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SCO vs. IBM Battle Over Linux May Finally Be Over (networkworld.com)
JG0LD writes with this news from Network World: A breach-of-contract and copyright lawsuit filed nearly 13 years ago by a successor company to business Linux vendor Caldera International against IBM may be drawing to a close at last, after a U.S. District Court judge issued an order in favor of the latter company earlier this week.
Here's the decision itself (PDF). Also at The Register.
Here's the decision itself (PDF). Also at The Register.
Burn the remnants of SCO and then stir the ashes.
Somewhere buried in all of this was an opportunity for Netcraft to finally be right about something. Maybe that story has yet to surface, and will appear all in due course in tomorrow's feed bag.
SCO is never going away. Fifty billion years from now, long after the last human is dead, alien successors-in-interest will still be suing each other over it.
The groklaw coverage was so good. I know that PJ closed the site down. Did anything ever spring up in its place?
Have you ever used SCO?
I have. It wasn't a bad system. I didn't like it as well as Solaris, but it was stable and reliable and pretty well documented. For a long time, they had a good product and supported it pretty well.
It was kind of like Debian stable but not nearly as cutting edge.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
PJ and Groklaw would be a huge boon for slashdot if you could somehow reach out to her and bring her back.
SYS V needs to go open next, not that overloaded slowlaris, but lean mean SYS V
I was under the impression that the entire POINT of SYS V was for the major UNIX vendors to re-implement the guts of Unix as a clearly, enforceably, proprietary product (after the CONTU recommendations and the resulting copyright law changes explicitly extended copyright to software), then move to it and orphan the original development thread. (This might make opening it a hard sell to the members of the consortium.)
There were at least a couple issues with the proprietary status of the AT&T code:
One issue was that AT&T was still a government-regulated utility monopoly and there were some requirements about disclosing and releasing non-telephone-related inventions they came up with.
The big issue was that, before copyright applied and before software patents were hacked up (by recasting software as one embodiment of, or a component of, a patentable machine or process), the only protection was trade secret and the related contract law. Trade secrets generally stop being enforceable when the secret out of the bag (with some details about whether the claimant contributed to the leak). Bell Labs had shipped code to a LOT of educational institutions. When the U of New South Wales used the System 6 kernel code and an explanation of it as the two-volume text for an Operating System class, the textbooks became an underground classic. This, along with AT&T's benign-neglect licensing policies, led to the burst of little, cheap, generic UNIX boxes, as this was also when microcomputer chips were just becoming powerful enough to do the job.
Up to then a big barrier to entry was that every new machine needed a custom O.S. to deploy, and these were enormous, machine specific, and mostly in assembler. That made it an expensive, undertaking, suitable only for financial giants. But all but under 2,000 lines of Unix was in C, and the entire kernel, which included essentially all the platform-specific code as a subset, was well under 10,000 lines of code. If you had a C compiler and assembler for your new machine, it was a matter of a few man-months to port it and get it up and running. Essentially ALL the utilities and applications came right over. You didn't have to train users, either, because they all worked pretty much just like what they'd used in college.
The game was:
1. Grab a bootleg copy of the code.
2. Port it to your machine and get it working.
3. Go to AT&T and ask for a license "to port Unix to our new machine and sell it."
4. AT&T, as a matter of policy, completely ignores any "violations" you may have committed during the porting phase and cuts you a license at a very reasonable price.
5. You "port Unix in an AMAZINGLY short time" (like the ten minutes it takes to tell Sales to go to market) and you're in business.
6. You (with your new business) and AT&T (with their small cut) slap each other on the back and laugh all the way to the bank. PROFIT! for you. (profit) for AT&T.
7. Because of the policy in 4., everybody ELSE manearly everbody's king a new machine knows they can do the same thing. So many do. AT&T gets a rakeoff from ALL of them. PROFIT! for AT&T. Far more than if they went dog-in-the-manger, held up the first few for all the traffic would bear, and got no more customers for Unix.
And because of this, it was in nearly everbody's interest to NOT challenge the AT&T-proprietary status of Unix. And it stayed this way until SCO's management screwed up and altered step 4. (Even then the case turned on other issues, so it never did come to the point of attacking AT&T's claim that Unix code was proprietary.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Many of my customers are still using SCO Open Desktop. For new licenses and users I now deal with XINUOS http://www.xinuos.com/ . They acquired the assets of SCO from the bankruptcy proceedings. They are pretty good people to deal with. The best part is that I can use the same platform that I have used since 1981 when I was supporting AT&T 3B2 computers (with technical upgrades, of course). Open Desktop is the name of the System V 3.2 architecture. It is now time to stop denigrating SCO (the OS) and see it as a viable commercial alternative to Linux or xxxBSD, and is a stable, strongly usable platform for getting actual work done.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Darl McBride drove the public company that he'd been allowed to run into the brick wall that is IBM and took it to his brother's panel shop (legal firm). Both made a fortune out of the destruction. Massive legal fees and a golden parachute draining all value out of the company before bankruptcy.
Linux was just the distraction for an old fashioned two man scam.
Some Australians gave it a go because if it succeeded then SCO employees in Australia could be charged with "demanding money with menaces". SCO refused to deal.
SysV and the flusterfuck dyslexic script hackery behind SysV was a constant nightmare with a mountain hardware complaints leading back to it.
Even so the clusterfuck of rc scripts in most redhat derivatives was Red-Hat's creation. People aren't using init, via inittab, properly and now the reason cited to replace init is because the rc system, and the script hackery behind it created by red-hat is disliked. Keh?
Wouldn't a better rc system work better?
Here is a thought, why not learn how to use the shell properly so that shell hackery is not required. Or another idea, learn how to implement design patterns in bash/sh/ksh/zsh. Init is a simple elegant idea, people are arguing for it's removal because they aren't skilled enough writing *shell scripts*. It seems a bit silly to me that people who can't write something so simple have any business modifying the way the OS initializes.
It would be great to get Ken Thopson's opinion on the situation.
However, since we have the attention of many systemd advocates, can someone please throw a use case at me that init doesn't satisfy that systemd does? I'm really trying to understand why it is supposed to be better than something that is as tested as init. I don't mind using it, but why it is supposed to be so compelling?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The court has already decided many of the claims against SCO including copyrights and ownership. The claim in this order was about tortious interference: Did IBM, by hardening Linux and porting code over to Linux, maliciously interfere with SCO's customers and business relationships?
Like many of SCO claims, the tortious interference were ambiguous and ever changing and lacked any detail. The number of parties that SCO alleged that IBM had caused interference changed by the month despite IBM asking repeatedly (and the court ordering SCO to respond repeatedly) to name the parties and the detail the interference. It was as low as 3 and as high as 150 with 150 being a number that SCO only claimed because one IBM email mentioned that it had 150 new customers on Linux.
Similarily to other claims, SCO brought almost no evidence to the case despite years of discovery. In fact it was often contradicted by indisputable evidence that IBM brought. For example, SCO claims that IBM damaged SCO's Unix by communicating to their third parties like their investor, Baystar, that IBM was supporting Linux and that the third parties should abandon Unix. Almost all customers third parties swore to the court that they never had communications with IBM on the topic. The only party that acknowledged it had any discussions with IBM was Hewlett-Packard and they testified that the discussion did not change their relationship with SCO so there was no damage.
The theory that SCO offered as motivation was that IBM wanted to damage SCO by hardening Linux and porting Unix code. Former SCO employees testified against SCO in that they did not believe damaging SCO was ever the motivation for supporting Linux. Their analysis was that IBM was competing against the likes of Sun and Microsoft by offering a cheaper Unix-like OS on cheaper Intel hardware that was nearly as good or better than Unix.
There are still a few claims left but at this point the pattern keeps repeating: SCO loses on summary judgements because they never had a case.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.