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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?"
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?
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.
...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....
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!
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
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.
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.
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...
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)
... 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. --
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!
What I'd like to know is, are there any companies who were planning Linux projects that are holding until after an SCO resolution?
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.
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.
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!
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.
The fact that IBM and other Big Name companies are telling SCO to go pound salt is a big help when making the Linux case to suits. Plus there is not real investment, if SCO succeeds and we end up with our back against the wall we can put something else on those boxes and carry on.
If the likes of IBM were to cave in to SCO the landscape would change dramatically. Headlines in the WSJ and NYT about IBM giving up Linux or big companies having the shell out big payouts after being sued would catch management's attention, and darkness would descend.
-- Sigs are for losers
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.
Wow, you crash much less than you used to. That's really nice. I've been running Linux on my home machine for nearly 10 years at this point. Except for two times when I misconfigured X back in the old days, my only crashes have been because of bad hardware. That's it. The Linux kernel has never crashed on me except when the underlying metal is bad.
I'll admit that Windows has gotten better over the years. However, crashing at all during normal use is unacceptable. I can't understand why anyone would put up with it.
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.
Funny this should come up. I have a friend sells specialized unix-type systems to businesses. Before the SCO thing, his choice was FreeBSD. He has since switched to Linux for these systems because he thinks that the SCO claim to BSD has a more solid basis in fact than the linux claims.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
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.
Seriously, if this goes bad, how in the hell is SCO going to find Linux users to chase? I can only think of those that use enterpise solutions from Red Hat/SUSE and the like who have customer databases to suponea. If a company has some talented admins and stick to free distros from the net how will SCO or anyone else for that matter find them to collect from?, NetCraft? That is just one box, or a farm of boxes, either way... for that box load BSD or like the parent says, make it look like something else.
I believe SCO is fuckered no matter how this things turns out. Even if they win, once the code is revealed it will be fixed and everyone will cut over to the non-SCO code. I don't think the courts will enforce a grandfather rule since the companies using Linux didn't intentionally use tainted code (my thought here is the business lobby will influence politicians and courts to make sure any ruling gives current users a couple months to clean up any boxes affected).
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!
Yes, but MS flew several of our execs (mostly technical execs) to Redmond to highlight their products, particularly aiming at the low-cost computing model. It was basically an attempt to take a whack at Linux since we were 4 months into a company-wide effort to adopt Linux at the expense of commercial UNIX and Windows.
The sales/marketing people made quite a large mention about the SCO suit making it sound like a forgone conclusion that Linux would be dead in a matter of months.
We're the largest business unit in my company and others looked to us for guidance on it. The presentation backfired and our CIO came back pretty hardened against MS.
Basically he felt it was "Use our stuff b/c Linux will be gone and then you won't have a choice anyway".
It's just the flip side of the coin...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Maybe not management, but my client got an invoice from SCO for their RedHat Linux installation. They called me (their consultant) and asked me what to do with it. I told them to ignore it and keep it for evidence in case it's needed when it's time to send Darl and friends to the slammer. He was surprised at this answer at first, but pointing him to the IBM and RedHat countersuits was very reassuring. Thanks, IBM and RedHat!
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
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.