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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."
Let me guess... they're embracing linux and having 50 developers workingg on it as a place to embed submarine patents?
Is Unisys still in business? They were so clueless, they didn't realize "The power squared" means you have less of a company then when you started when you take half a company and square it!
Unisys is trying to survive any way it can. They are a dying dinosaur of a company who has always dreamed of being IBM.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
Wow. This is the same Unisys as the "We have the way out" Unisys?...
Granted that Unisys makes crappy code (I cite the Bally Fitness credit card processor system built by them that 98% of the Bally fitness employees I've talked to complain about as proof, anyone who goes to Bally fitness might know what I mean).
So in going open source, Unisys is planning on developing crappy code for Linux and souring the reputation of the OS everywhere. To Microsofts gain.
To quote Admiral Akbar once again, IT'S A TRAP!!!
...in bed
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!
Most of the comments so far have been along the lines of "UNISYS IS TEH EV1L!!!" but I'll break from the trend.
The dynamic partitioning stuff strikes me as very useful. I'm on some large Solaris machines here with static partitioning; if the Unisys boxen can shuffle CPUs around to adapt to load, that'd be pretty damn cool.
They might actually have some interesting products to offset their general cluelessness.
No.
That's it, really. Patents are out of the scope of the GPL. The only way they interact is that if you don't have the rights to disribute the source (e.g. by patent liscence), you can't distribute the the binary.
It's oft talked about that patent might be a method of getting an end run around the GPL, and maintining restrictions on GPL'd code.
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.
There's no point in applying some ideological purity test to Unisys. As Rob pointed out, they speak with forked tongue. Not unlike IBM, who claims to be investing billions in Linux, but recommends Microsoft ® Windows ® XP Professional and generally assumes Windows is the only OS on the planet when they're not putting on their Linux act.
Unisys exists to make money, primarily by selling to big, dumb organizations that have a poor understanding of technology. If Linux is trendy they'll sell Linux. They don't care what slashdotters think. Nobody reading this will buy or recommend anything from Unisys, no matter how "nice" they act, because they simply inhabit a different sphere.
This idea that Unisys "sinned" by asserting their patent rights and should now beg for forgiveness is childish. Companies are moving to exploit their intellectual property. Read Rembrandts in the Attic if you don't understand this trend yet. You think they're going to carve out an exception for free software, when that free software is being used by businesses to make money by infringing patents?
Quit attributing moral good and bad to profit-driven companies. They are all essentially running the same algorithm.
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...
The marketing department at Unisys has a lot to learn. Last October, they ran an ad that said:
We helped JetBlue Airways do something unique with their data: treat customers like people.
Unisys
Imagine it. Done.
This wasn't a terrible ad, except that they ran it right after the JetBlue scandal. It was like they were completely out of touch with what was going on in the industry. I couldn't help but send them a little message asking if I could work for their marketing department, since there was no possible way I could do any worse than the one they presently have.
See, the difference between corporations and a community of people is that:
(a) There is no single atomic point where a "partner/foe" evaluation is made.
(b) Communities actually care about percieved relationships and treatments, and have a long memory. Every bias and irritation from years of experience comes out, because there's no requirement to "present a corporate front".
(c) If you have screwed people over quite a bit, you will pay for it for a long, long time in attacks, even when unjustified. Microsoft screwed a *lot* of people over for a long time (not that they've stopped). As a result, a lot of people really don't like Microsoft, and will bash them for anything they do (take SP2 as an example).
This means that there is no "person" who Unisys can win over to win over the open source world. Not ESR, not RMS, not Linus, not Perens, Lessig or PJ. It will take a long time and a lot of nice treatment for a long time, and probably be very discouraging.
If you want someone to support your platform, to write documentation for it and to avoid introducing compatibility issues, and they are doing this in their *hobby time*, then they have to feel rather friendly toward you. Unisys has spent years screwing people over in a rather unjustified manner. They wasted the time of *many* open source developers and users in the form of removed and disabled features, legal problems, anguished discussions, reformatting images, information campaigns, debugging software ported to PNG and other alternatives, and so forth.
So, is it impossible for Unisys to get OSS people to like them? No. Are there people in the OSS community that don't have any problem with them? Sure. Is it going to be long, hard and expensive (much more expensive than all the money they got from the GIF licensing stuff)? Probably.
May we never see th
GIF was developed as an image format by Compuserve (I think). They used LZW compression, which was a Unisys patented compression algorithm, but they never notified, let alone licensed LZW. Unisys, being the mainframe shop it was, didn't even notice for a long time. When they did, they pressed the patent issue.
The important point is that they didn't press the LZW patent because of it's use in GIFs, per se. They pressed it because it was an important patent to them at the time for other compression purposes. Unisys was big in air-traffic control and a variety of other communications applications that used LZW for dynamic, real-time, streaming compression (which is about the only application it was still good for when you look at the other algorithms available, even then). If they didn't press it on LZW in GIFs, they could have lost the ability to press it in those other lines.
Remember that uncompressed GIFs did not infringe, they asked only for licensing on commercial use, and as the article states they did make not-for-profit licenses available. Questions like "What if a licensed program made the GIF, but I editted it with Gimp" made no sense to them. (Besides, Gimp didn't exist then either ;)
I was a Unisys systems programmer at the time, and I didn't know much about "open source", so I suspect Unisys management didn't have much of a clue either. I seriously doubt they had (or even now have) any idea how the community reacted to that issue. No one ever really grasped that it was Compuserve's fault for pushing a patent encumbered format (with the patent held by someone else) as a "standard". Unisys was caught by surprise and acted in the way most any company would at that time.
Times change. I learned about open source (and TCP/IP, and Unisys' brand new C compiler, and how a 36-bit word architecture complicates a C libarary implementation) by porting a subset of NCSA's httpd server to OS/2200, partially because the GIF issue introduced comp.sys.unisys to open source. (iirc, this was when Mosaic was the browser and the "graphical web" was barely graphical at all.) Some time later, Unisys demo'ed their ClearPath model for us and said "they were even working on a web server for it". I wasn't there, but a co-worker donned a medieval french helmet and said "I doubt if we're interested. We already have one, you see!"
So Unisys and I went different ways (although I did get a "wayback-machine call" for Unisys help last week). I moved on into UNIX, self-taught by downloading Slackware and trying to get it to do anything on Token Ring. Unisys moved on to buy Burroughs and into the "datacenter push" of Microsoft. One of us apparently learns quicker ;) Still, the 2200 was seriously unstoppable from both a hardware and a software standpoint, and even attemting to use MVS or anything else on the "newer" IBM 390 made me want to run screaming to the hills.
If Unisys has woken up, they have the potential to do incredible things with hardware and helping them release that hardware from the constraints of Windows is a huge opportunity for both Unisys and the Linux community. If the haven't woken up, then they will once the see what Linux can do on their hardware. I was on vacation when they demo'ed the ClearPath and heard I had already written a web server on their previous (non-Intel) hardware and the day I got back a Unisys SE was waiting in my cube to ask "how'ed you do that!". He was fascinated and ate up everything about open source I had to offer (sadly, not much at the time).
Bottom line: What does it hurt us to give them a chance? If they screw up, it's going to be their fault. We've already shown that we can help any company that really wants to play nice. If we snub them for what we see as a past slight to open source, when they probably didn't know what open source was, we present ourselves as being petty about something that we still, as a community, fail to acknowledge was a situation not of their own making.