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 . . .

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!

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.

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.

Sign of the times

[bigjnsa500]

I feel things are speeding up because the domain

scoclassaction.com

has been registered.

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.