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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."
"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
It will probably be Novell, since they have the resources to push their offerings. They like IBM are fully embracing Linux and probably succeed.
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.
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...
I think he meant, "They could have 0WN3D Linux."
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
Hello, I'm MAX POWER.
0xfeedface
I think this is in reference to the System V/Linux compatibility library Caldera had developed, which was based on System V code and allowed System V software to run on Linux. (Last I checked, SCO was still marketing this product.) They wanted to make it so that the only way to run System V software on Linux was to license this library. ("Sure, you can drop SCO for Linux while preserving your software base, but it will cost you...")
Even this is controversial since it relies on the claim that the independent re-implementations of the System V ABI (which both Linux and BSD had) were illegal. But McBride and Company thought they could take this a whole lot farther, as we've seen...
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