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Does Unisys Really Get It?
Joe Barr writes "There's an interesting story on NewsForge today about Unisys and its new-found love for Linux. In the story, Robin Miller interviews Unisys VP of engineering Anthony Gold and asks such delicate questions as how Unisys 'planned to make amends for its use of GIF patents against open source projects'? It's a good read, and in this day and age of software dinosaurs trying for peaceful co-existence with Linux, a very timely one."
Wow. This is the same Unisys as the "We have the way out" Unisys?...
The .GIF dispute didn't do *that* much damage.
If Unisys really is willing to peacefully co-exist with Linux/OSS, I say we let them.
Does the GPL protect against that? If Unisys contributes code with their own pending patents to a GPL'd work like Linux, would the GPL force them to give the Linux community the rights/license to those patents?
(edited slightly for format, but retaining ALL the sense of the original article"
Q: "How does Unisys plan to make amends for its use of GIF patents against open source projects?"
A: "No comment" [If they had plans to make amends, they'd share them.]
Q: "Why should open source developers trust Unisys after the GIF nastiness?"
A: "I can't comment on past activities. I can only talk about where we're going." [They refuse to apologize.]
If a human being dealt with you like this, you'd be right to shun them. Why is a corporation any different?
Take anything you want from Unisys, but don't expect anything good from them. They clearly understand the harm they did, and THEY DON'T CARE. They realize that they behaved badly, but THEY EXPRESS NO PLANS FOR CHANGING.
OK, now that the first paragraphs lost my respect for them, on to the rest of the article!
The real question is whether it is true (or whether Unisys believes it to be true, so it's really two questions) that convincing Roblimo and the "Linux community" that they have "truly seen the open source light" makes any difference to their mainframe business. Given how fueled Linux adoption is by word of mouth, maybe it is true, but I suspect companies realize that being perceived as "getting it" isn't quite as important as was thought in 1998.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You could definately say that. I work for Unisys, and they are moving towards a more 'service-based' business model. Like IBM, they provide a 'solution', not just a product.
They find out what you need, they either make or buy a program, install it, support it. Buy the hardware, install it, support it, etc.
While it is trailing in IBM's shoes, its not a bad business model.
Now Unisys is still pretty big, but we did miss expectations for the first time in 4 years, and the stock price dumped, its now ~$9. And our stock is considered 'moderate gain, low-risk'.
Still, I'm new here, so I don't have much info on the "why's" of GIF.
Unisys sucks. I've known a number of people who've had to work there to make ends meet over the years, and to a (wo)man, they've all described it as a really toxic environment to work in, like a wanna-be EDS (which has been described to me as the 7th circle of IT hell).
Frankly, without even needing to RTFA, unless something really unexpected is happening here, this is just another example of a crass, stupid company trying to cover itself in the magic pixie dust of Linux or Open Source in the pursuit of a stock price bump. It's easy to talk the talk, but few walk the walk.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Large companies are not single entities with a single thought process. It is understandable that a company can have multiple product divisions and multiple differing interests. That said they are run by individuals at the highest levels and owned in total by the same stockholders. What Unisys did was despicable, not only did they cash in on a windfall as a result of the incidental inclusion of a trivial compression patent in the gif image standard (which was never challenged in court), but they moved the goalposts throughout the lifetime of their extortion even threatening webmasters who used gifs while trying to license their 'technology' beyond the period of their patent. They got so addicted to their easy and unearned cash that they just couldn't get their snout out of the trough in the end as they sought more and more ways to exploit gif useage sowing confusion & fear as the did so, and little guys everywhere suffered. We can't stop Unisys using GPL'd code, but really who the heck cares, ignore them and certainly don't work with these rats. We know how dangerous a morally bankrupt company can be and the damage they can wreak on a nacent industry. Unisys gave us themselves as that example. They can't comment on past activities, but we sure as heck can and should and we can remember. What other weapon do we have against miscreants who act as Unisys has acted? Where is the incentive to behave better is anyone treats Unisys with anything other than contempt?
What can I say, they managed to pull off the only Y2K problem I encountered.
Seems they had a "mainframe" Windows system that only their team -- of three clueless fossils -- were authorized to service. I gave them the minimum list of patches, and they certified the system Y2K compliant.
Sure enough, on January 1, the system had WINS resolution problems and applications broke. So the system was reliant upon a kluge name resolution method that was -- you guessed it -- still on non-Y2K compliant SP3.
Well, I confronted the three fossils when they finally showed up (January 3), and they told me I did not know what I was talking about, turned around and walked out. I yelled down the hall after them that I was going to report each of them to their supervisor and would go after their jobs. They weren't impressed and left.
They must have gotten scared, because they came back 45 minutes later with coffee and donuts for the department VP, and tried to pin the blame on me. Well, the VP was a PHB-extrordinaire, but even HE understood only Useless-sys was authorized (under an expensive contract) to service the ancho -- er, server. He then invited me into the office to answer the charges they leveled against me.
Two days later they finally patched the server, because "applying SP4 to an NT server is very serious business and requires a great deal of advanced planning."
And this is the company you want to go to for a Linux solution? Umm, they have a long heritage of milking government contracts, but those worthless government contractor types are now the guys out there servicing businesses that rely on software to MAKE MONEY.
No thanks. Even without the legacy of the gif shakedown, the company chased me away long ago.
Missed expectations? That may have to do with your gif patent expiring and your corporate pigs getting their snouts pulled out of everyone elses troughs. Life is tougher when you have to earn your cash instead of raking in millions for bupkis through legal extortion.
I worked with some ES7000s when I was at Microsoft. They are a NUMA architecture, and there is very, very high latency across the crossbars: a 32-way is basically 4 8-ways with a very, very, VERY VERY high latency interconnect between them. You need to partition your app so that groups of threads execute on an individual group of 8 processors, NEVER cross the crossbar, or perf blows up.
Once you've done all that work to partition to only run on 8 CPUs, you might as well just scale out like Google does. You can't truly scale up.
Of course things get better all the time, and maybe Linux will be a better NUMA os, but scaling up with Unisys is really just easier and cheaper to do with scaling out.
I "inherited" a unisys ClearPath MCP mainframe admin job and hated everything about it. They never used any "open" standards, and tasks as simple as telneting into the box was made mode difficult since the environment only accepted the "unisys telnet", a proprietary version of telnet, which you need to buy a client license. The CANDIE environment was horrible, and the MCP environment actually existed as a VM within Windows NT 4.0. The MCP environment used NT for hardware recognition, drivers, etc., so not only did you have the overhead of the Windows environment on the system, you had a VM which prescribed to this model. Everything about Unisys was about making money for Unisys. Documentation needed a license to download, pay-for-use transactions, thier vewsion of Cobol (which is actually Sperry-RAND COBOL), their print servers, etc. I'm getting the willies just thinking about it all over again.
I wouldn't be surprised that Unisys would charge a transaction-based license for their Linux, or a Unisys-branded Linux licence (similar to SCO). Unfortunately, many East Coast (US) universities, especially in Pennsylvania, use their systems for accounting, grading, etc...
I hate to admit it - I worked for Unisys (Australia) back in the day (and still know many people who continue to work there) - and although they treated their employee's very well - it was hell.
They're so top heavy its unbelievable. They charge more then even EDS does, and the service levels you get frankly leave something to be desired.
Thank God all their Patents from when they were a real (not a sleazy wintel) vendor in the 80s are expiring - without that teat to suckle upon, they should die a fast death.
My pics.
You work for a company that is miles behind and has a culture that is out of touch with the kinds of clients it needs to grow -- private enterprise. Unisys has never adapted to cultures that are anything but huge bureaucracies, and that is not where the new investments the company needs will come from. Basically, they have all the government -- megacorporate contracts they will ever see and are not going to win new ones; they are not tolerated by companies where rapid solutions, fast and intelligent responses matter.
Not that I'm questioning your qualifications, but I have a cousin who works there, too. The toughest question he had in the interview was "tell me how to improve server performance." The intelligent answer is a dissertation. His response "add more memory or buy a new server" was considered right on the mark. Yeah, don't benchmark the subsystems to identify the bottleneck, tell 'em they need a new server.
That doesn't cut it when the competition is IBM, with more experience dealing with real business and a 6-year Linux head start. Polish up the resume, because your co-workers do not have the skill sets to compete.
I do have a point here relevant to the current topic. In the "welcome to Uselessness" speech by the CMO (Chief Masturbatory Officer), he said all kinds of stuff about how the people were the real asset, and if they bought us just for the tech, well, there were easier ways to get our tech than to buy the company.
Then they failed to back that up with any kind of actual action, and people saw how full of shit they were. Fast-forward one year, and a junior-level CMO is out there announcing the slow closure of the division. Allow me to quote Mr. Ch***: "I know it's a bad decision, but we're going to do it anyway." Wow. One year later, it was all over. (At least I picked up a several $K worth of software and hardware that was headed directly for the trash bin. Thank you, ebay.)
So, based on their past double-speak corporate behaviour, of which I have been a direct victim, also remembering the GIF nastiness, I say, with friends like this, who needs enemies?
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
"anyone who goes to Bally fitness might know what I mean"
Bally Fitness? The one that requires you to hand over your bank accounts so that they can charge you even if they don't keep up their end of the bargain?
I had a sales guy repeatedly urge me to go to his club, saying that I could have a free this and a free that. Finally, because of his persistence, I visited the club. I didn't get to actually do anything except listen as he told me how great the club was, etc. Finally, it came down to this. If I wanted to use this club, I was expected to sign a long-term contract, and, get this, give them a bank account number so that they could EFT a monthly payment.
I asked why they were unique in that they could not bill by monthly invoice, or why I could not take advantage of a pay-as-you-go scheme, say, by paying with a credit card for each visit.
I wanted to leave already, and the sales guy physically placed himself between me and the door. He pushed me into a situation where I had to tell him that I would be outside the building within the next sixty seconds, or else I would be calling the police from his desk phone. It came to THAT, as if he somehow thought there was a possibility that I would still be willing to do business with this company!
After that experience, I looked into Bally's and discovered, to no surprise, that MANY people have been fleeced by them. I also discovered that by simply re-enrolling part-time at my University, I could take advantage of vastly superior exercise resources, and even was able to receive inexpensive physical therapy when I needed it, including treatment by a well-known sports doctor!
Crazy, that Bally's is. I can't believe that anybody is dumb enough to sign their contract.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Enter the joke about my brother... THE BUISNESS MAJOR.
Phone Call: Hey Sean, I just got a health club membership, can you read over the fine print?
(Two hours later, over a couple of bears)
Me: And this line item is where you are essentially financing a non-refundable $1500 "membership application" over 12 months at an ungodly interest rate.
Brother: Well I guess I stepped in it this time.
(Keep in mind, his major was business. I'm an engineering drop out.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I have long years of experience with Unisys, back from the time they actually created fine technology (only way, way overpriced). Actually, I started working for them in the early 90s, about the time they started to devolve from a technology company into a "systems integrator", as they like to put it. I did a couple of small chores on series A equipment, but most of my work was done on the x86 BTOS, then CTOS, machines.
(Those were beautiful machines, by the way. You extended them by daisychaining "blocks" into a bus that started from the CPU and grew to the right. E.g., you snapped in a SCSI disk block, a video card block, etc., all without having to open the case or fiddle with cables. Your workstation just grew longer and longer with each hardware expansion---mine was just under a meter long. You created native "LANs" (called "clusters") daisychaining stations using the dual "cluster ports", zero configuration required. And every machine included high speed synchronous serial ports. Also, they had a really stable OS, I never saw a single crash. It was a bit weird, but in a creative, interesting way. Probably had to do with the mainframe background of the company, because it was completely different from UNIX inspired OSs. This thing was even more alien than the original MacOS. The text editor was lovely. One of my first Unisys workstations was a B28, which sported an Intel 286 @ 8MHz and a whole two megabytes of RAM, IIRC. I also remember using an Intel 186 processor on some BTOS box---yes, it really existed, it was sold, and used.)
Unisys management was never too bright, their pointy-hairness surpassed only by that of Commodore execs, IMO. And when they dropped their technology division, they fired almost every engineer. At least I can personally attest that every friend of mine that worked there, and knew two things about computers, was fired or left on his own. The execs and the salesmen stayed. Maybe they kept a couple of smart techs in Atlanta, but from what I've seen, from then on they've been hiring only inexperienced technical people (read: cheap interns) for when a project plan calls for that, and they fire them as soon as possible afterwards. And I've seen them blow projects, or lose money in penalizations, because they lacked competent techs to do the work, or even to timely warn their salespeople that they were being sold, and in turn selling, snake oil.
Today Unisys, the technology company, has been dead for over a decade. It is a company of salespeople, and they mostly trade with the Unisys name. You know, they deal with banks and airlines and the likes, customers who were buying Unisys stuff three decades ago, and still regard them as the company they used to do business with. They sell expensive software they buy from other companies (Microsoft being a major supplier, indeed), or consultancy projects where they hire experts in the market just for the event. And yes, the name is eroding, even as we speak. And there's not much left of it, again IMO.
That "ES7000" thing, well, it's a PC with 16/32 processors, large and ugly as a fridge, and it runs Windows. Which, by the way, does not seem to scale all that well on that many processors: I've seen several of those choke as application servers with just over 300 clients. To be fair, the application software was a hideous contraption that costs several hundred thousand bucks to license---so maybe the suckitude did not come from Windows entirely. Anyway, you may call the ES7K "innovative", but to me, having seen the stuff the old Unisys used to make, is only boring, and a bit sad.
It kind of makes a mockery of the whole anti-trust thing. If you don't say "we recomment Microsoft AssHat 2.0" enough times you are effecively fined.
Sun don't have "static partitioning" - what could it possibly mean, anyway? SF3800+ (ie, all partitionable hardware) support DR, so, dynamic repartitioning. Shuffling CPUs around on demand can be scripted (eg, "I need 4 more CPUs at night for the backup server; give them back to the database in the daytime". It's not straightforward - it's a complex reorganisation of two systems - and being trusted to scripts. Not something I'd like to plan my business around, really. But if you're so short of cash for a few more CPUs to be worth the cost of developing (and testing and proving) some scripts to switch CPUs around, it's certainly do-able. Just very expensive, compared to buying a few more CPUs in the first place. Of course, I don't know your situation, but if it's something like my guess, then my initial response would be to buy more CPUs for the backup server.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Not quite. Unisys would be unable to distribute GPL code that implemented the ideas covered by a patent, that they were aware of, and that the patent holder had denied the use of said patent.
That is, if you don't know it's patented, you still distribute. 'Cos, like, otherwise we'd all be paralysed.
If they own the patent, and then distribute GPL'd code, that's implicitly that the patent is liscenced under a liscence that allows the downloader a patent liscence suitible to fufil the GPL.
Thing is, that's a liscence to distribute the code. Not use.
See, funny thing about the GPL is that you don't have to agree to it to use the code covered by it. Actually, it's not funny at all, it's the norm, just years of (very porbably bogus) EULA's make that less clear. So all the GPL covers is distribution of the code.
But, a patent requires a liscence to 'use' the patented invention.
So, Unisys could do the following:
1) Patent an idea.
2) Impement the idea in code.
3) Release the code under GPL, and not mention the patent.
4) Let it grow.
5) Point out that they only gave a patent liscence to re-distributed the code, not use it, and charge for it's use. Once it's popular.
6) Profit!
Any explicit mention of the patent would make the situation clear - either by explict licence, estoppel, or clear that you don't have that. No mention of the patent makes it really, really, hard. That's the first patent/copyright GPL hack.
Now, consider what happens if they add a patented algorithm to a GPL'd codebase. The only liscence they can put the implentation under is GPL. But they can stick a patent liscence on top of thier implemention, that effectivly prohibits re-disribution by parties other than themselves. What happens then?
Section 7 does not apply, becuase the condition is not _imposed_ on them - they have chosen that patent liscence. (Semantic's, perhaps. Still, that's one to be settled by the courts).
So, they can offer it for download, and then anyone who does get the patented implementation from them can't redistribute. That's a second hack.
Or, another option - offer a royalty-free liscence to use and redistribute the patented implemention (in effect, giving the implemention all the GPL-type conditions). Great, you think, and grab a copy, and modifiy and resdistribute.
They then change the patent liscence. What?! Well, it's an explict liscence, and if it doens't say that it's irrevokable, or if it has a clause that lets them change it a bit, then tough. Estoppel doesn't apply - the terms were explicit, and clear.
There are probably other hacks that can be applied in a situation with patents, but that's more than plenty to be getting on with.
All your examples are suspectible to the same end-run that LAME and the XViD guys use - source distribution. Source code is almost (not quite, but getting there) universally considered speech or in other words a communication between humans explaining how to implement something - no different from a paper or book that describes a process. Thus distributing source code for a program that when compiled and run would implement/violate a patent is not prohibited by patent law, at least not yet. I'm sure there are lawyers itching for a new clause about "contributory patent infringement" or somesuch nonsense.
Note, this end-run does not protect the end-user who compiles and then runs the code, but hunting them down and extorting fees out of them is orders of magnitude harder and more expensive than doing the same for a nice big fat slow moving target like HP or IBM.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I also remember using an Intel 186 processor on some BTOS box---yes, it really existed, it was sold, and used.
Yep, I'll vouch for that.
I used to own an 186 upgrade card for an 8086 PC. It was an interesting little card. Had an 80186 processor on it, plugged into an ISA slot, and a ribbon cable that was terminated with a connector that plugged into the CPU socket after you pulled the 8086 chip out.
I never got around to installing it, so I can't say how well it worked.
Off of the top of my head, I know that Penn State, Bloomsburg University and Temple University use the Unisys mainframes. I supported a Unisys mainframe MCP at a major financial brokerage firm, where the system was used for small and medium size companies 401k processing. Just to reboot the system, we had to call in Unisys for support, since the Windows NT hardware discovery was terrible. The NT's environment didn't do much for Volume Management. All of the Unisys' configuration was done by the Unisys tech. Nothing was divulged to us at all. They had a dial-in option into our system which allowed them to even do remote updates, even though we didn't want it. Our yearly maintenace budget for this 4CPU server was in excess of $600K US, which we could have saved by porting to Solaris (at the time, the company didn't support or even encourage the use of Linux).
In addition to supporting the Unisys MCP, I was also an OpenVMS on VAX sys admin (think DCL, VAX Basic and VAX Cobol along with DECNet). The on-going joke was that I would always have a job, because of these machines. In the meantime, the other admins were working on E10K's, etc.
Big nostalgia rush here. I worked for Convergent Technologies from 1983 to 1986, in the CTOS engineering group. Our biggest OEM customer was, of course, Burroughs.
The machines weren't weird because they were mainframe inspired. Convergent didn't come from a mainframe background -- the founder, Allen Michels, was an Intel salesman, and the early engineers came from Xerox PARC and places like that.
The company was founded in 1979 or thereabouts. CTOS was weird because it was original. Nobody worried about Microsoft compatibility (they were just another tiny company) or Unix compatibility (a 1979 workstation powered by a 4.77 MH 8086 with 256k of memory could barely run a shell and 'ls' at the same time). We worried about how to make personal workstations that with super easy plug-and-play LANs.
The 80186-based NGEN computers were pretty sweet, just plug the modules in as you describe. But those modules were expensive.
CTOS machines eventually got drowned out by the rising market share of Microsoft and Apple. Convergent didn't have anywhere near as many third-party developers; I think that was a factor in their demise.