says:

[KamuSan]

Corroberation from O'Reilly: http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/02/28 /caldera.html Why Caldera Released Unix: A Brief History [..] Things do tend to come full circle. It was Caldera that, on January 23 of this year, disencumbered the entire source code of Unix, up to and including the Seventh Edition (1979) and its VAX port "32V" from which BSD had started the development that led to 4.0BSD. (32V is basically V7, minus some bits that were written in the PDP-11 assembly language, and the remainder was adapted to work on the VAX.) This seems to mean that BSD Unix is, at last, fully disencumbered, even the few parts that couldn't be used in the various BSD systems over the years due to residual AT&T copyrights. Interestingly, Caldera released it under the original BSD copyright. [...]

Re:Register.co.uk says:

[Anonymous Coward]

That looks a bit more reputable.

Re:Register.co.uk says:

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, with google you can find these... (keyword: Dion L. Johnson II)

here,
there,
and some more.

I wonder what Mr. Johnson's opinion is about SCO case.

Re:Register.co.uk says:

[KamuSan]

More interesting stuff:

Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix
From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ ki rkmck.html

Describes history of BSD, interesting quote:
[...]The newly blessed release was called 4.4BSD-Lite and was released in June 1994 under terms identical to those used for the Networking releases. Specifically, the terms allow free redistribution in source and binary form subject only to the constraint that the University copyrights remain intact and that the University receive credit when others use the code. Simultaneously, the complete system was released as 4.4BSD-Encumbered, which still required recipients to have a USL source license.

The lawsuit settlement also stipulated that USL would not sue any organization using 4.4BSD-Lite as the base for their system.[!] [...]

Re:Register.co.uk says:

[ausoleil]

Are you sure you fully trust that story?

Read the whole article:

So after a little digging, we traced this serious UNIX(TM) violation to a hacker outfit called "Caldera Inc." The email was datelined 23 Jan 2002.

Perhaps using an assumed identity, the hacker signed himself as "Dion L. Johnson II - Product Manager and one of many open source enthusiasts in Caldera Intl."

Seems like the article, despite it's obviously acerbic tone, it indeed names names and in fact has been verified.

Re:Register.co.uk says:

[KamuSan]

Yup. So, SCO's IP is not completely public domain, but they certainly can't accuse IBM of stealing their copyrighted code, I think. So this is the end of SCO's case then? >-)

Especially with this quote (from my other post):
"The lawsuit settlement also stipulated that USL would not sue any organization using 4.4BSD-Lite as the base for their system."

So SCO can't sue *BSD at all, since they are the inheritants of the settlement.

Sorry NASA

[grub]

Keep a low profile and do not divulge details on Linux deployments.

Too bad NASA didn't read that advice. :)

Re:Sorry NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, neither did the United States Court System. This means SCO will have to sue the court who will be trying their case. ROTFLMAO! SUCKERS!

Re:Sorry NASA

[UnknowingFool]

Although I wouldn't put it past SCO to go after NASA, SCO would really hurt themselves more than anything. If they ask NASA for licensing, NASA will have to dispute it. Being a bureaucacy, NASA will have to ask the Dept. of Justice for legal advice, the OMB for a cost estimate of licenses, etc. When the OMB gets invovled, somebody in Congress will also get involved. SCO probably doesn't want all those different agencies looking at their claims. Should SCO get pushy, NASA can ask the IRS and the SEC to get medieval on them.

Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[hedley]

If you really want to hide (some who don't want
the hassle do). Then change the fingerprint on
the stack to show up as Win2k or equivalent.

When SCO does its IP addr sweep, you will be passed over.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[silentbozo]

Anyone have any details on how to do this? I've got some systems that I'd like to cloak as classic MacOS machines to discourage script kiddies from poking at them. They're already locked down, but I figure the more indirection I can throw out, the more likely that they'll go off and bother some other poor sod.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Heck, why not make it look like an System/360 or a DEC. If you are going for deception, make it original.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[Chibi Merrow]

So it's kind've like painting goat's blood over your door...

I don't know, I just can't see McBride as the angel of death.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[YetAnotherDave]

what fingerprinting tools do you use that can give meaningful info with no closed ports?

last I checked, nmap gets puzzled if there are not both open and closed ports, and we all know that exposed internet ports should be either filtered or open (and open on purpose :)

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[EvilTwinSkippy]

More like a snow-angel of slightly bad day.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[spectrokid]

You could also do the opposite, and attract SCO goons to a bunch of Win2K servers....

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[the_mad_poster]

Yup.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[Anonymous Coward]

" Having and unpatched or antique OS version is not very convenient for your company prestige. Imagine that your company is a bank and some users notice that you are running an unpatched box. They won't trust you any longer! In addition, these kind of 'bad' news are always sent to the public opinion."

Er. This guy is not working for the betterment of society, that's for sure.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[T5]

Let's change all our fingerprints to match SCO, and drown Boies and the boys in worthless bits.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[neurojab]

Imagine you're doing any business critical work and your box shows up as Windows! That's running the business without a seatbelt.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[KrispyKringle]

Why is this marked Interesting? It should be marked Inane or Silly.

SCO won't be doing address sweeps. The information gained from a TCp/IP fingerprint isn't nearly reliable enough to use to subpeona information on software usage. Doing the fingerprints, however, is arguably illegal in some states and violates the AUPs of many ISPs (though I don't personally think it should).

More to the point, as SCO themselves have said, they will be going after big companies known to have large Linux deployments. In other words, Fortune 500 customers of RedHat and SuSE. They said themselves they won't be suing private users.

Yes. I know SCO are The Devil. But cut me a fucking break. This is why I read the comments on Slashdot less and less. I get to see a few insightful points, a lot of garbage along the lines of `see how much I know' and random, weird comments like this.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[AKAImBatman]

Do better than that! Make it look like an array of PDP-11s! That'll keep 'em guessing. :-)

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[Anonymous Coward]

What's 120?

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[iceT]

Can't I just smear lambs blood around the edges of my router? That's how passover worked last time...

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[ducomputergeek]

This is a really good idea for anyone running boxes. Although, I've seen some idiots do this with Windows systems like walmart that runs Solaris 8 with MS IIS 5. Forget iTunes, hell really would have to freeze over for that server combo to happen.

The easiest to cloak is apache because it runs on just about anything. I've seen some sites say they are a PlayStation 2 with apache.

We bait our honeypots with OpenBSD boxes that state they are Windows running apache (which isn't too uncommon, I know a lot that do this). Its funny to sit there and watch sometimes.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[Asprin]

Why couldn't you just get one of those $50 Linksys NAT boxes for each server and use the inbound port mapping to only expose the port you really need open?

I guess if you really wanted to, you could also map a bunch of random inbound ports on the Linksys to an isolated telnet honeypot server, but then I start thinking, "really, what's the point in that? Confuse them into leaving you alone?"

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[UnknowingFool]

Great idea. Let's see some hacker try to figure out how to break into my Commodore 64:

POKE 63452
POKE 63451
POKE 63450
. . .

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[edbarrett]

When SCO does its IP addr sweep, you will be passed over.

Darnit, and I just got the lambs blood cleaned up from the Holy Spirit sweeps.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[thomas.galvin]

I don't know, I just can't see McBride as the angel of death.

SCO's investors won't have that trouble in about six months or so...

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[zurab]

Yeah, that's a good idea ... until ...

What happens when Microsoft does its IP address sweep? They will see you are running Win2k, determine who you are, that you don't have a license; then they will have to bring in the BSA with U.S. Marshalls in and force you to pay up and run their spyware on your network at your own cost.

They will even have compelling evidence you have been running Win2k and you won't be able to produce any licenses for that OS. Unless, you would be OK with getting sued and dragged into court for a lengthy and expensive trial, having to prove to a judge how you modified your "IP fingerprint" hoping he will understand and believe.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[crawling_chaos]

For the longest time I had Konqueror reporting that I was browsing using Mosaic .01A on a Coleco Adam. Used to drive our webmaster nuts when he ran the user agent reports for the month.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[lcde]

When SCO does its IP addr sweep, you will be passed over.

Is this like Moses and the Angel of Death? Saving all the first borns.

When someone writes the bible for the Linux religion this would be a cool addition.

"Then the great Linus Torvalds sent out to his message board and said 'Those who believe in the Community shall forge their TCP/IP fingerprint to read of another'

And on the night of the 20th, the devil SCO passed its evil port scan accross the Community, and all those who didn't believe in the Community were parished with a $699 licence fee"

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think script kiddies bother to check what OS people are running before trying to crack your box?

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course the +5 insightful posts that point out how the whole system works...

And the clever goober who posts a reply pointing all this out................

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[Bananenrepublik]

walmart that runs Solaris 8 with MS IIS 5
Couldn't that be the result of port forwarding? Solaris frirewall, windows server? Seems much more likely.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[EvilTwinSkippy]

But can you build a beowulf cluster of those...

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[the_mad_poster]

Signatures

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[RighteousFunby]

Fuck that. I stand by my MPLayer using, Mozilla running, Linux kernel-endowed Sega Genesis.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[Anonymous Coward]

You've made 120 signatures? Or am I missing something?

(Note: if you meant "It's in my signature", I know that, if I thought it was ontopic I'd not be posting AC.)

Just baffled by it, is all.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[the_mad_poster]

No, signatures are 120 character limited. People bitch about it all the time as if it were something important.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[eniu!uine]

"More to the point, as SCO themselves have said, they will be going after big companies known to have large Linux deployments. In other words, Fortune 500 customers of RedHat and SuSE. They said themselves they won't be suing private users. "

They also said they wouldn't be going after end users at all... they also said that they wanted Linux on intel to scale well.. they also said that Microsoft wasn't funding them..

Do you honestly trust these people? Follow the contradictory press clippings.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[dvdeug]

Although, I've seen some idiots do this with Windows systems like walmart that runs Solaris 8 with MS IIS 5. Forget iTunes, hell really would have to freeze over for that server combo to happen.

Isn't that the point? It'll confusing anything running automatically looking at that, and it's a big sign to hackers that "we know you're out there and your common tricks".

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[KrispyKringle]

They have no reason to go after you or I. They won't. It's ridiculous. Even for SCO.

Think about it. Yes, this has been stupid, but they clearly believe that they can make up for lost profits by inflating their stock prices with promises of a huge settlement with IBM et al. They claim, again, the possibility of huge settlements and/or licenses sold to various Fortune 500 companies. So who are they going to go after next looking for huge settlements? Oh. Right. Joe Shmoe in his basement running a Linux desktop. Because after the multi-billion-dollar, international mega-corporation, the big-time multi-million-dollar top Linux distributor, and the multi-million-dollar Fortune 500 firms, you go after individual citizens known to be using Linux and sitting on fat, fat bank accounts.

Cut me a break. They wouldn't get back anything near the cost of litigation. Even if they thought, like the RIAA, that they could scare people into becoming customers...well, they'd be really stupid. Even they know they wouldn't scare individuals into being customers. Only the big companies. Which is the goal.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[wannasleep]

I'd rather go through a lawsuit then pretending to use windows.

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[MosesJones]

NO! not W2K because then that will bump the server numbers up.

Anyone know what the fingerprint for a PDP11 is ?

Now that would be good

"New analysis shows that 42% of new server installations are in-fact PDP-11, this came as a suprise to HP who said 'we haven't sold a new one in 20 years'"

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint

[anthonyrcalgary]

Yes.

They just scan a lot of them until they find one they like. I get scanned by someone on my subnet every day.

In general I'm not convinced of the benefit of disguising one's OS, but I might change my sshd to report the version as 3.7.1p2. OpenBSD's version of OpenSSH lacks the compatability code where the bug was, so no new version is needed. Unfortunately, people see the version string and assume I'm vulnerable.

It's just *annoying* to have all these people always trying to break in.

Harm

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO is obviously causing harm with its threats, and people should request an immediate judgement, requiring SCO to submit enough evidence to be successful or face a ruling to the contrary. Then, the evidence would be as simple to get as requesting them from the court. Then, the infractions could be removed from linux (this assuming there actually were any...) to prevent further violation of sco's copyright.

Re:Harm

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you dream this brilliant advice up yourself, or are you just parroting what you've read about 10,000 times on the web?

That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[melted]

'cause they don't know jack shit! We once had Gartner do market analysis for us, and when the guy came over to present it, a couple of his pie charts showed wrong percentages. The percentages he had on his slides were adding up to something like 112%, not 100. Of course he got caught and laughed at. We haven't used their services since then. :0) Our management can pull better numbers out of their ass.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, why do percentages have to add up to 100% exactly? If I ask a group of people to check a box beside the name of each operating system they use, 10% might say Linux, 10% might say Apple, and 90% might say Windows. This is perfectly feasible even thought the numbers don't add up to 100%.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

you're an idiot.

percent also per cent.

Out of each hundred; per hundred..

n. .

pl. percent, also per cent One part in a hundred: The report states that 42 percent of the alumni contributed to the endowment. Also called per centum. .

pl. percents A percentage or portion: She has invested a large percent of her salary. percents Chiefly British. Public securities yielding interest at a specified percentage. .

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

That isn't what Pie charts are for. They are to show a direct percentage.

That is a poor way to display results. Percentages are designed to give a single choice.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

Been there! My old (now-defunct) company used some Gartner group reports to base future business on.
I spent some time reviewing the reports (because I'm a masochist) and every dang thing boiled down to, there is a 72% chance this will occur. None of it ever happened.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Otter]

My favorite part is when they proclaim that something will occur (probability 0.72). As if they've done extensive Monte Carlo simulations to determine such a precise number instead of pulling decimal places out of their butts.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

Any percantage higher than 100 is not a percentage.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[jhunsake]

couple of his pie charts showed wrong percentages

A pie chart implies disjoint choices.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

His example was right, though it's not relevent here. They showed a pie-chart, and as a pie chart is supposed to represent mutually exclusive options (ie "Uses Linux and Windows" would have to be a third option against "Uses only Linux" and "Uses only Windows".)

But he's right that percentages, per-se, do not have to add up to 100%, because those percentages may overlap.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[N1KO]

Well, you could talk about someone who makes 110% more money than someone else for example... of course you wouldn't use a pie chart to represent that data.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[wfberg]

My favorite part is when they proclaim that something will occur (probability 0.72). As if they've done extensive Monte Carlo simulations to determine such a precise number instead of pulling decimal places out of their butts.

Actually, there's research where they asked people to give an indication of how sure they were of a prediction (e.g. weather, diagnosis of a disease etc.)

Turns out metereologists are pretty good at it, their probabilities of something happening (i.e. 72% probability of rain, 60% probability of sun) correlate strongly (0.9) with post facto observations.

Everybody else SUCKS at it (0.5) - one possible explanation is that when metereologists get it dead wrong they are hit by small elderly women needlessly carrying heavy umbrellas on their persons.

So when Gartner says there's a 0.72 probability, either it is, or it isn't (0.5)!

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

But he's right that percentages, per-se, do not have to add up to 100%

For example, I ate 100% of the instant mashed potatoes I cooked today, and drank 100% of the cans of root beer that I opened.

On a pie chart, having over 100% is just moronic; leave it to a business droid to do that, but 100% is a mathematical whole. When considering one topic, having more than 100% is just plain dumb.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[DarkSarin]

You obviously know nothing regarding categorical variables, which is what pie charts are used for (as are several of the more common statistical analyses). IF you are going to say X % of folks use linux,and y% use windows, you had better have a category for z % who use both, and w% who use neither (and probably a% for those who use apple).

A categorical variable is considered discrete--on or the other, NEVER both. The most common example of this is biological gender. You are male or female, NOT both. Although recently it has become possible to change which you are.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Pieroxy]

You know, with a good random number generator, you can get very precise numbers. Plus it has the good side effect of making you look impartial. I mean, what better option than saying one thing and the very opposite a few month later! you'll never look like you take one side over the other...

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, lots of "intersex" people exist (no, I'm not one of them), but it's a nasty fallacy of the biological world that male+female are clear delineations.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot about she-males, also known as "chicks with dicks".

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[El]

You are male or female, NOT both.

Bad example. Some people really are born both, although the number is small enough so as to be statistically insignificant. There are a lot fewer categorical variables than you think -- in real life, variances usually occur in a continuous spectrum. Classifiation is a delusion invented by scientists as an expedient; don't be fooled into thinking it accurately mirrors the real world.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

So what exactly are these people anyway? Do they refer to themselves as "he" or "she"? Are all their organs functional?

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

Classification perfectly mirrors the real world at a fundamental level. You'll never find a prolectron.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Zeinfeld]

Actually, lots of "intersex" people exist

I think pretty much every adolescent male is in-fer-sex.

As Julius Ceasar said after his assasination, "infamy! infamy! they've all got it in fer me!"

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[twistedcubic]

From the description, it seems that the presenter meant for the percentages to sum to 100%. Anyway, nobody makes rules about what you can represent in a pie chart.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[herrvinny]

As Julius Ceasar said after his assasination, "infamy! infamy! they've all got it in fer me!"

After his assassination, huh? Did he use some kind of heaven - earth phone system? If so, how do I get an account with THAT phone company.. ;-)

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Dwonis]

You'll never find a prolectron.

I wouldn't be so sure. There's a lot about subatomic physics that we don't know.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[jhunsake]

Right. I have a pie chart right here showing how many times you've sucked your grandpa's dick.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[GQuon]

You are male or female, NOT both.

Bad example. Some people really are born both

Yes, but genetically, they're one or the other. Physically and mentally is another matter though, as you correctly state.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Bill_Mische]

Rather scarily not always.

There's a report on chimeras (people with genetically distinct cells) in last week's New Scientist. It mentions one little boy who is a chimera genetically both male and female. Apparently boy & girl twins merged during the early stages of pregnancy, leaving him with one functional testicle and one funtioning ovary. Externally male (hence me calling him "him") - internally he's both.

Poor little sod.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as the "probability" of a particular hypothetical future event occurring. Either it will or it won't. What we can have is an expectation of whether it will occur. That expectation should be equal to a calculated probability of such an event occurring in a randomly chosen situation from a class of situations to which the current situation belongs. However, the definition of the "class" is subjective and even given such a definition it can be very difficult to make an accurate determination of the probability. Meteorologists can do a pretty good job at this because they have extensive records with which they can compare the current situation, as can some other scientists. In a non-scientific field like market research I think I suspect that it's impossible to apply probability.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[El]

...genetically, they're one or the other....

And people with two X chromasomes and a Y chromasome are... ?

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[jeff4747]

There's also the situation where a baby is born with a defective Y. They're XY genetically, but they develop just the same as a XX.

Re:That's exactly why many call them anal-ysts

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, smart guy. Here's an example: shoot an electron through a screen with two slits in it. Now that electron must go through one or the other slit to hit the detector on the other side, right?

So..

[Anonymous Coward]

So not only has sco failed to get money from linux users, it will most likely lose the customers it has. Oh well, I guess the world will just have to go on without sco.

Re:So..

[Dehumanizer]

You mean SCO *has* customers?

Oh really?

[zonix]

You mean the same Gartner Group that recommended people to halt Linux deployment because of all the SCUD (SCO FUD)?

Wait a minute ... no, no, none of this adds up at all! :-)

z

Re:Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You mean the same Gartner Group that recommended people to halt Linux deployment because of all the SCUD (SCO FUD)?
Wait a minute ... no, no, none of this adds up at all!"

of course it adds up. ibm is getting testamony from anyone who goes on record saying sco's claims hold water. paid analysts hate to state on record that they have no evidence for their weekly bull.

Re:Oh really?

[benploni]

This research note is as close to a retraction of previous SCO boostering you're going to see from risk-averse analyst groups. The fact that they state the obvious (don't let them on your premises) and directly contradict their claim of making money from licensing pre-lawsuit conclusion is a HUGE deal. Most analysis notes are a lot more bland and cryptic, almost like a horoscope; it says nothing substantive you can hold them to. This one is different.

Re:Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute ... no, no, none of this adds up at all! :-)

Was that done in classic Twillight Zone voice?

Re:Oh really?

[zonix]

Was that done in classic Twillight Zone voice?

The classic 50's, 60's kinda voice, yes - thanks for noticing. :-)

z

Crying in his Jello

[BubbaTheBarbarian]

Remember Rambus v. World? The same thing happened to them. They tried to sue the world, and lost. In middle of it, Gartner said basically the same thing.

This is a HUGE blow to SCO, to have as respected a group as Gartner say these things about the case. They have basically had all of what they have done over the past 6 months ripped out. No one will pay them for nothing, and even worse, they now have the real possibility of losing alot of their current customers.

Is this why IBM has been so quiet?

Duhryl must be crying in his Jello salad today.

Thank you for comming! See you in hell!

(this post not worth spell checking)

Re:Crying in his Jello

[Anonymous Coward]

We DO NOT want SCO to turn out like Rambus. For chrissakes, just take a look
at the chart. The company is doing very very very well after WINNING the lawsuits.

Re:Crying in his Jello

[Orien]

No one will pay them for nothing

Yes, but will they pay them for something?

Re:Crying in his Jello

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this idiot down. He is reporting what he wished happened, not what actually happened.

Rambus came out of the lawsuits stronger. Their stock soared through the roof. A judge has ruled that they own the disputed IP. The path is open for more lawsuits, if memory manufacturers don't pony up and pay them.

Re:Crying in his Jello

[silicon not in the v]

I have a vested interest in this analogy since my company is in one of the Rambus lawsuits. They are going to take a while to play out to the bitter end, but there has been quite a bit of back and forth in them. I think they are currently looking good from their most recent appeal, but there are still cases ongoing with multiple companies. Rambus, at least, unlike SCO are still able to continue with their real business instead of just becoming a litigation factory. They were originally convicted of fraud, but that was overturned on appeal. The suits continue. I see the same possibility of repeated appeals in the SCO case, so don't look for them to be crushed in the first decision and that be the end of it.

Re:Crying in his Jello

[StarTux]

Darl must be one of the worst CEO's in technical computer history (no shit Sherlock on my part).

As for IBM, why not let Darl dig his own grave? IBM have other things to do, like sale a few products, unlike SCO...

StarTux

Re:Crying in his Jello

[Ohreally_factor]

Exactly how much will no one pay them for nothing?

And 5....

[EvilTwinSkippy]

... Profit!!!

Don't they realize that will severely ...

[burgburgburg]

hamper Darl and David's attempts to confuse the investing public into thinking that there is some validity to their claims, thus allowing them to continue to unload their massively overvalued shares? How will Canopy continue to use the overinflated valuation of SCOX to play their shell games and shuffle the monies around (eventually with them ending up in their pockets, of course)?

How utterly irresponsible of Gartner! No consulting contracts for them!

Re:Don't they realize that will severely ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a big problem, they'll just keep quoting the old Gartner analysis in their press releases.

Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Event

On 18 November 2003, SCO announced that it would pay $1 million and issue shares worth $7.95 million to Boies, Schiller & Flexner. This law firm represents SCO in its lawsuits against companies using Linux in alleged violation of SCO's intellectual property rights

First Take

Mounting financial pressures have forced SCO to find alternatives to pay Boies, Schiller & Flexner. SCO not only faces the litigation against IBM (scheduled for April 2005) but must also defend counterclaims by Red Hat and IBM. Moreover, after threatening 1,500 Linux users for infringing its intellectual property rights, SCO has declared that within 90 days (or by about February 2004) it will start litigation against one or more Fortune 500 companies with large Linux installations.

SCO has declared in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that its competitive position could decline if the company can't obtain additional financing. The latest share issue will dilute shareholders' investments about 3.5 percent. It comes on top of a previously announced arrangement giving Boies, Schiller & Flexner a 20-percent share in SCO if the company were sold. SCO also received an investment of $50 million from BayStar Capital in return for 17.5 percent of outstanding shares. We believe that these moves compromise SCO's mission as a software company. Increasingly, the legal and financial aspects of the intellectual property infringement cases will absorb the company's attention, and a law firm will be in an increasingly powerful position to set the overall agenda for its compensation. Therefore, SCO will likely pursue claims against Linux users quickly. Its degree of success will determine the vendor's financial health.

Recommendations:

• Keep a low profile and do not divulge details on Linux deployments.
• Until a judgment in a case would unequivocally warrant it, Linux users should not pay SCO the license fees it has asked for to settle its allegations of infringement of intellectual property rights.
• Do not permit SCO to audit your premises without legal authorization.
• Your legal counsel should monitor developments and understand the infringement claims.
• Pressure high-profile Linux vendors to contractually guarantee against infringement claims by covering court costs. Evaluate Hewlett-Packard's willingness to indemnify Linux customers.
• Fence off the innocuous Linux deployments (such as network-edge solutions) from the performance-intensive ones. Where feasible, delay deployment of high-performance systems until the end of 1Q04 to see what SCO will do.
• If high-performance Linux systems are in production, develop plans that would enable a quick changeover in case SCO wins a favorable judgment and requires the Linux kernel code to be substantially changed. Unix systems are the best alternatives.
• For customers of SCO Open Server and UnixWare, an unfavorable judgment could cause SCO to cease operations or sell itself. That could harm future support and maintenance. Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years.

Analytical Source: George Weiss, Gartner Research

Recommended Reading and Related Research

• "HP and Linux Users Will Benefit From Legal Indemnity Offer" -- The offer to pay the legal expenses of Linux customers sued by SCO for infringing its intellectual-property rights sets Hewlett-Packard apart from other major vendors. By George Weiss
• "IBM, Red Hat Lawsuits Will Put Financial Pressure on SCO" -- Enterprises with large future Linux commitments should avoid paying SCO's server license fees because they appear arbitrarily high, represent a concession to SCO's claims and will expose the customers to ever-larger license fees. By George Weiss

(You may need to sign in or be a Gartner client to access all of this content.)

Re:Article Text

[DataCannibal]

Do these wankers actually get paid for writing this?

They're worse than fucking estate agents (I think amercians call then real estatet salesman or something)

Re:Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

"They're worse than fucking estate agents (I think amercians call then real estatet salesman or something)"

The most common term on this side of the pond is "real estate agents", but alot of us just call them pricks.

Re:Article Text

[Artifakt]

If SCO's deal is to pay 1 million cash and 7.95 million is shares to B,S & F, I'd expect B, S & F to do real work nominally worth about a million (or less), and stall on incurring expenses that might go above the cash part of the payment. The more they decided their client's case was a long shot, the more I'd expect them to stay under that cap. Does anyone know of a way to calculate the real expenses B, S, & F has incurred, from paper for all those briefs to non-partner salaries? Or is it just a pipe dream that this can be estimated?

What are they doing?

[DroopyStonx]

They know they have absolutely no case... so what is SCO trying to do, exactly?

Are they just toying with the system for whatever reason? Is the CEO bored so they ask themselves, "How much BS can we get away with before we get arrested and/or the govt. tells us to stop?"

What exactly is going on? They're not stupid. They know that their claims that "their" code was included in Linux distributions is completely asinine.

That'd be like me running of and trying to sue all these corporations because I wanted to buy black shoelaces but purchased a remote control helicopter instead (or something else utterly stupid that wastes everyone's time)..

Re:What are they doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Something utterly stupid that wastes everyone's time? Sounds like /.!

Haha number 3

[Anonymous Coward]

3) Do not permit SCO to audit your premises without legal authorization
Just ask them to come to our premises...

BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[eddy]

Check this out:

"Next up: Former SCO employee Jack Craig, now an SDK support engineer at another software company.

[...] While it was later excised and replaced with UDI code, I wonder how the world would take the news that SCO/Caldera paid a contract house in San Jose over $150,000 to port the NetBSD USB stack to osr5! They sure don't mind stealing open source when it suites them!" -- article here

This should be researched. McBride has been very admant that it doesn't matter if his imagined IP is removed from GNU/Linux, there price must be paid. Surely then his amazing legal understanding must be extended to his own company, in which case SCO could be a veritable GOLDMINE for the BSD Developers.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO/Caldera paid a contract house in San Jose over $150,000 to port the NetBSD USB stack to osr5! They sure don't mind stealing open source when it suites them!"

McBride has been very admant that it doesn't matter if his imagined IP is removed from GNU/Linux, there price must be paid.

Only McBride is arguing that the GPL is invalid, whereas SCO's supposed copyright was in place. Thus, he'd likely try to spin it as there was "no valid copyright violation" involved when lifting from Open Source, but for Linux to copy "proprietary information" is wrong.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[dougmc]

... to port the NetBSD USB stack to osr5! They sure don't mind stealing open source when it suites them!

To be fair, the BSD license permits this. Is it really stealing if you accept something that somebody else gives you?

(Also, Microsoft has been accused of the same thing -- using *BSD code in their products. And as far as I can tell, this accusation is completely true -- but irrelevant, because it's not illegal or even `wrong'.)

I've always wondered why people who make embedded devices like WAPs and the like chose Linux rather than *BSD -- with BSD they don't have the GPL requirements to open up the source. If you intend to give out the source, fine -- use Linux -- but if you don't, it seems to be that one of the BSDs would be a better choice.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[the morgawr]

umm..hate to tell you, under the BSD license, SCO is allowed to do that.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[(startx)]

except your basic bsd license says "do whatever you want with my code, just 1) leave my copyright notice and 2) there is no warrenty associated with it"

no restrictions on remaining open source, compiling with other licenses, badmouthing the authors, nothing.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

Surely then his amazing legal understanding must be extended to his own company, in which case SCO could be a veritable GOLDMINE for the BSD Developers.

The BSD license allows this. This is also the reason many OSS developers prefer the LGPL or GPL to BSD and Artistic licenses. The BSD is a free-market radical/libertarian's wet dream, but the GPL and LGPL constitute a steal all you want but give back approach.

The various BSD teams are fully aware of what people can do with their code and only care if someone else claims copyright over code they wrote. If SCO used BSD code, the OSS community gets nothing, if they had used GPL'd code, the copyright owner (possibly the FSF) could demand everything opened or the code removed plus damages. Under the LGPL, there are more possiblities, depending on how the code was used.

Spend more time analyzing OSS licenses than the SCO case and you'll have a better idea of when to get excited and when to not care.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[BJH]

Depends on whether or not they've preserved the copyright. The BSD license doesn't allow uncredited copying.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone, even SCOmbags can use BSD code.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[KrispyKringle]

I had the fortune to hear the CTO of RedHat give a speech. Afterwords, over refreshments (mmm...donuts), I asked him about this. `Why isn't it RedHat BSD?'

He said partly it was historical accident, but that there is also a good reason. He said something like, `Well, look at it this way. IBM recently pledged $1,000,000 to Linux (though where that money is I can't say). With Linux, we know that whatever they put into it will come back out. But if it were BSD, nothing would stop IBM from putting that money into BSD and making ``BSD+'' and not releasing the code. Here, we know we can benefit from what others put in without them closing it off.' I had to admit this was a pretty good point. To guys like you and me, it seems as if the companies get nothing out of it. But to the companies, the hard work of independent developers is just as important as their hard work is to us.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[Anonymous Coward]

If licensing was the only concern when making an embedded device, or if revealing the source code to your embedded device harmed your business, you'd have a point.

But really--if you're selling HARDWARE, how does it matter who sees the source code of the OS inside? (answer: it doesn't)

And if more tools are readily available for, or more developers are familiar with, one platform rather than another, wouldn't that be a bigger deal than the license?

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Actually, I was a part of this. UDI is The Uniform Driver Interface Project. I'm not sure what they mean about San Jose part, we're Midwest. Maybe another group did this in parallel? I don't know. Maybe they ported the USB stack in OSR5 is native DDI and built on USB. I can say that the UDI USB stack that shipped in OpenServer 8.0 is BSD code. Not that this is illegal, or violates any contracts. Just it's assholish of them to (threaten to) sue BSD when they use BSD code themselves. Wouldn't be the first time - ATT UNIX had many BSD enhancements, but that didn't stop them from suing.

The theory of UDI is you have this virtual environment thats consistent across all architectures. All drivers are 100% source compatible across all architectures. Environments with the same C ABI are binary compatible.

At one time, back when SCO/Caldera actually sold OSes for a living, they wanted to migrate people from OpenServer to UnixWare. One of the problems they saw was with device drivers. Nobody wanted to spend real money to port drivers to UnixWare. Why spend all that testing for an OS that won't give you a lot of sales (because lack of OS sales means no market)? So they came up with Project UDI, which is a driver environent, consistent across all platforms. You virtualize things and give a common API. The environment also handles synchronization, so you don't have to worry about locking data - you'll never get preempted. I forgot the timing, but I think UnixWare had this on top of the 7.x DDI, then OpenUnix 8 (which had a LOT of Linux stuff) had UDI as the native DDI, and the old DDI on top of it.

We talked to other major UNIX guys, but the proprietary ones said no; they were big enough in most cases for people to target their OS specifically, so it became strategic to not support having drivers for other OSes. Stallman hated (hates? it's pretty much dead) the idea because it makes it easier to close drivers (binary compatibility across a large number of potential platforms).

It was a weird environment, and you don't program like normal DDIs, it's more of a message passing architecture, with marshalling and unmarshalling of parameters on either side of a call (the marshalling was a major source of bugs early on). It seems pretty much dead in the water now. And yes, the USB stack is definitely the "Net"BSD one. I put "Net" in quotes because the stack is essentially shared across Net,Free,Open, and I assume now, DragonflyBSD.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[joe_bruin]

i work at a company that makes embedded devices using linux, and i'll tell you why.
the real advantage is that we give up relatively little. sure, we have to give out the kernel source, but it's not like we ever owned that in the first place. we have to share most of our custom driver code, which arguably has some value, but we make our money selling hardware, not writing drivers. the advantage, however, is that we can grab patches and drivers from dozens of other companies that use the same cpu/flash/dac/video chip/... as we do. the gpl forces everyone to share their code, so we can take advantage of work done by other companies (and they can benefit from ours). for the "cost" of giving out a bit of our in-house code, we get the benefit of using the code from all those other companies for free.
while i'm a big supporter of the bsd license, there's no way all these companies (many of them our competitors) would release this code if they didn't have to, and our work would be much harder.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

BTW: I haven't touched this in a while, so I looked around. All of this stuff was released opensource, can be seen at the project UDI sourceforge page with a link to download the source from cvs. The usb stuff isn't shipped as part of the environment, but is being used. I guess they closed the drivers, even though essentially they're just BSD code ported to USI.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[Anonymous Coward]

> IBM from putting that money into BSD and making ``BSD+''

Which is what they did with AIX, more or less. It's important to recognize that the "BSD Model" was tried on the commercial level and for the most part it lead to incompatibilties and vendor spats and "The Death of Unix".

Of course, BSD was originally developed as a government research project, so the liberal licence is fully justified.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[DunbarTheInept]

If you build something on top of Linux, you are not required to open your own source just because the kernel is GPL. It's only if you make modifications to the linux kernel itself that you have to release those changes. If all you are doing is making executables on it, or even kernel modules rather than direct kernel edits, you can do that closed-source. That's why Linux is still a usable platform for embedded systems even though it is GPL.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[DunbarTheInept]

The BSD is a free-market radical/libertarian's wet dream, but the GPL and LGPL constitute a steal all you want but give back approach.

Not quite. BSD is "if you improve it, you can keep your changes to yourself", and (L)GPL is "if you improve it, you should submit your changes for the world to see." NEITHER one actually requires you to "give back" if you 'steal' code - The GPL restrictions only activate if you *build* on that code.

The world is loaded with Linux users who haven't contribued a single line of code, despite "stealing" millions of lines of kernel source - and the GPL allows that just fine.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[DunbarTheInept]

1) leave my copyright notice

I thought they'd dropped that part now, too.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[Dalcius]

I fail to see how the BSD licence is a Libertarian's wet dream, could you please explain?

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[(startx)]

Nope, the original authors copyright notice has to remain in the source file. Go pull anything from the FreeBSD (or many linux drivers that were copied from the BSDs) source and take a look.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[platypus]

Additionaly, if your driver gets accepted into the mainline, you get a whole lot of maintenance for free, including adaptions between minor kernel versions, and, certainly, a lot of free testing.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[Ronny Cook]

SCO are liable if they use BSD code *and* fail to retain the copyright header indicating that it's BSD code or incorporates BSD code.

The BSD licence is extremely generous, but does require that copyright attributions be retained. If they skip that step, it's open season. Not having seen the SCO sources, I don't know whether that's the case here.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Because the GPL insists that you contribute any fixes you come up with, which increases its strength slightly.

Any single ocurrence makes only the slightest difference, but they accumulate, and enhance one another. Soon enough, GPL software is pretty robust, so more use it... and submit even more fixes.

Soon, GPL software has more drivers, supports weirder things.

Don't get me wrong, I like BSD too, it kicks ass. And it's just as free as linux. But the GPL is an asset.

As for this being "viral"... that's just propaganda. This is a good thing, and the stone soup parable probably describes the situation far more accurately than Balmer's crud.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[KrispyKringle]

I see no issues with that, per se. Linux advocates often prioritize popularity or acceptance or some sort of odd ideological goal above technical superiority. The so-called Death of Unix, that is, the breakup of standards in favor of seperate commercial distributions, does effect the technical side insofar as it hurts interoperability, but little more. And in many ways, it was probably inevitable.

Each distributor made changes specifically to differentiate itself in a crowded market. This was not by accident. Had BSD not been licensed open source, it's unlikely it would have been adopted so widely in education or research labs, and therefore not in industry. Had it been open source with a GPL-style license, I wonder if it would have even been used commercially or not. Regardless, as you correctly pointed out, those who funded it--the government, corporate interests, etc--probably would not have been interested in funding something GPL'ed (or similar).

And so long as corporations are going to make sure their products are distinguishable, there are going to be interoperability issues. Yes, Linux is different, but only because the entire business model is different. That is, RedHat, SuSE, etc, differentiate each other with configurations and things like patch-management services, but these are not technological secrets. RedHat could take SuSE's technology easily. The difference is service-wise, in that RedHat and SuSE are self-proclaimed service companies. And the idea of software as a service industry rather than a manufacturing industry was pretty far off in the early days, when software was just something needed to make hardware run right.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[Anonymous Conrad]

Because the GPL insists that you contribute any fixes you come up with,

Oh no it doesn't. I can download GCC or the Linux kernel, fix bugs and keep the fixes to myself. I have no obligation to give them to *anyone* unless I give them a binary copy of my kernel.

Any single ocurrence makes only the slightest difference, but they accumulate, and enhance one another.

In an ideal world, yeah, but fixing something often breaks something else or uncovers another bug.

And the more cruft that keeps getting added the harder something becomes to maintain.

As for this being "viral"... that's just propaganda.

Well, no, that's how it works. If you use GPL code or a GPL library you're obliged to make the whole program GPL. Which has some analogy to a virus, although pro-GPL people would pick a kinder name.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

How is that analogous, exactly?

I caught a cold a few weeks back. Colds are viral illnesses. Certainly, the virus didn't make every lung cell in my body its own, or I'd be dead.

Maybe a computer virus? Because we all know that every single computer virus has always achieved 100% infection rate... oh wait, not that kind of virus either.

So yes, it is propaganda.

Libraries can and often are exempt, if proper precautions are taken. Use code in the middle of your binary, non-library app? Hell yes, it has to be GPL. But if you weren't a lazy fucking loser, you'd write your own right?

Try to use microsoft code in your app.... see if you don't have to follow their restrictions. No one ever accuses their code of being viral though, even though it meets one of the criteria (causes a machine to flake out if you execute it).

One last thing, In an ideal world, yeah, but fixing something often breaks something else or uncovers another bug.

Since when is uncovering a but a bad thing? We fix them that way. As for the characterization that little or no improvement can be made with the fixes GPL insists on, how do you explain the improvements the linux kernel made?

Oh, that's right. Linux slipped a floppy disk into his pocket when he toured SCO back in 1991...

Now, if there were only an emoticon for flipping someone the finger.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[Anonymous Conrad]

I wrote originally to point out your perception of the GPL was off. There's no obligation to give back bug fixes. Library code is not exempt from the full GPL and that's the intention.

Let everyone add their own little bit to a project? I think that's a bad idea, but that's just my philosophy. Fix bugs? I think the biggest hurdle open source has to becoming well accepted is because it lacks formal QA. But that's just my opinion too.

So yes, it is propaganda.

Isn't it all? Would you call Stallman's closed-source-is-bad stuff propaganda? I can't see why you shouldn't. This is another point of view.

I'm not going to push the analogies bit. I'm not baling because I can't argue (e.g. there's no immune system against the GPL, consider an antiobiotic-resistant viruses? you could compare GPL code amongst other source as a Code Red infected windows machine on or off an unpatched network - mix them and it spreads). But I don't care about that - if the analogy doesn't work for you, fine.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Ouch. How to argue that Stallman isn't more of a propaganda artist than the Iraqi Information Minister...

Still, when is closed source good? Algorithm patents are questionable in my opinion, and general software patents are absurd. So what's to be gained by closed source? (Besides, you dont need to hide if patented, you've already got legal protection). Certainly, there are many, many software projects that I don't want to be closed source. Voting machines, air traffic controller equipment. Even those that dislike the GPL or this or that "open source" license, should be concerned when someone chooses to not let them see how the software works, and yet they depend on it.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they dropped the "advertising clause" which used to require all advertising of BSD-derived software to credit the UC.

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX?

[Ohreally_factor]

It is interesting that at least one major OS company, Apple, has taken advantage of BSD, it's license, and Open Source development by basing OS X on BSD.

And they have given back to the community with Darwin, although they benefit from this as well, to the extent that outside developers contribute to the project. I don't know if there is a way to prove that all their Darwin development gets put back into the Darwin project, but they generally update Darwin concurrently with OS X.

Apple has demonstrated that there is a way to use BSD in a way that is positive for the community, but they've managed to avoid the possibility of having their feet held to the fire. In effect, they can always "take their ball home" if they don't want to play.

To be fair...

[Vexler]

If you read the article carefully, similar recommendation was also given to Linux users to delay large-scale deployment until the dust begins to settle a bit (i.e. 1st quarter of 2004). Granted, deep down Gartner probably feels, as many of us do, that SCO's days are numbered, but good sense calls for level-headed thinking that should apply to all who are involved - not just a particular subset of the whole.

Not all favorable to Linux

[JohnGrahamCumming]

The paper also says:

> Fence off the innocuous Linux deployments (such
> as network-edge solutions) from the
> performance-intensive ones. Where feasible, delay
> deployment of high-performance systems until the
> end of 1Q04 to see what SCO will do.

and

> If high-performance Linux systems are in
> production, develop plans that would enable a
> quick changeover in case SCO wins a favorable
> judgment and requires the Linux kernel code to be
>substantially changed. Unix systems are the best
alternatives.

Which I read as "do your best to not use Linux for the time-being, and if you are be prepared to switch".

John.

Re:Not all favorable to Linux

[AKnightCowboy]

Which I read as "do your best to not use Linux for the time-being, and if you are be prepared to switch".

Makes sense. If Linux loses you're going to be doing some system shuffling. The safe bet for new deployments is Sun's Solaris which is a true licensed UNIX until Darl sues them after *BSD.

Re:Not all favorable to Linux

[XO]

If Linux loses, I won't be doing system shuffling. I'll be in my car, driving to Utah, to give Darl some seriously well-deserved HRA. Using an unlubed condom.

Re:Not all favorable to Linux

[DickBreath]

If Linux loses, then IBM will pay their $3 Billion of $50 Billion or whatever for damages, and that will be the end of it. Period.

Just like if you bought a textbook later proven to have material that infringes someone else's copyright, or even worse outright plagarism.

The guilty party will pay damages for the damage they caused. End of story.

Re:Not all favorable to Linux

[AKnightCowboy]

If Linux loses, then IBM will pay their $3 Billion of $50 Billion or whatever for damages, and that will be the end of it. Period.

No, that will be the end of it for IBM. It would be open season on going after other Linux vendors and kernel developers. They've already suggested they will be going after the BSD people after they're done with this.

Gartner borrowing from the Slashdotter playbook

[azaris]

prepare plans to migrate...

Is this Gartner's answer to everything?

MS software insecure - prepare to migrate.

Sun changing licensing terms - prepare to migrate.

SCO threatens Linux users - prepare to migrate.

I've used to seeing "switch to another platform/software package" as the default answer on Slashdot to most articles about potential problems any piece of software in existence, but some people actually pay for these Gartner analyses.

When are people who constantly advocate jumping ship whenever a potential problem appears with a product your relying on in you're business going to stop breathing since you can potentially be poisoned by air-borne pollution?

Re:Gartner borrowing from the Slashdotter playbook

[Eberlin]

Dude, the best thing about analysts is that if you don't like what they're saying, you can always migrate to a different group.

Re:Gartner borrowing from the Slashdotter playbook

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

If you are running some SCO Unix, you want to do exactly that - start migrating.
If you are using Linux and are worried, draw up a contingency plan and home you don't actually have to use it.

Re:Gartner borrowing from the Slashdotter playbook

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it. Consultants (and, by extension, analysts) don't make money telling you to preserve the status quo. A consultant's job is to recommend centralization of distributed systems and distribution of centralized systems. Above all, change, change, change -- because that's where the money's made!

Put another way: when was the last time you heard of a consultant that did an evaluation of anything and then said, "on balance, you're doing things pretty well; I don't think I'd alter your plans one bit."?

Re:Gartner borrowing from the Slashdotter playbook

[file-exists-p]

Well, when you migrate from MS, Sun and SCO .. what remains ? I Think Gartner group is trying to send a message here.

--
Go debian!

Re:Gartner borrowing from the Slashdotter playbook

[Anonymous Coward]

I was officially a "IT Consultant" for a while. I said that once or twice (got told off for saying it, too!).

Amusingly, it usually isn't even what the customer wants to hear, since they've only called in a consultant to "justify" some stupid large capital expenditure they've decided on some insane whim to undertake, they _say_ they want the consultant to give advice, they _want_ the consultant to give rationalisations.

Re:Gartner borrowing from the Slashdotter playbook

[owlstead]

On:

prepare plans to migrate...

Azaris wrote:

Is this Gartner's answer to everything?

Probably, and don't forget that they don't say what to migrate to. I think I know the an$wer if you a$ked Gartner for thi$ information.

Re:Gartner borrowing from the Slashdotter playbook

[dipipanone]

Amusingly, it usually isn't even what the customer wants to hear, since they've only called in a consultant to "justify" some stupid large capital expenditure they've decided on some insane whim to undertake, they _say_ they want the consultant to give advice, they _want_ the consultant to give rationalisations.

Of course they do. The whole point of using consultants/analysts is to cover your ass. If you come up with a bright idea to migrate all of your SCO servers to Linux tomorrow (for example), and SCO prevails and you end up having to stump up $1400 per CPU, it's your ass on the line for having made the decision.

Pay a consultant to make the recommendation, and your hands are clean. When the axe comes, you simply point out that you were just following the experts advice.

Tomorrow's headline...

[The Wookie]

"SCO sues Gartner Group"

Re:Tomorrow's headline...

[u-235-sentinel]

Probably for obstruction of justice.

Is this an example of SCOicide?

They can't say that!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

They don't want to publicly say "don't wait" because that could land them in the shit. Rather they sow the seeds of doubt and let the PBH join the dots.

Of course analysts are "catching on"

[csoto]

It just took them a bunch of time to finish reading all the SCO stuff on /.

But what do they think about emacs vs vi?

Re:Of course analysts are "catching on"

[Anonymous Coward]

But what do they think about emacs vs vi?

They both suck -- prepare plans for migration.

Re:Of course analysts are "catching on"

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Emacs.

Sure it's a little bloated, but all the double-buckey keystrokes feel like home to me. I dig the code development tools for various languages. Heck, I use Emacs under windows as my preferred source editor.

Re:Of course analysts are "catching on"

[Bigby]

The concluded that "pico" is the best.

Re:Of course analysts are "catching on"

[insomaniac]

I prefer vim.

It has all the editing features of emacs and the (for me) nice interface of vi. ;) And I dont like the control keystrokes at all compared to vi style of doing the same.

"You can do everything in emacs, shame it doesn't have a good texteditor"

Re:Of course analysts are "catching on"

[archivis]

nano rules!

You listen to analysts ?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

There's more, but are the analysts finally catching on?

I reckon it's more interesting to investigate which analysts may have a personal interest recommending SCO stock, which ones may have taken their marbles out of the game (and therefore can recommend against SCO without hurting themselves), and which ones may have received / still receive monetary gifts from SCO or Canopy.

If you followed advices from Credit Suisse First Boston analysts right before the dot-com collapse, you know the above isn't paranoia : analysts can almost never be trusted, because they almost always defend their own interest, or those of their employers, before the interests of the people they give advices to.

Re:You listen to analysts ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Canopy = Umbrella Corp from Resident Evil folks.

Good, maybe SCO will learn the sword of Justice...

[Anonymous Coward]

..can cut both ways. An unfavorable judgment and damages levied against SCO would be the perfect punishment.

.."Unix systems are the best alternatives."..

[burgburgburg]

If high-performance Linux systems are in production, develop plans that would enable a quick changeover in case SCO wins a favorable judgment and requires the Linux kernel code to be substantially changed. Unix systems are the best alternatives.

No, BSD is the best alternative. SCO faces an even greater uphill battle to try and imply that they have any IP issues with it, considering the AT&T 1994 settlement.

Yes, I remember that yesterday there were intimations that SCO would be going after BSD next. And while I know Darl is crack-addled and David is clueless, I think there might be a paralegal or an associate around who might be able to point out to them the extreme problems they'd have. Or maybe one judge who'd be willing to just slap them upside the head, as they've long deserved.

Re:.."Unix systems are the best alternatives."..

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Oh no, let them come. Let them break the seal on the 1994 suit like the seal of the elder gods.

I have this hankering to develop a new distro. Cthulu Linux anyone? Or maybe Hast... (Snarf)

Re:.."Unix systems are the best alternatives."..

[Anonymous Coward]

• If high-performance Linux systems are in production, develop plans that would enable a quick changeover in case SCO wins a favorable judgment and requires the Linux kernel code to be substantially changed. Unix systems are the best alternatives.
• • No, BSD is the best alternative.

They said "high-performance". BSD can barely even do SMP.

Re:.."Unix systems are the best alternatives."..

[nathanh]

If high-performance Linux systems are in production, develop plans that would enable a quick changeover in case SCO wins a favorable judgment and requires the Linux kernel code to be substantially changed. Unix systems are the best alternatives.

No, BSD is the best alternative.

No. BSD had its chance and lost. Linux has a license that forces greedy unscrupulous companies to play fair. The BSD license was too permissive and it almost led to the destruction of UNIX. BSD is not going to get a second chance.

Linux 2.0 is the best alternative.

SCO users

[Anonymous Coward]

i was interested in what OSs were being run at a local college where i live and they use SCO's UNIX, if anyone wants to check it out and maybe send them some info enlighening them on their knowledge vaccume since it is a small town university and are typical of small towns being ignorent of what is going on in the world at large.

it is East Central University in Ada Oklahoma http://www.ecok.edu/

here is a copy & paste from their Computer Science webpage (equipment)

Both of our servers are running SCO Unix Openserver 5.0.5. This provides students with an opportunity to work in a "mission critical" and "industrial strength" programming environment. This is consistently a "plus" when employers seek seek new employees.

Somebody paid how much for this?

[cybergrue]

Somebody paid how much for this? They could have gotten the same advice on Slashdot for free.

Re:Somebody paid how much for this?

[canajin56]

"And so, the rich and powerful of the city approached the sage, and said 'Great sage, we have been feeding you the finest foods, and housing you in luxury for years now. Come, what have you divined of the universe in this time?' And the sage replied
'I have determined that the universe is infinitly complex.'
'Yes, and?'
'And that there is a great deal to be said in favour of lazing about in luxury, eating the finest foods available.'
'We already KNEW all of that!'
'Well, then you should be pleased to have your opinions confirmed by one so erudite and wise as myself!'"

Re:Somebody paid how much for this?

[FFFish]

Pshaw. This is Slashdot. Of course the advice is free.

(Bloody pirates. No respect for copyright!)

"software company"

[siskbc]

But what I can't figure out is why they think SCO is a software company . . .

Analysts are required to maintain some degree of objectivity and avoid controversial statements. That said, if you read between the lines, he basically said just what we've all been saying.

From Gartner:

We believe that these moves compromise SCO's mission as a software company.

If he thought SCO was still a software company, he would have said "We believe that these moves compromise SCO's ability to remain profitable." He's stating, quite clearly, that because these moves make it impossible to remain profitable as a software company, they only make sense for SCO as a litigation manufacturing company. In other words, they're changing their "mission," as he puts it.

He can't say that SCO are a bunch of litigation-happy jackasses that deserve to be sued into the stone age (at least in print). But he can, and did, say things that readers can translate as such.

All in all, it sounds like he completely gets it, if you read between the lines a tad.

Re:"software company"

[Artifakt]

This is a great example of how to read an analysis. Anyone who invests in the market needs to know this sort of thing before they get in over their heads. Good, professional people, knowing that their words can have an impact beyond their face value, will be careful to say only what they can back up. Your 'warning' that the stock's a turkey is never going to be a simple "Don't buy this Turkey!".
About the clearest I've seen was "While X claims to have resolved all major old contract disputes, the state wherein X is incorporated allows a full year for filing appeals." (Meaning they have been in court a lot in just the last fiscal year, and It looks like there's a good chance things aren't as resolved as they say. If you don't have the sense to check in detail to see just what the company considers a "minor" dispute, and whether any of the "major" ones ARE filing an appeal, you should not invest in stocks.) Most warning signs are subtler than that example.

Re:"software company"

[beowulf405]

I think the comment that they aren't a software company anymore is very much to the point. If SCO wins they will get paid for each copy of Linux in use. Why continue to develop and sell SCO Unix? If I was using SCO's products I'd be planning on to change on the assumption they won't be supported any more win or lose.

Re:"software company"

[cshark]

I find myself criticizing gartner whever they come out and say something stupid. In fact, they've spread so much fud over the years that I have trouble giving them any sort of notice. This however is the first thing they've said, that I agree with in several years. I'm impressed. Now if only they would keep it up.

You're forgetting where the money comes from

[burgburgburg]

5) "Suggest" that companies hire you as a consultant. Those that do get listed by you as top 3 market leaders. Those that don't get listed as dead ends.
6) PROFIT!!!

Give me some of that gravy, uh huh!

mod parent up as thoughtful

[Artifex]

I've also wondered why *BSD hasn't been used in a few of these devices.

Hypocrisy at least.

[eddy]

Fine, got a little hot-headed there, but it's another nice case of hypocrisy from their side.

Hmm.. not sure if it beats the whole GNU toolchain + Samba thing though.. got to ponder that one.

Sign of the times

[bigjnsa500]

I feel things are speeding up because the domain

scoclassaction.com

has been registered.

Re:Sign of the times

[eric2hill]

At least ilovesco.com is still available!

Re:Sign of the times

[StarTux]

Cool,

Mentioned this on the LinuxShow as individual lawsuits are going to be too expensive for most of us.

StarTux

Re:Sign of the times

[herrvinny]

Isn't there supposed to be an anti-domain-squatting law or something? Can't find it on Google, but I thought there was something along those lines.

By the way, you tried to reg that domain yerself, didn't you? ;-)

Re:Sign of the times

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, when I go there I get the following:

ERROR: The IP ADDRESS you came from is not allowed on our network.

To avoid fraud and to protect our customers we have blocked the ip address or range you came from. If you feel you received this message in error, please contact our support group at support@namerenters.com

And someone is obviously planning on trying to make money off this (the NameRenters slogan is "Rent you domain, earn money from your traffic")

I'd like to point out that he WAS ..

[burgburgburg]

Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire. He owned a mansion und a yacht.

Re:I'd like to point out that he WAS ..

[Ohreally_factor]

You should never

'SCO money'?

[civilengineer]

I object to the choice of words. Its 'my money'. SCO wants it does not mean it is 'SCO money'.

Re:'SCO money'?

[benploni]

I didn't write that. The "editor" changed it from "Gartner recommends NOT paying SCO."

Bottom line (mirroring prior SCO related thread)

[Lead Butthead]

Did SCO stock price take a dive in light of this recommendation?

It's 2Q04...

[j0keralpha]

Do you know where your emergency migration plan is?

Its very like gartner to play both sides of the fence, but i find it interesting that the analyst's true opinion shows out here. Quite aside from SCO's financial woes (lets face it, you'd need the Sultan's treasury to really afford taking on IBM) he doesnt place much faith in any of SCOs bullying, or their case. He basically warns you to sit tight, do nothing, and watch SCO sort of topple over and die. I applaud him for his very sensible advice.

[OT] Re: hostip.info

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, why not seed the databse using whois queries?

And why can I query addresses in reserved blocks like 192.168.0.1?

Are the analysts catching on?

[ENOENT]

Those that don't own SCO shares are!

But what about 2.2 kernels???

[rcpitt]

SCO seems to only be going after 2.4 and later kernels - so, deploy older versions if you can or feel you have to.

I know this leaves those with multi-processor boxen in the lurch, but in the mean time the single processor stuff is getting faster and there may be other options for many/most now.

Re:But what about 2.2 kernels???

[Anonymous Coward]

even according to Darl McBribe (did I spell it right?) newer versions on kernel are not infringing on SCO 'IP'. here is the quote from teleconference two days ago -
"McBride: (crosstalk) . . . other questions. We have gone through and shown the Linux community a bunch of code. We sat down in August and we shared with them the derivative works code that was out there and one sample file that was out there on a direct copyright infringement. The Linux community has said they have removed the copyright-infringed file. That was a very small number of the infringements we see out there, which will address the coming up version of the 2.6 kernel. It doesn't address the fact that the 2.4 kernel is out there today. "

Re:But what about 2.2 kernels???

[Anonymous Coward]

We still run 2.2 on many or our boxes. Linux was definitely extremely usuable pre 2.4 kernel. Remember all that SCO blabbing that Linux was not an enterprise level OS pre-2.4 failing to mention the Oracle support pre 2.4 for Linux, etc...

What I find humourous is that Darl keeps saying that it would be too difficult to removal the offending code and that really, the industry would really prefer that it stays and just pay SCO a royalty.

Reminds me of those Computer Associates ads..."How much software do you want to buy?"

What a waste of paper...

[herrvinny]

1) Keep a low profile and do not divulge details on Linux deployments.

How is even a medium size company going to do this? A quick scan of company servers would be enough to see if they're running Linux or not. And even if you do change the servers to say they are Win 2003 or something, what about social engineering? Calling up the company, saying you're MS tech support, and you found a problem with the company's web servers. "But we run Linux." Gotcha! What about companies that have already said they run Linux? Yahoo, Google.

2) Until a judgment in a case would unequivocally warrant it, Linux users should not pay SCO the license fees it has asked for to settle its allegations of infringement of intellectual property rights.

Duh. All techies have been saying this for months.

3) Do not permit SCO to audit your premises without legal authorization.

Why the hell would you allow SCO (or any companies) people onsite for anything except if you're called them first?

4) For customers of SCO Open Server and UnixWare, an unfavorable judgment could cause SCO to cease operations or sell itself. That could harm future support and maintenance. Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years.

SCO will die in the next 2 years.

Re:What a waste of paper...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your opinion doesn't count in the public forum.

No matter how stupid you are, if you're "important", people will listen to you.

Now who's the president of the US?

Re:What a waste of paper...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only a matter of time before SCO tries to drag the BSA into things and starts asking them to audit schools, government institutions, libraries, and corporations which have deployed Linux either on the Desktop or in the Server Stack.

Re:What a waste of paper...

[benploni]

2) Until a judgment in a case would unequivocally warrant it, Linux users should not pay SCO the license fees it has asked for to settle its allegations of infringement of intellectual property rights.

Duh. All techies have been saying this for months.

It matters that analysts are saying this, because it gets to heart of the point of the lawsuit: stock manipulation. If stories like this hit the newswires (this one hasn't), SCOX:US is done for.

Re:What a waste of paper...

[Kjella]

1) Keep a low profile and do not divulge details on Linux deployments.

How is even a medium size company going to do this? A quick scan of company servers would be enough to see if they're running Linux or not. And even if you do change the servers to say they are Win 2003 or something, what about social engineering? Calling up the company, saying you're MS tech support, and you found a problem with the company's web servers. "But we run Linux." Gotcha! What about companies that have already said they run Linux? Yahoo, Google.

There's a world of difference between keeping a low profile, and keeping it a complete and utter secret. E.g. sending out press releases and giving interviews where you quote the great cost savings in moving to Linux, pointing out it's lack of licence fees would be a high profile.

Vague and ambigious answers like "We run a variety of OSs based on their cost-efficiency for their various tasks, desktop/workstation/server etc." would be keeping a low profile. "We are currently evalutating our Linux strategy (or OS strategy, migration strategy, whatever) and would not like to comment on it at this time." also.

It's not about keeping SCO from finding out. It's simply about not sticking your neck out, in case SCO takes a swipe at the most vocal advocates of Linux. After all, there's damn many to pick from, and as long as there's no reason they should pick out *you* in particular...

Kjella

Re:What a waste of paper...

[Blrfl]

A quick scan of company servers would be enough to see if they're running Linux or not. And even if you do change the servers to say they are Win 2003 or something, what about social engineering? Calling up the company, saying you're MS tech support, and you found a problem with the company's web servers. "But we run Linux." Gotcha!

Anybody who gets an unsolicited call from MS tech support and doesn't have their crap detectors go off full blast deserves what they've got coming.

Any security-conscious operation isn't going to reveal what they're running anyway, especially not to a complete stranger. Requests for HTTP service should be met with something that isn't a general-purpose computer, and the web server should identify itself as SomeWebServer 3.14 on SomeOperatingSystem. There's really no need for the browser, hackers, Billy Gates, SCO or Netcraft to know.

good thing in the long run?

[smd4985]

"There's more, but are the analysts finally catching on?"

Perhaps the whole SCO fiasco will be a boon for Linux in the long run. First off, any kind of press is good press. Secondly, the SCO lawsuit forces the media to understand the issues regarding GNU/Linux and free software, so perhaps this will lead to more widespread understanding and support.

Re:good thing in the long run?

[amplt1337]

I'm a little concerned by the "any kind of press is good press" argument -- are Michael Jackson's album sales going up this week? It seems like a lot of people saying "no, stop!!!" to generally conservative business decision makers does not further the cause of mainstream Linux adoption. (That's not everybody's goal, but the poster's reference to 'good press' suggests that s/he considers it to be one.)

And *nothing* can force the media to understand something. They'll choose to understand eventually, if given proper incentives, but media understanding is sort of an oxymoron :~)

What would be good is if we can finally get the GPL officially vetted by a judge, so people no longer have to worry about it being theoretical. Assuming the case ever goes anywhere.

Re:good thing in the long run?

[Anonymous Coward]

Media coverage doesn't lead to understanding. Research leads to understanding. Media hasn't been in the research business since the early eighties. "Understanding" doesn't pay the bills, and research costs a lot.

Here's what happens: SCO makes baseless accusations about IP infringement in Linux. Media reaction: "The integrity of the IP in Linux is in question! Those crazy Linux teenagers and their W4R3Z!" Now, let's say SCO implodes and people go to jail. Media reports: "SCO implodes in massive Linux fraud ring!"

I predict that SCO's self-destruction will be accompanied by headlines that make Linux sound like a securities scam. Why? It would sell more papers, and it wouldn't involve actually having to research anything, wouldn't you think?

To SCO Customers...

[IA-Outdoors]

This Gartner guy recommends to SCO customers to be thinking about contigency plans should SCO not be around. Personally, if you are SCO customer you'd be better off doing that regardless. My main justification is that you should not run your enterprise on software built by a company who feels their only way for survival is to sue competitors.

If they had a sound business plan and a good set of products then they would have customers and their bottom line wouldn't require these desperate tactics. The harder decision to make out of all this is what you should switch to. I'd be interested to see how non-linux, non-BSD based posix operating systems (i.e. Solaris) now that SCO is suing everbody.

You know, in the end this SCO thing is probably best settled with ski masks and crowbars.

Re:To SCO Customers...

[IA-Outdoors]

Sorry that should read

"I'd be interested to see how non-linux, non-BSD based posix operating systems (i.e. Solaris) are doing now that SCO is suing everbody."

Migration

[jargoone]

For customers of SCO Open Server and UnixWare, an unfavorable judgment could cause SCO to cease operations or sell itself. That could harm future support and maintenance. Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years.

Gee, just what platform would be good to migrate to?

Re:Migration

[tomhudson]

Since SCO would be out of business (this means their lawsuits failed), Linux would certainly be safe to migrate to :-)

Re:Migration

[jargoone]

Um, yeah. Coming soon to a theater near you: the clue train. All aboard!

For those of you with SCO Unix products....

[overbyj]

I also recommend that you run out to CompUSA quickly because I saw a copy of "SCO Unix in a Nutshell" on the discount shelf for only $5. You will need this after SCO goes out of business and you no longer have support.

Re:For those of you with SCO Unix products....

[Anonymous Coward]

...nutshell...

'bout sums it up, eh?

Re:For those of you with SCO Unix products....

[mdmarkus]

I tried to call for support from SCO once. You'll need it even if they _DO_ stay in business...

Re:For those of you with SCO Unix products....

[f0rt0r]

$5 is about right. My copy only had one page that said "fdisk and install another OS"

But...

[JamesP]

If Microsoft==Gardner

Then Gardner -> Pro-Linux

Pro-Linux -> Anti-SCO

And Microsoft-> SCO

This doesn't match up... Guess we'll need NEO to balance the equation (or Agent Smith)

Thank you Mr. Obvious

[orthogonal]

3) Do not permit SCO to audit your premises without legal authorization.

Huh? Are there actually companies stupid enough to say,

"Sure, Darl, come right on over. Nah, a week of disruption as your people trample through our offices and server rooms is no problem!"

"And you're looking to bill us $699 for each unix, linux, minix, or *bsd box, and for any microwave with an embedded controller? Hey, that's cool, you're the rightful owners after all!"

Re:Thank you Mr. Obvious

[tb3]

There were enough companies stupid enough when that damn BSA audit was going on. I know, I worked for one. Our lawyer was more than happy to negotiate a price for the 'illegal' copies of Microsoft software we had, he just wasn't bright enough to tell the PHBs that the BSA had no grounds in the first place.

Good to hear it

[zymano]

Good to hear someone in the media has said it. 'Don't pay that SCO license ! '. Investment analysts are probably looking at the SCO/ip/linux licensing revenues from Fortune 500 companies that have already paid up and they think that there probably is going to be even more revenue. Linux Distribution companies need to raise their voices too so we can stop the SCO licensing so we can put a dent in the evil cycle of SCO bashing Linux which causes corporate companies to pay the license and analysts then giving a "STRONG BUY" on SCOX stock which in turn helps finance all this crap. Let's cut cut their damn oxygen off and stop this fire now .

They're STILL recommending that.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

You mean the same Gartner Group that recommended people to halt Linux deployment because of all the SCUD (SCO FUD)?

They're STILL recommending that:

Where feasible, delay deployment of high-performance systems until the end of 1Q04 to see what SCO will do.

Also a bunch of other inhibitions to Linux deployment - developing plans to migrate away, pressure on vendors to indemnify, spending lawyer time on watching the SCO suit, etc.

It's just that now they're ALSO pushing people away from SCO similarly, and advising existing Linux users not to pay the SCO tax, not to allow audits, and to keep a low profile.

So SCO also takes a further hit in deployments and revenue on the software side for solid business reasons. SCO and Linux vendors both get hit.

Who benefits? Gartner suggests preparing to move mission critical Linux apps to other Unix platforms if SCO wins. But other open Unix platforms are at risk as well (note that SCO is already sending up trial ballons on *BSD.) So only SCO-licensed commercial vendors need apply. (And of course, though Gartner doesn't mention it, there's always the Microsoft tar baby.)

SCO put all its eggs in the litigation basket. Gartner points out the paying the lawyers in stock means the lawyers exert more control and bias management toward further suits. Now Gartner's paper will drive more customers away from SCO, making it that much harder for them to back out and go back to being a software provider, rather than an IP dog-in-the-manger litigation, company.

So IMHO SCO is now committed and this will play out to the bitter end.

Interesting, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

... I thought the important bit was that in the past, didn't Gartner support Microsoft quite a bit? I seem to recall people here saying that Gartner was not much more than a MS PR firm.

If that's true, then maybe MS has a more neutral opinion on the whole SCO-Linux mess than we thought and this disproves the conspiracy theory?

Or...MAYBE...that's part of the conspiracy, making us THINK MS isn't that interested!!

Wow, suddenly glad I posted AC.

The Major Missing Recommendation

[Nom du Keyboard]

And the major missing recommendation:

Move all SCO stock you own out of your long term hold portfolio.

Re:The Major Missing Recommendation

[benploni]

This research note come very close to saying that. The fact that they state the obvious (don't let them on your premises) and directly contradict their claim of making money from licensing pre-lawsuit conclusion is highly unusual. Most analysis notes are a lot more bland and cryptic, almost like a horoscope; they say nothing substantive you can hold them to. This one screams of SELL.

SCO Information Minister

[RenegadeTempest]

SCO Information Minister McBride claims Garnter Group isn't even within 100 miles of the truth.

What did they intend vs what they are doing.

[khasim]

Background:
SCO hasn't had a new release in years and they are still years behind on 64-bit.

SCO's business is dead. New deployments are going to Linux or Microsoft or Sun.

My guess is that this was ORIGINALLY an attempt to get IBM to buy them out and shut them up.

But SCO messed that up so badly that IBM decided to face them in court.

So, the SCO execs have a failed company and not much hope for an easy buy out.

So the decided to pump-n-dump their stock. That way they can realize SOME profit.

So SCO goes public with all sorts of claims, people seem willing to buy SCO stock on the "lottery" principle.

SCO execs dump their stock as fast as they can. That's on the record.

But the SEC doesn't like pump-n-dump schemes.

SCO has to do something so the SEC doesn't start digging.

So now you have SCO making strange claim after strange claim after even stranger claims.

That's why SCO is taking venture capital funding for stock.

That's why SCO is paying their lawyers in stock.

All they have to pay for the things they need is stock.

So they have to keep the stock price up.

But repeating the same claims over and over has a diminishing rate of return. People don't buy your stock in 4th quarter if you keep repeating the claims you made in 2nd quarter.

You need new claims. Something to fire the imagination. Something to get those "journalists" calling you again and printing your words.

Something like ....... announcing ANOTHER lawsuit.

But don't actually file one. SCO cannot afford to split their legal department.

Just threaten to file one. That's just as good for those "journalists".

It's strange...

[Phantasmo]

that anyone would let a private company search their property without law enforcement being involved.

There's this one episode of The Awful Truth where they have two retired police officers (in uniform) walk around NYC and frisk random people.
The frisk-ees sort of look confused for a second, then calmly allow the search.

I don't know why North Americans are so uppity about "freedom" lately. We're obviously not terribly interested if we need someone to tell us, "Don't LET people take your privacy away!"

Re:It's strange...

[iggymanz]

well, there's alot of companies that think SCO is the very same SCO they've been doing business with and going back to the early 80's. So it's normal to let in reps from a vendor you've been dealing with for 1 or 2 decades! They may not realize it's the Living Dead zombies who ate the brain of the old SCO's corpse!

Re:It's strange...

[El]

If they are carrying guns, perhaps your best strategy would be to comply now, get their badge numbers, and sue them later. Look what happened recently when the police raided a high school to look for drugs. A few students laboring under the impression that they had rights refused to get down on the floor as ordered. That resulted in drawn weapons being pointed at them, and probably in their being thrown up against the wall and hog-tied... oh, and by the way, they didn't find any drugs.

Re:It's strange...

[ewhac]

The tactic employed is probably the same as employed by the BSA/SIAA. They sent you a notice of suspected infringement, then sit down to "negotiate" with you:

• Allow us free reign to audit your premises, and we'll hammer out a deal based on what we say we find,
• We'll come in with law enforcement, shut down your company, press criminal charges, and slap you with the maximum fine per infringing copy.

Given that you're a CEO of a company whose first responsibility is to shareholders, which choice would you make?

Schwab

Re:It's strange...

[Grishnakh]

Wow, companies are willing to let just anyone come in and do audits for products which they don't even own, and then bill them for it? Maybe I should take this up as a profession.

"I'm here to do an audit of your company for all copies of Internet Explorer, which I'm the IP owner of. I'll have to charge you a $699 fee for each copy I find."

I may have to skip the country, but it wouldn't take long to make enough money to make the scam worth it.

Re:It's strange...

[pizpot]

Its the school that should then be sued by the parents. Not the cops, they are good for society, and kicking ass is their job, say what you want.

Re:It's strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you emphasize private company

Seems just as scary if not more-so if it's a public company.

In either case get a lawyer first.

Re:Bottom line (mirroring prior SCO related thread

[phil reed]

It's down half a percent from today's open.

Heh, heh....

[Asprin]

"Scaldera". That's appropriate.

Gartner still pushes for indemnification though

[Dav3K]

Sure the report 'gets it right' on most points, but the analyst still is hung up on the indemnification red-herring, and cites HP as an example of a vendor who offers a solution.

Indemnification offered by HP (or Sun) seems to be much more of a cynical marketing tactic than something companies should be asking for.

This is obviously part of IBM's plan

[obsid1an]

I am waiting to see how long it will take for good old Darl to come out and say that this report is just IBM plotting again.

Re:Bottom line (mirroring prior SCO related thread

[whittrash]

They are down a dime. That just means that the people in 'the know' unloaded a few shares. But the news will hit tommorrow, and the panic will strike. I bet they drop another dollar or more. The conversation will go like this:

Investment advisor: You remember that stock I told you about and you bought 100000 shares at $20 a share. Well you better sell now. It is about to tank.

Clueless Investor:What?

Investment advisor: It is time to devest yourself from SCO.

Clueless Investor: But you told me....?

Investment Advisor: It is time to panic!

Clueless Investor: OHHHHHHH MYYYYYYYY GOOOOOOOOOOOD, Im ruined. (grabs cell phone...1 800 ATTORNEY)

STOP STOP STOP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, everything I've read from Weiss thus far (not just the SCO stuff) has always been "wishy washy". He never really makes a stand and only says things that any geek with half a brain would be thinking about months before. But this one just takes the cake. "umm be prepare incase SCO wins to get off linux...but don't forget they might loose too". So, he's basically saying you should have a legal UNIX copy lying around just incase. Were's the sense in his rantings?

If you have a copy lying around...you've had to pay someone which eventually ends up in SCOs hands (yes, that includes Microsoft...how do you think they have Unix services in it). Let's not forget the fact that if SCO looses, you now have a license you're not going to use.

Developers, if they haven't started looking at other alternatives now and have themselves tied into Unix only. Then I wouldn't be doing business with companies that are that short sited. Certainly not for mission critical software.

MY Advice would be just to sit tight and wait for SCO to die. It's inevitable as what they are doing now is death rolls anyway. Remember what their stock was down to before they started this B.S.? Less than $2 a share. Sun was worth more than that.

Standard risk-averse analysis...

[Kjella]

...if SCO turns out to have a case, Gartner warned about it. If they don't, Gartner can go "We couldn't know that in advance, so we suggested companies to have a plan B and not rely solely on Linux."

The important thing is that they're denying SCO their cashflow, both from licencing and from their software business. A lawsuit seems a lot more credible when it comes from a running company than from a tanking company.

Kjella

Re:Bottom line (mirroring prior SCO related thread

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, about flat for the past few days.

Compare and Contrast

[glenrm]

NOVL taks a much better course of action to handle Linux than the SCO option, IMHO. What say you Slashdotters?

ALL UNIX users should be on alert

[n1ywb]

You know, it's not just SCO UNIX customers that should have contingency plans in case SCO folds. Lets say hypothetically that SCO loses the case, declares bankruptcy, and liquidates their assets... Now what happenes to every other System V derivitive OS, like AIX, Solaris, etc? Seems like a lot of uncertainty. I think it would be prudent for any organization that uses any Sys-V type UNIX to have a contingency plan, just in case.

Re:ALL UNIX users should be on alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Novel has already ordered SCO to waive IBM alleged violations of the System V license and when SCO refused, Novel waived the violations for it. If Novel has that power, I would imagine that they also have the power to perpetuate a System V license when SCO dies.

Re:ALL UNIX users should be on alert

[MachineShedFred]

What happens? Simple.

One of the licensees of SysV buys the rights and codebase for pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy court.

Life goes on, hoping that the new owner actually posesses more intelligence than a bag of rusty hammers.

Not so much money

[Anonymous Coward]

From the CRN article: McBride, "When I said we have $60 some million in cash [on hand at SCO] ..."

From this Gartner recommendation: "SCO also received an investment of $50 million from BayStar Capital ..."

Does that mean that SCO is basically out of money except for the recent investment from BayStar capital? Well, I guess we already knew that... paying Boise in shares. (Did he learn nothing from the dot-com era? hehehe.) Anyway, just thought it was interesting.

k.bye

Software Company? Got jobs?

[geekmetal]

After reading the article I wondered if they had any software job openings posted on their website, take a look at the one Software Engineer job they have open.

Re:Software Company? Got jobs?

[XO]

I love how they are looking for "7+ years of web technologies experience"... Has the web passed it's 7th birthday yet?

If it has, not by much...

Re:Software Company? Got jobs?

[Zeinfeld]

I love how they are looking for "7+ years of web technologies experience"... Has the web passed it's 7th birthday yet?

I have eleven years experience. The first public demonstration of the Web was in Annecy in 1992.

Re:Software Company? Got jobs?

[the_other_one]

You will have to check with Al Gore as to exactly when he invented it but I'm sure it was over 7 years ago. The web started to become a really hot Fad in 1996 so that's almost the same as a birthday. I've been downloading porn for over 7 years so I suppose that qualifies for 7+ years of web technologies experience. I should at least have no problem preparing a legitimate looking register your linux and give us(world+dog) your credit card website. I could probably get their marketers to go for a $100 discount to $599 if you name 10 of your Comunist linux conspirators to whom they could send spam and the FBI.

Re:Software Company? Got jobs?

[shanen]

So a few thousand /.ers should apply for the position? How long would it take SCO to figure out their leg was being pulled?

Re:Software Company? Got jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Al Gore "invented the internet", not the web, you dweeb.

Re:Software Company? Got jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

No my friend of little imagination. The point is we can get a .NET man, (the bastard!) on the inside. Have someone actually apply for and get said job. Then this inside operative may be able to be used as a very effective piece on the board that is the SCO/Linux battle. Or failing that we can insert the element of doubt into the minds of the SCO execs... are their employees loyal, or Linux-commie-pinko-fag-spies working against the suits... are they to be trusted? Or shall all SCO employees be subjected to intense interrogation and cavity searches upon entrance to SCO HQ. Bwahahah! Go forth my penguinistas! Go forth and foment chaos and whatnot!

Re:Software Company? Got jobs?

[JCCyC]

After reading the article I wondered if they had any software job openings posted on their website, take a look at the one Software Engineer job they have open.

Heh. I wish I could plant myself as a mole, but I'd probably not get by the ideology barrier. Hint for people who never released GPL software... and never posted opinions about Free Software except under pseudonym.

Re:Software Company? Got jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The web's been around for 12-13 years now so while most web developers only got started within the last 5 years I don't think 7 is that much of a stretch. I wrote my first HTML pages in 1995 and might have written a CGI script in 1996, so I think I would qualify.

Re:Software Company? Got jobs?

[XO]

Sure, the first demonstration.. but at that point, it was no different than gopher, really...

When did the first usable browser exist?

Re:Nobody is...

[freeweed]

an issue that only exists in places like Slashdot and is solely sustained by the "media" attention the OSS community and trolls that work for Fortune give it

Tell that to IBM's lawyers.

The first half of your post was true. The rest IS a troll, and if you're wondering why you'll get moderated as such, it's not (just) because people disagree with you.

Mod 'er up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous, but so very true!

Darl McBride is Toad from X Men

[usurper_ii]

I was watching X men and it hit me that the whole movie was a SCO analogy. Stay with me here. Bill Gates is Magneto and Darl McBride is Toad. Now I haven't figured out who Mystique is yet, but since she is the closest thing to a nude woman most Slashdotters are ever going to see, we all need to at least get a mental image of her at this point. Anyway, Magneto has all the important people rounded up at this big party -- these people are IBM, Novell, Red Hat big wigs, etc. -- and he has this huge electrical storm heading toward them (I have seen the movie three times now and I'm still not exactly sure what that electrical-storm thing is supposed to do?). Now here is where it gets good because Linus is Wolverine (Logan) and off on the side, as this big storm comes, he is battling Toad. First, Wolverine makes it look like he killed himself by starting to talk about incorporating DRM into Linux, but this is all blowing smoke up everyone's ass, 'cause Toad, thinking Wolverine is dead, goes up to him and starts looking through his pockets for some code to steal, but Wolverine shoots his knives out of his fingers and rams them right through Toad...you can see them sticking out of his back, and as the camera zooms in, you see blood stained, cool-looking shiny metal glistening in the moonlight. Now with Toad out of the way Wolverine turns his sights toward stopping Magneto and his electrical storm-cloud thing speeding towards everyone. Wolverine quickly finds the computer controlling the storm and starts to do some hacking on it to stop the storm, but when he brings up a DOS window to run a script in, the damn thing gets a BSOD...forcing Logan to do a crtl-alt-delete on the computer...three times. Luckily, the reboot stops the electrical storm-cloud thing, but Logan does feel a little robbed that it was Magneto's own poor software that really did him in!

To be continued....

Re:Darl McBride is Toad from X Men

[gearheadsmp]

The 'electrical storm' in Xmen 1 was a field of radiation. Started by Magneto, he then 'handed' the machine over to Rogue. The purpose of the radiation field was to turn all the Senators and Politicians into what they really are - Mutants.

Re:Darl McBride is Toad from X Men

[glen]

How about Titanium man and the Crimson Dynamo?

consulting on migration

[decapentaplegic]

So is anyone starting up companies that specifically do consulting on how to migrate away from SCO?

One of the open source mantras is that the profit isn't in the code itself, it's in consulting, customizing and tech support. So this one seems like a no brainer. Get a bunch of specialists who understand what keeps SCO's current customers in the SCO fold. Put together specific GNU/Linux packages to match those needs and sell "migration consulting services". Best of all, one could write 2 tier contracts. One tier is just a migration plan analysis. The second centers around the work to be done to implement it if (sorry, when) SCO implodes.

This seems like a business model with considerably better fundatmentals than selling 50lb bags of dogfood over the internet.

Plus doing the sales calls could be fun: "Your chief technology supplier currently has a market cap of X million dollars. They are in a legal fight with IBM, which has a market cap of Y billion dollars. IBM has stated that they have no plan to settle before the damage wrought by their lawyers can be seen from orbit. For Z hundred thousand dollars we can show you how to not be collateral damage."

Due to potential bad smell problems...

[rarose]

we recommend preparing to migrate to a aquatic-based respiratory system.

Gartner on Outsourcing

[bstadil]

Question:

Most of the IT job is being outsourced to low cost regions. What should I do?

A:

prepare plans to migrate..

Re:Change your TCP/IP fingerprint to DOS BOX

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting ports on X.X.X.X
All 65531 ports not shown are in state: closed
tcp/22 ssh
tcp/25 smtp
tcp/53 dns
tcp/80 http
tcp/443 https
Remote Operating System Guess: MS-DOS
Nmap run completed -- 1 Ip scanned (One host up)


Wonder what this guy's really running?

lamb's blood, not goat's

[vcohen]

So it's kind've like painting goat's blood over your door...

erm, sorry to pick nits, but this is /. after all. It was lamb's blood, not goat's....

Re:lamb's blood, not goat's

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn. No wonder all my children are dead!

Corollary to Godwin's Law

[amplt1337]

As the hours passed in any given day approach 24, the probability of a Slashdot story regarding SCO being posted approaches one.

At such time as this story is posted, refreshing Slashdot is not necessary until work next morning, as no further productive news will be posted on that day.

Too Late!

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Keep a low profile and do not divulge details on Linux deployments.

Oops, I already emailed SCO and dared them to sue me...

Remember that "Reasons not to buy iPod" article?

[Kjella]

If you look at any product, you'll find reasons not to buy them. The only question is if it's better where you're going than were you are now. For that reason, having a plan to migrate - migrate anywhere really, in case the current OS becomes unacceptable, is a good thing. Never put all your eggs in one basket and all that.

Another thing is that they need do recommend *something*, a paper that says "That's the way it is, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it" won't sell much. And what are you going to do? Fix Microsoft's software design practices? Dictate Sun's licencing? Snap your fingers and make SCO go away? No. If you take the concerns raised seriously, you need to seek alternatives. That's not really the part they pay Gartner for. What they pay them for is to answer "Should this concern me?"

Kjella

In other news...

[karlandtanya]

Fire hot, water wet

BSD in Windows is a big deal

[Spamalamadingdong]

To be fair, the BSD license permits this. Is it really stealing if you accept something that somebody else gives you?

(Also, Microsoft has been accused of the same thing -- using *BSD code in their products. And as far as I can tell, this accusation is completely true -- but irrelevant, because it's not illegal or even `wrong'.)

No, and yes. The user (whether SCO or M$) has no legal obligation, and thus can't be legally accused of stealing anything. However, on the moral level it's otherwise. Both SCO and Microsoft are trying to crush all competition in their respective niches, and their use of the same free software that they are trying to get rid of is grossly hypocritical.

This is why the GPL is better for the world than the BSD license; it prevents attempts to take the commons private, and allows much more rapid advancement of the useful arts. (If you think having to work around a minefield of patent rights is a problem for software, consider that patents expire 5 times sooner than copyrights do.)

Does George Weiss Draw A Salary? +1, Intriguing

[Anonymous Coward]

For giving lame advice:

1. Be careful about using Linux
2. Have a Plan B for another operating system
3. Blah...Blahh...Blah

My advice:

1. Flaunt Linux in the face of SCO.
2. Don't have a Plan B
3. Don't hire George Weiss
4. Dear SCO: Go To Hell

Another suit!

[LilMikey]

I can see tomorrow's headline already: "SCO Sues Gartner"; claims ownership of 'letters and numbers and stuff' used to create the report citing similar reports produced by SCO in the past. It appears most of these allegations stem from similar comments strewn across the reports such as "we are so screwed" and "hurry up and sell that before it goes back down."

AntiSCUD working: Boies loses $32,000 today

[ronubi]

SCOX is down $0.08/share today, after being up several percent most of the day. Considering all the PR they tried yesterday, I'd say that the Anti-SCO-FUD (AntiSCUD) by PJ at GrokLaw, as well as by Slashdot, Forbes (finally!) and other analysts, is starting to work. :-]

Re:AntiSCUD working: Boies loses $32,000 today

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering all the penalties if SCOX drops below a certain point, do you know of anything legal we can do to drive it down that far?

For something that volatile, with that few shares outstanding, you'd think there'd be some legal way to effectively sabotage what we all feel is their attempt to steal all our open source code...

We Might have just turned the corner

[aws4y]

if you look at there stock performance over the past 5 years (here) you will see that over the past month that SCO stock has been loosing its value, and even after the SCO FUD machine kicked into high gear this week and brought on some lawyers the stock is still on a downward slope. So maybe now its time for people to start shorting that stock, at least do it before Dec 8, when the judge may rule on IBMs motion to compel. IANAL but there might even be a declatory judgement at that time due to the poor response from SCO and the fact that there public statements are contradictory to many aspects of their case.

Re:We Might have just turned the corner

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't short this stock if you tried. The shorting demanded probably outstrips the supply of stock on loan by something like 100,000 to 1. Or more.

Re:Bottom line (mirroring prior SCO related thread

[SillySlashdotName]

OH MY GOD, NO!!! OH THE HUMANITY OF IT ALL!!! WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN??!!?

SCOX down $0.08 at the close, all the way down to $13.85. Gives me a warm fuzzy knowing Boies et al lost (400,000x.08) $32,000 just today.

Here's hoping for an even better tomorrow...

MSFT wants Linux installations to "Keep Quiet"

[Anonymous Coward]

The more people/companies that publically announce GNU/Linux installations the more momentum gained by Linux.

That is why SCO is targeting the 1500 biggest enterprise companies to spread the most FUD among the companies that have the most IT credibility. How much affect would a few less enterprise 1500 companies publically announcing switching to Linux have on other companies thinking of switching to Linux?

The one thing Microsoft fears the most is a snowball/avalanche effect of GNU/Linux adoption. All of their FUD is geared towards preventing the inevitable avalanche.

Why stop at SCO? Go after Boise's law firm too.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is clear that Davis Boise's law firm is an accessory to SCO's shakedown of the industry. If SCO loses its case, Davis Boise's law firm should also be sued for complicity.

Consultants like Gartner Group...

[bs_02_06_02]

All consultants do this. They take money from companies like Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and publish reports allowing a lot of spin for their customer. The companies can then use these reports as PR. Consultants lose crebility because of that behavior.

Consultants crave credibility. They come back with freebies like this one, touting their ability to consolidate a large amount of information. There's nothing earth shattering there, but the rest of the world will suddenly think, "Whew. The cat is out of the bag." SCO is going down the tubes, and this is a desperate act by desperate people."

Consultants are good at publishing "safe" analysis that won't offend anyone. It's already public, it's not that hard to believe. The public buys it.

Away from the consulting biz, most Wall Street analysts couldn't find water if they fell out of a boat. Analysts follow trends. They're more like sheep than anything else. Look at the analysts that follow Rambus. What a spectacle! Completely predictable too. Rambus produces extremely overpriced IP that marginally beats a much lesser priced product. Yet the analysts tout Rambus repeatedly.
Analysts are like sheep. None of them really wants to leave the flock. If there's a slaughter coming, they'll follow the leader. If you were an analyst, and your butt was on the line every day, how many gambles would you take? Not very many. If you say the same stupid things as the next analyst, you're safe.
99% of the analysts are not very bright. Every once in awhile, you run into an analyst that ventures into uncharted territory, and everyone rips 'em to shreds. It's funny too.

Re:Consultants like Gartner Group...

[Anonymous Coward]

All consultants do this. They take money from companies like Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and publish reports allowing a lot of spin for their customer.

Precisely. It's where the money comes from. As a perma-temp phone-monkey for Gartner (by the way, it's not Gartner Group anymore; we've rebranded, and every one of us is supposed to Be The Brand and let people know about it, so that we don't have Brand Disconnect), I've had the pleasure of arranging very high-profile interviews between a Gartner analyst and a couple dozen CIOs of fucking huge companies, just so that AMD can, a month later, put out a press release cherrypicking the good quotes from said interviews to support their 32/64 processors.

It's hard to do this sort of bullshit for companies that I otherwise respect, but it beats flipping burgers. The thing that really cheeses me is that after that AMD thing, for example, one of the managerial toads dropped by a copy of an article from The Oregonian evidencing media perpetration of said cherrypicking.

And they Couldn't Have Done It Without Me.

Why do I have a B.S. in Computer Science, again?

Who will end up pwning SCO after the dust clears?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look out folks. Everyone here thinks that IBM or Novell (same difference anymore) will end up owning SCO's remaining assets and the Unix copyrights after the smoke clears and the dust settles...think again. It will end up being owned by a bunch of lawyers (Boes, et al) instead. This would become an even worse nightmare than what we got already. Think about it.

No Need to Hide, is there?

[twitter]

It's not even good advice. Your cheary outlook:

First off, any kind of press is good press. Secondly, the SCO lawsuit forces the media to understand the issues regarding GNU/Linux and free software, so perhaps this will lead to more widespread understanding and support.

is nice, but misses a few things.

The media is being forced to learn about free software because it's dramatic news on it's own. What could be a bigger story than a revolutionary development model that turns everything "experts" ever said about software on it's head and works much better than most people now use? If the only things you learn about free software come from Wintel rags, you are going to have a very warped and negative view. Lies and insults are not good press. Disinformation is bad, it wastes time to learn and even more to unlearn. You are better off not listening to any of it, especially those nuts at SCO.

Worse, the report recomends a "low profile". What PHB is not going to read that as proof that something is wrong with free software? "Do this, but don't tell anyone", what kind of bullshit is that?

Next the dummies will recomend Windoze migration.

But...

[ddavis539]

Sco probably doesn't track when this happens and I'm willing to bet that at least some of the comment or code area matches used to generate the FUD were those that originated in other systems and were placed into Unix.

Hopefully the judge in the IBM case is able to consider this possibility and require SCO to prove that the any code in question was actually an original creation of theirs and not ported from someplace else.

#3 doesn't even need to be said.

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone wants to investigate your premises, and you don't have some clear contractural obligation to allow them to do so, the only reasonable response is a most emphatic refusal.

Any effort that is made beyond that, is grounds to call the state police, or even the FBI. EVEN IF THEY SHOW UP WITH POLICE OFFICERS!

In some places, it's grounds for a civilian to use deadly force.

Now, if they show up at your door accompanied by marshals and holding a search warrant, that's another story. If anyone enters your property without your consent, you've got a case of criminal trespass at a minimum, and if you have reason to believe your life and property is endangered, you have cause to use force in self-defense.

Universal TLA Recommendations

[4of12]

A lot of the recommendations seem like good advic e in the event of a BSA audit, too.

If SCO comes into my premises...

[generationxyu]

...I'll tell them to leave my premises or they will be shot. If they don't leave, they will be shot.

Novell is a 6 pound capuchin monkey

[myowntrueself]

not an 800 pound gorilla.

Monkey I tell you! MONKEY!!!

Re:Novell is a 6 pound capuchin monkey

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I blew pizza out of my nose. Good job!

Re:Novell is a 6 pound capuchin monkey

[fredrik70]

ever seen the movie Outbreak?? Monkeys can be quite lethal! :-)

MOD PARENT UP

[PCM2]

Awesome that they're looking for .Net developers...

precedent?

[mr_burns]

I just had a thought. Seems to me that with IBM courtroom showdown so far away and by the looks of it SCO's going to lose, perhaps these little suits have nothing to do with collecting fees.

Maybe what they're trying to do is win against paople who can't defend themselves adequately against Boise and Co to set precedent, then meet IBM in court with that.

So maybe the thing to do, once these things come out is to try to get a stay until the end of the IBM/Red Hat mess or file a joint counterclaim with other defendants to pool resources and compell discovery. I think the stay might be prudent because that one case will definitely test the legitimacy of SCO's claim AND will have more capable and better informed council on both sides.

Why not disclose Linux deployments?

[Corpus_Callosum]

Why is Gartner saying not to disclose Linux deployments?

It seems to me that disclosing Linux deployments is irrelevant. SCO lawsuits win or loose, anyone who has Linux installed will meet the same destiny, regardless of whether they discuss it... The only party that gains from not disclosing Linux deployments is, ahem... Microsoft...

Re:Why not disclose Linux deployments?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, disclosing a large Linux deployment makes you a target. None really wants to be drag into this mess.

Re:Why not disclose Linux deployments?

[Cid Highwind]

SCO said recently (yeasterday? It was on slashdot) that they intend to sue one or two end users to "make an example". Disclosing that your company recently added a bunch of new Linux systems may make you a target. Whether or not SCO has a case, sitting opposite David Boies in courtroom is never a comfortable position...

Re:Why not disclose Linux deployments?

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO said recently (yeasterday? It was on slashdot) that they intend to sue one or two end users to "make an example".

Are you actually creating an argument starting with, "SCO said..."?

Shame on you!

Can't believe I'm commenting about a sig

[What is a number]

If, in your sig, you changed 'signature' to 'sig', your sig would sound more like the original song (and more like the original: 'song' too! strangely enough...)

---
I type this every time.

Re:Nobody is...

[the_mad_poster]

Tell that to IBM's lawyers.

Ironic.

Do you see IBM pissing its pants everytime a headline has SCO in it like the mouthbreathing dweebs that keep commenting on it elsewhere do? Exactly - no. Because unlike the idiots that keep this at the forefront of everyone's attention, they realize that if they just keep quietly and bludgeon SCO with the legal system they'll slowly beat them to death.

I'm tired of seeing these idiotic "stories" on Slashdot and eWeek and their ilk all the time. It's NOT news and it DOESN'T matter although the only people that care are NERDS.

Here, I'll sum the whole thing up in 2 bullet points for all the people who still don't get it:

1. SCO is making baseless claims it has repeatedly refused to substantiate.
2. Ass-sucking organizations like Fortune and Gartner group who get on their knees and pucker up for anybody in a suit keep making "stories" about 1. so they can ride the popular wave and sell shit.

That's it! That's all the news! Oooooo! Big, detailed, important stuff, huh?

And, I note, some smartass thinks they're real bright for modding me with the utterly pointless 'Overrated' moderation. WHY is it overrated, dumbass?

And again...

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO is down .08. Check their chart though - really good performance and a final plummet.

fuck you, moderator!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great job moderator! Dude posted a factual correction, and you mod it as "overrated". You must hate the Xmen

Just a thought

[EmagGeek]

Brand New IBM Edge Server: $4500

MiniCluster of Opteron Servers: $85000

Cicso infrastructure found on eBay: $2100

Big screen TV for watching an irrelevant $200M software company take on a $150B worldwide behemoth, without a leg to stand on: $3000

Seeing the guts of the cockroach squirt out from around IBM's Gucci Loafer: PRICELESS

There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard....

Analysts

[t0ny]

Ive noticed that, for the most part, analysts are a pretty sharp bunch. They see the ins and outs of things pretty well.

People can cite the tech bubble as a contrary opinion, but IMO there were many factors at play, from payola, to mass hysteria, to unchecked optimism, to 'book-cooking' in order to fool analysts.

Anyway, its nice to see this kind of level-headed advice in print. All the lawsuits and stuff are sure to cause the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that SCO can profit from, so when a prominent publication says "be cool, all is well, and be sure to plan for the future", it is a perfect foil to the FUD.

Hopefully SCO will just go the way of Rambus, and be have a future as nothing more than old tech guy trivia.

Obviously...

[Rocky]

...Carly Fiorina is Mystique...

Libertarian's wet dream...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The BSD is a free-market radical/libertarian's wet dream, but the GPL and LGPL constitute a steal all you want but give back approach."

Um, no. The GPL's "take but give back" ideal is more of a libertarian approach. If not code, then testing feedback, making copies for other, maybe just dome props to the maker. Sure, one can just take and never give, but it doesn't get you anything else. The BSD license is cool, too, but the GPL completes the choices. Both have their place.

Have a nice war,
Mal the Elder

Re: Really, really slow learners

[leonbrooks]

Better yet: don't pay parking tickets at all.

No worries. Mind if I park across your driveway?

Or...

[siskbc]

I think the comment that they aren't a software company anymore is very much to the point. If SCO wins they will get paid for each copy of Linux in use. Why continue to develop and sell SCO Unix? If I was using SCO's products I'd be planning on to change on the assumption they won't be supported any more win or lose.

Why do even that when you can just send out press releases every day about how you're going to sue everybody, drive the stock price sky-high, cash out, and then never go to court or bother with collecting payment from anyone?

Re:Red Herrings Vomit Refunds

[leonbrooks]

But wait... what happens when all of their customers discover that the IP wasn't SCO's to sell in the first place, and start (1) demanding refunds; and (2) suing for fraud?

Become one of the crowd...

[leonbrooks]

...install The HURD. One year it will be fantastic.

Seriously, it occurs to me that OpenVMS is probably an excellent non-controversial choice. Just have to get used to hitting $ at least twice per symbol typed.

Re: Really, really slow learners

[FirstEdition]

He doesn't have a driveway.

It doesn't appear to benefit Microsoft either.

[Anonymous Coward]

How does telling somebody with a scanner that we have just deployed 1,000 Sega Dreamcasts help Microsoft?

Re:Red Herrings Vomit Refunds

[shotfeel]

It wouldn't be the customers I'd be worried about. Its the lawsuits from the developers who code was stolen and sold by SCO that I'd be worried about.

Hostile Takeover

[unixluv]

We should start a hostile takeover of SCO. If we each bought 1 share of SCO stock, we could attend the annual shareholder meeting and force a vote for SCO to cease threatening Linux users and the GPL. We could even cause them to settle out of court with IBM or drop it. We could even fire Darl!

This is war! Pick up a sword (share of stock)! What's 14 bucks with what's at stake?

Re: Really, really slow learners

[pizpot]

"not at all, we're having a baseball game."

Wait and see?

[the_arrow]

As usual here on /. everything not pro-linux is a little skewed, so I would like to point out that while the report tells us to wait and see with SCO deployments and to plan migrating from SCO, it also points out that Linux deplyoments should be halted in case SCO comes out of this victorious. There is even a point in the report that tells us that Linux customers should plan a move away from Linux (preferably to some UNIX variant) in case SCO wins.

You can't.

[Simple-Simmian]

It seems people never learn.
It is a fact you can't.
Canopy group has 51% of the voting stock.
They are not selling this stock.
You will never be able to take over SCO if you can't get control of 51% of the voting stock.,br> The stock you can buy for 14 dollars is non-voting stock.
This idea will not work.

I'll bring my Koningstiger

[leonbrooks]

The one with the sloped plates fitted. Sorry about the ripples.

Rounding errors

[TheMidget]

A categorical variable is considered discrete--on or the other, NEVER both.

Which still leaves the possibility of rouding errors.

Just consider the following fictitious example. Your raw data have the following for the user's "primary" OS (most used, only one choice possible):

• Windows 74.6%
• Linux 10.6%
• MacOS 5.6%
• FreeBSD 2.6%
• GNU/Hurd 1.6%
• BEOS 1.6%
• OS/2 1.6%
• Amiga OS 0.6%
• Atari TOS 0.6%
• Others 0.6%

The raw numbers add up to 100%.

Now consider that for "graphical" reasons, you decide to round to an integer number of percentage:

• Windows 75%
• Linux 11%
• MacOS 6%
• FreeBSD 3%
• GNU/Hurd 2%
• BEOS 2%
• OS/2 2%
• AmigaOS 1%
• Atari TOS 1%
• Others 1%

If you add up the rounded numbers, they no longer add up: you get 104% instead of 100%!

Given a high enough number of categories, such rounding errors can be as large as you want...

Re:Rounding errors

[DarkSarin]

Why would you do that? Rounding only one digit seems foolish.

Now to reply to some of the other people who are talking about my inaccurate example of gender, let me quote myself: "A categorical variable is considered discrete--on or the other, NEVER both. The most common example of this is biological gender. You are male or female, NOT both. Although recently it has become possible to change which you are."

What I should have said, was that it is one of the most common examples given to illustrate the idea of categorical variables. I did NOT mean to start a war about biological anomolies that exist in a very small portion of the population (although I will probably get in trouble for that--it may be more common than I think).

As for categorical variables being rather rare, I agree--it is generally a continuum of some sort, and I have seen many people argue against the use of categorical vars to the point of refusing to use the ANOVA, and always doing linear regression. But there are cases (at least in psychology), when categoricals make a lot of sense-say repitions of an activity or test. Typically if you don't finish the second or third test (which would be trial #2.5 or sum such) that data is eliminated from the test, and you are left with discrete numbers.

This IS a useful expiremental method, even if the trials are as identical in as many ways as possible (say to test the effects of some type of learning, or having caffiene).

Other times categorical variables are used would be if caffiene is given to a subject. If all subjects are given the same amount of caffiene before a driving test (or none at all), it becomes extremely convenient to make your categories "CAFFIENE" or "NO CAFFIENE". This is a discrete, dichotomous variable.

Does it always make sense to do this? No. I recently read a study where someone did this quite carelessly, making two categories of "burnout" and "no burnout" after giving subjects a test to measure levels of burnout. This a problem because the test does yield a continuous score (actually 3 continuous scores). This is a case where categorization is inappropriate, but I do believe that there are cases where it is useful and appropriate, even if there are more than two categories.

As for gender, yes there are anomolies, and some wierdness. There are also different ways of looking at things (mental/social/sexual gender), but when you are filling out a form at most any gov't office, they will only give you TWO boxes--male/female. I haven't ever seen an exception to this. Maybe there should be, but it woun't happen in most institutions until there is a lawsuit.

(WHen they do, will there then be an "Other" bathroom for those who check "Other"? (for the humor impaired, its a joke!!!))

Pardon the rant, but I find it odd that I was jumped on for choosing one of the most commonly given examples in pretty much every text book on the subject I have seen.

Re:Usenet Kooks!

[Anonymous Coward]

What does any of this have to do with SCO? Irrelevant.

Corporations use Gartners advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Many corporations and consulting firms use Gartner as a "white paper". By placing these comments about SCO, they essencially are recommending to stay away from SCO and make plans to get away from SCO if you already own the software. Our business has some SCO that is being replaced by Sun boxes, but when one of our managers mention getting more SCO, he was told about how they "sue their customers", hence we are not going to purchase/renew licences with SCO. You do not support your enemy!

Re:Usenet Kooks!

[Anonymous Coward]

> What does any of this have to do with SCO? Irrelevant.

Hey - you're catching on!! Don't post here - reply to him in rec.music.classical! Lets see if we can get his list up to 100 "antagonists"!

Just thinking about the artical

[Anonymous Coward]

I wounder how long it will be before both Redhat, IBM and Novell bankrupt SCO???? With their latest filing I don't think it will be long at all, my recommendation to their legal council is to bail, take the shares you have and dump them on the market, take your million dollars and run, because if you lose then you will have nothing...

The Situation of EU companies

[root007]

Guys, what is the legal situation according this case of an EU company - is SCO in a position to invoice also non US(EU) firms? Or is the EU law not allowing such claims? Thx

Re:The Situation of EU companies

[fuzzybunny]

SCO is currently in a position to invoice anyone and everyone.

SCO is currently not in a position to actually collect on its invoices.

Unless I'm mistaken, this as true for the US as it is for the EU, the CIS, the Arab League, SEATO the Galactic Confederation, and Papua New Guinea.

Re:The Situation of EU companies

[root007]

Sorry - my question was not precise enough.
What I actually wanted to ask was whether SCO is able to raise similar IP claim in the EU and based on this claim invoice EU homed companies?

(pls. excuse the naive questions - but I'mm not at all legal expert)

Re:The Situation of EU companies

[fuzzybunny]

I think they probably could, assuming that the chain of license ownership transfers which occurred in the US (Bell Labs-AT&T-USG-USL-whoever-whoever else-SCO) was done in parallel to the US. If so, they could certainly issue invoices, although the enforcement is where it gets interesting. Once again, I can invoice anyone I want (unless my country has frivolous billing & harassment laws).

However, don't forget that European courts do not allow as much license in the use of legal action as a compliance threat as in the US. Generally, I believe that EU (I live in Switzerland, so no guarantees) trade law puts fairly sizeable obstacles in the way of launching a lawsuit simply to try and get someone to settle out of court due to the threat of heavy legal expenses to be incurred. Napoleonic law (and I believe, to some degree, English common law) provides for the assignment of trial costs to the loser of a case, which in SCO's case, would quite possibly be thrown out of court.

So yes, assuming the IP situation is similar, they can invoice, but it'll be very difficult to collect, and they can't rely on court action as a no-cost threat against those who don't pay up.

IANALETCADNAUSEUMETAL.

Science essentially MEANS classification

[Andor]

Classifiation is a delusion invented by scientists as an expedient

Yes, even the word for Science comes from Latin scindere, to split, or to categorise. This idea of categorisation is one of the fundamental ideas that made study of the world, and hence Science, possible.

Re:Science essentially MEANS classification

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, even the word for Science comes from Latin scindere, to split, or to categorise.

Sorry, science comes "from Latin scientia, from sciens, scient- present participle of scire, to know."

Oh no!

[Shoten]

The fact that Gartner has said this makes me think that SCO is going to win, and end up the only standing survivor! IBM? GONE! Red Hat? SAYONARA! Novell? FUHGETABOUTIT! SCO will be the new Microsoft.

Or maybe Gartner figured it was about time they were RIGHT about something, and saw this as something they couldn't possibly screw up...

Re:Nobody is...

[braindigitalis]

I'm tired of seeing these idiotic "stories" on Slashdot and eWeek and their ilk all the time. It's NOT news and it DOESN'T matter although the only people that care are NERDS.

Errrrrm.... am i missing something? Doesnt it say in the title of this very site "News For Nerds"? I enjoy coming to this site and reading everyone else's opinions, especially about things they have no control over like this ;-)

+1 Interesting

[GQuon]

+1 Interesting
I guess we're getting -1 Offtopic now, but here goes:

So we have many kinds of gender definers now:

• Mental gender (What you think you are. This includes pretending to be something else, even for some of the time.)
• Brain gender (There are areas of the brain that are different between men and women. These areas tell you what gender you are, but you could override it because of a mental condition, up-bringing or whatever.)
• Sexual organ gender (What sexual organs you have.)
• Hormonal gender (Your sexual hormone balance.)
• Genetic gender (Are you XX or XY.)

All these indicators usually are either male or female, but sometimes one of theim are "in-between" or some might be male and others female.

I usually consider the genetic gender to be the real gender. The genes and the hormones in the womb influence all the other indicators.

I saw a documentary about the importance of the brain in defining gender. It was once thought that up-bringing (treating boys like boys and girls like girls) was the only thing that shaped the sexual identity. This case showed this belief to be wrong. John was a born a boy (genetic, brain, organs, hormones), but was given a sex-change operation. He was treated like a girl and given hormone treatment, but his genes and brain told him he was a boy.

Sexual "re-assigment" is sometimes performed on babies born with genital defects. I hope they do a DNA and hormone test to see what gender the baby "really" has before giving a genetic boy a vulva, or giving a genetic girl a penis.

I'm just glad I don't have to go thorugh something like that.

Re:Perhaps FSF should SCO for GPL violations

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it might make sense to counter sue SCO on the grounds of GPL violations. I would imagine that lots of code released under GPL has been incorporated in SCO's products. The countersuit would provide the grounds to initial a legal discovery and allow FSF full access to SCO source code to determine the original source of the code.

Plus, it would be nice to have a multimillion bank account to support development of future Open Source projects.

Finally FSF could also go after the SCO puppeteers. Those that have provided SCO with funding to pursue ligitation, which is an attempt to block market competition. This would fall under the grounds of an anti-trust lawsuit.

Chromosomes

[GQuon]

And people with two X chromasomes and a Y chromasome are... ?

• Well endowed in the chromosome department?
• people with Klinefelter syndrome?

I haven't heard about Klinefelter syndrome before. Thanks for clearing that up. Also see the other post about the person half XX and half XY.

I really should do more research before posting.....

Stock Pumpers Wanted

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a total of four jobs listed. Besides the one software engineer position, they have three positions available in their Investor Relations Department:

Director, Investor Relations
Executive Assistant/Investor Relations
Internal Audit

From looking at the job requirements in the listings, it looks like the primary purpose of each of these positions is to encourage people to buy SCOX stock. I just wonder whether the previous people who held these positions left in disgust, or if they just feel a need to expand the department given the recent deflation of their stock price.

Re: Really, really slow learners

[billcopc]

I'm afraid we're thinking of different kinds of parking tickets. I mean the quarter-eating-meter-timed-out ticket, not the lame-excuse-for-a-parking-spot ticket.

In your example, that's just being a nuisance (a jerk). Jerks should be punished, respectful citizens should not. Which is why we all have homicidal fantasies when we get a 20$ parking ticket for being 5 minutes late to feed the meter, because it is simply unjustified. Nobody's safety is at stake, the only reason parking meters exist is to fill the municipal coffers, and that's no good of a reason at all.