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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?'"
Here is the timeline for SCO vs IBM and Linux: Click here
fuvoo: watch something
Sounds cheesy doesnt it
There is no sig
looks like ibm got the better of SCO
data... check
supporting information...check
patents...gotta wait till the courts are out on this one
copyright...check
liscensing...check
having lots of high priced lawyers.....priceless.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
In the question and answer session at the end of the keynote (44:30 minutes into the videostream), Love was asked about the possible confict over Monterey and Linux IA-64. (A mp3 capture of the transcribed portion)
...that SCO actually launched this case on their own behalf and with some merit?
I thought it was obvious from very early on that this was a proxy attack on behalf of Microsoft against its two main enemies, IBM and Linux?
Also, clear by now that the attack failed, with heavy losses to Microsoft.
The actual contents of SCO's case seem pretty irrelevant.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
...but why stop beating it now? Since the conclusion is pretty obvious now, the announcement I am waiting for is the final judgement on the SCO cases.
In the late 90's and early 00's, SCO was messing around with a product called LKP (Linux Kernel Personality) which was a method for allowing system calls from linux applications to the UNIX kernel.
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.
To the best of my ability to recall...
in 96-97, SCO and HP and Intel were all joined in happy hands developing what was going to become Itanium.
HP and SCO were going to merge their flavors of UNIX, as well - a move that fell apart (rumor has it) when SCO showed up to the table with something like 1/10th of the developers HP did.
Remember that it takes a while for Monterey-like deals to be created from a BizDev standpoint, maybe as much as 6-12 months - so it's likely that Monterey came about as a response from SCO's viewpoint as a substitute for the aborted HP collab. (A quick google for Monterey will turn up all sorts of anti-HP language circa 1998). IBM had nothing to lose, AIX was already a poor performer - heck up until 2000 or so the largest Sun reseller was IBM (one of the smartest things IBM did was embrace Linux).
And knowing SCO circa 1998 - I really doubt they thought of Linux as much more of a fad... a predominant source of income at that point being support contracts and services (NT 4 was the major threat to platform migration away from SCO at the time).
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
No, not really.
I'm working in Monterey, CA and there's not much cheesey about the place. Lots of fish though along Cannery Row.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yes, we all know the SCO party line, but the problem with it is the total lack of evidence two years running. Even the judge was amazed that SCO can't seem to bring up anything to back these claims in court. And when you look at the Project Monterey contract details, you see that SCO hasn't a leg to stand on.
SCO actually launched this case on their own behalf and with some merit?
Of course not. There was never any merit.
this was a proxy attack on behalf of Microsoft against its two main enemies, IBM and Linux
Actually, it started out as a way for SCO executives to bail out a dying company. They threatened IBM with a bogus suit, expecting to be bought out. When they weren't, they shopped it to MS as a way to continue to make IBM's life painful, and for MS to smear Linux.
Both McBride and Sontag have publically stated this - they were "amazed" that IBM chose to fight, instead of taking the easy way out, and purchasing them.
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.
IBM was supposed to use SCO's code to develop Monterey, and instead, they apparently used it to enhance Linux.
The word you're looking for is "allegedly", not "apparently". SCO alleges that this happened, but it doesn't appear that their allegations are correct. They have been asked to produce evidence that IBM took the code SCO provided for Monterey and put it in Linux. that's when they started saying IBM put code that IBM had developed but which allegedly (there's that word again) belonged to IBM because of some allegedly viral language in the license for System V. The problem is that IBM has explicit documentation that this is a misreading of the license and Novell who wrote the license backs them up on it.
The issue is really quite simple. SCO is claiming ownership of any UNIX code developed by any company with a System V source license, whether the software in question was licensed System V code or not.
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.
I wrote: ...code that IBM had developed but which allegedly (there's that word again) belonged to IBM because of ....
...code that IBM had developed but which allegedly (there's that word again) belonged to SCO because of ....
Obviously that should have been:
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. Everything else being said about this case is just rehashing of religious fervor and procedural issues.
Wow, Deja vu. IBM paid MS to code OS/2, and they instead worked on NT. maybe IBM just figured if it worked once...
"Unlike IBM, virtually none of these (Linux) software developers and hobbyists had access to enterprise-scale equipment and testing facilities for Linux development."
This was back in 2001.
Pardon me, but this is blatent nonsense. SGI had a significant push to put Linux on the Itanium Processor back in 2001. I don't believe that it was announced publically then, but it was a significant effort, and the NUMA stuff resulted from it (among other things). This is definitely Enterprise-class equipment, well beyond the price range for your average "hobbyist". And needless to say, this required Enterprise-class testing. I speak from direct experience, as I was involved with the project.
So this statement alone is blatently false, and here's some more ammo for PJ to shoot down SCO's claims.
Heck, 64-bit Linux appeared on Sun's 64-bit SPARC machines before SunSoft had completed it's 64-bitization efforts as well. This was back in the Solaris 2.7 timeframe, around 1998, IIRC. Most people would consider the 64-bit SPARCs to be Enterprise level as well.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Not that SCO has a leg to stand on concerning copyright issues, but SCO is now desperate to amend their complaint once again to say this is a contract dispute with copyright issues, which they feel would allow them to ignore the New York requirement (I assume because copyright violations are a federal issue).
Another funny thing is (one thing among the thousand funny things in the SCO case), that if SCO managed to convince the court (or jury) that their version of derivative works is the correct version (and thereby gain control over IBM's code), the Monterey contract also has this provision in it:
2.0 OWNERSHIP AND LICENSES:
(a) Joint Ownership
All IBM and SCO jointly created Project Work shall be jointly owned by SCO and IBM, including ownership of associated copyrights or confidential information. Each party shall be free in all respects to exercise or dispose of any or all of its ownership rights in the jointly created Project Work without accounting to the other party.
So, wouldn't the same interpretation of derivative works mean that IBM would now have control over UNIX Ware, etc., source (assuming SCO is using code developed as part of the Monterey project in their own products as they have the right to do), as well as negate SCO's copyright claim to IBM's AIX and Dynix code at the same time (per SCO's logic, AIX and Dynix would then be a "derivative" of the project Monterey code, which IBM has joint ownership of, and therefore unrestricted ownership rights to their own AIX and Dynix code)? One has to wonder where it all ends...
Of course, the above conjecture simply points out the ridiculous nature of SCO's definition of derivative works...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I would be interested in seeing something in print from IBM about Monterey being a stepping stone to Linux. The material I have states that it is a planned common UNIX for Power, IA-32 and IA-64 processors. Also nothing about Linux in the press release linked from the Groklaw article. Monterey was more to get AIX back into the mainstream then anything else. I have never heard any plan to "phase out" or transition AIX to Linux. They are both running on IBM systems quite happily now.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Yet.
lol, i cannot believe you went. i am really amazed. ill fix it up for real now,
m l but i forgot and put in the old page, default.htm, and its blank now.
all i had was a fucking shitty flash movie up, and it was suppose to link to www.theserver.cis.uoguelph/2100de/mfadock/dupe.ht
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
To add to my own post :)...
That clause would also mean that IBM would have the right to develop a POWER version...regardless of SCO's definition of derivative works or contract interpretation over SCO code use on processors other than Intel chips...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
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.
So, to coin MSFT's phrasiology "SCO Group believes that the SVR4 code they licensed from Novell/AT&T is even more "viral" than F/OSS licenses like GPL."
As MSFT's handmaiden in this battle with IBM over linux, SCO Group should have realized that their release of Caldera code under GPL would taint any suit against IBM. They should also have realized that the AT&T/BSD court battle of 20 years ago cannot be overturned just because they now have MSFT on their side.
The only marginally possible thing that could happen as an outcome to this SCO Group/IBM battle that could be harmful to linux is for the F/OSS GPL to be ruled invalid. This wouldn't help SCO Group much, but would take the wind out of the sails of all F/OSS efforts based upon anything but BSD. Which is exactly what MSFT would have wanted.
Not yet, but on lower-priced commodity servers running Intel that was the goal. It was to fend off the NT threat.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
As far as I can tell, the UnixWare product that SCO still sells is pretty much the same product that the old Santa Cruz Operation used to sell, both as a server and desktop OS. The fact that they position it purely as a server product is purely a marketting decision.
As others have said, SCO hasn't offered the court even poor evidence that any of that happened.
The trial doesn't start until November, so why should they reveal their evidence now? IANAL, but it makes sense that any litigant would want to wait as long as possible to reveal their evidence, in order to minimize the opportunity for their opposition to attack that evidence, no?
Another big thing to keep in mind that most people leave out is that Monterey, while cross-platform, was aimed largely at the IA-64 architecture with has nothing to do with SCO's supposed "expertise" with x86.
IA-64 was designed to couple the x86 architecture with a next-generation VLIW-like design. It turned out that IA-64's x86 binary compatibility would be a joke, but nobody knew that at the time Monterey was being designed. The focus then was on building a smooth upgrade path into Monterey for users of existing x86 applications. SCO was the leading provider of UNIX for the x86 platform, and the deal with IBM had *everything* to do with its x86 expertise.
JFS and RCU which were developed with ZERO input from SCO.
Well, we won't know that until we compare that code with SCO's code, will we?
The people responsible for the earlier timelines have been sacked.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
"JFS and RCU which were developed with ZERO input from SCO.
Well, we won't know that until we compare that code with SCO's code, will we?"
Well since SCO has the source to RCU and JFS they could show us any code that is the same.
Since SCO never produced a system that used RCU and even admit as much I would say that is a given. JFS was developed under OS/2 and then back ported to AIX. What SCO is claiming is that since RCU and JFS were added to AIX by IBM/Sequent that SCO now owns the code in RCU and JFS. So in this case unless you think that IBM signed over all rights to their code to SCO which Novell the company that wrote the agreement says it not true there is no need to see the code.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Al right, enough already. This SCO suit has become so absurd that no one is buying it anymore. It's time to drop the act, and admit the truth. ... so as I was saying, Linux is clearly a pirated version of SCO UNIX....
The whole SCO fiasco was just an attempt to cover up the true origins of Linux. If we could create the rumor that Linux was a pirated version of AT&T UNIX, then we wouldn't have to admit that it was really reverse engineered from the computers aboard alien spacecraft under study by project BlueBook in Area 51 of the Nellis Airforce base in Groome Lake, NV.
So there, now the secret is out!
Wait, who are those men in black suits on my front lawn? Wait, stop, what does that thing do?
****FLASH*****
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Many employees, such as Jun U Nakajima, were transfered from SCO to Caldera. So Caldera effectively did purchase the Old SCO server division.