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Caldera/SCO Co-Founder Ransom Love Speaks
securitas writes "CNet has published an interview with Caldera (now SCO Group) co-founder Ransom Love, in which he talks about the Novell acquisition of SuSE, Novell's Linux history, the early history of Caldera, the SCO-IBM lawsuit, his new role at Progeny and open standards. It's a good read that covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space."
what? no SCO is teh suxors comments yet? seriously, this sheds a lot of light on the current situation.
Owned linux ?, Last time I checked nobody owned , owns or never will own linux, not even linus. Isn't that open source is all about ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
"I hired Darl, then realized what a HUGE mistake that was, so I quit SCO and sold my shares and Debian is really cool, thanks guys!"
Ceci n'est pas une signature
"Ransom Love"? "Darl McBride"?
I'm beginning to see some sort of pattern here...
It will probably be Novell, since they have the resources to push their offerings. They like IBM are fully embracing Linux and probably succeed.
...I want to know how this will all end... but am sick of hearing all the scwabbling that is going on...
:-P
I could turn off stories about Caldera to just get it off my front page....
But, then I can miss it when something major happens...
Or I can whine in bitch in the article....
I'll chose the latter, I suppose
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This was interesting - it's the first I've heard of a long-standing disagreement with IBM. The SCO press I've seen so far has presented it as a "We've just discovered this" rather than a "We've been trying for years to rationalise this". I'm surprised they're not taking the latter path, it would look better from a PR perspective. Must be legal reasons, I suppose.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
...in that it offers some mildly engaging history, but not much else. The phrase that bothers me is:
it's so ironic, the turn of events. (Caldera began discussing) what we can do through UnitedLinux to indemnify people who had used both Unix and Linux. Apparently, Darl took that in a little different direction than we intended.
I can't tell if thats Ransome indicting Darl or simply distancing himself from the brouhaha.
"They could have owned Linux" was said in regards to the fact that Novell could have been a huge player and market leader in the Linux market.
ikeya
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
From the article:
You'll have to try elsewhere to "hear from the troublemakers".
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Yeah. But it isn't cooler then Randy Bush
Is that he and his management team burned through many tens of millions of dollars worth of venture capital, along with a significant portion of the original Microsoft settlement, and, in the end, had nothing to show for it. The venture capital org behind Caldera (Canopy, remember them?) finally wised up, threw out Love's team, and put it a disaster recovery team.
Caldera/SCO may or may not have any legal basis for when they're doing now, but they've certainly got a better plan that Love's gang of Underpants Gnomes did...
Seriously , it is a name.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
"Ransom Love" sounds like what the parents' of 12 year olds are planning when they send their kids to Michael Jackson's for the weekend.
Trolling is a art,
Is Ransom his name or business strategy??? (Sounds like a cheap anime character...)
Fnord.
The article mentions that Love knew Darl from Novell and brought him on board at Caldera/SCO. Does anybody know what Darl did at Novell? I just wonder what was going through Ransom's head when he decided to hire Darl. Was Darl this superstar executive at Novell or was he the one that was always telling Novell "hey, our IP is being infringed somewhere, let's get on the suing bandwagon"?
I am just wondering what the legacy of Darl was at Novell that made him so suited to be CEO of some company that has morphed into one of the most hated entities in the IT world?
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
If only IBM pushed OS/2 onto the desktop
If only Commodore could market their way out of a paper bag
If only Atari hadn't fumbled the desktop
and now:
if only Novell had pushed for Linux rather than UNIX in the 90's...
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
My first thought, upon reading this article, is that it really bears little relevance to the SCO-IBM suit. Mr. Love is no longer with SCO, and appears to have chosen to pursue more traditional UNIX flavors over Linux.
However, on further thinking this over, I realize that Mr. Love has a unique perspective: he understands how SCO conducts its business, but he has the objectivity of an outsider. Consider this:
It would appear, then, that Mr. Love is suggesting that the lawsuit in question is a vengence tactic - a way to attack IBM for 'unresolved issues'.Mr. Love also strike a rather insidious blow at SCO's choice of filing such a major lawsuit:
Notice how Mr. Love implies that lawsuits (and, by context and implication this lawsuit), are bad for SCO; he further indicates that selling SCO stock might be a wise idea, by relating his own decision to sell. If SCO et al still take Mr. Love seriously, they are likely to review how to continue without either giving up the lawsuit (which would look bad to investors, as it is an implied admission of error) or continuing down a fatal path.Given the slim chance of SCO actually winning this lawsuit, it makes one wonder what their strategy is; it all must come down to how will it affect the stock?
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
But Love left in 2002, before the company renamed itself SCO Group and launched a legal attack on IBM and the open-source operating system.
-- Seq
Hello, I'm MAX POWER.
0xfeedface
If you want a quote to startle your appetite, here it goes:
I should really have submitted this as a main page story, as my karma really needs some help since I've started being realistic on the LG business.
I'd be interested to know in what sense Mr. Love thinks that Novell could have "owned" Linux, had they played their cards right.
If he meant that literally, it's mind-boggling that someone could have been an executive for Linux-related companies for so many years, and still have absolutely no clue about it.
But hey, I've learned not to underestimate this guy in the cluelessness department.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
No. Caldera was always the Linux company that didn't "get it" the most. They wanted to own Linux. Love says it in this article that he thought Novell could own Linux. He was prescient is seeing a bright future for Linux and he thought he could chain up that star and then hitch his wagon to it. He helped create this monster.
Ransom Love? That sounds like some sort of soft-core star, or the title of an 80s movie that repeatedly shows on the TNT network...
Ransom Love may have told a truth or two here. Freqently people have attributed the seeming irrationality of SCO to McBride and others being on Crack. However, what better explains their actions than that this lawsuit has begun as SCO's one last chance at "payback" for old grudges? Maybe it's a classic tragedy, with McBride ending up saying "For Hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee" just before the great blue whale rolls over on him.
Who is John Cabal?
"I think where this could work is in the area of standards. It comes back to the Linux Standard Base. Maybe Novell can expand that so it doesn't care what's underneath. As long as applications can install and function, then Linux can truly be a platform." If Novell could make their GNU/Linux software conform to the LSB and run on any LSB compliant distro then..... However the Ximian product of Novell is VERY particular on what distro it gets installed on. Mandrake 9.1 is Ok but 9.2 is not OK.
zenray
not even worth the read.
Yes, but then so do the names of most of the "My Little Pony" characters here.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Yeah, NT was a "joke". Well, I guess that finally proves my theories about the arrogance of Novell in the face of a direct threat. I'd be wary of any business venture in which Mr. Love is involved. I'm also dubious with regard to a SuSE/Novell merger producing anything capable of competing with Windows.
I began using GNU/Linux around 1995. It was more reliable than Windows NT at the time, but nowhere near as fast to configure. It also didn't match NT feature-for-feature in filesharing and printsharing, which was the hotly contested marketspace for low-end server installations at the time.
Novell were content to sit on their fat behinds and make fun of NT, even as NT 4 hit the shelves, and PC sales for business went through the roof (giving Microsoft inroads through their OEM channels). Sure the first NT 4 installations crashed or exhibited strange behavior on a regular basis, but the Microsoft marketing machine was in full swing.
My personal experience was that customers demanded Windows NT 4 because it was "new" and less costly, no matter how I tried to convince them otherwise (I would be servicing it crissakes, not them). So, rather than lose an account, I did the work. Novell didn't seem to react to the threat.
Microsoft was competitive on pricing. The upfront costs for licenses were cheaper, MS made it easier to migrate by giving upgrade discounts and including client software to talk with Netware servers. Novell didn't lower its prices to compete, or make any gestures whatsoever to remind its existing customers that their present and future business was valuable (until much, much later, after they lost most of their customers to MS).
Microsoft purposely had lax per-seat license checking restrictions, which people found easier to deal with. Novell still stuck with their inflexible, floppy-disk based per-seat license enforcement, which was unpopular with techs and customers alike (oops, disk went bad, guess you have an expensive doorstop instead of a new server).
Microsoft made it easy to get documentation and programming tools for Windows. Microsoft sold those tools, other developers sold Windows programming tools, and there was healthy competition. Netware programming remained a black art, and there wasn't a whole lot of API to work with. Novell hasn't moved to correct this situation until very recently, and they still hassle you to give out information about yourself and your employer to see the documentation. I guess I'm out of the mainstream, because I think operating system developers that don't provide a full-featured compiler (even without an IDE) and reasonably detailed documentation for free are incredibly short-sighted.
Microsoft embraced (but extended) TCP/IP as the core communication protocol in Windows, while Netware had an ugly IP duct-tape fix up until version 5. Sure Novell's implementation of IPX/SPX was more secure (and probably performed better), but IP was more flexible, and IP-enabled software was practically falling from the sky, and it was not easily ported to Netware, (as evidenced by the fact that it wasn't).
Netware had a winning technology with NDS. I still think it's the most impressive piece of work that Novell ever released. Even with Microsoft dominating the fileserver marketspace, Novell still priced the NDS add-on for Windows more than the cost of a Windows server (with ADS) license.
***
Where do Novell's profits come from these days? They must have an awful lot of funds in reserve, because they are one of the slowest-moving tech companies I've ever seen. They still can't make up their mind about what to do, and Windows has steadily become better over the past decade. I've pretty much written off Novell. Does Netware even stack up to Windows 2000/2003 now? Does it scale as well? Does it's TCP/IP stack perform as well? Is it less expensive?
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Personally, I support SCO and their lawful actions. It's about time someone gave those Linux users what they deserved.