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Novell Sued Microsoft Through Caldera?
cheesedog writes "The intrigue increases: According to this article in the Salt Lake Tribune, the secret terms of the sale of DR-DOS to Caldera included the provision that Caldera would have to sue Microsoft (for Novell by proxy) over the OS and that they would have to do so without revealing Novell's hand in it. Did Novell indirectly create a monster? Caldera's 300 million winnings against Microsoft are now being used to fund lawsuits against Linux (and Novell)."
AWESOME!
Very well put. Karma can be a "bitch", and a LOT of these stupid-assed corporate and corporate-bought state-level labor code lawyers need to remember the words of Redd Foxx, as Fred Sanford, when the character said, "I don't believe in doing unto others before they do unto me, 'cuzz I might get **done in** DO 'IN IT."
My variation on "live and let live" is "Let Live, then Live". Corporate hegemenony/imperialism, regardless of its nation of spawning, is ultimately going to cast upon itself a molten, heaping slag the might just undue them. But, the question, is "How long will it take?"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Novell is a extremely ironic situation.
They had the rights to AT&T Unix stuff.
BSD Unix was a free OS that was used to create stuff like TCP/IP and other things that directly related to the early commercial success of Unix.
As a show of gratitude companies led by Novell helped sue to stop the free distribution of the BSD operating system. They claimed they just wanted to protect their IP.
Eventually when it turned out that the court case would end up being painfull they settled out of court.
It finally made it so that BSD had to remove every bit of code that was related to Unix. This turned into a near fatal blow to BSD, one that they never recovered from.
Now Novell owns a Linux Distro. A Unix compatable operating system dedicated to being free.
The owners of the Unix IP are suing them to stop the distribution of Linux and pay royalties to a company that they helped create.
A company (Caldera, original SCO change it's name and sold its company off to Caldera) whose early success came directly from using Linux!
Live buy the sword, die by the sword.
Hopefully this will be a lesson to the industry don't bite the hand that feeds you (free software).
Novell was to be awarded around 17% of the Microsoft settlement money, but of course, as the money lovers they are, Canopy wanted more and sued Novell over their share of the pie.
Also, while Caldera initiated the suit against Microsoft, Caldera later split in two and the DRDOS operations went to the embedded division, called Caldera Thin Clients, then later Lineo. Lineo never got much of the settlement money, Canopy and Caldera Inc (the original company, who had nothing to do with DOS anymore for years when the suit ended) got most of it. And their lawyers.
Oh, and also, you might be interested to know that Ray Noorda, the man behind the suit against Microsoft, was the former CEO of Novell, and everybody close to the suit knew Caldera was Novell's tool.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They are very much *not* dying -- if you look at the year's chart, you can see an enormous peak beginning around June, and they're just now settling back into their old stock price; they're still about 20% above where their stock price was this time last year. The sad thing is, being evil pays nowadays.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
Novell was at the time headed by Ray Noorda, who was instrumental in the Canopy Group which was funding Caldera. It just that in addition to providing the litigation funding, it seems that they have also provided the litigation-friendly-managers which SCO and Canopy now are using to launch their campaign.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Novel sought to hide it's involvement from Microsoft, fearing retaliation. It would be easy enough for Microsoft to have done that, as the DRDOS case itself proved. At the time, Microsoft making your code look bad was deadly. Novel sought to protect itself from Microsoft and recover a little of the damage already done.
Microsoft sought to hide it's involvement with SCO from the public and watching anti-trust regulators. Microsoft learned that their public smear campaign against free software had backfired and sought proxies to say the same things. Microsoft seeks to further injure it's competitors but does not dare level such factually unsubstantiated charges themselves. The rapidly disintegrating SCO case is proving that there was never any merit to the accusations and the whole thing was designed simply to slander a competitor they can't break by any other means.
Both cases show what happens to people who deal with Microsoft.
Oral contracts are worth the paper they're written on.
Sure, an agreement with someone you've known for years is one thing, if the stakes are relatively low. But, otherwise, get it in writing.
It's hard to believe that people in charge of a corporation would be that stupid, but there it is.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Open mind, yes, but "innocent until proven guilty" is missing one word in front of it and that word is "presumed". If you kill some one you aren't 'innocent' at all, you are just presumed innocent by the law. This is one of the things that bugs me is that when some one like O.J. is being hounded by the press and people are calling him a killer, people get outraged about it and say "He is innocent until proven guilty!", but really he is presumed innocent by the government and this whole thing ONLY applys to the government. I can presume that some one is guilty all I want.
Actually, the US didn't fuel hatred. There was plenty of hatred against the Soviets by Muslims, and against Shiites by Sunnis before the US got involved. The US took sides to serve its short term interests which backfired in the long run.
Thompson and Ritchie wrote Unix to play a game on. To make it portable they wrote C and a compiler. This was done at Bell Labs on their dime. They let Berkley, and some others, have copies to evaluate and improve, thus causing BSD, and other variants. AT&T allows this and causes the forking of Unix. Then through mirad stupidity and laywer speak we end up with todays chinese fire drill. All because AT&T did not think to guard their original IP by copyrighting it. Then allowed several groups to modify it without central control.
At least all Linux kernal mods have to be approved by Linus. It's more control than AT&T ever exerted when it mattered.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
The overwhelming majority are innocent
I hope that you're talking about the population in general here, and not crime suspects in general. The majority of criminal suspects are not innocent, and they are in fact, suspects, because the evidence indicates such. Usually, where there's smoke, there's fire. Note that I did not say always, but usually. That's majority.
The Law, and not the government, presumes innocence. It is always a scary thing when people confuse government with law, even scarier when they equate the two
True, but in this context, I think you're splitting hairs. Laws are executed and enforced by whatever Government is current at the time, so, for the posters intents and purposes, the same.
It all boils down to common sense. If a strange guy comes running out of an old woman's house with a bloody knife in his hand, blood all over his shirt and face, wads of jewelry and cash hanging out of his back pocket, and hops into a car and takes off leaving behind a stabbed-to-death, burglared woman in the house, chances are pretty good he's guilty. There's always a chance he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and didn't do it, which is why our system presumes innocent until proven guilty, but it doesn't take rocket science or advanced statistical analysis to figure out he's more than likely the murderer.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
The US funds Saddam Hussein against war with Iran. Saddam and the US later go to war. (Twice.)
Yeah... sort of how the Allies funded Stalin and the Soviets in the war against Germany. Should have let Hitler have the whole damn continent, eh?
Look, life isn't perfect, but by trying to pretend that it is, you are only making things far worse. I wonder how all the peace mongers would react if Hitler (the original, not some barely literate moron with a Texan accent) was alive today. You'd probably just let him be (unless he was American or Israeli.)
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
The only thing interesting here is that even when Novell kicked out Norda, he was willing to work with them in going after Microsoft. And even that's not too interesting considering Norda, at the time he was CEO of Novell, was pointing the gun at Microsoft with a Novell based Linux desktop project.
So, is this really THAT interesting and new? Not if you've been in/around the industry for about 10 years. IMO.
There's nothing here. Move along, move along.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
OS is still used today in many automation control and assorted embedded systems.
:-)
Wow...I said something incorrect and I got a pair of reasonable replies and no flamage.
Slashdot never ceases to surprise me.
The notion of GNU, a self-described clone of UNIX, being innovative is bizarre. UNIX was innovative in some ways (despite being based on Multics), but GNU, like most open source, is imitative (which isn't necessarily bad, if the products being imitated are massively overpriced, as UNIX was).
.NET was obviously inspired by Java, but is much more than just a Java clone. (Needless to say, there are open source clones of both Java and .NET, and they're quite different.)
Apple is a shining example of creativity (despite having copied a lot of its UI concepts from Xerox, et al.), but Microsoft has actually been pretty innovative too. Just look at how many desktop environments copy Microsoft UI, and more broadly, Microsoft applications (e.g. MS Office, which itself was inspired by Apple's Lisa Office System, but is much more than just a copy of it). Similarly,
Despite being remarkably innovative, Apple has also done its share to stifle competition. Its look-and-feel lawsuit (which was fiercely opposed by GNU, since it would have banned cloning of user interfaces) was one of the most obvious examples, but it also used legal pressure to drive most of the Apple II cloners out of the market (especially Franklin, which made clones that were generally more poweful than Apples, and a lot cheaper).
Well, all I have to say is, what goes around, comes around.
Oh, I might add this too:
...etc. the dissidents become more extreme.
Two of the regimes that the US supported were Egypt and Saudi Arabia, often against the will of the people there.
Both of these regimes were an indirect cause for terrorism today.
These regimes are dictatorial to varying degrees, and they do not tolerate dissent or legitimate political opposition.
By choking the oppostion, using emergency marital law, stripping citizenship, jailing,
Bin Laden is now #1 in Al Qaeda. He was stripped of citizenship in his native Saudi Arabia when he opposed some actions of the King Fahad (mainly getting US forces on Saudi soil to protect against Saddam). Had there been a peaceful form of political protest, he may have not been transformed from a hero to an outlaw.
Ayman Al Zawahri is now #2 in Al Qaeda. He was jailed in Egypt after the assassination of President Sadat, and during the reign of Mubarak. His ideal was to establish an Islamic state. Since there was no peaceful mean of doing so in the political process, he became an extremist and a militant.
Now both these people are not only a problem in their home country, nor for Arab countries, but an international problem for all of us.
Had their countries been not dictatorial, and had the US not supported the dictatorial rule in these countries, I very much doubt that these people would have existed, nor would have gone as far as they did.
Well, we will never know what may have happened otherwise.
remember when you "leased" proprietary software for 99 years?
Apparently, a life-of-the-copyright lease seems to be coming back into vogue so that publishers of computer programs can work around the consumer protections codified in sections 109 and 117 of the U.S. copyright law, which apply only to the owner of a copy rather than to a lessee.
I think you overestimate the peace mongers of the past - vanity was as much a human trait then as it is now. Also, apathy and lack of desire to sacrifice for an unproven cause are as good reasons now as they were then. Actually, the WW2 situation was somehow clearer, as before Pearl Harbour both Europe and Asia were already deep into war and the US was sitting (geographically) in the middle.