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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?
Wow. This is the same Unisys as the "We have the way out" Unisys?...
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?
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.
a human being dealt with you like this, you'd be right to shun them. Why is a corporation any different?
Actually, corporations are treated as individuals under US law, IIRC. So i'm shunning them. Keep your nasty GIF patents where the sun doesn't shine!
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.
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 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.
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.