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More on IBM's Project Monterey and SCO
karvind writes "Groklaw has posted another interesting article about AIX/Monterey/POWER research. The primary purpose of Project Monterey was to provide a stepping stone to Linux. IBM clearly stated this in promotional and technical materials, some of which SCO participated in publishing. It was always the plan that Project Monterey would be for POWER and SCO knew about IBM using SVR4 on POWER as far back as 2001. The article asks (and answers) some interesting questions: 'Where is the monetary damage to SCO? Where is there copyright infringement? Was SCO fully aware how quickly Linux would develop, that it would replace Unix, or did it take them by surprise?'"
What heavy losses to Microsoft?
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1. Loss of a potential weapon against Linux, namely the "you stole IP" accusation.
2. Loss of face. Microsoft paid SCO, SCO turned out to be little better than shakedown artists.
3. Kudos to the opposition as a "worth opponent". Linux survived and became much stronger.
Basically, the SCO case sealed Microsoft's fate as the loser in the commoditization of operating systems. Their only remaining defense is software patentability and if that battle fails in Europe, they are, basically, screwed.
Heavy losses, yes.
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"patents...gotta wait till the courts are out on this one"
Yea we have to wait but the odds are pretty good that IBM has this locked down. IBM has the patents on just about everything.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Except there is no evidence at all that IBM used SCO's code to enhance linux, to date there has not been one shred of code that suggests this.
Perhaps IBM wanted the fight. They have invested considerably in Linux. Winning this battle - which they must have known they would - has made that investment a lot more valuable.
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The people who are now in charge of SCO saw that their business was failing. Their only workable solution was to get bought out and quickly. They looked at all their existing contracts and decided that they could tilt at IBM and get some attention.
This is completely unrelated to their expectations in the Monterey project, when different people were running the company with different goals.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
"The issue is really quite simple. IBM was supposed to use SCO's code to develop Monterey, and instead, they apparently used it to enhance Linux."
Except they have yet to show a single piece of SCO code that IBM included into Linux. If your statement is true then SCO would not need any source code from IBM to prove their point. They have the source to Linux and the source to Unixware. So as the man said, "show me the code".
The last time I checked SCO was claiming that SCOs owns code that IBM wrote and that IBM put that code into Linux. Hence the reason that they need the source for AIX.
I would say your answers are out of date at best.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If SCO was so anti-linux, why would they make a move to incorporate linux into its own product. That step right there discounts any claims they might have regarding linux code source.
No it doesn't. They weren't incorporating Linux code. They were making a compatibility layer so you could run Linux apps; BSD has one too.
But the main thing is: SCO was not at all anti-linux until Darl McBride entered the game as new CEO after Ransom Love. SCO was a Linux distributor, forchrissakes!
(And that, however, may invalidate any claims they had on Linux code, since by distributing, they are bound to follow the GPL)
However in reality they don't have any claims on Linux. Despite what they've been repeatedly telling the press, they haven't claimed in court that Linux infringes on their Unix copyrights. What they claimed in court was that IBM couldn't contribute to Linux since they had a Unix license. (Although the contract seems to indicate otherwise).
They made some other claims, too, but in reality the SCO-IBM case has very little to do with Linux at all. IBM's counterclaims regarding SCO's public statements and GPL violations are actually the more directly Linux-related things in this whole mess.
Perhaps IBM, decided to crush and utterly destroy a company trying to manipulate them through baseless claims.
Maybe IBM was even smart enough to realize that tSCOg was hoping to be bought out, and decided *not* to play their little game, even though the financial cost was higher, in order to set an example for others who might think they could try something similar.
IBM got bit in a similar way, back in the early 90s, when a gentleman by the name of Olaf Soderblom claimed he'd patented Token Ring and extracted a $1M license payment from them. Thanksfully, that networking technology is dead (or should be by now)
At least SCO knew about IBM using SVR4 on POWER, I never could get caldera running on anything so esoteric as electricity though. I had to read through the cheap book supplied in the boxed set, then barely get it running with my own human generated bio-chemical and electrical imagination unit.