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McBride Says No More Lawsuits From SCO
thephotoman writes "Well, Darl McBride gave an interview to IDG News Services in which he said that SCO is not going to sue any more customers. They do bring up the issue of the SCOsource Linux licensing, and how much of a failure it has been. Instead, they plan to start marketing their flavor of Unix. However, as he's not dropping the current lawsuits, there's no good reason to believe him on this change in strategy."
He must have lost his funding.
It seems strange that he would give up for any other reason... he's shown himself to be hell-bent on his mission.
Sigs cause cancer.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
This is just confirmation that they have committed corporate suicide. I don't think they would do this unless they'd figured out that they have scared off prospective customers (and partners) and sabotaged their sales efforts. But if things have gotten to that point, McBride telling a magazine they're going to refrain from suing customers in the future has exactly zero chance of restoring enough trust in the company to revive their sales.
who are not SCO customers...
Verbal statement is nothing, SCO could be planning for another lawsuit while everybody's relaxed enough to step into a trappy.
A trappy is like a trap except there's nothing in it, but this doesn't stop people from being frightened by it.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
Cloudscape donated to Apache, new Helix, Open-XChange going GPL, now this...
Things are going too well. Look for Microsoft patent lawsuits to be unleashed tomorrow.
McBride saying "No More Lawsuits" is like an alchoholic saying "No more alchohol" after beating on his wife and kids.
Who knows, maybe there's some 12-step program he can join.
That's like saying M$ no longer makes operating systems because they have too many bugs.
SCO is going to find a new revenue route. And it's going to be nastier than sueing nontechnical grandmothers.
Can you imagine what it'd be like if they hadn't decided this?
"Alright! Welcome to this year's Forum! We've got some exciting things to discuss this year. Now... before we start... how many of you are Solutions Providers and Software Engineers? How many hands? That many. Huh. I have no idea why you guys are here. Now... how about the lawyers? How many? Yeah! Hello. And Buisness Strategists from other companies competing against Linux solutions? Hello! Good crowd! We've got some really exciting news for all you guys...!"
Granted - any solution providers who DO show up should still be asking themselves what they're doing there.
As The SCO Group Inc.'s reseller and developer community gathers for its annual SCO Forum convention in Las Vegas this week, one question on many attendees' minds will be whether the company's future will be as a software vendor or as a litigator.
The answer is No, they do not have a future as a software vendor or litigator.
Or ask the Wright brothers. They sunk their company by investing all their time in litigation against competitors instead of development and innovation.
Your point is a good one. Perhaps the only reason to use SCO Unix:
If you're existing systems depend on SCO, I'd probably stay with it as long as it worked too.
(I'm running some legacy Alpha systems with Digital Unix on them myself. They're more stable than our Linux boxes, but were also far more expensive in their day)
But still what I was expressing was that noone in their right mind would migrate to SCO Unix today. Which is what Darl was trying to imply, I believe.
Isn't a a matter of scp -r project scobox:src/project
and running make clean && make on that box?
If it runs on linux, it should be a recompile away from running on a sco box.
McBride, who in the past claimed SCO wouldn't sue Linux users but later did, is now claiming they won't sue Linux users anymore.
At what point does McBride's ideas of lies and truth begin and end?
Your sig:
id Software lost $2.75 million to record-breaking piracy on the weekend before Doom 3's release. Thanks, guys!
Sorry, but I don't buy into this. I was one of those that downloaded Doom3 over the weekend, so I could play it NOW. I will be buying it, no question there, even if it cost $100. But when it is easier to pirate it than to buy it, perhaps the distribution model is the problem. I do the same with movies. If they don't suck, I buy them for the better quality and the other goodies. If they DO suck, then I would have asked for my money back anyway, so they get deleted.
I am not some kiddie saying this, Im an old fart who has bought DOZENS of CDs, games and movies ONLY because I pirated them first. I would never have paid for them to try them to begin with, or never heard of them until I got them for almost free. With CDs and movies, what you pirate is usually much lower quality that the real thing. And before you say "Some are very high quality" go fucking download and see for yourself, no skipping to chapters, lower res, etc. Its still great to try before you buy, but its not the same.
I know not everyone is this way, but to say they lost millions is as bullshit as the stuff coming out of Darl's mouth. Many (if not most) of the people who downloaded it this weekend will buy it next week when it is actually in the stores, or not play it. Likely, you will have to have a real purchased copy of the game to play online anyway, which is the ENTIRE reason I wanted it. So the pirated copy is probably useless for that anyway.
Yes, to date SCO have not sued a non-customer in regard to Linux. Take home lesson: don't deal with SCO.
However, they have subpoenaed various Linux contributors and other parties who didn't have any business relationship to SCO. In some cases this seems to be merely a fishing expedition or harrassment. Not as bad as a suit, but still not something I'd like to see in my mailbox.
SCO have also sent letters to non-SCO-customer Linux users threatening a lawsuit, although they have not actually filed suit against one of them as far as we know. It would be accurate for the original poster to ask that SCO stop *threatening to sue* non-customers.
So people should be precise in what they say about SCO, but SCO still suck. I welcome their new future as a Caldera (literally "crater").
It's worth remembering that Darl is likely to walk away with millions of dollars in his pocket. Linus gets at most a sense of vindication. There is no justice.
It makes a lot of business sense to migrate away from SCO. Who wants to be stuck with an unsupported operating system when SCO goes belly up?
Oh for God's sake, drop it. This effectively amounts to a surrender on SCO's part. If they're lying, then we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
As much as I love the open-source community and despise SCO's litigatory strategy you have to give them the option of backing down.
Beating this dead horse any further simply hurts our image and will drive people away from our cause.
"None of the customers are gonna risk a $50k accounting package gettign messed up to see if it works on something else."
Well, that isn't really the customer's job, that's the ISV's isn't it?
Seems to me that an ISV that doesn't have a migration plan away from SCO already is one that I wouldn't want to do business with. They should have been migrating to something else 2-3 years ago.
And even if SCO were to win the lawsuit against IBM, how does that help their core business? More to the point, how are current SCO customers helped by a win?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
You are 100% correct in saying that precise language is important. News outlets have implied that because SCO have sued AutoZone (gasp! a Linux shop) and DaimlerChrysler (yikes! another Linux shop) that somehow running Linux puts one at risk. When in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Exactly ALL of the lawsuits today show that instead, being an SCO customer puts one at risk.
.GIFs on my local machine when Unysis started their patent crusade, nor do I recall being called to testify as to whether Windows 3.1 had the same "look and feel" as Mac OS during that memorable lawsuit.
Agreed that being subpoenaed is no day in the park, but people and companies are subpoenaed for various reasons all the time all day every day regardless of whether they are right, wrong, or merely loosely associated with whatever legal proceeding is at hand.
My problem is with furthering Darl's FUD meme that running Linux is risky. It's so far from credible. OK, let's speculate that contributing to Linux is questionable. Let's further speculate that *distributing* those contributions is questionable. How on God's green Earth is RUNNING a piece of software you acquired in good faith a risky action? Where are examples of any other lawsuits against end users for running software from a reputable vendor, regardless of whether that vendor happened to be embroiled in legal trouble? I don't recall being sued for having
The chicken little act is what Darl WANTS. Aren't we all smarter than that? What sane, intelligent person honestly thinks they'll be sued for *using* Linux?
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005