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Increased Linux Use With SCO's Defeat Predicted
twitter writes "The defeat of SCO's infamous copyright attack has Forbes wondering if a GNU/Linux boom is upon us. They discuss how this will benefit Novel, IBM, Chrysler, AutoZone and Red Hat. 'The SCO Group frightened potential business users away from Linux with lawsuits demanding billions in royalties. But the litigious company's claims were shot down in a ruling that will likely boost uptake of the operating system.'"
A little company with a lot to protect in the PC market. 20 Mil is such a paltry sum though, they probably don't even remember making the donation.
God is real unless declared integer.
Please. The name of the company that makes things like Netware and did a deal with Microsoft is Novell, not Novel. It's not that hard to get right!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Statement from SCO Regarding Recent Court Ruling
The company is obviously disappointed with the ruling issued last Friday. However, the court clearly determined that SCO owns the copyrights to the technology developed or derived by SCO after Novell transferred the assets to SCO in 1995. This includes the new development in all subsequent versions of UnixWare up through the most current release of UnixWare and substantial portions of SCO UnixWare Gemini 64. Also, SCO owns the exclusive, worldwide license to use the UnixWare trademark, now owned by The Open Group. SCO's ownership of OpenServer and its Mobile Server platforms were not challenged and remain intact. These SCO platforms continue to drive enterprises large and small and our rapidly developing mobile business is being well received in the marketplace.
What's more, the court did not dismiss our claims against Novell regarding the non compete provisions of the 1995 Technology License Agreement relating to Novell's distribution of Linux to the extent implicated by the technology developed by SCO after 1995. Those issues remain to be litigated.
Although the district judge ruled in Novell's favor on important issues, the case has not yet been fully vetted by the legal system and we will continue to explore our options with respect to how we move forward from here.
http://www.sco.com/company/news/statement.html
Autozone got sued for switching because SCO alleges that there was a point during the transition when Linux applications are linking to unix libraries. Daimler/Chrysler got sued because they didn't respond within 30 days to a letter sent to the wrong address and, eventually, SCO alleged that when DC said "we are not using Unix" they didn't answer the question "which servers are running Unix" and SCO claimed that they had audit rights to Linux usage. For the latter two points, the Michigan state court sent SCO packing with another expensive goose egg.
having read the article, I felt it was either thrown together or built from pieces of a larger article. The sections just didn't flow very well and there was no depth to any of it. IMO, this seems to be a poor hack at getting something regarding this news into their content.
Notice that they totally missed that Microsoft had put $15M into SCO for a UNIX license and Sun put in $10 million for their UNIX license. Now, it turns out that SCO does not own UNIX and though they were allowed to sell licenses, they were legally obliged to pay 95% of those fees to Novell. IMO, this is atleast as important to the story since both these companies are still around and still fighting against Linux. Not to mention that Novell has some legal issues to deal with related to those licenses and their validity. As the owner of the product, do they not have the right to void such licenses since they were never paid?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I *did* short it...back in 2003, but sold in 2004. Made a chunk of cash doing so, too. I'd have made more cash if I'd kept those shares until today, but it took a long, long time to get there and so in the end, it would have only been a marginal investment had I kept it longer. Basically, the stock didn't move for three years as the only people holding onto it were hanging on for dear life, hoping for a miracle.
The investment community decided that the case had no merit in 2004. You can see that in the stock price. SCOX has been a shitty investment in either direction for years.
The cake is a pie
In Autozone, one of the things SCO is alleging is that Autozone could not have replaced their SCO Unix system with a Linux system without illegally using (or reverse-engineering) their libraries. The case was stayed pending the outcome of IBM, Redhat, and Novell. Now that it has been shown that Novell owns the Unix copyrights, it will limit what SCO can claim. To proceed, SCO would have to show that the libraries in question are under their copyrights and not Novell's or anyone else's. After all, a lot of the libraries used in Unix and Linux share a common lineage like BSD, GNU, etc. If the libraries were reverse-engineered, SCO would have to show how it was illegally done as reverse-engineering is not illegal per se.
I can see that if it gets to discovery, SCO will show the same ineptitude in code review as it has shown these last several years.
SCO: See, right here, Autozone uses ncurses, which is a rip off of our curses library!
Autozone: First, ncurses came from the GNU project. Second, curses came from BSD.
SCO: So you admit you stole our code!
[Autozone laywer bangs head on table]
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It was actually a bit of a boon to the likes of RedHat and Novell.
I work on embedded linux for a living, and all of the customers I have done work for switched from a "roll-their-own" (usually based on an existing freely-available distribution) model for their embedded solution to buying from RedHat or SuSE. The impression that investors and decision makers got was that it was worth the per-unit fee to go through one of them just to avoid the legal hassles down the road.
Now, though, I'm already transitioning an embedded linux appliance from SuSE to Debian... The company doesn't want to pay $200+ to SuSE for every box they ship anymore.