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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?"
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.
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.
We use and sell SCO to run progress db apps.
We have made plans to switch away from it.
"/Dread"
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.
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 ??
We haven't decided what to replace them with yet (most likely RHEL AS or possibly Solaris - it has to be certified for Progress),
Well, if performance or future-proofness matter to you at all, pick up RHEL. Solaris is a dead end. BTW, I thought Progress was going to certify RHEL ES. What happened to that?
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
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!
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
... 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....
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.
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!"
And you pointed out that Linux is supported by such fly-by-night operations as IBM, Novell, Hewlett-Packard, and RedHat, right?
If you're not attempting to address such factually-inaccurate opinions, then you're not doing your job. That is, if you're serious about offering Linux projects as an option...
Jay (=
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
4th infantry division
Not really, FUD has a more specific meaning
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.
No, this is strictly a WinDOS problem.
This is not something I've ever even HEARD of for Linux, *BSD or Solaris.
Poor quality code in ring zero is still poor quality code. An OS is BUILT for managing computing resources. If it can't do that well, it's pretty useless.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
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
At my co. we are thinking of running Linux for some new products, and the SCO suit hasn't even come up...
I can not name the company, if it got back how I know, someone would get fired for sure... I am also glad to see that this is the RAREest of exceptions... Note that this is NOT a small company. We are talking about 30B$ in sales per year! Large DP staff and lots of infrastructure.
The company I know has held all Linux work and turned off all Linux systems (where possible) because of the SCO letter received by the legal staff. Any of the techies using a personally installed Linux desktop for real work had to abandon them.
Talk about knee-jerk, un-educated reactions!!
--TJ
Never under estimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
Sorry, my client called it an "invoice", but it was one of the dubious letters. Sorry to get everyone so excited. Since my client called it an "invoice", it was a highly misleading letter. So those letters are evidence when we get to the criminal trial.