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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!
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.
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.
Check out their 3d Visual Enterprise product. You would think that a 3D product would have some screenshots wouldn't you? Nope, it's just vaporware.
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.
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.
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.