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Grokking SCO's Demise
An anonymous reader writes "You have already heard the news that the SCO Group's US$5 billion threat against Linux is effectively finished. It was the Web site Groklaw.net that broke the news and posted the complete 102-page ruling; after that, it was picked up by mainstream media and trade press.
In fact, it's Groklaw that has covered every aspect of SCO's legal fights with Linux vendors IBM , Novell and Red Hat and Linux users Daimler Chrysler and AutoZone ever since paralegal Pamela Jones started the site as a hobby in 2003. This feature does a great job of chronicling Groklaws' hand in the demise of SCO's case."
If, after looking at everything carefully, you conclude that the GNU/Linux people were right, how can you call what they say, "partisan crowd noise" ? Perhaps you need to remove that M$ beam from your eye. GNU/Linux people correctly identified the motives, facts and outcome of this trial in days. Then they meticulously documented every bluff, bluster and lie from the SCO/M$ PR people threw out over years in their criminal abuse of the judical system. How can anyone possibly hold the same level of credibility for M$/SCO and GNU/Linux advocates after all of that? This is only something you can do if you are a dedicated MicroSoftologist. It is completely irrational.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
SCO is dead!? I just bought a new SCO Source license yesterday for $699! Why wasn't I told about this sooner? Thanks a lot, guys.
Anyway, I'm still glad I have the peace of mind of fully licensing all of SCO's Unix intellectual property within my installation of Ubuntu. If you'd like this peace of mind, buy today at:
http://www.caldera.com/scosource/
Now does anyone know where I can purchase a rock that wards off tigers?
I'm a big tall mofo.
Perhaps instead of expending all that time, effort, money, and resources on suing the whole world (and causing the whole world to expend a similar amount of time, effort, money, and resources to defend itself), SCO should have concentrated on making technically superior products, marketing them effectively, and earning the rewards that come from making good business decisions. But no, they had to go play the lawsuit lottery. Well, playing that lottery is gambling and is no different than going to a casino and throwing millions on a Poker table. Maybe you'll win, but probably you won't.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Groklaw is the best thing to come out of SCO's mess. Thanks PJ.
The way TFA starts about the August 10th ruling, you could think it was a recent event. The author refers to the summary judgment decision of 8/10/2007.
Since then there was a trial, and currently the bankrupt SCO is waiting for the final judgment to be entered to appeal - mainly that year old decision.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Some folks are still willing to see SCO as the 'comeback kids' (Found from a Groklaw link from today
And, of course, McBride is still harping about how misguided all the 'naysayers' are. Ah, corporate message control - so consistent, no matter the insanity of what is said.
I guess that's the point of freedom - for every choice that can be used to help build something greater, there is also choice to harm others. It's too bad that so much freedom ends up being used to crush the freedom of others for minimal short-term benefit, like those of SCO (which in turn was at least partly on behalf of Microsoft's FUD campaign).
Ryan Fenton
Ryan Fenton
Umm, has anyone else noticed TFA is claiming the judge's ruling from over a year ago was made last week?
I met Pamela Jones a few years ago. She makes Cowboy Neal look like a fitness freak. Last I heard, she doesn't use Linux, though.
From the article:
Did Groklaw really have an impact on those court cases? Naaah.
I love Groklaw as much as the next guy, but this article is truly worthless; it just reads as worthless praise for groklaw without even so much as a particular.
Frank Hayes hasn't noticed that the August 10 ruling was for year 2007.
And SCO is a nice pelt to hang on the fence for anyone getting similar ideas. The SCO case was a stereotype of every piece of misinformation MS had ever put out about Linux and they got crushed. It's also a good example for companies thinking about getting in bed with Microsoft, which financed this whole charade. I wonder if Sun will ever live it down that they were part of the clown posse?
IBM showed a lot of foresight and got to dish out a little payback to MS over the OS2 incident. You can't buy that kind of advertising and then using it to tweak Redmond was priceless.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Groklaw was certainly informative, and it is nice to see major media give a nod of thanks to an internet site that had done their research. What I wonder is where is Groklaw to grok next?
I'd vote for Groking RIAA, big time.
Grok IP law and squelch that mess once and for all.
And since it the season, groking certain political parties (or all of them) would be nice.
I didn't even think about this until I saw the posting. In any even who really care expect for Microsoft. After all Redmond was actively supporting a fellow thief.
Even veals have more autonomy!
Pamela has taught us (well, at least myself) quite a few things about tech and the law:
* Legal matters may be messy, disgusting things, but in a perverse way, being a lawyer or judge often requires as much (if not more) logical and mental discipline than programming ever did.
* This crap takes time. Five years... five years! Just to throw out what folks who knew better (read: those of us who lived/worked/breathed Linux) saw instantly as an obvious cock-and-bull scam by a dying dot-bust corporation.
* There's a lot going on behind the curtain. Without Groklaw, Microsoft could have credibly denied being any part of the proceedings, and would've been almost perfectly insulated from the whole SCO mess. Now, they're painted with 98 shades of evil, and the tech community at large** has even more reason to reject them unless absolutely necessary.
* Most folks think that IT/Tech is pretty insulated and isolated from the usual crap that infects most businesses. Groklaw proves otherwise. As much as we'd like to be otherwise, we're just as mired and smothered in politics and legal crap as any other commercial endeavor.
I highly recommend Groklaw as a solid starting point for any CS student, perhaps as a semester or two of curricula... just to get the students to realize just what the hell kind of crazy world they're signing on to.
** I mean real techs who use multiple platforms, not "Em-See-Ess-Aaay's" who happily swallow Redmond's Kool-Aid (among other fluids) on a near daily basis.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Exactly how is this the power of open source? Looks to me more like the power of high priced corporate attorneys.
"So when Judge Kimball ruled this month that Novell, not SCO, owns the copyrights to Unix, we know he eliminated the basis for SCO's copyright claims against IBM, Red Hat and AutoZone, too."
That ruling was issued on the 10th August 2007. I know Groklaw readers are slow on the uptake, but a year?
What is this article doing that is great? At best it is a 100,000 foot view of the past 5 years...but there is no "chronicling" going on.
The information in this article is barely worthwhile to someone who knows nothing about the SCO case (and that type of person wouldn't care about Groklaw anyways), and has ZERO information in it for everyone else.
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
Like donating to the site. It's a massive amount of work that PJ has put into the site. So if you got a few bucks, donate. Sorry, but it has to be said and PJ won't say it.
Although many of us pointed out the question of Novell's
ownership of the actual copyrights at the outset, why isn't the
law structured to eliminate much sturm and drang by hoisting
this test out of the loop as an initial cutoff? Or were
the parallel lawsuits invoked without common sense
serialization just done for fun? I suspect the real reason
is that the motion practice follies made for good
billable hours...
It is kinda like how people say "we won" when their favorite sports teams win.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
How did IBM get payback on Microsoft?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Thing is, I believe that SCO knew it was doomed from the start, but did it anyway.
McBride still made millions of bucks off of the deal, as did most of SCO's principals. Unless/Until there's criminal proceedings for SEC violations, they probably don't care, and are only making noises for long enough to provide plausible deniability. In short - they got their dough, and they probably don't care what happens to SCO from this point on.
SCO lasted five years longer than it probably would have if it had simply died quietly as Yet Another Dot-Bust Carcass.
Finally, most corps know nowadays that getting into bed with MSFT is a sure recipe for disaster. PlaysForSure, HD-DVD, Windows Defender, OS/2, and numerous other smaller examples are proof-positive of just how badly you get burned in any partnership with MSFT... unless of course you're Microsoft. I think only NBC has managed to not get raped in a MSFT partnership (and even then, only because of NBC's vastly different market segments).
As for Sun? I think they simply got caught in the crossfire. They were looking to license SVR permanently so that they could protect (and eventually open-source) Solaris. Otherwise, they were (and are) hating life anyway, as market dynamics dictate that buying pricey Sparc-based servers is kinda stupid for most applications.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Maybe the work Grokking can be now referred to the lambasting of frivolous software patent lawsuits by SCO-like troll companies. We all hate SCO like trolls that all they do is make money by suing others with patents they own, but don't actually use because all the do is think stuff up on how things could work and then take advantage of the Patent Office's own weaknesses in approving 'my-dog-can-fart' processes. A big hi-five to my fellow Grokkers!
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
In fairness to Sun, Sun actually got something from their SCO agreement. They paid SCO for the right to essentially open source Solaris as some parts of Solaris were covered by their Unix agreements. The problem was SCO didn't have the right to grant Sun this ability. Only Novell has this right. MS on the other hand, paid tens of millions of dollars for things they haven't used yet. Maybe future versions of Windows will use parts of legacy Unix and the newer Unixware, but I doubt it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
And just how much did this little adventure cost all of us through these years? And who pays in the end for all the lawyers, disruptions, changed and shelved plans, and the rest of the collateral damage caused by this SCO debacle?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Didn't you get the memo? Comments are now like articles: people don't really read them. They are rated by how quickly they come out and how long they are.
It isn't the "spite-driven, FSF worshiping Zealots" who sound bitter, my anonymous friend.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Because I Grok this article and I'm really Groking Heinlein's stories.
I have always wondered who Pamela Jones is. This lady is very meticulous in what she does and I congratulate her. I have done an image search on Google and got some images.
But I am not sure the images I get in the search actually represent Pamela Jones. Googling my own name returns images other than mine!
Request: I am looking for a kind slashdotter to help me put a face on the name "Pamela Jones" of Groklaw.net.
Thanks.
The real turning point in the case was when IBM decided to fight SCO's claims and put Cravath, Swaine, and Moore LLP on the job. Cravath is very good; they say of themselves "Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP is known as the premier American law firm.", and nobody laughs. They're very organized and thorough. Cravath was the first firm to use litigation support systems (developed by IBM for an IBM case). They can't be snowed with documents; they'll put enough people and hardware on the job to deal with truckloads of materials when necessary. At times, the staff for a single case has filled a sizable office building. This is expensive, but it works.
It works especially well when the other side has voluminous but bogus claims. That's what happened with SCO. All SCO's claims were analyzed by that huge staff, checked, and countered. In the end, SCO had nothing left.
Groklaw reported on all this, but Cravath really did the work.
Didn't SCO accuse Pamela Jones of non-existence? That she was a construct of IBM's legal team or something? I can't recall the details, except I don't think we ever saw conclusive proof that she did exist.
Not that it matters. But I would be curious to know. It always struck me as unusual that a sharp female paralegal would be that interested in the fate of Linux or Open Source. Not competely implausable, but a bit strange nonetheless.
does anyone seriously think that all the brilliant legal and technical analyses come from a mid-twenties paralegal?
I find that hard to believe, particularly since some of the analytical papers are long and yet precise. All this writing - and there is lots of it on GL - takes quite some time to write, to edit, to back up with facts, to think through. Plus all the time it takes to scour all possible info channels, keep a team of volunteers working and coordinate it, keep up with tons of internal and external communication, keep up with keeping a blog forum "clean" with a heavy hand, keep up with the latest development in free and open source software etc.
While I believe there may actually be a Pamela Jones, however elusive she may be, I strongly doubt that she is the only one running this site. She will need legal advice on practically everything in the blog, given the litigatioous nature of its rivals, she will need a sophisticated back office system for data storage, analysis, retrieval and processing and a superior mind to keep all these aspects from falling apart, keeping her minions at bay and generally run a tight ship, both on the inside and the outside. The "biography" of said Pamela Jones most certainly gives no hint at these international leadership qualities, neither in elite education, nor in any previous jobs or projects.
She must be the only open source "leader", who does not appear in public. Bizarre, if you ask me, and I can only surmise that her legal knowledge and expertise wouldn't hold up in a 3minute chit chat with a legal mind.
Either that, or she is butt ugly.
Didn't Microsoft make "Services for Unix" a free download after paying SCO off? At least that was their cover story.
I was about to ask the same question. It shows the power of a free and open media... However the site could have been run on Windows running IIS, as far as most people would care. There is a general confusion among open source zealots about Open Source, Open Specs, Open Press, Open Government and Free Speech. Yes you can Have Open Source without Free Speech (just as long as your code does what the government wants your code to do, releasing the source is irrelevant) or you can have Free Speech without Open Source, as you will not be imprisoned for stating your views, however you could get legal trouble for releasing source code, but you are free to protest that action.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Daryl has of late said they will reap the benefits of the software they have recently put "10's" of millions of dollars into".
Instead, I believe they will reap what they have sown, but not to his vision.
Oh, I don't think the SEC has even started yet. Those things take time, and the SEC is waiting for the legal fallout to happen first. This is a typical pattern for the SEC as well, where they wait for all of the normal legal evidence to come out in the various lawsuits, and then add the final insult to injury in the end.
Too bad the SEC couldn't have saved the shareholders (*cough*) some grief by more closely investigating the pump and dump accusations. From what I've seen, besides the compensation on the part of the senior execs at SCO, the only other people who've made money on SCO were those who shorted the stock. Even that wasn't a fantastic deal due to the protracted nature of this legal fight.
I will say that this company seems like the ultimate zombie that just can't be killed. They've used up at least seven of the nine lives that should have killed them a long time ago, and yet they keep coming back for more. I'm really interested in seeing just how much longer they can last... and wondering if the creditors who are taking over the company ownership need to get their head examined for wanting to continue the lawsuits. Then again, who is so incredibly stupid as to loan money to SCO with the hopes that it will someday be paid back?
"The SCO Group 's US$5 billion threat against Linux is effectively finished. On Friday, Aug. 10, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball ruled that SCO doesn't actually own the copyrights that it was using to threaten -- and in some cases, sue -- Linux users"
"It's Groklaw that has published every scrap of legal and technical information available on the cases -- every brief, deposition and ruling, along with press releases, technical documentation and historical information"
"All that has made it easy for reporters, analysts and deep-thinkers keeping an eye on the lawsuits. We just filtered out the partisan crowd noise -- no mistake, this is a pro-Linux crowd -- and dug into that virtual mountain of legal documents. Everything was there, posted, transcribed, organized and searchable"
"Did Groklaw really have an impact on those court cases? Naaah. The impact was on the rest of us. That collection of documents gave SCO's suits a transparency that's impossible to come by with most IT industry litigation"
"For that, we all owe Groklaw thanks"
davecb5620@gmail.com
Vampires and monster movie lore has the creatures ever rising once the hero's attention has been shifted.
We need to keep after SCO. There was an article about how SCO is partnering with another company that they "trust."
We need to boycott EVERY company that does business with SCO.
SCO is a corporate cancer that must not be allowed to survive.
Get it here founder of Groklw
davecb5620@gmail.com
Just twitter.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
There was an AC who was bitter
That frosty piss belonged to twitter.
For twitter is boring
When he's karma-whoring
Ain't he a loathsome critter?
Ignore this signature. By order.
Well said, friend. I wish I had points to give.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Darl, is that you doing AC posts to Slashdot again?
"Services for Unix" goes back to 1999 before the SCO saga began, and MS had a Unix OS way back in the day called Xenix which they started developing in the 1970s. The latest variant of Services for Unix includes many modules like GNU and NFS that having nothing to do the legacy Unix that they acquired from SCO. Really if you wanted to develop Unix like compatibility you would develop from BSD which is more flexible and feature rich and no licensing required. Also Novell questioned in the lawsuit that if MS wanted to develop more stuff on Unix, their old AT&T agreements covered it so what were the payments for?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
While I hate to break the news to you, SCO is technically alive, could still be a general nuisance to the who computing business. Until a judge declares them irrevocably bankrupt, they are bought out for remnants and SCO managers are pounding the pavement for work, so is alive. I don't believe in kicking when they are down, but for SCO, I make the exception. Keep the presure on and finish SCO right off.
If SCO's lawsuit failed because Novell rather than SCO owns UNIX, does that mean Linux is now infringing on Novell IP rather than SCO IP?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Is SCO Finally dead? I got some 10 year old aged rum that I've been specifically saving for this day.
Well actually Microsoft used to be 98 shades of evil. Then they tried to make evil pretty for the MillEnnium. After that they grew to 2000 shades of evil. Eventually they became eXPerienced at being evil. Finally nowadays they've moved to a much broader form of evil. A VISTA if you will.
Besides, just as SCO has been proven to have done, Novell has distributed Linux under the GPL so they would have no claim anyway.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
SFU is a licensed port os System Vr4 running on Windows. It's not BSD based and never was. Also, remember that Xenix was sold to The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and Microsoft made agreements with them about what they could and couldn't do. SCO later sold all their Unix intersts to Caldera, and changed their name to Tarantella, and Caldera became the "new" SCO.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
What is most incredible to me is that Darl McBride and company will be able to walk away from this... humbled and humiliated publicly, but nonetheless able to walk away and try to do the same all over again. Everyone knows what they did was socially and economically unethical, and yet the corporate Old Boys' Network simply views what they did with a knowing wink and a nod. In the back social rooms, McBride will laugh and joke and reminisce with other CEOs about his stunt, and perhaps even be offered a few sage tips how he can improve his chances the next time. For people like this, there's always a next time because they never pay the full consequences of their actions.
People would be inclined to take you a lot more seriously if you didn't insist on that passe dollar sign thing. As it is, you're probable being voted up because you got first post.
It's like reading one of those posts by muslims who feel they must append "peace be upon him" to every single mention of their prophet. It just becomes unreadable after the first few lines, even ignoring the inherent comedic effect.
You do realize that creative spelling went out of style in the late 90s, right?
You might indulge into reading Erwan's table on Groklaw. SCO Litigation - From Soup to Nuts
If, after looking at everything carefully, you conclude that the GNU/Linux people were right, how can you call what they say, "partisan crowd noise" ?
Ain't nothing sacred about being right. People become partisan because we believe that there's something 'right' about that partisan attitude. Sometimes we're right. Sometimes we're wrong.
PJ is, in this case, both clearly pro-Linux and clearly right. She claims and I believe) that if things were coming out tha would have been clearly bad for the linux side, she would have documented it just as clearly (unhappily but clearly).
As somebody else intimated, pretending to be unbiased is one of the prime inauthenticities. Journalists (unfortunately) get taught to write like they're dispassionate (no matter how biased they are -- or are told to be -- about what's going on). It really messes up the people who buy that line.
That's part of the reason why I like (pseudo) amateur rags.... they'll actually say things like "We hate so and so. we think you should to, and here's why (no matter how sucky the reasons why may be). That way, you at least know their bias, and can read around it.
PJ is about the best I think we can hope for: She's open about her bias and attempting to produce the most clean record possible inside of that bias. Sge states her bias and her opinions, and then gathers together as much of the documentation a spossible so that you can check her opinions against reality.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
"* This crap takes time. Five years... five years! Just to throw out what folks who knew better (read: those of us who lived/worked/breathed Linux) saw instantly as an obvious cock-and-bull scam by a dying dot-bust corporation."
It's not done yet. Appeals are still a possibility. The probability is quite high, I think.
The thing is... the only reason it got this far is because IBM and Novell decided it was worth fighting (for business reasons), AND they had the money to Waste(!) doing it too. It cost them more than you can imagine.
Now, the problem with the legal system is you, me, my dog, my company and all it's employees could not pool our resources and defend against a law suit like this from a bunch of petty thugs that have convinced deep pockets to pay for the "lottery ticket" (or the FUD). Actually, this sort of thing Has happened to me in a previous company (different thugs, unrelated issue). We had to "fold", we could not afford to defend even though we had the better "hand".
So, yeah. We did learn from PJ. But hopefully what we really learned is that the Legal System is -Completely- broken.
Breaking News-
the CEO of SCO... still rich.
the head of Groklaw... still not rich.
Last laugh goes to... um, who, exactly?
Overstock.com and the Utah AG - It is perfectly legitimate for companies to donate monies to politicians to help further their political interests. There are also instances in which elected officials have accepted large sums of money to do favors for corporations. As I will be describing in this blog post, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff sold out the integrity of his office, as the chief legal officer of the state of Utah, for a mere $5,000 campaign contribution as a favor to Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK). Here is what happened: The Utah Attorney Generalâ(TM)s Office invited me to make a presentation at its 14th Annual White Collar Crime Conference In August 2007, the Deputy Attorney General Richard Hamp invited me to appear at the Utah Attorney Generalâ(TM)s 14th Annual White Collar Crime Conference after reading my blog and whitecollarfraud.com web site and watching my appearance on CNBC's Business Nation that aired in June 2007. I agreed to make my presentation for no fees and took no cost reimbursements, as has been my policy with all speaking engagements. In other words, my presentation at the white-collar crime conference did not cost the Utah Attorney Generalâ(TM)s office a single penny. About two weeks later, Richard Hamp contacted me again with an unusual request on behalf of his office. He asked me not to mention Overstock.com during my presentation, unless someone asked a question about the company during the presentation.... http://whitecollarfraud.blogspot.com/2008/08/overstockcom-nasdaq-ostk-ceo-patrick.html
"It's also a good example for companies thinking about getting in bed with Microsoft, which financed this whole charade."
Any company might be willing to sell out and turn into a throwaway "land mine" for the right price.
Companies are built by people, but they aren't people and if their owners decide to consider them expendable, they are precisely that.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
She was *born* in the mid-twenties.
Most people who shorted the stock will have lost money. When you take a short position, you have a very small window for the stock to go down before you have to buy it back.
This is very different from taking a long position, were you can hold out for years until the stock comes good.
... chairs are flying in Redmond.
Here be signatures
*Applause all around*
Then the court system is rotten to the core. :) :)
Luckily it isn't
How do you think a paralegal site should (and could) influence a court case significantly?
The courts must (and i bet they would) have decided the same way without Groklaw.
Of course Groklaw was sorely needed to dispel the fud and to keep concerned people informed.
It balanced SCO quite well, even with its 'partisan noise'
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Let the names of the "expert testimony" scumbags that aided and abetted the SCO scam; selling themselves for a few dollars at the expense of their good names. Two come to the top of the list: Marc Rochkind and Thomas Cargill.
May their names be soiled with SCO for all time.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
n/t
I am reminded of Laslo from Real Genius. Would SCO have more to show if they spent the money in Las Vegas, or on power ball lottery tickets?
Think Deeply.
Looks like they are still at it. However, it seems that the are now based in Pakistan, (SCOXQ.PK). I don't see Darryl's name anywhere but it looks like the same managerial skills are being applied. Stock is worth a whopping $0.22. Balance sheet is that of a dead company. Cash flow exists but could be best described as pathetic. On the other hand their web site, (http://www.sco.com/), looks like business as usual. They are even offering free downloads of Samba 3.0.24!
Right, the stock was run up intentionally by big investors in a "short squeeze".
Slashdot was full of "How do I do short?" comments so a lot of linux smarties probably took a bath on this one.
... and it could even be an interesting hypothesis, but I doubt it. PJ, while having a definite position, is way too even-handed to be a pseudonym for Stallman.
Finally, most corps know nowadays that getting into bed with MSFT is a sure recipe for disaster. PlaysForSure, HD-DVD, Windows Defender, OS/2, and numerous other smaller examples are proof-positive of just how badly you get burned in any partnership with MSFT... unless of course you're Microsoft.
Yep. That's why nobody partners with Microsoft any more and existing partners are doing everything they can to jump ship.
XBox is in a dog fight. Yahoo proposal vaporized. Vista is a flop. Now SCO returned $0. Guess Bill left just in time.
SFU contains various bits and pieces from OpenBSD. It was never a licensed version of SysV until the SCOSource thing.
To the thread starter, Microsoft is using it. It's now called "Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications" and is included in some versions of Vista.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The ".PK" means that they are "pink sheet" - penny stock, less than one dollar a share. The "Q" means that they are in bankruptcy. So the stock was originally called SCOX, then they declared bankruptcy and fell below $1 (I forget the order), and now they're SCOXQ.PK.
SFU is based on Interix, which in turn was based on OpenNT bought from Softway. It's true that Interix has OpenBSD userspace utilities by default, the kernel is System V based. You can also install the System V utilities optionally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix
I first used OpenNT about 10 years ago, and it was billed by Softway as "A licensed port of System Vr4 Unix running on Windows NT".
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Not according to this:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981205114447/www.interix.com/22flyer.htm (product page before MS bought them out)
They did promise they were working on being UNIX(tm) certified though.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Perhaps I'm missing something here. When did SCO have a major run-up on their stock?
From what I understand, SCO was one of the most heavily shorted public stocks ever. So much so that a number of even stock brokers who know what was going on with the lawsuits were discouraging clients from getting too aggressive on the stock in this way.
BTW, a short position can have a varying window that you need before you "buy it back". It all depends on the contract that you sign, although I would agree it tends to be in the range of a few weeks to a few months... not the years and years it has been with SCO lately. I do remember that shortly before it was delisted on NASDAQ, the price suddenly shot back up briefly, and there was quite a bit of speculation that it was due to some large groups of folks covering their short positions. That was about the only "good news" I've seen with this company since the lawsuit was initiated.
As far as the folks who were in a "long position" on SCO.... they're screwed. They now have a bit of computer history in terms of the paper their stock certificates represent, but only for collectors of that sort of esoteric historical document.
I say DRM, it serves no public good, creates no new innovations and at the end of the day doesn't even increase the profits for the media distributors anyway as the petty financial gains made are consumed by all the DRM overhead.
Most of the unix people seem to be going with Solaris rather than Linux.. Linux is definately around but doesn't seem to be strong in the commercial companies.
That's so not true it makes me wonder what partisan or corporate bias you bring to the table.
I've been employed in the financial industry for some years, working for large multinational banks and hedge funds on three continents. While Solaris does have a large installed base, every employer I've worked for, without exception, is actively migrating away from Solaris to Linux. Not all third party packages are ready on Linux yet (Reuters rendezvous and Kondor+ have been culprits in the past for requiring legacy Sun systems we would otherwise have decomissioned), but just about everything UNIX in-house is written to run on Linux.
Even Virtualisation on Solaris stinks compared to Linux and even *gasp* Windows. Xen and VMWare at least allows for live migration, while Solaris virtualisation won't offer migration capabilities until "sometime mid-to-late next year" (according to the Sun rep I spoke with at a Sun Virtualisation conference in London).
I'm not saying Solaris is dead, or doesn't have a place in a corporate environment (I administer quite a few Solaris 9 and 10 servers myself), but to claim "most unix people seem to be going with Solaris rather than Linux" implies a lot of wishful thinking, or I suspect a very small, cherry picked sample base.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I seemed to have missed the part about the judge reading Groklaw. What Groklaw did was useful and interesting, but to say they had a hand in the demise of SCO seems a bit over the top.
I wonder if Groklaw can find something useful to do after SCO? So far, when it is ventured into other areas, its record has been spotty. There was a lot of inaccuracies in its coverage of OOXML standardization, for instance--I'd often read things there, and then follow the references to the original sources, and find out that the Groklaw reporting was just plain wrong.
I hope Groklaw can turn into an accurate site for legal issues beyond SCO, and not just degenerate into another anti-MS site where accuracy is not important as long as the story is anti-MS.
I'm pro-SCO so this isn't good for me.
SCOX was at 0.66 during the week of 24 Jun 2002. It was at 1.09 the week of 10 Feb 2003.
After the lawsuits were filed, it went up to 20.50 on 15 Oct 2003.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If, after looking at everything carefully, you conclude that the GNU/Linux people were right, how can you call what they $ay, "parti$an crowd noi$e" ? Perhap$ you need to remove that M$ beam from your eye. GNU/Linux people correctly identified the motive$, fact$ and outcome of thi$ trial in day$. Then they meticulou$ly documented every bluff, blu$ter and lie from the $CO/M$ PR people threw out over year$ in their criminal abu$e of the judical $y$tem. How can anyone po$$ibly hold the $ame level of credibility for M$/$CO and GNU/Linux advocate$ after all of that? Thi$ i$ only $omething you can do if you are a dedicated Micro$oftologi$t. It i$ completely irrational.
SCO defrauded their own small investors through manipulating their stock over years. Significantly owned by Paul Allen, half owner of M$$, they insider traded and fraudulently stock split with the best of them. Next will be the 'bankruptcy game' when the rest of the small holder shares(if there are any left) will be simply 'cancelled'! New shares will be minted at the emergence, if any, from bankrupcy and these will be literally handed to the management group. Bet that Ransom Love, Paul Allen, and others will profit handily, again! May they all rot in Hell.
the computer and the keybrd is gone!!
But it is fair to say that our species would probably not exist without rape.
I don't see any evidence to support this, and you haven't provided any. It's possible that the human species may be a much smaller population without rape, but I doubt even that's true.
There's nothing to suggest our species isn't capable of maintaining a sufficient level of voluntary reproduction in the absence of rape, nor that it ever was incapable of it.
At most, particular individuals -- even many individuals from whole bloodlines -- may owe their existence to rape, but certainly not the whole (or even a majority of) the species.
Given the slander of every Linux user and FOSS contributor by SCO's employees, let's get started with 10 million small claims suits for libel and slander.
Andy Out!
That was immediately after the lawsuit was filed... and why nearly everybody in the "geek community" was so eager to short the stock. Clearly it was over-inflated at $20/share when all that really changed was the filing of the lawsuit.
It has since been delisted from NASDAQ due to the stock price falling so low, and with bankruptcy has eaten what little value may have remained.
... for a break from calm reasoned debate:
OK. So we've been following this saga for so long I can't even frakkin remember when it started. So much revealed via Groklaw. That is where the true value is. Groklaw diseminated valuable information gleaned from legal documents. Information that counteracted the FUD war, which was the whole purpose of the exercise. Anyone who followed the thing knows this, I think we have just forgotten a lot over the last few years of relative quiet.
Man. How do I celebrate this? I'm sure I can think of lots of ways over lots of time. Hmm.
Bitter and proud of it.
Yes. And it took four years to drop from $20 to below $1 for the delisting.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It's the open source method applied to legal research.
I've been unable to find anything that refers to Interix or SFU being a licensed port of System VR4. If anything, it seems to be making use of existing Posix subsystem and extending it to being... something useful. But I haven't found anything that implies any aspect of this comes from actual Unix pedigree (and Posix doesn't count). Do you have better insight / references to share?
Note the article's date: 18/08/2007! That isn't a mistake; I remember reading the article months ago.
I realize SCO is a juicy target, but I hope this won't be on /. again on August 18, 2009. I wouldn't bet on it, though.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
SCO v. IBM was filed in 2003, well after Phil Gramm's deregulation legislation was enacted. Essentially, SCO is Enron, but with a litigation theater complete with lawyers.
What we need is a Lewis Black rant on McBride and his cronies, along the lines of:
"Three people took a billion dollars. Three people, a billion. What were they gonna do!?! Start their own space program!?! 'Let's send the monkey to Mars, Dad!'"
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Enjoy:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=651859&cid=24683041
coupled with:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=562692&cid=23524480
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=573869&cid=23659029
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=563593&cid=23536795
On x86 yes, not on sparc.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy