Slashdot Mirror
The Microsoft/SCO Connection
rocketjam writes "CNET is running a long question-and-answer format article which takes an in-depth look at the relationship between Microsoft and SCO and the financial support SCO has received both directly and indirectly from Microsoft in their ongoing litigation alleging that Linux violates the intellectual property rights they claim to hold on UNIX. The article details the money Microsoft has paid to SCO to "license" UNIX as well as the role they played in BayStar's $50 million investment in SCO in late 2003. Microsoft paid SCO $16.6 million for a UNIX license. The only other company that has come close to paying SCO that much money for a license is Sun, who paid $9.3 million to license UNIX for their Solaris operating system."
It's nice to know there is a connection, but nothing out of the blue. Corporates are known to use lawsuit to 'retard' competitors, and there are enough memos from MS that suggested they don't really like Linux. How about FUDs and some creative TCO analysis? Those are equally damaging.
Wasn't it not long ago that we see Google 'embraces' Firefox by having www.google.com/firefox? And what came with this? People started suggesting that Google would of course support anything that kills IE since MS is now attacking Google's search market.
It's almost as exciting as a lobbyist who 'invested' $xxx million in a presidential campaign so that certain laws can be passed.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.
He who controls the spice... Oh, wait.
of course this is to be expected. i mean, microsoft, though they may not admit it, knows that linux is a big block in the way of their domination of the software market (how many sane people use microsoft on any kind of serious server?). it's not that M$ is evil either, they're just another capitalist corporation. just because they've been hugely sucessful doesn't make them evil. but they are ruthless and that's probably how they got to the top.
I'm against picketing but I don't know how to show it.
MSFT and SUNW have plausible deniability in that they can claim the payments were for SCOX licenses.
As deniability goes, it's not very plausible, but as far as the law is concerned, it doesn't have to be. As long as the words on the paper are there, you don't even have to keep a straight face while reading them.
It's a shame M$ feels they have to attack Linux in this way. They may actually win some support from the tech crowd if they fought the battle based on the quality of their products. I think we are more likely to see the second coming first though :o) (please don't mod me down for mentioning religion)
I can't help feeling that M$ is a company that can't decide whether they want to cater to the server market or the home market when it comes to Windows.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I hope you all at least consider that MSFT paid 16.6 million for the SCO Unix license, just to avoid lawsuits from them, with no "evil plans" againstLinux whatsoever. Of course, when they saw the whole affair unwrap last year, it surely made them smile (for a little while at least). But maybe (MAYBE) it wasn't intentional... SCO did it all by itself (Hey look! Big companies give up big money easily! Lets continue!). Sun gave them 9 millions and nobody is accusing them...
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
By redefining the UNIX rights, Microsoft hopes to quell the growth of UNIX family operating systems, of course.
Why Microsoft doesn't just embrace the UNIX family and not fight it beats the hell out of me.
Take a Linux distribution (or BSD, or Darwin, or whatever), place a Windows GUI on it, port their apps so that anyone can buy Office (profit!), inherit stronger security from the UNIX model, and add classic Windows support with their Virtual PC/Virtual Server technology they bought from Connectix.
Perhaps they feel that are in too deep to change.
"Hear that, Mr. Gates? It is the sound of inevitability..."
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
... are there that could potentially be threatened by SCOs litigious ways? It makes sense for any company (MSFT, SUNW etc) to evaluate their risk and cut a check accordingly.
If there were other OS vendors that went through the same evaluation I'm sure we would see more payments to SCO along identical lines.
This is a non-story.
You mean a company that's losing business to Linux (MS) might be helping another company (SCO)that's also losing users to Linux?
Sort of like "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"?
Who'd a thunk it!
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
SUN paid 9 mil for Solaris and Microsoft paid almost double that and yet MS doesn't even have a real UNIX OS product. I agree, that "licensing" money was really spent in something else.
[alk]
isn't there already some "splainin" to do seeing as they are open sourcing Solaris which supposedly they had to pay to use? I know I'm missing something but so far this translates to:
"We don't have to pay SCO, we just want to"
to me.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Ethics have nothing to do with antitrust. If SCO's license posed no threat to MS, and Microsoft had reason to know it, then there might be a case. If MS had reason to believe that SCOX might have some valid foundation for suing, no matter how tenuous, or even had some reason to fear that SCO might be able to create a suit aginst MS and pursue it for a long period of time, then the company would have been perfectly within its rights to pay protection to SCOX -- and to refer it to other investment companies, just to get it out of the corporation's hair.
Given that SCOX is the original home of the litigious bastards, that seems to me to be a completely reasonable fear. Better to pay out a few megabucks and be rid of the flea than try to clap it and create a monster. (Think Linspire. Microsoft won every case that counted, but Linspire still wound up the winner.)
Because Sun hates Linux nearly as much as Microsoft.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
In addition, SUNW doesn't have a monopoly. In US law, there are lots of things that are legal for a competitor to do, but illegal if that competitor has a monopoly (or even a majority share of the market, in some cases).
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
> ...in their ongoing litigation alleging that
> Linux violates the intellectual property rights
> they claim to hold on UNIX.
While The SCO Group has repeatedly made such allegations in the press they have never done so in any litigation. Their statements to the contrary are lies.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
SCO is not going after Open Source, they are going after Linux. BSD has already gone through this type of thing with AT&T in the early 90's, and they ended up changing a few suspect lines of code, and 4.4BSD is 100% free of AT&T code, since they changed it because of AT&T's suit. So no, they can't go after Apple or any BSD-based kernel.
....
/. rather than 'real' people" :-]
But why are the majority of people[1] not suprised by this? when will we be suprised at something MS does[2]? The more I see of MS the more Antitrust looks like a training guide.
Jaj
[1] "People" as in "the posters on
[2]Other than opensource windows.
Not to knock slashdot, but most people who browse slashdot already have some negative feelings towards microsoft and don't necessarily feel that they practice the most responsible business practices. Its nice to see a more "mainstream" (read John Q. Public can't use a computer might read) is carring a story like this.
At least one vendor (IBM) looked around at what SCO was claiming, said "you have to be kidding" and realized that if they let SCO get away with their little extortion scheme(let's call it what it is -- i am going to sue you so that you buy my company isnt exactly a business plan) then there will be a lineup of equally baseless lawsuits.
While it is certainly true that IBM has the financial resources to cut a cheque to make SCO go away it will only encourage other bottom-feeders to line up at the trough(sorry for the mixed metaphor) and that would make for a constant distraction.
Even a company the size of IBM can be impaired by a barrage of deposition requests, email hunts, paperwork diving expeditions, etc.
Don't think that IBM defended the lawsuit because of some political stance in favour of Open Source. They defended the lawsuit for pure practical purposes. They saw that the long term costs of the lawsuit went far beyond the $100,000,000 (for sake of argument) that it would have taken to make SCO go away
Not that I disagree in general, but:
This doesn't really dismiss what you said---the opposite, really: it says even this guy found it blindingly obvious what MS was after.
I'm not sure why anyone is suprised though. This is MS. They have a history of fighting dirty and using their wallet to get their way. However, people need to see that it's not the government or the courts that are going to stop the problem, or they probably already would have. It's a competitor who also plays by different rules, ones against which MS can't compete. This has been said repeatedly as well.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
SCO did report that MS had bought a UNIX license (and withheld the name of the other company, which turned out to be Sun, which bought one). They claimed it as a success of their licensing program. So, while SCO has lied about practically everything else, this actually went their way (since MS actually wanted to fund them).
This whole thing has been based on a couple of grains of truth which, while they don't mean what SCO wants them to mean, can't be completely disregarded. If there weren't any truth to anything SCO says, the case would have been dismissed immediately. There's just not enough truth to what SCO says for them to get anywhere.
We have police and jails in order to get criminals off the street and to discourage further crime. The idea is to convince your potential criminal that they are likely get caught and suffer great harm if they carry their intentions out and rob that 7/11.
In the case of Corporate crim and especially in the case MS it does not work this way. MS gets caught, found guilty but then is rewarded for their crimes by keeping the profits of their crime.
As long as the law isn't willing to punish the guilty then we should expect to see more crimes by the corporate class.
evil is as evil does