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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."
"I think right now we've got the claims in front of the various courts that we need in order to get our complaints heard and to get them argued and to get resolution. With respect to being more vocal or going after new targets at the customer level, we don't see the need for that. We had the need to get the basic issues on the table, but we're fine to argue the merits of what we have out there right now (in) the current litigation setting."
There's something in law called "res judicata," (incorrect definition here) which means if something is decided by one court, it's binding on a court in another jurisdiction. The definition given is incorrect in stating that it applies only to the parties in the original suit. It can be used against a party in the original suit, if it's the same facts/situation, and the original party had ample and adequate opportunity and reason (motivation) to provide a full defense in the first case.
If there is going to be a lot of cases, usually a company will do several, in different forums/jurisdictions, and see if they get a good result. If they do, such as SCO getting a ruling that all Linux violates their copyright/trade secrets/whatever, then they can use that in subsequent cases when suing. The inverse is also true. If a court finds that SCO is a bunch of mindless jerks that will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes (e.g. their claims are totally without merit), then they really cannot go after anyone else without overcoming some really large hurdles.
Not only do I play an attorney on TV, I am an attorney in real life as well.
I love Linux. I think SCO's claims are totally without merit. But please remember, just because Darl McBride says he won't sue any more customers does not mean he'll follow through. Remember, he's made all kinds of claims and promises in the past, almost none of which turned out to be true. His lack of honesty (or, optimistically, his lack of knowledge) cuts both ways.
So, if you are an SCO customer, or even if you aren't, and if you run Linux, BSD, or Windows (all of which SCO has stated a claim to), you are still not safe. They may still sue you, even after claiming they won't.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Ah Darl. Silly, silly Darl. SCO Unix had its day 7-8 years ago, when Linux was still a hobby. The key market they owned was the x86 commodity hardware Unix. Linux absolutely owns x86 hardware-based *nix now, official Unix name or not. No ounce of marketing muscle you could possibly muster will change that fact. You're dead. Go away. And no, "Linux" didn't steal your IP, which you're quietly admitting now. Thanks for the 2+ year roadblock. Now fuck off.
RW
Nothing to see here. Just Darl's usual nonsense.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Darl has to pretend that Unixware is a viable alternative to everything Linux, but in reality SCO has a more targeted market than that. As I understand it, they have a big presence in areas like point-of-sale terminals at McDonald's. Those kind of high-volume sales will probably continue to form their core business, particularly if they can continue to create FUD as to whether the Linux alternative will be a viable long-term proposition.
Breakfast served all day!
...who would even dare think of writing their apps for the SCO Openserver/Unixware platform anymore. In fact it would not surprise me one bit to hear of all the major players begin to announce dropping all support for their products to run on SCO's flavors of *nix in the very near future.
With features like:
Risking having to migrate again in a year or two when they're bankrupt?
No 2Gb+ file support
No 64-bit support
Ever-diminishing support from the OSS community, which ironically provides the most useful server apps for the platform?
Risk future lawsuits from SCO if you do migrate?
I mean.. SCO Unix has been uncompetitive for years now, while their management has been throwing all their effort into last-ditch lawsuits.
Naturally.. it's all bullshitness as usual from SCO. But it's always worth the debunking, in case someone actually thought SCO had something of value.
SCO has one kind of customer, and that is legacy. McDonald's used to use Xenix, and for all I know they still might. If they're still SCO it's only because SCO promised them minimal effort in the upgrade department. Sooner or later they're going to decide they need something SCO can't give them and go to Linux.
Xenix was basically the ideal OS for point of sale applications because it ran entirely reliably on 286 and 386 class machines. Now that point of sale systems are typically pentium or above (celeron, anyone?) there's no reason to be quite so miserly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Any woe be to any SCO users that defect, because they've just lost their customer status.
In Damler, the judge threw out most of their case, so they can't argue that the next one is brought in good faith.
Fight Spammers!
I actually hope they come out with Duke Nuekom forever. Just slap that title on a silly old-fashioned side scrolling game. Then we'd get a whole new range of jokes..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
In retrospect, I think you're right. It's so surreal, but there was probably no better way to give GNU softare credibility in the business world. Look at how it looks to the corporate world:
Big companies (Daimler/Chysler, etc) use Linux.
Big companies like Linux so much, they'll fight in court to keep using it.
IBM will stand by Linux's IP and defend it legally
HP will stand by Linux's IP if you pay them for indemnification/insurance
The code is so clean, despite being a "unix clone", even the owners of unix can't find any infringing code.
What if, instead of pursuing hopeless litigation against other behemoth companies, you just tried to please the customers you had and try to make your product a better product?
They would have failed, yes. Probably. But, who knows? Maybe they would have been able to garner a reputation for good service, and hold onto their core base for a longer time then they are now. Maybe they could have even segued into providing linux solutions, and made partnerships with other major companies (like IBM) instead of suing.
Would SCO be a more successful company if they had? They might have failed yes, but they would have a good reputation, and they might have even been successful (or bought out), if they had played their cards right. Alas, they threw it all to the wind on a shot-the-moon scenario that will only end in tears for everyone.
It just saddens me that people have such a lack of perspective.
Darl already made millions by inflating the SCO stock so I don't think that he gives a damn what happens to SCO now.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Well, they apparently still have an engineer on staff somewhere.
They just posted to Bugtraq the other day fixing vulnerabilities mentioned in a CERT advisory which was well over a year old. And CERT advisories are usually only issued once the isses raised in them are old hat...
A problem for them, in this regard, would have been a couple of my previous employers. They used both, SCO Unix and Linux for separate purposes. They may not need to be sued, but feel the change in climate and decide to dump SCO. Most companies could care less about the politics of operating system backers, they just want stuff to work and get on with business.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As I would have expected, and was the sole intent of these responses, the SCOX stock price took a nice step up on Monday following the interview in which SCO's CEO heighlighted SCO's other enterprises.
Thing is, there are thousands of Open Source / Free Software developers who DO get paid for their work. RedHat, SUSE, Mandrake, IBM, Sun, and hundreds of other commercial companies pay people to write free software.
When Darl says something like this he just proves he has no clue how the Open Source community actually works.
Yup. But it may slow the attrition of their current customers. SCO may be trying to convince their customers that OpenServer is going to be maintained by SCO for years yet. With the rate that SCO is already burning through money, their customers are probably getting antsy. But who knows what McBride thinks?
Yes, but it is a new one for SCO. Because SCO had no copyright case they actually sued former customers on trumped up charges, and so far have lost. I mean it is one thing to sue a customer who screws you over, but SCO were suing customers who had done NOTHING wrong other than perhaps not do as much business with SCO as SCO would like. All this just to create the public impression that SCO was somehow valuable through the public pretence that the lawsuits were over SCO copyrights.
You'd have to be a raving lunatic to do any business with SCO or accept any EULA with them. Thay HAVE used this to sue customers frivilously IMHO. Daryl McBride as the architect of this strategy should be high on the list of assholes to avoid in the business world, wherever he may go in future, AVOID.
Didn't they already half-implicate BSD in one of their interviews?
They love to make those vague implications. For a while there, we were hearing a new one every week. So much for that?
It's a relative term, but I'd say "pretty quickly" instead.
And I'm not sure what they plan with SCO Marketplace either. I'd love to see an NDA on that contract.
Anyone notice this?
...
IDGNS: Why did SCO recently decide to file a trademark claim for AT&T Corp.'s old Unix subsidiary, Unix Systems Laboratories (USL)?
McBride: There are a couple of reasons around going back to the USL part of the business.
We think that there's a very bright future in the company to return to the model that we had in the past with Unix Systems Laboratories.
Quite a bit of revisionist history going on there, with Calde^H^H^H^H^HSCOG along with McBride and company at USL.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Darl: One announcement that we are making at the show is called the SCO Marketplace, and that's a marketplace exchange whereby we are going to allow developers to come and bid on work-for-hire projects that we have, to fill in the gaps where we're going with our development plan.
Given that software developers in low cost countries like India and Eastern Europe can develop software far cheaper than developers in the US, does this mean that SCO is outsourcing their software development? I can see it now: SCO will fire their engineering staff (what little is left) and announce that they are a "virtual company" consisting of lawyers, suing IBM, and outsourced software projects. SCO will consist of Darl and a few hench-weasels to manage the lawyers and Indian software engineers.
It's not a change of strategy. It's a rout. The suit based on copyrights (SCO v AutoZone) was stayed in favor of the original IBM suit and copyright counterclaims - as was Redhat v SCO - so it's clear that any other copyright-based suit will get the same treatment, making the filing worthless, even as intimidation. The other customer suit (SCO v Diamler ) was a joke that was almost entirley dismissed. There's probalby not enough left for any action.
So it's not a change of strategy, it's a smackdown, one of many they will endure, tho not necessarily quickly.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
I have experience working in a few restaurants that have used the Micros system, and to my knowledge the backend was NT based, except for one place that had some kind of *nix backend; it definitely could've been sco. Another poster mentioned Squirrel systems. I haven't used any of their modern stuff, but the two setups i've seen ran on os/2. Yes, they were both really old.
Actually, my employer is about to launch a pilot test to move the top 7 most critical systems from SCO to SUSE Linux. Thankfully, I'm going to have some involvement in it personally.
They told me that the move had to wait until they saw what would become of the SCO lawsuits, and I guess they've decided that SCO basically was a flop and they aren't scared anymore.
He says It's no surprise, but it's interesting that it comes from him.