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New Survey Finds No Linux 'Chill' From SCO Suit
daddywonka writes "According to this article at internetnews.com, an upcoming survey from the Robert Frances Group shows that 'cost-savings and the General Public License, or GPL, are trumping any concerns about SCO Group's claim of copyright infringement within parts of Linux.' The survey only covers 15 companies. That doesn't seem very reassuring to me. Do any slashdotters have experience with their companies pulling the plug on Linux projects due to the SCO trial or is it business as usual?"
The reason the SCO heat is not affecting Linux deployments all that much is simple - most Linux admins are knowledgeable enough to gather that it's only a matter of time before the entire SCO thing blows over. Armed with this knowledge, they are able to make a convincing argument to management that there is nothing to worry about, and any Linux projects on the table are able to move forward as planned.
I am sure there are exceptions, but my guess is that this is the overall trend.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
People who would use linux already know better than to listen to SCO attacks anyway.
OK this SCO stuff is not just being thrown about in the courtroom, it's being played in the media.
Is this legal, for a company to go about talking crap that's as yet unproven?
For a year now they've been throwing around allegations of suing anyone who uses Linux, claiming ownership of parts of Linux, and only involved in ONE court case so far. It seems awfully crap, to be honest. They're claiming the IP that may or may not be there is in another product and providing no proof. It's a year of this now!
Is what they're doing legal, or pushing the boundaries of legality yet?
If this ever comes up at work, I'll give my legal team a copy of SCO's motion to dismiss the Redhat case where they state in a legal filing that Redhat has not violated their copyrights (hence, so how could we?) and then follow it up with the slam dunk of pointing out how Novell owns those same copyrights, so the entire matter is in dispute. Finally top it off with a "linux is not unix" and hasn't been proven in a court of law to be anyway.
Seriously. We run at least 10 mission-critical Linux boxes (Mostly Debian - DNS, E-Mail, FileServing, Backup, etc.) and I don't even think my boss knows about the SCO lawsuit. The people who don't read Slashdot don't have that much exposure to it. To the (smart) businesspeople, it just looks like some dying company is trying to salvage itself using bullying techniques. So, you always think of smart business people simplifying the details to get a bigger, better picture, right? Well... There ya go.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I work as sysadmin in a webhosting company and while we had some initial concerns it soon became obvious that this is a pump 'n dump scam - nothing else. We're deploying new Linux servers all the time and has actually increased the deployment rate since the lawsuit was made.
I work for a company that provides multiplatform software for Windows, Macintosh, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and Linux. The biggest problem that we have with Linux as far as I know is that kernel changes often breaks our software, but as far as dropping support due to the SCO lawsuits... no way.
you insensitive clod! Yeah, I know SCO are talking about BSD now, thus proving they really are crazy.
A memo was sent by a manager (non techy) to my team leader (very techy) about the possibility of us having to pay linux license fees on our servers....his reaction "They can shove it" and "Im not f*cking paying anything to SCO".
About 60 or so servers used for firewalls/mailservers.
Management don't even seem aware of the situation, or that the platform of choice (RedHat 7.3) has limited support life.
I guess those that would not understand the claims are not even aware of SCO's case.
Yesterday, the GPL was described as "GPL (General _Purpose_ License)". Was very strange. I guess somebody gave a comment about that. It however shows, in my opinion, that the writer didnt do a lot of research and doesnt know what he/she is talking about.
Three AIX servers, thirty six Linux servers in two clusters, one happy team of system admins. If SCO ever come calling here they will be escorted from the building to the sound of our laughter.
Ed
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
...is currently running its primary business application on a Compaq Proliant 800 server box -- Pentium III 500 Mhz, 512MB RAM, and a 36GB SCSI drive. It's running SCO Unix, as well.
The decision was made to upgrade that machine (before I was hired) since we're well over 60 employees strong. If they run a general ledger report, it brings the machine down to its knees.
It was originally proposed to put the business application on a Linux machine. But, my manager, (the VP of IT) said that with all of the hoo-hah going on about Linux, he suggested against it. Instead, he bought a brand-spankin'-new HP 9000 box, running 11i.
I'm a huge Linux proponent. I've been a Linux consultant for the past four years, and do EVERYTHING Linux. I was disappointed to hear that the whole SCO/Linux thing changed my VP's mind about Linux. The good news is that after I started with the company, I impressed upon the VP the importance of Linux, and what a crap-case SCO has.
Our new mail server (slated to be built Q1 2004) will be running RHEL. I told him not to worry about the SCO business, they'll crawl under the carpet and die soon enough.
I just take great satisfaction in knowing that we're replacing a SCO server with an HP 11i server! HA! Eat dirt, Darl.
We're building an embedded device to be used by many of our troops -- think tens of thousands if not way more than that.
We're just laughing at the SCO license as it will take our per unit cost from $0 to $699. Something about how they'll change their minds when 4ID shows up at their door.
On the otherhand, this device was originally intended to run W2K on dual processors, so $699 may be cheap....
We use and sell SCO to run progress db apps.
We have made plans to switch away from it.
"/Dread"
I work for a Fortune 100 company and my boss ordered me to switch all my servers away from Linux because the legal department was afraid of law suits.
Naturally, I chose FreeBSD. Now that I think about it, I wish I ran FreeBSD from the start, as it's an awsome OS.
me too ;)
It's business as usual (or actually increasing)
I've always wondered if SCO Employees read slashdot, and if any are geek enough and annoyed enough at their employer's actions to comment. Anyone? Anyone who was or is employed there since this has all blown up in the last year? Any thoughts on what your employer is doing? Are you happy with them? agree with them? leaving them as damned soon as you find another job?
I'm curious
One project that we just worked on, the knowledgable CIO was leaning toward Linux for a web application, and decided at the last minute to go Microsoft due to the lawsuit. (he has both Linux and MS Web Servers, and it was pretty much a toss-up in his mind, prior to the lawsuit.) This guy's a SHARP CIO in most every one of his decisions.
But I agree with other comments; most people don't even know about it. I'll tell you, though, selling Microsoft projects is MUCH easier than selling Linux projects. The average non-technical business person has some exposure to MS and Windows. "Linux.. isn't that software that was written by a bunch of non-professional hobbists and Chinese Hackers in their spare time, and there's no support for it? What if something goes wrong? We're trying to run a mission critical application here, not some hobby system!"
Oh well!
How about pulling the plug on SCO? SCO's `you filthy little theives` approach isn't all that well respected around here.
I've actually managed to convince my boss to (slowly) phase out our (dozen-odd) OpenServer machines. We haven't decided what to replace them with yet (most likely RHEL AS or possibly Solaris - it has to be certified for Progress), but I'm happy to be moving away from OpenServer, which is not at all nice to admin.
Well from a few friends who use to work at SCO in the Dublin call center is that quite a few people have walked out over the Linux/SCO fiasco. So it looks like its hurting sco as well
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I can't speak for other companies, but FWIW the SCO FUD hasn't had one ounce of affect on the company I work for. Since the SCO BS began, we've actually increased our use of Linux and continued to look into where else it is a good fit in our enterprise. We've even added an additional AIX server. Maybe our plans will change once SCO has some actual legal settlements behind them, but until then we arn't buying into their Brooklyn Bridge offer.
Among other things, I manage the servers for two different companies - both with existing Linux servers. Both are continuing to advance their Linux deployments without any major concerns.
With a small selection of sidearms one bad employee could put an end to all this FUD.
Aside from corporations , lets say SCO by some weird alignment of the stars, actually freakin won their case !! .. Would all linux lovers pay??
albeit, that happening are slim, but would the linux community embrace this or would everyone turn their back on linux and find an alternative??
What would you do ??
When I first saw that headline, I thought "What the hell is a Linux Chili?"
This space intentionally left blank.
> Even the comments are identical - I find it hard to
> imagine that they weren't copied directly from SCO. Now,
> I'm not a tech guy, but try to look at it from our
> perspective - they presented us with a list of infringing
> filenames, and lo and behold, those files are identical.
Those comments and many of the header lines are also well-documented standards, publicly available and identical in many other operating systems.
It's a bit like if Ford suddenly claimed ownership of the wheel, and took legal action against GM for also using the wheel. Would a GM dealer look at the wheels and go "whoa, they're identical to Ford ones, they MUST have been copied".
Perhaps they would, if they'd fallen for the Ford hype machine
I'm the sysadmin at an mid-sized ag company whose owner is the local Republican Committee chair. He saw an article in one of the business magazines and asked me if we were running "Linus" on any of our equipment. I told him we were using it for our web and email server and he looked a bit worried. I then told him that the SCO deal was probably a pump and dump scheme at which point he got really interested. I explained how "Linus" came about and then said that it was inevitable that given its success, someone who wasn't around in the early days would claim ownership. "Sort of like Gore claiming to have invented the Internet..." at which point he started laughing and told me to look into other ways to use "Linus" in the company. So for one company at least, SCO's strategy of intimidation has backfired.
The company I work for uses custom software programmed in Business BASIC. They have used this software running exclusively on SCO for around 20 years now. The MIS Director decided that McBrides attitudes on business, customer service and innovation are surely SCOs doom. I have spent the last month preparing my Red Hat server to take over in production I will implement it in Jan 04. No more SCO....ever. That was my guidance from above.
In a perverse sort of way, that SCO is having little effect on Linux deployment is NOT necessarily good news for Red Hat, as far as the declaratory judgement case in Delaware is concerned. That is because several of Red Hat's counts (false advertising, deceptive trade practices, unfair competition, tortious interference with prospective business opportunities, and trade libel and disparagement) appear to require Red Hat to prove actual damages.
For example, paragraph 82 of the complaint reads:
"SCO's statements are material and affect the decision as to whether a customer would purchase LINUX software or services."
Paragraphs 93 and 94 read:
"93. SCO's actions have caused and are causing irreparable harm to Red Hat, and unless permanently restrained and enjoined by this Court, such irreparable harm will continue.
"94. Red Hat is entitled to actual damages for injuries sustained as a result of SCO's violations of the common law prohibiting unfair competition."
If everyone is ignoring SCO's threats, and they have *no* effect on Linux deployment, then how could Red Hat show actual damages?
I could envision Drew Carey saying in an episode of the American version of the TV show Who's Line Is It, Anyway: "The show where everything's made up and the points don't matter. That's right, the points don't matter. Just like SCO claiming copyright to Linux."
So if you are on Red Hat's side in the Red Hat v. SCO lawsuit, articles like this are not necessarily good news.
AFAIK there are no SCO-related news on computer or business sites. Just Slashdot and few other linux-related sites constantly put these boring "news". Usually I skip them (both stories and comments), because there is really nothing interesting in it. SCO has nothing to offer, SCO will destroy nothing. SCO will change nothing. These "news" are worthless, just like soap opera.
Who's afraid of the big bad SCO
Big bad SCO, big bad SCO?
Who's afraid of the big bad SCO?
Mother F-ing Darl
Who's afraid of the big bad SCO
Big bad SCO, big bad SCO?
Who's afraid of the big bad SCO?
Mother F-ing Darl
Darl is the windy wolf, the three little pigs are IBM, Redhat and Novell. Unfortunately, there were no straw or twigs used in this story, and the three little piggies are all laughing their asses off as Darl stands outside the door of the brick house, huffing and puffing about the validity of the GPL, the mysterious stolen code and Darl's hurt feelings because he tried a working relationship with IBM and it went sour.
C'mon, Darl, let's see you huff and puff and blow the door down. I don't think you can do it!
but surely as a lawyer you should know that even if that code is theres (which it probably isnt considering the last lot of code they showed as an example of infringement was all open source code taken from BSD or was released by Caldera themselves) they made it open source when they released it under the GPL when they distributed linux
The company I work at recently switched an in-progress web application from Redhat Linux to FreeBSD soley because of the SCO thing. All the developers wanted to use Linux, but the project manager chose FreeBSD because he thought we might have to pay SCO money at some point.
Stupid SCO...
Even if (BIG IF) SCO would win, there is no way in the world they could let the user pay.
You got the software under the GPL. That license says specifically you are in the clear.
The only thing SCO could do is sue the people infringing the so-called IP. And if their IP are the files they presented, they will be rewritten to unmatch SCO's.
But there is absolutely no way in this current Time-Space continuum that SCO will win.
What they are saying at the moment with the files they showed is something like:
You wrote a book. That's OK. But you wrote it in English. You can't do that ! English is ours ! We own that copyright !
And then they go on:
You are currently reading a book, written in English, which we own the copyright of. You will have to pay us $699 to read the book in English. Your alternative is to stop reading, or read it in Hungarian, Swahili or Klingon (although we might have the copyright on Klingon).
If you really halted the Linux adoption, you did your company a big disfavor. Maybe you should review the decision (if possible).
And yet no one seems too concerned about the possibility of Windows' market share being too severely affected by this.
So I'd think it's only logical that there wouldn't be too much concern about Linux' future either.
Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim. (Frances Farmer)
I had the owner of the company i work for ask me about it, but he did so with a chuckle. i think most halfway-intelligent people will understand that without proof and without trial, SCO is just trying to make a buck before they go out of business. I think in (american) football, they call that a hail mary. They have nothing to lose by talking the talk, and walking the walk, and they have everything to gain. Their product is still stuck in the 80's and they have no money to bring it up to date.
money (or lack of) does strange things to people.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Interesting how so many people who are not switching are posting as themselves (when they're the ones who might in theory have reason to be anonymous), and the couple of people who claim to have run into trouble with the lawsuit are AC's, here at the bottom of the thread.
So you've "looked at the files," have you? Tell us more about that.
Windows 2000 is a bargain, is it? Actually, in addition to nearing an EOL from MS (to push the newer, more expensive server products, of course), it's also more expensive than $699.
Howya doin! Do you work for MS or SCO, or are you just having fun?
Karma/Moderation strikes again.
Since they have plans to decommission a few hundred servers in the upcoming year it looks like their decision will grow the Linux footprint there.
There were two more articles on SCO yesterday (Tuesday Dec 23, 2003) in Investor's Business Daily - one an interview (http://www.investors.com/editorial/tech01.asp?v=1 2/23) and one a new article (http://www.investors.com/editorial/tech.asp?v=12/ 23) are in Investor's Business Daily today. The interview has some interesting quotations from McBride, including "we don't deny that right [to give away their work through the GPL-he mentions it] at all. Anybody that wants to develop their work and give it away, God bless them." The interesting part about that is it seems at odds with previous statements he has made/implied regarding the GPL.
The follow-up question *should* have been:
"Given that you support the right to give away software under the GPL, once someone has done so, thereby accepting the terms of the GPL, how can one take the opposing position, after all, the terms don't allow one to 'un-release' under the GPL?"
I had submitted this yesterday, and no doubt 3 or 4 copies of it will show up in the next week, but it is relevant now!
Nice try, Bill. But it isn't gonna work!
Actualy hes probably an AC because as he said hes a lawyer and not a tech guy
he probably doesnt come to slashdot very often
... and I'm not bothered in the slightest by this SCO FUD-festival.
...
What's the worst case? We switch to FreeBSD or one of the other countless POSIX/C/C++/assembly-friendly kernels out there.
The cat is out of the bag. Operating Systems are no longer so difficult to write that companies should expect to profit from them
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
A new (potential) customer of the company where I work at (as a Software Engineer), has pecifically requested that our software should be able to run on a Linux server. As far as I know, management approved with this.
:-)
At this moment, we support several Unix variants and an experimental Linux port is already working.
So, definately "no pulling the plug" here
Note too that the code WASN'T distributed by SCO under the GPL unknowingly, it was distributed, as known, and they themselves said exactly what we're saying now. To quote Blake Stowell even:
"No, none of the code in the Linux ABI modules contains SCO IP. This code is under the GPL and it re-implements publicly documented interfaces. We do not have an issue with the Linux ABI modules. The IP that we are licensing is all in the shared libraries - these libraries are needed by many OpenServer applications *in addition* to the Linux ABI.--BlakeStowell, 2003-02-05"
Publicly documented interfaces. Thats what they are, and thats what SCO said they are. Now they're trying to start legal action about them.
You deduce all that from a list of filenames with identical content? Try asking yourself these questions:
1. If SCO file A is the same as Linux file B, how do you know that B was copied from A, and not the other way round? SCO have not presented any solid evidence that shows WHICH WAY the copying took place. Identical files by themselves do not prove anything -- you need a history. SCO doesn't seem to do much research into the history of the so-called infringing files. Which leads me to...
2. How do you know that both A and B are not based on an older file C from separate source? Did A and B both have permission to copy from that source? (e.g. BSD code, or international standards, such as many of the header files SCO list?)
3. Can copyright even be granted on some of those header files, many of which may be construed to contain simple facts (e.g. "#define"s) required to comply with standards or be compatible with existing systems? Copyright does not extend to facts, nor the straightforward expression of them.
4. How do you know that those files even belong to SCO, given the complex history of UNIX copyrights, and the fact that Novell ALSO claim to own UNIX and that SCO's licence does not permit them to make such a claim? Oh, and the fact that SCO repeatedly asked Novell to assign UNIX copyrights to them, but were DENIED?
As an "attorney", you might also want to actually speak to a "tech guy" before making IT infrastructure decisions, or in my book you're being NEGLIGENT.
But then again, I don't believe for one minute that you are an attorney (or at least not a GOOD attorney) or you would have investigated some of these things. I think you're a TROLL.
Previous coverage on slashdot, groklaw, and many other web sites have delved way deeper into this than you. In fact, I am somewhat suspicious you are actually a troll, since I can't believe a Fortune 500's legal department can't crank out a more sophisticated analysis than "the files sure look identical". Even us non-legally-trained bozos know that a show of identical looking files is light years away from a case that SCO owns any copyright whatsoever that is being infringed in any way by Linux users. And, in fact, all the facts most of us have seen point the other direction.
When SCO is gone and your IT department points out to your bosses the ungodly amount of time and money you cost the company due to jumping the gun (especially when your competitors didn't take the same silly steps), I'm sure part of those costs will be recouped from the legal department's payroll!
Everyone knows there are no real employees of SCO anymore and the headquaters building stands empty
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
On the offchance you're not just trolling, ask a lawyer not slashdot. Minor miswording can mess shit like that up, so talk to a professional and get it right.
Just a word to those SCO employees lurking/posting here. Keep in your mind that, at least for me, I despise what your management is doing but hold the poor laboring schlub actually doing work in only the highest regard. I hope for your sake that cooler heads prevail, your owner/boss/tyrant gets the ax, and you can go back to doing useful work for a class company.
Hang in.
Dogu
ps - if you ARE a manager/owner/tyrant, move along, there's nothing here for you.
I kind of guessed it may be something like that. Hey you're employed, you're doing better than many and I figure there are employers who've done far worse things in the world than take what look like big risks, to save the company.
While there are companies that have hired slave labor (BWM, Bayer), and those that continue to employ near-slave labor (Nike), and even those that have killed en masse (Union Carbide, Monsanto), trying to steal the hard work of tens of thousands of people and claim it as your own, then force the creators to buy their own work back at extortionate prices (or any price, for that matter) is still pretty damn low. About as low as one can get without doing actual, direct physical harm to others.
Frankly, anyone willingly working at SCO, recession or no, deserves the low self esteem they undoubtably enjoy and the difficult job prospects their current employment on their Resume post-law-suit will almost certainly bring. This notion that earning a living justifies doing what is unequivocably wrong is complete and utter bullshit. Evil isn't defined by the difficulty of doing good, it is defined by the harm it causes others. The fact that doing the right thing would be difficult for those foolish enough to be working at Caldera/SCO has absolutely no bearing on the fact that what they are doing all those long hours they put in each day is wrong both morally and ethically, nor does it absolve them of one iota of their part in it all.
I'm sick to death of "my employer made me do it" or "I fear unemployment so I have no ethics" crap this formerly great nation seems to have instilled in so many of its drones. It rings a hollow as the famed defenses of the Nuremburg trials, or the death-bed repentences of dying Christians. (cue Godwin-Law pundits)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
That sounds good. Lets show everyone that at anytime, the open source communitity is willing to completely screw you over because of the OS you are running! and not by just not supporting it, but by forbidding it! That will be a huge leap for Open source! People will feel our wrath!...oh wait, thats the stupidest thing I've ever heard, do you work for SCO?
A sco mbag.
Surely you recognise that if x is identical to y, it does not necessarily mean x was copied from y. y may have been copied from x, or both from z. Yesterday for example Linus himself said that he wrote a piece of code in 1991 from scratch, which SCO is now claiming to have been copied from themselves. In your assumption, you are making the same mistake as SCO. Having said that it would not suprise me to find examples of code copied any of the above three ways (of course we know that some came from BSD), but worth $2 billion? No way!
Geez, I'm not even sure our IT department can spell Linux...We just loooooovvvvve filling Bill's pockets with money.
Oh wait, gotta reboot....
Dogu
ps - as much as I hate to admit it, we've been switching most everything over to Win2000 and/or XP Pro and the overall reliability of workstations and servers has improved - we don't crash and burn nearly as often as we used to.
In conversation we came down to the basic idea that IBM knows what is going on. If IBM was in wrong they would have bought SCO. (like Intel bought DEC Alpha)
So if IBM is fighting this then IBM is safe.
If SCO was right they would be buying there stock not selling it.
Follow the money.
Charles Puffer
Where I work I'm pretty much the only person that knows anything, or even cares about whats going on. Occasionally someone will ask about it and I will simply say there is no proof and SCO has been fighting giving any as hard as they can. Any time they have released what they call proof it turned out to be a complete farse that even a half wit could see. Then I email them a list of investment firms that deal in SCO stock and advise them to take their money and run.
If you are an attorney, check the groklaw.net web site.
Sorry for being an AC.
My company is a recognizable international Bank, we currently so not have Linux deployed but the writing is in the wall:
-Colleagues of mine are going to RH certification training.
-We have an internal distribution that takes care of internal audit issues 9mostly security concerns) that is being tested an will be ready fro deployment soon.
-The big heads that design this stuff have all Linux under their desks and some even in their laptops.
-It seems (this is a rumour) like the company is evaluating Linux for the desktop. Yup, if we go that way it will be front page history on this site, thousend of Windows machines could go the way of the dodo.
Nevertheless the company is holding on a bit just in case, but I guess it will not be for too long, and in any case part of the deployments will be using Suns's Linux offerings, nothing SCO can do about those.
"most Linux admins are knowledgeable enough to gather that it's only a matter of time before the entire SCO thing blows over."
Probably true, but what about similar lawsuits in the future? MS or whoever is behind the SCO trouble probably has plans to involve a never-ending series of them.
It seems very likely that not only the kernel will be affected by bogus IP claims, but other packages as well, the aim of which would be to put a semi-permanent damper on linux development and adoption.
We need a way out, which is why I suggest putting a disclaimer on Linux distributions regarding the possibility of inadvertent proprietary code inclusion, and some time limit that would allow recalcitrant IP holders to find and withdraw their code if they wish to. Failing to notify the code maintainers would then be an implied grant of permission to use the code.
Yes, it could result in a lot more work for developers and would probably delay new releases until the proprietary code is replaced, but in the end, there would be fewer legal problems.
This would be something like a "Lost and found" advertisement saying "Found article, it's yours if you can identify it, otherwise it's mine."
The next big problem for Linux to overcome will be a series of frivolous lawsuits based on frivolously awarded patents.
IANAL, ADWBO (I am not a lawyer, and don't wanna be one.)
AC
I work at an ISR/Software house. We are both a SCO Partner and an advocate of Linux. Our software was hosted on AIX, Motorola's and SCO for many years. Four years ago we began shifting all our new business (and existing customers) over to RedHat and haven't had a SCO sale for what seems like a couple of years.
Our existing customers have had little/no interest in the entire SCO/Linux debarcle, especially once we read them the gospel of Groklaw, and new customers don't seem that interested either - more the same old NT (Server 2003) vs. Unix question.
Quite frankly we all agree with the general concensus that SCO have dropped some really bad acid although I'd say their paranoia was now justified - we are ALL out to get them now!
by several posts in this thread to the effect that "My boss switched us"; assuming that RH could get any of the folks to provide documentation, the case is established.
;-)
No worries, mate
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
We just placed an order for 24 copies of RHAS and are about to plunk down some serious coin on IBM Blade frames... we're ripping out a Sun 6800 used for QM analysis, so the net will be to save tons o' cash... ;)
I wouldn't say our company isn't concerned about the lawsuit, but our lawyers, er, Corporate Counsel, basically ripped up SCOs claims for our management's benefit.
If this project is a success, we're looking to leverage Linux at every opportunity we get.
Here, in Argentina, only thing that matter is "costs", I think nobody knows about the SCO problem here and if they know, they don't care...
We're installing linux for our servers, and we're planning to install it on every desktop too.
ajf
That was good enough for him.
OTOH, I'm a bit wary of officially experimenting with kernel 2.6 here, simply because of the Sequent code in 2.6. Anyone have any insights into that?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Just because I'm a curious lad, but doesn't the 40% rule apply to software as well? I mean can SCO really calim copyright infingment for little snipits of code especially if there is no other way to construct the code to preform certain functions. It would be like Ford claiming copyright infringment for GM using the wheel...
Where did you say we were going, and what's with the hand basket?
... is who I work for (Think Big and Military) and we have a few dozen boxen running just in my area, either Redhat or Gentoo, and there hasn't even been a mention any pending changes or even a concern.
Even the guberment is smarter than that....
OK. I work as a consultant for serveral State agencies. I can tell you first hand that SCO is killing themselves Here is what's happening.
IBM is triking back by discontinuing any DB2 or Informix support on SCO. So we are migrating those boxes to Linux/Oracle. The State Agencies I consult
for use HPUX, AIX, Linux, and SCO. No new SCO boxes are going to be implemented, and we are migrating away from SCO. Most small hosts are going to be migrated to the Z series maingframe on a Linux partition.
SCO will be dead in about a year.
No. Not us, not anyone I even know.
-j
Actually, the only thing that is scaring my company is the recent RedHat nonsense regarding desktops. So our direction now is to switch over to Debian and use Progeny for support.
I work for a large, fairly conservative insurance company. We got "the letter" from SCO back in (March?), and legal had us draw up a list of mission-critical servers running Linux, so we'd know our level of exposure.
While legal and management seem to understand that it's a frivolous claim, they also correctly understand that being frivolous has never stopped the legal system from making dumb rulings. For reasons which are quite annoying, we are currently "on hold until this gets worked out" for several very interesting projects. This is real, folks. You know that SCO's claims are bullshit. I know that they're bullshit. Legal and management know they're bullshit, but one bad ruling and the waters get muddier for that much longer.
Remember - if SCO gets bought out without being legally slapped down first, they still win in their mission to spread FUD about Linux and the GPL. I firmly believe this is their real goal, because Linux and the GPL threaten certain people who stand to lose a whole lot because of it.
Bottom line, until SCO gets slapped down, my large employer isn't doing any more Linux projects. Solaris is an easy choice here, since we're using it widely already, but the cost savings to be realized are huge, if only we could put aside SCO's asinine behavior and get on with business.
If anything is found in Linux that doesn't belong there, swarms of Penguin lovers will remove it and replace it with working original code. Darl has already said that's what he's afraid of. Probably weeks, at most a few months.
That's how it's always been.
That's how it always will be.
If even the tiniest shred of improper software is found, Linux will be fixed faster than Microsoft can fight an anti-trust suit.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
While i don't agree to the comparison to nazi's, i agree with the fact you are working for an unethical company.
Nobody's comparing SCO's actions (embezzling and confiscating the hard work of others) to the actions of the Nazis (murder on a hitherto unprecedented scale), least of all me. What is being compared is the logical justification of the one ("I'm just a guy doing my job") with the historically debunked justification of the other ("I was just following orders"). The two justifications can be shown to be semantically equal ("I was just doing my job" -> "I was just following my manger's orders" ~= "I was just following orders"), so while the crimes they seek to justify are vastly different in both substance and magnitude, the justifications used are in fact identical, and there veracity equal (i.e. nil).
"I'm just doing my job" didn't hold water then, and it doesn't hold water now. It wouldn't hold water if your job was going to your competitor's office and stealing a $0.05 paperclip from the secretary's desk, nor would it hold water if your job were corporate hitman tasked with "taking out" the competition and their families, nor is it for supporting actions which fall somewhere between those moral and ethical extremes.
You ARE unethical, and blinded by greed if you can't see what's happening.
Indeed he is. Unfortunately, many people seem to be blinded by the comparison of methodoligies (e.g. justifying bad behavior as "just doing one's job") with actions (theft vs. murder), and blind themselves to the underlying similiarities in mindsets by emphesizing the differences in venue and specifics of the crime while dismissing the virtually identical arguments both perpetrators used to justify their behavior.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Corrupt...Regime..McCarthiest
Are you using one of those weird Perl scripts to generate random Anti-US rants?
"The more he talked about his honor the faster we counted the spoons..."
I recently applied to SCO a few weeks ago for a software engineer position. Now with the current state of the economy, I have been unemployed for almost a year now. I have only had 2 interviews and most companies don't even bother to reply to my resume. So, for the fun of it, I applied to a position at SCO. A few hours later I got an email from the hiring department asking me if I was willing to relocate to UT from MA. If so I can immediately come in for an interview.
Of course I turned it down. I'd rather live off my savings account than truely scar my resume by saying I was employed by SCO on it.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
deploying XENIX. Merry holidays...
I work for a small software company where our lifeblood over the last ten years has been selling servers preconfigured with our software all running on SCO's own brand of 'nix. We're in the midst of switching our entire client base (about 180 installations) to Linux.
So far the major concerns coming out of our client's IT departments:
1) Security.
2) Server stability and the availability of updates (we're using RH 8.0 as it requires the least amount of wrangling to make it work with our DBs).
3) See number 1.
As for managerial persons, most of them don't have a clue (about the suit, no comments on managers at this time). Though the few that do, pretty much follow the lead of their IT peeps. The number one priority is get the job done (hopefully without expensive license fees).
WHen I'm servicing the clients whom I work for. Darl McNut is somewhat correct when he accounts that 7 of 10 of the top retailers use SCO's unix. I know with some certanity that First and the third use SCO Unix.
I'm really akin to taking the "parenting" stance on this.
Darl McNut is only going for two things:
a) they want to inflate his stock price so he can get his bonus, and,
b) to keep a steady stream of FUD coming to keep said stock price up.
I've drawn the conculsion that the community should take the "Sane Parent" stance with Darl and SCO. If we're out shopping, and little Darly Jr. starts acting up, you either smack his ass and tell him to settle down, ignore him, or give him attention. He wants you to notice him, he wants everyone to pay attention to him. If we ignore him, he'll realize that his FUD's getting nowhere.
Of course, it's even questionable that the SCOG *owns* unix. According to the Open Group, They own Unix. (URL: http://www.opengroup.org/press/22may03.htm) So, I'm not sure which 'crack pipe' Darl's smoking.
I should have brought this up on the DMCA story, but, if my memory serves me correct, you've got to provide *exact* notification of what files are infringing when you serve someone a DMCA notice. If there's nothing exact on the DMCA notice, it's a worthless piece of paper (just like the DMCA, ha!). If I should happen to get a DMCA notice, I'll be the first one to let them know that under the DMCA, they've got to show specifics as to what gets taken down, and until they do so, to polietly go shove off.
I listened to their last conference call, and I'm just amazed at Darl's iron gonads. Does he really think he's going to win, or does he just want us to fold in and call it quits? Darl and SCO are truly becoming the "Boy who Cried Wolf" of the software industry.
Ian
I disable sigs...do you?
All the developers wanted to use Linux, but the project manager chose FreeBSD because he thought we might have to pay SCO money at some point.
Stupid SCO...
Stupid manager. SCO has already publicly announced that it plans to go after FreeBSD next. Either the case has no merit (probability approaching unity), in which case deploying Linux would have been fine, or it does (probability almost but not quite equal to zero), in which case FreeBSD will be next. Followed by every other brand of UNIX out there (except Sun's offerings, as they are helping to bankroll this fiasco).
Not a very bright manager. Either s/he can't think logically past his or her own nose, or s/he doesn't plan very far ahead. About the only way to have 100% certainty that one will not be sued by SCO would be to deploy Windows or Solaris.
NOTE that I did not include SCO Open Server. If you will recall, Darl McBride cited a professional relationship with ones customers as having the primary purpose of providing an avenue for future litigation. Companies having any relationship with SCO are at much greater risk of litigation than those with no relationship.
Of course, having 99.99999999% certainty is good enough for most of us, in which case, running Linux (or FreeBSD, or HPUX, or Irix, or AIX) would be more than adequate.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The only place I have seen any impact in the SCO garbage has been isolated individuals, such as a certain nameless contract officer in my state government, who use it to further reinforce their own existing prejudices or bias against using fs/os solutions in general. However, in the larger view, these are people that probably will never really change their bias regardless of if there had been a SCO or not, and the best one can hope for is that they are retired or replaced over time.
Turning a big firm like IBM, Ford or Unilever around (recent Linux converts) is a big, big task that needs a lot of planning and manpower. Any way up you put it, its an expensive undertaking. Such undertakings are made at board level and after a lot of due diligence.
A little company like SCO throwing its toys out of the pram will not be enough to reverse such a decision. A sysadm somewhere may have been asked to write a plan B and/or imapct analysis if the decision went SCO's way.
If I was CIO of IBFordLever (thought Im far from it TBH) these would be my four ways to go:
a) BSD or other decent Intel OS
b) Let SCO take me to court ( I have deep pockets)
c) Sue SCO into oblivion (ditto)
d) Pay the SCO tax
All of these options will cost me additional money and therefore are not going to happen.
The only valid option is a wait-and-see. Such a strategy has advantages:
SCO's case gets eroded for me by IBM
I get my improved TCO
I avoid my vendor lock-in
The last one is the key as it promotes competition and therefore reduces my costs when the SCO thing shakes out.
The only technical point that is important here is that "OSS" products such as Apache, MySQL, Java, StarOffice, Mozilla, Postfix, gcc et al are all so good and so portable now that the OS is not even the issue any more. I can develop and deploy on Linux and change over later by simply sliding another OS in between the apps and the iron.
Like I always said - its easy to start on Linux then change to Solaris, HPUX, AIX, even Windows but its very hard to go the other way. Big installations and clued-up SMEs know this and will therefore hedge.
I think the one thing that is certain is that SCO are going to be waiting a VERY long time for their license revenues. If/when the bill does come a simple question will be asked in the boardroom:
"Is it cheaper to have our day in court?"
For a bioinformatics firm I know with upwards of 1000 CPUs, the answer will almost certainly be "Yes".
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
"Do any slashdotters have experience with their companies pulling the plug on Linux projects due to the SCO trial or is it business as usual?"
No. In fact two new projects have begun.
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
My boss recently sent out an email saying he was going change from Dell to HP for buying any new equipment (laptops, workstations & servers) because HP are indemnifying linux users against SCO. I don't really care what brand label is on the box I use, but of course I sent him an email with many references that show no one is taking SCO seriously. The HP indemnification thing still seems to be an effective marketing tool for HP, especially to the PHB's who make strategic decisions based on no real understanding and a concern for safety first.
The company I work for runs their app on FreeBSD right now, on i386 hardware. This is the prototype; for the finished version, they're planning Linux on PowerPC blade computers. No one has taken this lawsuit seriously.
Linux is not a small hobbit doing battle against MS and SCO, the two towers. This should not seem like a us against them battle at all.
I don't know about you... But I sure wouldn't want millions of Angry Penguins running after me. Those flightless birds have a terrible temper. ;-)
Sure there is a solution: major reform of the US legal system, preferably on similar lines to the German system. As long as the legal system is designed for lawyers to make money rather than to dispense quick justice, a rapid solution is in clear conflict with the objectives of the system.
We were one of the 1500 companies that received the original letter.
Needless to say, not being an IP company, there was a lot of wrangling over how to proceed. Originally, the decision was made to cool off on Linux deployments until Legal could evaluate things. In an ironic little twist of fate, that meant that for a couple of projects we purchased IBM P-series boxes and AIX rather than deploying on Linux. I guess the thought was that IBM had a legal team and would protect AIX long after it bailed on Linux, or something along those lines.
Lately, however, it's become a non-concern. The case has become so ridiculous that it's not treated seriously anymore.
My suggestion to people who are having trouble in the office is to point the bosses to groklaw.net. Pamela has done such a fantastic job there. Her analyses are useful for lawyers, suits, and geeks all together. That's an amazing feat.
Way to go Pamela!
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
The company I work for has just upgraded 7 of 8 machines that are essential to the business to newer ones running Linux just last week. The 8th one is going to be done early in the new year. The systems are set up with Linux already, as we purchase them and support from a different company, so in a sense I guess it wasn't our direct choice to go to Linux. The previous systems were running SCO UNIX, I believe. However, there are still systems with SCO there, and they want to move them to Linux soon, but they are waiting until the dust settles around this suit. So they didn't ditch the plans, they just want to put it off for now, to be safe.
In many cases, the alternative to Linux is Microsoft (or the other way around). Which is the bigger threat: BSA audit or SCO legal victory? One of these is current reality, the other is about as likely as me getting hit by lightning in the next 10 minutes. One of these organizations has collected lots of money from its customer/victims, the other talks about collecting lots of money.
"Gee, I dunno, maybe we ought to put all this Linux stuff on hold" Yeah, right.
Linux will remain the better financial choice.
$700/cpu extortion as a one-time fee is small potatoes compared against the alternatives. Windows and Unix licenses cost more than that up front. And purchase cost is dwarfed against annual maintenance/support fees, whether done in house or paid to a third party.
If Linux has an advantage, it's the impressive pace of development of both the kernel and dependent application software (both free and proprietary) that runs on it.
While I'm certain that some deployments have been affected, I'm equally certain that the degree of press attention and analysis has made Linux just that much more visible, which will probably turn out to be a good thing[tm] over the long haul.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
...not that we are abandoning Linux.
We were told to set up some FreeBSD boxes and build - which we did with very few changes.
QA will be running regression tests on FreeBSD, but from a developers point of view everything SEEMS to be running fine.
So to us it doesn't matter - we could hop to the other open source OS if need be with little impact... but we aren't planning on it.
This took very little effort - at the very least we have another maketing bullet now.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I can't help but wonder what is achieved by asking
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
but I have worked with a company that pulled the plug on SCO. One of their major applications was running on a SCO platform and to reduce risk, another platform was selected.
Seems to me that people should be just as worried about what happens if (when?) SCO loses as they are about loses related to being charged for running Linux. With the amount of money they are losing, they could be in massive amounts of trouble if the do lose (I mean, any business who's major strategy fails is not going to do well, right?).
Even worse analogy. SCO is Iraq. Linux is the U.N. Guess who's going to win in the end?
The ONLY way for this SCO affair to come out in their favor is if some judge decides they are entitled to own Linux copyrights. And that, friends, is not going to happen.
Okay I'll bite where is the proof that SCO's is the original file? Can you actually prove anything? Show me absolute proof which is the original? AT&T vs. BSD was lost because when it came down to specifics, Berkley had proof that AT&T had copied BSD not the other way around. Ever heard of posix? The Open Group Base Specifications IEEE Std 1003.1 ? The so called list of files are all header files from an open standard. Look at this link errno.h
It's but one of the so called offending files.
Now go back to jerking off and leave intelligent discussions to people with brains.
we are accelerating our deployments with up to 30 new linux network computers (currently 2000 clients installed) a month in our retail locations and we are making progress in gaining support to do some prototyping of using linux for our web development (currently done on an iSeries). So far the SCO suit has just been a distraction and I have to answer questions from upper managment who are worried about the risk. my guess is that this will all come to a head pretty soon and SCO will go away.
We are staying away from it because of the risk standpoint. We are deploying Freebsd and Openbsd instead, as there is a lower risk not only from the SCO impacts, but also, because of the better quality.
If anything Linux Deployments are increasing. We are re-writing out counter application which is all java running on a cluster of Red Hat boxes. As we move forward even more linux servers will be added. Plus we have a major relationship with IBM and they are telling us that ALL thier machines will be Linux in a couple of years, little or no AIX.
Though we are a whole owned subsidary of Ford Motor Company so, to Sue us you have to sue Ford.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
I know this is offtopic, but a lot of people here can use a job, so since Slashdot have a section for job postings, I have to hope this gets modded up. And I didnt want to get ridiculed, so I am being a coward.
I received this from a friend who works for Polaris in US.
Organization: Polaris (www.polaris.co.in)
Offices in : NJ/ATL/IL and CA.
Job Code 104 EG 22
JOB TITLE: Sr. Developer
GRADE: T100 / T200 Series
UNIT EG 22 / SEC 2
Reporting to Project Director
Job Role and Responsibilities Designing
Programming
Testing
Job Specifications (Education, Experience, Talent) Relevatn Educational Background with 5 - 6
years of experience with the following skillsets.
PL/SQL, SQL,
HTP & HTF packages,
Oracle 9i,
Oracle Webserver (9iAS),
Oracle 9i reports,
HTML, Javascript, Java,
XML,
Strong Logical and Problem Solving skills.
Location Onsite - US
No. of Positions Vacant 8
However, I am slowly starting to bring it back in. Mostly, in the appliance market. Not good, but it is a start.
The management are just doing the best for their shareholders. That is what they are paid for: to play the system as best they can to boost the stock price. It is not their fault that the system sucks.
The politicians who could fix the system are just doing what it takes to get elected. Taking actions that would upset the businesses that pay for the election campaigns would just be stupid. America likes winners, not wimps who accept defeat just because winning requires a few distasteful decisions.
The electorate that elects these politicians is doing nothing wrong. Hell, if they can keep taxes low and not cut programs that directly affect me, why shouldn't I elect them?
Let everyone fend for themselves.
Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD all have relatively good support for the native system calls of each platform to which they've been ported, for example:
- Linux on IA32 hardware can run SCO binaries,
- FreeBSD and Linux on SPARC hardware will run Solaris binaries,
- OpenBSD and NetBSD on Alpha will run Tru64/OSF1 binaries,
- FreeBSD can run IA32 Linux binaries, etc.
The only complicating factors have to do with supported executable formats (e.g. FreeBSD can't execute QMAGIC-format Linux binaries, Linux can't run non-ELF-format SCO binaries IIRC) and shared library licensing (e.g. to run Tru64/OSF1 dynamically-linked binaries under Linux, you'll have to copy the shared libraries and linker/loader from a OSF1 installation onto Linux, which technically requires a valid license for OSF1 for the Linux machine).(This system call support is also known as an Application Binary Interface (ABI). Basically, each hardware platform has a de facto standard for invoking the operating system kernel, e.g. on IA32 I think one uses interrupt 0x80 with system call parameters placed in certain registers or memory locations. As long as the running operating system preserves the semantics of the system call, the running application won't know the difference.)
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
My kingdom for a horse
And then SCO tries to assert their ownership (right or wrong, and I know 99.9% of you think it's wrong). If they win this thing, it could be great for the marketplace. Maybe.
Makes me wonder what would have happened if they would have "spun" it differently - that license fees would lead to a stronger Microsoft-competitor. That they'd reinvest near 100% of the license fees into direct competition with Microsoft. Hmmm... I wonder if it would be remotely possible to have spun it differently.
Clearly they would have needed Linus' and other leaders' support... but it might have been an interesting approach. Instead, they have pissed everyone off!
Would that be "foucking" then?
The UN won? I thought they got kicked out of the game toward the end.
Keep em alive and well
Just got a job in a small company to supervise the porting of their >10 year old application from DOS to Linux... Hardly a chilling effect!!!
I mean it, too. That is funny shit. Goddam USian Imperialist Assmaster.
RedHat even got mention on the Nightly Business Report recently - the sco thing isn't taking the wind out of their sails. Techies who can grok the facts arent' scared of a paper tiger, however real it may appear to others who fall for that type of thing.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
One of my customers is the third largest Ford dealership in the U.S. and the two that are bigger are in Dearborn and cater to Ford employees.
This dealership has five FreeBSD boxes doing a variety of things, one Redhat box which snuck by me because of the better java support, and one lonely, fearful Open Server system that runs a single application provided by an outside vendor. I'm not allowed to dismantle that one, but I'm certain the vendor has strategic plans to move to some Linux distribution once SCO's stock collapses and they lose all their employees.
I showed the in house admin OpenOffice.org a while back; M$ will be getting no more Office extortion dollars from those guys
We're going to roll out Knoppix to a couple of hundred desktops in 2004. They're just desktops, and I'm kind of a wimp, so I'll make sure it'll all run on a 2.2 kernel and we'll just keep on truckin'.
Screw SCO. If you're really, really, really pissed about it, realize they got their money from M$ and start talking to anyone who will listen about OpenOffice.org - don't abuse the ground troops in a proxy war, get into their homeland and start burning crops and blowing up bridges
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
One of my contract clients (I run his Linux web server) had some concerns, and I eased his mind quite easily.
See, the people who buy into this nonsense are the same people who thought planes were going to crash due to Y2K, and believe everything FOX tells them (eg, that we didn't land on the moon). These people hear something and start to worry.
Usually, just giving them the facts, and telling them that they shouldn't believe everything they hear is all it takes. Linux is fine, you are fine, SCO is full of shit.
It's like dealing with a child, really, and it's not all that difficult. In my case (contract client) he tends to believe me on this kind of stuff, after several "told you so" situations over the years (Y2K being one of them).
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
Do any slashdotters have experience with their companies pulling the plug on Linux projects due to the SCO trial or is it business as usual?"
:oP
In the datacentre i work in, RH discontinuing its "free RedHat" is a bigger deal than all this. We aren't the least bit concerned about SCO. Just Fedora Core vs. Debian for our new servers.
do() || do_not();
We are a large fortune 500 company we are migrating from windows to linux in servers and desktop. We seen a much lower TCO I hate to say this but all that paid survey by MS is hog wash on TCO.
We are a java shop so running Tomcat and weblogic in linux is no issue and eclipse just runs fine in linux desktop. We are using Oo as our office package.
I own a small consulting and development Linux company in Brazil (although I live in Colorado). None of our 100+ consulting clients has asked us about the SCO case and we don't feel any slowing in Linux deployments in all those clients. We're even expanding our client base. Our biggest development customer has asked me personally if they should be worried about it (they're betting the company's future in a new product that has Linux as an embedded OS). After I explained what the whole think is about (with no little help from /. and groklaw) they went back to business as usual and haven't questioned the decision to use Linux again.
One final morsel for what, at this point, I must conclude is almost certainly a troll (albeit an entertaining one).
... that is something the Red Hat case will determine), and are just happy to have a job irrespective of the harm that job may cause to others.
Pursuing LEGAL action in a LEGAL way is far from being unethical - this has nothing to do with genocide or stealing paper clips! If we are causing damage to you or others, those who are damaged are completely within their rights to pursue LEGAL actions against US.
You need to grow up. LEGALITY does not make something ethical or right. SCO's behavior is UNETHICAL and despicable. It may also be illegal (certainly there are cases pending in court to determine this, and their behavior has been judged ILLEGAL in numerous other countries already), or it may not. The courts will decide.
Whatever the legality, their behavior is DISHONEST, DECEPTIVE, and UNETHICAL, and if it does in fact turn out that what they have done is technically legal, then that is a statement on the state of American law (and its need for serious reform) than it is in defense of SCO's actions, which are unconscionable by any rational measure.
Before you continue to spout off on my ethics, I suggest you take a good look at yourself - got any mutual funds? If so, there's a reasonable chance that YOU stand to benefit from this lawsuit more than *I* do! Better make sure SCO isn't in your portfolio.
Please. Unwittingly possessing something isn't the same as conscously choosing to devote one's energies toward helping advance a particular agenda. Owning a pair of sneakers does not equate to running a sweat shop usiing virtual slave labor, particularly if the person involved had no idea the manufacturer was engaged in such activity.
You appear to be weak, and to have made a decision stemming from weakness of character, blinded perhaps by fear if not greed. You have publicly stated that you have no problem putting your professional energies into promoting a business whose actions are unarguable DECEPTIVE and unethical, illegal in many countries (quite possibly including the United States
Furthermore, you have justified SCO's DECEIT, INNUENDO, and UNETHICAL business practices as perfectly acceptable because they will enrich those stupid enough to own shares in the company. Circular reasoning at its finest, given an air of legitimacy for having been enshrined in our current financial markets. Is it any wonder we have the Worldcoms, Enrons, and SCOs, with this kind of mindset? "It will make us money if take an unethical approach to this situation. But it's OK to do something unethical and skirt the limits of the law, in fact, it is a duty, because it will make us money." Are you really living so deep in denial as to not see the problem with that?
In most people's book, that would be considered very unethical. No one, except those trying to justify such actions, would equate the unwitting possession of a mutual fund whose fund manager has been duped by SCO's pump-and-dump scheme with the conscious choice to help and support an organization persuing a business strategy of deception, misdirection. FUD, and extortion of license fees for material belonging to someone else.
And no one, except someone who stands to benefit financially from an action they know to be unethical, would so vehemently defend such an action on the basis of perceived LEGAL technicalities (notice how the subject was so conviniently changed from ethics to legal technicalities?), which legal technicalities in fact probably do not exist, if the decisions of courts in other countries and the current trends in the IBM case are any guide.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I, too, wish to be a party to SCO Group's lawsuit. Regrettably, I believe that I lack the cheif qualification... I am not rich. They are not interested in suing poor folks. They aren't really intertested in protecting their (putative) IP rights; they just want a fast buck without working for it.
As for SCO employees who want to keep their jobs... I am sorry folks, I've been where you are about to be... (I spent 18 months unemployed). Start looking NOW, because when all your co-workers are looking too, it just makes it harder.
TFL
Any time I try to work with a file that's larger than the available memory, Win2K will fail. It might not crash instantly (although sometimes it will), but even after I stop trying to play with the file, it will be very slow and other apps just stop responding.
I don't think Microsoft has a good handle on their swap file.
And I see the same behaviour on multiple Win2K machines so it isn't flaky hardware.
Linux seems to handle swapping much nicer.
Is using Linux. We don't talk about it though. We don't tell our competitors because it's a HUGE advantage that we don't have the multi-million dollar license problem that most do. Our customers couldn't care less as our last "official" downtime was over a year ago on our web server.
Anyone NOT using Linux is just plain stupid. Microsoft is crafting this whole piece of BS with SCO designed to be the biggest piece of FUD you people ever saw. Don't be blinded by stupidity. Just get some balls and tell your windows group PEACE-OUT.
"The survey only covers 15 companies. That doesn't seem very reassuring to me." I work for an opinion research company, and although most of our work is done over the telephone, I think this applies here: alot of people have similar questions when we survey 300 people and say that their opinions are representative of those of hundreds of thousands. My boss, the founder of the company, has a famous reply. He says that if you are making chicken soup, and you want to know if you've added enough salt, you don't eat the entire pot of soup, you stir it up (this is important), and take a spoonful off the top, then if you need to add more salt, you can. The same principle applies to sampling people to determine public opinion, and you'd be suprised how accurate it can be.
"where words meet intent, lies rhetoric's lament"
The UN called for action to bring Iraq into compliance, so the coalition from the UN did that. In a sense, yes, the UN won what they have been trying to acheive for years. ;)
My company isn't considering walking away from Linux, then again I am the CTO. I think that sums up the kind of postings we'll get here. What we need is to see is a poll of the Business 2.0 readers.
So far, we are not slowing down our migration from Winblows to Linux. I actually just ordered 3 more servers to run the Oracle Collaboration Suite running linux. I am also trying to get the company off of MS Office, and even look at moving towards some of the desktops running linux. Who knows, in another 4 years, I think we will be completely linux.
Seriously, if this is really affecting decisions your company is making. SCO will be done soon, and the people responsible for this tradegy will be in prison. Racketeering and fraud for starters. It will also be the most damaging marketing adventure ever attempted at Redmond.
Just ignore them. It's just a marketing distraction to get you to buy windows. DUH!
My company will continue to run circles around yours as your corporate posture continues to show such fear.
... you must be kidding.
Everyone I met from the affected parties (except of some knowlegable Red Hat engineers) I had to explain what the noise was all about.
That wasn't Bill posting, that is our friend Laura Dildo.
The company I work for is currently setting up their first couple of linux servers. They intend to move much of the server room to Linux but aren't really budging so much on the desktop. The PHBs just kinda point and laugh whenever anyone mentions SCO so the only 'chilling' effect SCO had is the feeling I get in my spine knowing I'll still have to develop for those damn Windows Terminal Servers while perfectly good Linux boxen are sitting right there!
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
...and those of us who have chosen ethically in the past, even to our own financial disadvantage, quite rightly look down on those who do not.
Nice view, from way up there on your high horse, but put yourself in the same situation. The economy is in the shitter. You quitting wouldn't change a damn thing.
"Yeah, I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway. If I hadn't, someone else would have." I cannot believe that an adult would even field such an answer in public, much less accept its veracity.
It's not like they're committing genocide - it's a fucking law suit.
No one ever suggested it was genocide. However, what so is doing is much more than a lawsuit. Indeed, it is a lawsuit in name only.
Were it merely a lawsuit, it would not entail the vast amount of public FUD, misdirection, deception, and outright lies (including lies that contradict one another) that has come from SCO's management. Indeed, attorney's strongly discourage such statements, as they are destructive to their client's case. The fact that SCO shows no such restraint (and that SCO's lawyers apparently feel no need to reign them in or insist upon such restraint) demonstrates prima facia that this isn't so much a lawsuit as something very, very different.
At its heart it is an attempt to defraud thousands of free software out of their hard work, to defraud third parties by charging licensing fees for things that do not belong to them, and to defraud their investors by pumping up their stock value through deceit and market manipulation.
They may be within the limits of the law in the United States (or they may not). They certainly are not within the limits of the law in Australia, Germany, and numerous other countries.
Either way, they, and those who support them, are unethical, and I for one would never hire an HR person who would knowingly hire unethical people and open my company up to the potential of such behavior within my own ranks. Nor would I hire an HR who would staff my company with weak-minded people who put a paycheck ahead of any ethical considerations, or who cannot recognize a lost cause when they see one.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
In short the answer is yes. SCOs lawsuit is slowing the deployment of Linux and other OSS in at least my enterprise
/. for the last few months. I haven't really seen anyone point out the challenge that OSS puts into the corporate world in terms of how using software, particular mission critical software, is different now with OSS model then in the old traditional enterprise license model. The biggest area of concern as noted before is the IP infringement and that is what the SCO case fundamentally is about regardless of its particular merits (or lack there of).
The longer answer is below:
I've read a bunch of these SCO Bad vs. Linux Good threads on
When a large enterprise goes down the road of building a critical business application (read as revenue producing) many times there is a contract negotiation that has an Indemnity clause to protect the company licensing the software from claims against intellectual property asserted by another party. The greatest risk for the mission critical application is that there could be an attempt at an injunctive action against the infringing parties (Not common, but it does happen anyone remember Amazon's one click and bn.com???). This then could mean the company licensing the software that infringes might have to shutdown their application. Not such a big deal if now I can't load those spiffy web applets in my browser to download MP3s or have to make two clicks to buy a book, but a real bummer if Im a bank and I cannot run my funds transfer system.
In the case that a traditional software application infringes on the IP of another the indemnity clause gives the end user some protection. [Of course an indemnity clause from Joe & Bob development, Inc. doesnt really mean that much to Mucho-Huge-Bank-Corp, Inc., but one from Mega-PC-Soft, Inc. might.) In either case it also places a burden, because of the indemnity clause, on the original software developer to do a search of intellectual property to see if the is an infringement and seek to license from the IP owner that intellectual property or re-build the infringing model. If I am a software development shop and know my industry my legal consul can perform that task, as I know the internal mechanisms of the software applications I developed. You see this happen all the time in standards bodies when new specifications are being developed its called "identification of necessary claims" by the parties to the standard.
The trick is this is very hard to do for an enterprise that is the end customer of an application. As such, all new software that use OSS either in the app layer or as the base OS is still being viewed with a hairy eye-ball and needs to have a "how do I move to something else" plan developed before it is deployed in my shop. This is manageable for something like Apache where I can replace it with another web server with a modest amount of trauma, but a whole different story when I need to rebuild from the ground up because I have to toss the operating system.
My $0.02
The first part is a given, migrating is never easy. But remember: It's easier to migrate from Linux to BSD than from Windoz to Linux... As to the second part, what you are talking about, 'license fees', have about ZERO chance of happening.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
One of our clients recently replaced a SCO server with a Linux one. when told about the lawsuit by me, they shrugged it off and said
"they're greedy bastards anyways"
Who cares what people are saying about you? You have a job and you're getting paid.
But the latest financials from your company show that you're losing money on everything. The only growth hope you have is the lawsuit. That's hardly a "distraction". That's your paycheck.
Even your executives are dumping their stock. You now have executives who have sold ALL their stock in your company.
This isn't about the "slashdot perceptions". This is about whether you believe your company will be able to pay your salary. To do that, SCO needs income. It doesn't look like SCO is going to have much income soon.
I think that SCO will post a $2 Million loss next quarter. IBM won't let up on the counter-suit and SCO's case might be thrown out of court by the end of January (unless SCO can come up with some SPECIFIC code that was stolen that IBM cannot, instantly, refute).
So no, given the ridiculously oversimplified analysis and the fact that this so-called attorney chose to brag about it here, I did not think this guy has "delved" deeper into the subject at all.
And by the way, this will probably surprise you, but calling me "fucko" doesn't actually make you sound less stupid.
P.S. sorry, everybody, for responding to two trolls in a row. I'm bored today. Mod this down so nobody else has to read it!
Good analogy -- IBM (US) and Red Hat (Britain) are the two with the resources and the balls to fight it out, while Sun (France) tries to swoop in and get attention...
Personally, I don't know if I myself would quit righ t away, especially right before Christmas.
I do know I'd be spending all my waking moments not at work looking for new employment. Hell, with the way SCO can be expected to go (down, long and hard sometime in the not-too-far future) I would be looking for a new job even if SCO wasn't evil.
Not quitting without alternate employment doesn't make employees evil. Any not looking for said alternate employment, however, would probably make them rather dumb.
...has only had its Linux awareness raised amongst the Windows mooks as a result of SCO's shenanigans (which even the most die-hard MS lubber acknowledges is at least partly a product of MS's desire to squish linux between its thumb and forefinger). There is a bit of concern regarding SCO's litigation, especially by the suited crowd, but we have four more linux boxes this year than we did last year. Do the math.
It's a shame that you need to equate SCO employees trying to feed their families to Nazis, seeing as I don't remember anyone at SCO killing 12 million people in concentration camps, or did I miss a history lesson?
Nope. You missed a logic lesson.
I did not compare SCO employees trying to feed their families with Nazis trying to feed their fmailies. I did compare the justification "I am only doing my job" used by an alleged SCO employee with the justification "I was only following orders" used by famed war criminals in years past.
The crimes being justified couldn't be more radically different from each other, indeed they utterly unrelated. However, the justifications used by both parties are virtually identical. The latter ("I was only folling order", ie. "I was only doing my job") has been formally and resoundingly debunked; the former ("I am only doing my job"), being semantically identical to the latter, is likewise nonesense.
The only similiarity between this troll posing as a SCO employee and war criminals of centuries past is that they use exactly the same justification to defend their immoral and unethical behavior, and that justification holds absolutely no water.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The key words are here though:
"Give away their work"
And that is SCO's opinion of the GPL. They see GPL'ed projects as a free source of software to run on their OS and steal as they see free. In truth, the GPL is about "sharing" and "contributing" much more than giving away... but don't expect SCO to see this.
On the contrary, my company is starting to move **everything** to Linux. We were going to go Redhat, but since they dropped support for RH9, we're going SUSE. I think it's a good decision. I haven't felt any tension over the SCO thing here. I guess even if SCO wins the lawsuit, the extra licensing fees we'd have to pay would still be less than the price of MS operating systems.
Mostly it crashed while trying to either Print or utilize the local area network.
One way to get ANY operating system running on x86 architecture to hard-lock is to introduce a conflict in networking.
Networking runs in Ring Zero regardless of what operating system you are running. I got Windows 2K to do the Windows 2K equivalent of a kernel panic when Zone Alarm and an ill-tempered piece of courseware I have to use in College that uses Active X and IE did battle. I had to pull the AC adapter and the battery to ungracefully shut down.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Its buisness as usual. No one stopped using .gifs during the .gif crisis. No one stopped using .jpegs when that was a problem. It is an already established part of buisness, its not going to dissapear that easily.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
Send a copy to your state's attorney general and the FTC, along with the information that you have never done business with or received a product from this company. Sending someone an invoice (assuming this is an invoice, not just one of SCO's dubious letters) for a product they purchased from someone else is illegal under federal and state laws - see Groklaw's "Open Letter to Darl McBride" for some references.
I didn't think SCO had actually sent any invoices out - it hasn't made the news, and all the legal types I've seen comment have been pretty confident that SCO wouldn't send anything out without lots of "This is not an invoice" fine print to try and avoid legal consequences.
Our CIO sent out a ban on Linux when this all flared up. I since educated him and he's changed his mind a bit.
We have yet to formally embrace Linux in our enterprise (we're a pretty conservative wireless telco) and big IT customer with an IT budget of about $50million/yr.
In 2004 I have enough people convinced that Linux is safe and we will be deploying some pilot Linux projects where price/performance is better than Sun...to directly answer the question, yes SCO actions have hurt Linux vendors prospects at our company.
Sorry for the AC, but my company views this type of info as sensitive and a potential competitive advantage even though in my mind were so late in the Linux deployment curve.
Just look the stocks prices.
Can we submit what that SCO manager wrote as evidence to the SEC?
let me explain before i get flammed. i think it is right for people to give away their work under the GPL IF they want. if they dont want to then SCO has every right to sue IF they can prove the infringing code exists. I honestly hope SCO stays around for diversitys sake, we need choices to go with what we want and need. I use linux now and see no reason to fear the lawsuits since A) i am a home user and B) SCO has shown no reasonable proof that i am using an illigal os. if they did prove i was then i would hope linus and every body elese works to take out the infringing code. i see no problem with proprietary oses as long as they are quality and conduct reasonable business practices, however if all they make is FUD then yes i do agree they should die or at least make major changes to business practices.
In my world, the upper management may have *heard* the word Linux, and that it is free, but that's as far as it goes. They certainly don't have their finger to the pulse of the industry enough to know about SCO and their suit. All they know is that our system works, and they pay me to keep it so.
Considering that most companies are running around with hundreds of unlicensed copies of MS Office, Photoshop, Windows etc. in the first place, I don't think that SCO's threats to Linux are high on their radar.
Are you saying that my 3 year old couldn't figure that out? How insulting!
"What use is power to the Keeps of Balance?" -Disnt of Nightmare LpMud
I would agree, if I found that _all_ SCO employees doing their jobs were morally reprehensible, which I do not.
I do, however, find that the actions of certain SCO employees are morally and ethically void, and that the argument "I am only doing my job," when presented by these employees, is nonsense.
I am loathe to pass moral and ethical judgment on the entire SCO workforce because of the actions of the few at the top. If that equates to me feeling that a file clerk in Germany in the 40's isn't responsible for the actions of Goering, then so be it.
There, believe it or not, is a difference between a war criminal and the secretary that the war criminal employs. If you don't see it that way, more power to you.
destructophonic.com
grow some balls. believe in something and take a stand.
Let the anal probing begin!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
so no impact when it was banned by our upper management.
Having said that, we use HP/UX and AIX 5L which use Linux libs. Nope, no Linux here...
But being in healthcare makes you paranoid about lawsuits, mainly because we have so many lawyers working for us, so that is why they said that.
Besides, IT already got the death knell when it was placed under Finance.
This company values 3 letters or less companies, so HP (DEC), IBM, SUN...no Dell, Linux or Gateway.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Once SCO folds, you will have hell of a time finding a decent job merely because majority of *nix people are aware of SCO case and none of them likes it. By sticking with SCO now you are ruining your chances for a good job later.
"In an ironic little twist of fate, that meant that for a couple of projects we purchased IBM P-series boxes and AIX rather than deploying on Linux."
That's not ironic, that's just a good idea!
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
It's me, Darl.
> The survey only covers 15 companies.
> That doesn't seem very reassuring to me.
Yeah, and a Slashdot survey is the height of statistical accuracy, NOT.
>they use exactly the same justification to defend their immoral and unethical behavior, and that justification holds absolutely no water.
Ummm... what holy and innocent corporation do you work for?
What holy and innocent corporation is there?
What holy and innocent individual is there?
The point being is that you are blowing this way out of proportion. What SCO might be dumb/bothersome, but is it evil in the "red devil with the pointy horns and tail" evil?
SCO is not eating babies.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Surely all that would need to happen is over the course of a few weeks to rewrite or remove any infringing code and re-release distributions. Then SCO would really have no grounds to charge people licences and it would be business as usual. Or because Linux sounds a bit like Unix will we always have to pay of that privilege?
It's certainly preferable to work for a company whose morals you agree with...but it's just as valuable to have good people in bad places. You can do a thousand times more good being a moral, respectable person in the SCO ranks than you can by quitting. As long as you are true to yourself and some concept of morality...as long as you're not the one trying to screw honest developers out of their work, I'd rather have someone like you working for SCO than someone who totally agrees with Darl. Working for a bad company doesn't make you bad...it's only when you become like them.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
This is not a troll.
Could someone please explain to me how a _civil_ entity (such as a corporation)
can legally cause trouble for someone breaking their NDA? Why doesn't someone
with a very good memory sign the SCO NDA, look at the source code,
and then tell us what source is conflicting and should be changed?
There is no infraction of a criminal nature. Does this become a case of civil law?
Again, this is not intended to be a troll, but perhaps the author is ignorant
of the ramifications of signing an NDA.
IAONAL (I Am Obviously Not A Lawyer!)
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
go find something better to do with your time!
Actually, the SCO drama only really affects investors, and has little to do with technology at this point.
There, believe it or not, is a difference between a war criminal and the secretary that the war criminal employs. If you don't see it that way, more power to you.
The interesting question becomes the secretary working for the war criminal who processes the paperwork for a person's execution, knowing full well what s/he is doing, vs. the secretary who processes the paperwork having no idea what it really means. Where then is the ethical culpability? Perhaps not equal to that of the person who sets policy, or physically carries it out, but certainly a great deal more than zero.
Were the SCO employees ignorant of what their bosses are doing, that would be one thing. But, as the original person purporting to be a SCO employee pointed out, most of the talk around the coffee pot IS about the lawsuit. It stretches credulity beyond the breaking point to assume they are not knowledgable about what is going on, or the role they play in it by helping such people keep the doors open and the lights on.
The justifications and excuses are identical to those used by far more notorious criminals of decades past. The crime (seeking to steal the creativity and hard work of thousands, seeking to cripple the empowerment of millions) is nowhere near as horrific as other crimes that have been committed throughout history, but the excuses this particular, alleged employee of SCO is using to justify their participation, however minor, in SCO's crimes are indistinguishable from those used by historical figures to justify their bad behavior. The fact that their behavior was orders of magnitude more wicked than that of SCO is not in dispute: the same arguments are being used to justify bad behavior. Those arguments didn't hold up then, and they don't hold up now.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I know that the code doesn't exist, the largest similarities would be Linux's POSIX headers compared to UNIXware's UNIX93 headers. The question still comes up, why not just quote?
/*This came from SysV*/ CODE_GOES_HERE /*end of code from SysV*/. Legaly, is there any basis to prevent quoting?
If Linux was a book, we could just add something like
DISCLAIMER: I'm proud of the Linux kernel being pure, and I do not suggest that we muddy it up with code of disputed ownership.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
We are a pretty small company and needed to expand our storage capacity (from 250GB to 750GB) so we decided to get a whole new server while we were at it. We already have two Windows 2000 Advanced Server licenses so it would cost nothing (in license terms) to make it a Windows box, but after weighing all the factors we decided to go with Redhat 9. Even our lawyer (who is also the CFO) seems pretty excited about it.
At the company where I work we use Redhat for some of our servers and FreeBSD for others. Our company is rather unconcerned with the "potentials" of SCO's claims. At current we have no plans to switch our Redhat servers to anything else, but we have personnel well versed in FreeBSD, HP-UX and SCO Unix to be able to make a switch if need be.
In the mean time, we have discussed the possibility of doing a switch with certain key individuals in our company and the impacts involved. While my company doesn't have a contingency plan prepared, we are small enough that we can react quickly to such a change if necessary. For those larger companies, my advice is to make your contingency plans now. With everything I've seen about this recently, I would say you have little to worry about. But it never hurts to have the contingnecies prepared, just in case.
Seppuku: Your solution to my problems!
I work at a university a couple of miles from SCO's offices in Lindon, Utah. There hasn't been a peep about dropping Linux from any of our projects. In fact we're ordering new servers and installing Linux.
We just deployed six 1U dual Xeon boxes and a 16-blade Tatung box, all running Linux. We'll be doing more soon. Management is aware of the SCO imbroglio but unconcerned.
It helps that we have a clear escape route, though. If Linux is taken down, we move to FreeBSD. If FreeBSD is taken down, we move to Solaris. If Solaris is taken down, we move to Microsoft. If Microsoft is taken down, then we'll shut down the company and hitch a ride with a swarm of flying pigs to a happier place.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Greetings!!
:/
Well, I can at least say that my place of employment has changed out a few Windows servers for Linux. I know that in the grand scheme of things, it is not much, but for us it was a big move. We changed over four servers that had been running Windows 2000. The only purchase cost involved in the move was a distro of Linux because we (the IS staff) wanted to support the Linux world with company money. We already had the hardware, and the rest was our own labor, which isn't all that expensive around here.
Those four machines count for 20% of our servers. The rest are, at this time, not viable for migration due to either being locked into specific applications, or the expense of designing the custom applications we would need. So, we will be keeping an eye for future possible changes, but for now we are done switching server platforms.
Workstations on the other hand, we (the IS staff) would love to use Linux with Open Office. Unfortunately we have not been able to convince the execs that this is a good thing. We continue to work on that.
So, like I said, it isn't a lot, but if every sompany could replace 20% of their servers with Linux systems, that would be a hit that Microsoft would feel next time those systems don't get upgraded to "Windows Next (tm)". Sadly, there is no way to make the change hit Microsoft's cash flow right now. All we can do is deny money in the future. Well, that's better than not doing it. Hmm, by transferring the copies of Windows Server we had been using to another business unit, we are actually not giving money to Microsoft. I guess that counts.
-Z
red devil with the pointy horns and tail
Hey how did BSD get into this?
May I ask what investigation you did to lead you to the conclusion that a mere allegation would suffice to change your company's conduct?
I am an attorney, too, who has spent several years advising a large corporation. I can tell you that the first thing I would have advised had our corporation received one of these letters would be to contact SCO and demand specifics. Are they just blowing smoke, or is there a real risk of fire?
Being a diligent attorney at a prominent corporation who presumably knows a little bit about corporate defense against corporate tactics, I also sure as heck would not have relied on MY OWN comparison of the code (despite the fact that I am also an amateur programmer and have at least some capacity to do that), but would have gathered as much knowledge as I could about what other interpretations of the facts were. Familiarizing myself with the various source documents including court filings by IBM and Redhat and copyright filings by Novell, and all that has been written on Groklaw and Slashdot and elsewhere, I would have seen that there is a strong argument that SCO may be blowing smoke, and so, if upon request SCO failed to produce any support for their assertion, then after a careful review of the facts and circumstances I would likely have advised my executives to continue with their Linux plans unless and until circumstances (such as court decisions, or further clarifications from SCO) dictated otherwise. I would make sure we had plenty of letters to SCO creating a paper trail demonstrating to any subsequent reviewer such as a judge five years down the road that WE were doing everything we could in good faith to understand SCO's allegations and THEY (SCO) were the ones acting in bad faith by making allegations which were unsupported. Although courts of equity have been subsumed within courts of law in recent times, judges are typically and quite reasonably persuaded by equitable arguments like that.
As a corporate attorney, I was frequently reminded that my job was to try to find ways for the company's executives to do LAWFULLY what they had determined from a business perspective was the right course of action. And I fully accept and respect that definition of the corporate counsel's role. It certainly wasn't my job to tell my executives to roll over and start begging every time someone blew a little smoke in the company's direction. What a dereliction of duty for a lawyer, if that were the case! And, as you know if you truly work for a corporation, allegations are made constantly, almost to the point that the attorney-employee can get blase about it. My usual response to a mere allegation is always, "So what? Get in line." As you know, 99% of them don't have any merit.
So, my fellow corporate counsel, if you are going to post on Slashdot about how you determined that SCO's allegations contained sufficient merit in order to sway your company to move in a certain direction, then can you please advise us or at least give a glimpse about all of the questions you asked, the resources you consulted, and just what it was that finally persuaded you that SCO's allegations raised a very real risk?
It is not sufficient to say, "The comments in the code looked the same - therefore I advised my Fortune 500 company to back off from using Linux." If that is all the research that you did, then may I suggest that you think about whether such paucity of analysis might rise to the level of legal malpractice?
Anonymous for a good reason. Cowardice ain't it.
However, in the larger view, these are people that probably will never really change their bias regardless of if there had been a SCO or not, and the best one can hope for is that they are retired or replaced over time.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if two years from now we find ourselves thanking SCO for shutting these people up. SCO has already helped us some in that regard. Most of those anti-Linux people used to focus on the argument that Linux is penny-ante, hobbyist crap, not something that should be used for real work. Now, we've got the biggest computer company on the planet embroiled in a $3,000,000,000 lawsuit over Linux, defending their right to enhance it so that they can use it as their core platform. Clearly, whatever else Linux is, SCO has proved that it's not penny-ante.
So, now those anti-Linux people have had to shut up or focus on other arguments, and many of them have grabbed onto the "Linux is ripped off and SCO is going to destroy it" argument and the subsidiary "The GPL is unenforceable and/or illegal" argement. By all means, encourage them to trumpet these arguments to everyone within hearing range. Daily. For months on end. So that by the time the dust settles, they are firmly wedded to those arguments in the minds of everyone around.
Then, when the court has dismissed SCO's case against IBM with predudice and sanctioned SCO's attorneys for bringing a suit without a case; when IBM has pummeled SCO into the ground with SCO's copyright infringements (due to GPL violation) and the patent portfoloio; when Red Hat is awarded millions that SCO doesn't have in compensatory and punitive damages; when Darl and Chris are facing an SEC investigation with probable jail terms at the end; and when even the directors of the Canopy group are sweating bullets over the possibility that they may end up next door to Darl and Chris;[*] the anti-Linuxers are going to have to start backpedaling like mad to maintain any semblance of credibility -- and maybe to keep their jobs.
[*] No, I don't really believe all of that will happen. I'm certain that much of it will, however. Enough.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"Yeah, I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway. If I hadn't, someone else would have." I cannot believe that an adult would even field such an answer in public, much less accept its veracity.
..and those of us who have chosen ethically in the past, even to our own financial disadvantage, quite rightly look down on those who do not.
I feel sorry for you. You're proposing that someone quit a job they have and enter this employment climate right now? That's a laugh. Must be nice to have such strong morals.
Where do you buy your food? What do you eat? What kind of clothing do you wear? Where is it made? What do you do with your old computers? Do you think about what happens to them after they leave your sight? What kind of car do you drive? What kind of mileage does it get?
I can't imagine you've even considered those questions, since the answers would undoubtedly knock you off your holier-than-thou perch.
Give me a fucking break.
Haida Manga
I wanted to say the U.S. to keep the analogy closer to reality, but decided to try and avoid the whole "pro-US" slant. :-/
My employer and my home run Linux, and frankly, the only reason we give a shyte about SCO is for the schadenfreude factor.
This sig no verb.
Cute troll. If it's not open sourced, it's not BSD licensed.
So you looked at those files, and somewhere in SCO's UNIX source, you found files containing lines like the following?
Hmmm...
I'm recycling old PC's and sending them out with Linux on them. Fsck Darl and his voodoo scare tactics. Let him come after me. Nothing would make me happier. Hey Darl, I make money from selling Linux boxes, wanna make something of it??
:) clean them up like new, install Linux on them and resell them for a very cheap price as a SAFE Internet appliance for browsing and email, and maybe other basic functions depending on the box and thier needs.
I put up ads in all the stores (a sheet with tear off phone # strips) asking people to call me to pick their old computers rather than throw them in the trash piles.
I pick them up for free
People throw away 20 million computers each year I'm trying to keep a few out of the landfills and make a few HONEST dollars for myself...
I push Linux every chance I get. SCO can go blow off....
I have access to SysV source. I can say here and now that none of the files named are identical to SysV files.
Comments are indeed the same in many cases: however, these comments have been published in several sources including the OSF/1 POSIX documentation (OSF/1 is an unencumbered UNIX variant.)
Such pale impersonation of the Great Slashdot Prophet. So transparent. So worthless.
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
As an attorney you might want to go and check out this website first, before you cost your company that much money.
I have some doubts about your comment. Since as an attorney for a big company I'd expect you to know the costs involved in massive migration. It's not a trivial thing. Well, I'd expect you to know that if it were your decision to make such a huge call.
And you should also know that SCO have not proven anything whatsoever yet. Their claims have so far been disproven dramatically, most of the times hours after they made them. Most legal minds - if they comment - say SCO is out on a limb.
And as you should know: even if they win the case against IBM, they still won't be in their rights to ask for a license. Go read groklaw, they explain far better than I can.
So maybe, just maybe you haven't really spoken to IT or haven't really done your homework.
This leads me to think you are either a troll or not a very good attorney. It's one thing to be over cautious, it's another thing to make expensive and disruptive choices on a whim - after reading one letter.
I'd like you to give me the name of your company. I'd like to write them a letter. I have several bridges for sale...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
My company (~100 employees, with a bunch of open positions to fill) runs its entire business on Linux. The only thing we use Windows for is our corporate LAN, with a single W2K PDC. All of our customer services, our web site, mail systems, the works, run on Linux and we've deployed about 100 new servers in the last three months.
:-)
The SCO situation hasn't changed our plans or business at all, nor do I expect it to do so. Someday when Darl is homeless and penniless, if he comes to LA because it's warmer than begging on th e subzero streets of Utah in winter, I'll give him some money for food, and a free Debian install CD
I don't know, there's just something odd about someone bragging about the strength of their moral fiber by justifying looking down at people. Just a bit odd.
sic transit gloria mundi
Having looked at the files, it certainly seems like SCO has a point.
Methinks the title of your post implies you aren't very good at checking for errors.
you're just jealous.
At my co. we are thinking of running Linux for some new products, and the SCO suit hasn't even come up...
Did anyone on Slashdot think of the possibility of Microsoft turning over the IP addresses assigned to the email addresses entered for their Linux survey directly over to SCO? Seems like that would be an easy way of compiling a list of direct end-users to sue RIAA-style...
:)
= 75 &ncid=75&e=1&u=/nf/20031224/tc_nf/2291 5
Then again, I'm an avid conspiracist.
Here's a link to an article on the survey courtesy of Yahoo:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Tell you what; I'll make the morally correct decision. Then how about you give me a job. After I'm hired, you can tell me all about how I did the correct thing.
Before you go off like this, try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who needs to feed his family, and pay his bills, and just keep his head above water.
I'm not saying it's right either, but it's not as black and white as you make it out to be.
RIght, and this is why people who keep asking "is SCO going to stop shipping Samba, etc." are missing the point. SCO is arguing that the limitations of the GPL are unconstitutional. They have never denied that people have the right to place works in the public domain (PD). They simply think it has to be all or nothing, and if you try to go "half-way" towards PD (as they seem to view it), then legally you have indicated your intention to go all the way, and your work should be treated as PD.
Of course, companies that rely on the GPL to protect their own software, and who actually earn license fees for non-GPL-compatible use (like MySQL and Trolltech) will fight this interpretation tooth and nail.
Do you have any openings for a software developer?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Think about it. Why would Linus steal loads of code and then post it for everyone to see?
"So Daddy, why do we have to move out of our house?"
"Well, the company I was in had a lawsuit that some people on slashdot didn't like. They said that I would not be moral or ethical to keep working there"
"So, whats for dinner?"
"We have some bread and a slice of chees. we would have more, but I need to keep my ethics"
"Daddy, I'm cold."
"I know sweet heart, but people on slashdot said it was best I quit no matter what. for my ethics"
"daddy, was your company killing people?"
"No sweet heart I told you, there in a lawsuit some people aren't happy with, that's why you are cold and hungry."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dude, they are talking servers here, not gamer crap that ain't no big thing when the chip fries, or overall stability goes down, for a few extra Mhz.
I would suggest to them, if the motherboard can handle it, add another 512MB RAM. Doubling the size of RAM would vastly improve overall system performance, without sacrificing stability.
Overclocking is fine for those who merely play with their computers, it has no use for those who actually work with their computers.
For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?
Man, what the fuck are they talking about. "Feeding their families" is the last thing they need to worry about. This is about keeping their families well clothed, driving in nice cars, etc. If all they needed to do was keep them fed they could work at walmart or go on welfare. Either option would be better then contributing to a criminal enterprise.
By your logic, if someone stole a million dollars from a bank, it would be "ok" because they need to "feed their families" (caviar and champaign, I guess)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
So ... are you saying that you would look "up" at criminals? Or consider them equals?
Or are you saying that it's unethical to make statements about one's own moral beliefs and actions?
Son, bragging is not a moral issue. It is a social and cultural one.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
they use exactly the same justification to defend their immoral and unethical behavior, and that justification holds absolutely no water.
Absolutely. It's called blaming someone else for one's own actions.
I find it odd that so many Slashdot readers find that hard to understand...but given the stupidity that most voters in the US consistently show, I suppose it's not surprising.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Is there a defense fund for Linus Torvalds? Is there a defense fund for Monty Widenius when SCO decides to get into the MySQL business? Is there in truth no sanity clause?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
One of SCO's main PR arguments is that Linux can't possibly match proprietary software becuase it's written by amateurs, not professionals employed by a software company. We can expect them to use the exact same argument to attack the open-source legal analysis at Groklaw.
I can't imagine you've even considered those questions, since the answers would undoubtedly knock you off your holier-than-thou perch.
Nice, buddy. Way to equate having strong morals with being holier-than-thou.
What kind of example do I set for my children?
The employment environment is bad right now, so it's okay to sell drugs to kids.
Our five year outlook isn't so good, so theft and unethical business will be acceptable.
If you were to catch two people breaking into your car, to steal your stuff, would you let it slide? How about if one of them was lookout only, not actively participating in the break-in (because he didn't want to break the law, just make a few bucks to feed his kids, after all, jobs are scarce, remember?), just watching for cops, because the one doing the actual break-in was paying him to do so?
Have you asked yourself these questions? For if you value money over morals, you will soon have neither.
Yes, I have quit jobs over managerial decisions that pushed my moral bounds. No, I did not have a backup plan, and yes, I was scared as Hell about not being able to feed my familiy, or keep a roof over our heads, because I live in a small town that doesn't have many high-tech positions in any field, especially computer related areas. As it turns out, I ended up getting a job with another company (who I'd never really considered as economically viable,) and am now making nearly double what I was, am learning new skills, have way more self-respect and peer-respect, have a boss whose morality and integrity is top-notch, and, most importantly, I never had to sell my morals to anyone for a few loaves of bread and a month's worth of shelter.
It's amazing what having morals and ethics will do for a person, especially if one sticks to them. It is the scariest shit you'll ever do, but it is also the most rewarding, spiritually and financially.
For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?
Nah..
;)
They gave up. Like the useless French.
Until SCO actually wins a lawsuit they have no real claims on anything. They have yet to show that the 'tainting of Linux' was not done intentionally. IE since SCo's own employees did most of the 'tainting' then they need to prove that it was NOT a directive from management that they take the code from SCO to Linux. Also they have not proved that the code did not go into Linux first and SCO second.
So until we know that there is 'tainted code' in Linux my company has said, we are not going to worry about SCO's claims.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
My experience with the DoD's High Performance Computing Moderization Office, the USAF Research Labs, and the Office of Naval Research is that there could as well be no SCO. There are no delays in deployment, no limitations in source selection, and existing installations are getting no instructions other than the usual security hole alerts.
Yup.. everyone's stupid if they don't agree with YOUR opinions. right.
I am a SysAdmin at a large document management company. We handle document and project management for large building companies and subcontractors.
Since ditching websphere (blergh) we have been developing and running strong on linux/java/pgsql for over 3 years now and we see no reason to change our model now because of this SCO farce.
My take on the SCO krefuffle is that it will only create strong precedents protecting the GPL and may, if we're luck, cast the first stone against ludicrus software patents.
I'd wish SCO good luck, but really, it'll take more than that to save their skins from this litigation nightmare that is about to explode in their faces.
Dave
Speaking as an observer of, and formerly employed at but now retired, a tv station. The SCO thingy hasn't had an effect one way or the other that I can tell. Generally speaking, OpenOffice is slowly replaceing MS Office on the desk, and there will come a day when everybody is running OO. At that point its just barely noticed if the OS gets switched to linux. At worst we teach the grunts how to use a real email agent, not something that has all sorts of viri receptors builtin like the M$ things do.
All the server stuffs have been annointed with a red hat long ago.
Those apps used that require windows have been put on notice that no more updates will be purchased until it works on a recent linux box. 2 years ago they were laughing us off the phone. Today they're asking when, and it includes some fairly big names in broadcast software. In another 2 years I predict linux will be considered commonplace, with the windows versions on life support only.
Thats my $0.50 worth. That was originally $0.02, but inflation has taken its toll you know.
--
Cheers, and have a merry Christmas everybody, Gene
If somebody is using Linux for a reason, and/or prefers to work with it, I can hardly see them doing a massive conversion to another OS they arent so familiar with.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
However, what so is doing is much more than a lawsuit. Indeed, it is a lawsuit in name only.
... wait for it ... a lawsuit.
BS. Lawsuits have been filed. Discovery (a stage in a lawsuit) is ongoing. Lawyers are filing motions in court. It's a lawsuit. There may be more than one goal in pursuing it, but it is
Were it merely a lawsuit, it would not entail the vast amount of public FUD, misdirection, deception, and outright lies
You apparently are new to observing our legal system. That sort of thing goes on pretty often. Did anyone mention it was a lawsuit? By the way, now do you think that lawyers have such a bad reputation? Is it possible that it's because that sort of thing goes on?
The fact that SCO shows no such restraint (and that SCO's lawyers apparently feel no need to reign them in or insist upon such restraint) demonstrates prima facia that this isn't so much a lawsuit as something very, very different.
I would take this as prima facia evidence that you don't know what you are talking about.
At its heart it is an attempt to defraud thousands of free software out of their hard work, to defraud third parties by charging licensing fees for things that do not belong to them...
Ah, at last we come to the heart of the matter. Its your ox that you think is going to be gored.
I for one would never hire an HR person who would knowingly hire unethical people and open my company up to the potential of such behavior within my own ranks.
Say, are the books and legal documents in your company open to all employees for inspection to make sure that everything is on the up and up? How do they know that your company is doing the right thing? No tax fraud? No cooked books? No kickbacks to suppliers? No bribes to procurement agents? All of your software is legal, right? Can the employees audit to make sure? How should the employees in your company know if they should stay there? I'm not sure that the SCO employees should be relying upon those with axes to grind and a scorched earth mindset for guidance as to where to work.
Nor would I hire an HR who would staff my company with weak-minded people who put a paycheck ahead of any ethical considerations, or who cannot recognize a lost cause when they see one.
People who can't recognize a lost cause, huh? So, anyone that Microsoft comes after should just surrender? Any company with a market that Microsoft creates a product for should just give up? Have you heard of Quicken? Shouldn't Apple be dead now instead of making billions of dollars? Is the Linux desktop a lost cause? I thought that Sun just won a million desktops for Linux in China. We now have the ONE TRUE *nix window manager (KDE|Gnome), shouldn't the other ones just give up? Does your company own its market? Is its market share rapidly expanding? If not, shouldn't you give up? Wasn't it a lost cause for some Finnish nerd to write an OS kernel and dream of crushing HP, SUN, DEC, IBM, Microsoft? If you have a sure eye for lost causes, you must have an amazing stock portfolio. Since SCO made money this year it may be premature to write them off as a lost cause.
Speaking of the ethically weak, if SCO wins their case, if it is proven that their assertions are correct, will you be sending them some checks? Will you be removing Linux from your company in favor of something else? Let me guess... NO?
Hear Hear, the king of taking out of context and adding an unrelated issue.
So how great does w2k look once you buy all those CALS in order to actually connect to it?
That said, there's nothing stopping you from breaking the compile on Unixware and OpenServer.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Do you think it might be hard to find loyal employees because we know we are the first to get pink slips when "times are tough" or we get too close to retirement. Loyalty works both ways - if you're going to look out for yourself, I'm going to lookout for myself.
It's us versus them.
how many companies are ditching SCO as an obviously non-viable product with no future outside of its whorably broken linux strategy?
I know my company is...
Network Computing Magazine Asia (www.ncasia.com)
did a reader survey in November this year that had several Open Source and Linux related questions. One of them asked about whether the SCO suit had effected their deployment strategy for Linux. The survey had nearly 300 respondants.
The article describing the results wont appear until the Jan/Feb issue, but will be available online for those of you not living in Asia who cant get the printed magazine. I apologize that I cant go into the detailed results right now, since Im the author. But I will confirm that it had similar results to this story about the effect of the SCO suit. Some, but not too much effect.
Honestly, the results of the OSS/Linux parts of the survey were fairly interesting, and a couple surprised even me. Ill try to remember to suggest a slashdot story on it when it comes out.
The savings brought by using Linux are undeniable, security wise the advantages are far too great to ignore. With MS's Windos or Sun's Solaris you have no idea what is going on behind the scenes, with Linux you can get involved straight ahead with a problem, you will better off with 3rd party support, but certainly you are not sitting iddle waiting for the support, or you can't see exactly what they fixed. With Linux and OSS in general you gain an involvement in *your* software that was lost for a generation.
Something more important is that in our company there is a DIY culture, a lot of software that could be bought "of the shelf" is better developped internally and customized to our exact needs. That means that people are not afraid of looking at the source code of something and tailoring it.
Not only traders'.
If we could replace desktops of technical people, secretaries, HR, managers and business people with less demanding needs we would be on the track to big savings.
Something else used widely is Citrix or equivalent like VNC, you can have a few of these servers which can be accessed remotely for the people that require Windows functionality, all other applications can be run locally using Linux native stuff (many of our internal applications are web based any way, so the underlying platfrom becomes less of an issue).
People doing the daily grunt work congregate here. They are bound to know if this is having any effect, regardless their personal position regarding the matter, or OSS.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As far as I know we haven't received any legal letters, though I'm not sure if I'd hear about it immediately if we did. Doesn't seem likely we would though because the majority of visible servers are, sadly, Winblows...
Actually, one of our IT directors likes Linux now, because it's so cheap. While he isn't in favor of it as our primary computing platform, he's mentioned it as a possible thin-client solution for sales.
In the darkness of future past, The magician longs to see. One chants between two worlds, "Fire, walk with me!"
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