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SCO Is Undeniably, Reliably Dead (fossforce.com)
An anonymous reader writes: On Friday, IBM and SCO filed an agreement with the US district court in Utah to accept a ruling of dismissal of the last remaining claims by SCO against IBM. Says the linked article, in line with our most recent other mentions of the long-due death spiral:
This agreement wasn't unexpected, and in fact, came down right on deadline. On February 10, I reported that Judge David Nuffer with the U.S. District Court in Utah had ruled to dismiss a couple of interference claims SCO had filed against IBM, and had ordered both parties to reach an agreement on whether to accept the dismissal by February 26, which was Friday. In all likelihood this is the last we'll ever hear from SCO as its current owner, the California based software company Xinuos which now owns and markets many of SCO's old products, will probably remove what's left of SCO from life support.
In that case I make claim to all of linux.
Here we thought unicode support was just broken in comments and discussion, apparently it doesn't work anywhere here...
I know this came up in the discussion back on February 2 after someone accidentally bought slashdot, but apparently it still isn't that important a month later...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
March 2016, still UTF8 errors on /.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Where do I send my $99 licensing fee?
Trolling is a art,
And we owe this 30 year court battle over Linux to... copyright law! I'm sure we all feel glad our work is protected by such an efficient and fair system!
I can't believe this went on for so long. What is it, 14 years?
Anybody remember that 'We own all your code' picture?
Sianara, bitches!
This site has been covering the trials of SCO for ten years. http://slashdot.org/tag/sco
I made a killing shorting their stock about 10 years ago when they first sued IBM. Too bad they aren't still around to do more stupid things I could make money from.
Has Netcraft confirmed it?
That is all.
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: SCO is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered SCO community when IDC confirmed that SCO market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that SCO has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. SCO is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict SCO's future. The hand writing is on the wall: SCO faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for SCO because SCO is dying. Things are looking very bad for SCO. As many of us are already aware, SCO continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeSCO is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeSCO developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeSCO is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenSCO leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenSCO. How many users of NetSCO are there? Let's see. The number of OpenSCO versus NetSCO posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetSCO users. SCO/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetSCO posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SCO/OS. A recent article put FreeSCO at about 80 percent of the SCO market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeSCO users. This is consistent with the number of FreeSCO Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeSCO went out of business and was taken over by SCOI who sell another troubled OS. Now SCOI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that SCO has steadily declined in market share. SCO is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If SCO is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. SCO continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, SCO is dead.
Fact: SCO is dying
Don't get your britches tied in a knot just because I dare to mention "systemd". It doesn't matter whether you like it, hate it, are neutral about it, or never have a reason to use it. When we look back at the SCO saga, and when we compare it what what systemd has done to Linux and the Linux community, I think we can say with certainty that systemd has been far more disruptive and harmful to Linux than SCO ever could have been.
The SCO nonsense brought legal uncertainty to Linux, but it never brought the technical quality of Linux into question. Regardless of who was considered the owner or creator of the code was irrelevant to Linux users; their Linux systems would work just as well either way.
Systemd, on the other hand, has adversely affected many Linux users from a technical perspective. The numerous bug reports across all of the distros that have adopted it, the painful cries for help on mailing lists and in IRC channels, and the angry outbursts in blogs and forums just go to show the severe level of distress systemd caused so many people.
SCO's legal shenanigans didn't prevent Linux systems from booting properly; systemd has prevented proper system operating, on many occasions.
We've even seen a community like Debian's, once one of the strongest and most coherent developer and user communities, torn apart by strife and disagreement over systemd. Instead of using systemd in an optional branch of Debian, systemd was forced on all Debian users, even those who did not or could not use it. Even today Debian remains a fractured, divided community. Many Debian users have left for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, and even Windows!
Systemd has transformed the Linux landscape in ways that SCO never could have. All of the major Linux distros have switched to systemd. The only ones that haven't are legacy distros like Slackware, or niche distros like Gentoo. And since its architecture and philosophy is so anti-UNIX, we've seen systemd move Linux distros away from their roots and into something that often isn't suitable for the server or workstation use that Linux has traditionally seen.
The SCO debacle wasn't good for Linux, that's for sure. But systemd has had a much more negative impact on Linux as a whole, I think, than anything SCO might have ever done or even hoped to have done.
I was wondering what's happening with the "XXX is for cows" comments... the only time it could be insightful the anonymous coward isn't making it...
I can't call that English
Why? If it's even vaguely profitable, what's the reason for not selling it anymore?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Generallisimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Red Hat sued SCO in 2003 for false advertising, and that case was stayed pending resolution of the IBM case. Is that still pending (and can Red Hat try to get damages)?
Sure its not just pining for the fjords? Or maybe just stunned?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
He's just pining for Darl....
UTF-8 is itself an error
Serves the submitter right for using the wrong character for the apostrophe. Surely his word processor should warn him that he's closing 4 single-quotes that he didn't open?
(adopt high-pitched voice) ...and SCO's not only merely dead,
it's really most sincerely dead!
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The SCO lawsuit started in 2003 and, in comparison, Unicode version 1.0 was released in 1992. So, it's not like this is a new standard, preceding the lawsuit by ten years. Unicode support in Linux seems to be around 1999.
I guess somebody at /. (or, more likely submitters) are getting a perverse kick out of copy and pasting unicode characters on the SCO article and I'm trying to figure out why. Maybe /. article editor tools make the unicode characters invisible to them but this has been going on long enough.
Timothy, et al, could you take this back to your new masters and get it fixed - one way or another? I, like probably a lot of people who come to this site, when we see the acronym "SCO" immediately look to see how many unicode characters are embedded in the summary.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Say it ain't SCO!
Guess my Unixware and Openserver Master Ace is worthless now?
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
I'm getting quite worried about the future of Linux. We're seeing numerous factors converging, and it's not looking good for Linux.
The first problem is that Linux is making no inroads into the desktop/workstation market. Desktop environments like GNOME 3 and Unity are widely disliked. Systemd has caused stability issues for many. There's no compelling open source applications, and the ones that might be candidates, like Firefox or GIMP, pale in comparison to their main competitors.
Worse, Linux is becoming questioned as a server OS. Systemd has caused too many admins too many problems. The OpenSSL and Bash security woes have not helped. Now there are licensing questions about using ZFS with Linux. Meanwhile, we've seen OSes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD avoid many of these problems, or do a much better effort at prevent further problems.
We've also seen recent versions of Windows Server become much more appealing options. There are now very minimal versions available, and they're extremely usable and practical. Best of all, they allow the use of the .NET stack and C#, which are among the best around. Serious developers prefer to use C# and .NET instead of the more amateurish PHP platform that's so common on Linux.
While the Linux kernel does see widespread use in mobile devices through Android, it's critical to note that it's well hidden, with little use made of GNU or other open source software. Most Android users, and even many developers, wouldn't have any idea that Linux is involved, it's so well disguised.
So we see Linux having totally failed in the desktop/workstation segment of the market. It's faltering within the server segment. It's barely visible within the mobile segment. It's facing strong competition from FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows and OS X. More and more people have found Linux's quality and robustness to be decreasing. And there's nothing to suggest that things will be improving for Linux any time soon.
I'm really worried about all of this. I really hope that things will turn around, but it all seems so uncertain to me at this point.
How do all the bad actors in this case just get to walk away?
Vote for Trump == Vote for satan
Vote for Hillary == Vote for satan
don't vote for either.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Here we thought unicode support was just broken in comments and discussion, apparently it doesn't work anywhere here...
The strange thing is that the so-called "editors" don't filter out stuff that makes the text "break" in the presentation.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
well he has an even number; 2 pairs.
Long live Santa Cruiz Operationn
SCO = Supply Chain Optimization
As Coroner I must aver, I thoroughly examined her. And she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead
Man it took him a long time to die.
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOOOOOO! MOOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU COMMENTING COWS!!
with the wooden stake in its heart!
Great summary to show off a couple of slashdot's worst issues: no unicode support for things as simple as quotes and useless "editing" that doesn't even correct the aforementioned obvious problem with the summary. /. overlords, are you "on it" as you claimed or not?
So, new
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
FTW!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
What SCO agreed to is dismissing remaining motions for summary judgment . This is more IBM agreeing there is no point delaying SCO's option of appealing the motions that went against them. It is still possible that SCO might try one last gasp effort in the appeals court. I am not sure how long they have before they must file such an appeal.
/. is too poor to afford a preview function, I guess. So much for it being a "technical" website.
It's not even unicode, it's just utf-8 encoding in a varchar field. Something absolutely elementary to implement, even for the dimmest of PERL hackers.
timothy is an ad-bot.
My first encounter with SCO UNIX was in a PC support call center back in the mid 1990s. It ran the phone ACDs and showed stats on various screens. For some reason, the co-worker next to me had some odd X-windows font error by his name, and the call center people were so clueless, they had security physically drag him away from his desk, frog march him out with one arm wrenches behind his back, because they thought he was "hacking" the phone lines.
Of course, I got booted (although without that ceremony) when I plugged a terminator back into the thinnet network when it plopped off, the manager said I knew too much to be there and was whisked out.
Is there a grave-stone we can dance on, and perform other bodily activities?
They made one for COBOL, although it was quite premature.
Table-ized A.I.
This bit here made me laugh way too fucking hard. Thanks damn_registrars - you've made my gloomy Tuesday a bit brighter :)
Our software freedom is shackled by systemd.
tbh cleaning up advertising and making sure there is no malware in it seemed more important than unicode to me, too......I'll bet even Rei would agree.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Get an axe.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
You deserve it!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Why aren't Darl Mcbride and his cronies locked up in Club Fed for pump-n-dump scam they perpetuated?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Until tSCOg is officially legally no longer a 'business' *and* has divested itself of all of the software to a trustable party, the potential remains for further outlandish claims.
If you have followed this charade in detail is that they kept coming back like a bad dream even after already suffering multiple 'flesh wounds'.
My reading of order does not lead me to conclude that
they are really dead. Yet.
What it may allow to occur is the piercing of the corporate veil. Who was really behind the attacks in the first place.
The first problem is that Linux is making no inroads into the desktop/workstation market.
Nothing new there. It's going to be virtually impossible to push Windows out of this desktop market. It's simple network effects. Linux would have to offer something that isn't available on Windows that people care strongly about for people to switch. Unlikely that is going to happen. The only thing that linux has that Windows doesn't is that it is available for free. But until the applications they use are also available on linux AND it is installed from day 1 they aren't going to switch en-mass.
Worse, Linux is becoming questioned as a server OS.
Not really. Yes it has problems but that's nothing new and none of them are so awful that it's going to change the landscape. People that use Windows servers will mostly continue to do so and people that use linux servers will mostly continue to do so. There really aren't any other serious options for most use cases. BSD isn't really terribly different (porting software between them is trivial) and OS X isn't really used for servers.
While the Linux kernel does see widespread use in mobile devices through Android, it's critical to note that it's well hidden, with little use made of GNU or other open source software.
So what? That's nothing new either. Whether or not people are aware they are using linux is mostly not very important. Most people don't care so long as it does what they want. Whether or not they know it is open source is similarly immaterial. It's important that it be open source but awareness of it is a peripheral concern.
You may not believe it, but /. supported Unicode for probably over 15 years now.
Its just early abuse by posters destined to misuse it forced the implementation of a whitelist of acceptable UTF-8 characters, which basically are all the printables between 32 through 127. Everything else is effectively stripped. Since UTF-8 uses the high-bit to indicate that the codepoint consists of additional bytes,
(The Unicode support came as part of Slashdot.jp way back when.).
If you google for erocS or even 5:erocS, you can try to guess what the Unicode "fun" posters and trolls did that forced the implementation of the whitelist.
Because it is dead, it can take off its head, and recite Shakespearian quotations.
I will believe it when I see a picture of the stake through Darl's heart.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Would the licensing fee happen to be around $699?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I have thoroughly examined them,
And they are not just merely dead,
They are really quite sincerely dead.
more cowbell
Like a decent UI or privacy?
I'll presume you are being serious. Most people are familiar enough with Windows that anything other than a completely revolutionary gotta-have-it huge improvement isn't going to matter. If they haven't done it in 20 years I don't think we should reasonably expect it any time soon. Furthermore any such improvement could likely be easily copied by Microsoft in short order.
As for privacy, people clearly aren't too concerned with that. If you need evidence I refer you to Facebook as exhibit A. A few people care greatly about it but they are a tiny tiny minority. Most people don't care much about privacy as an abstract concept.
Neither of those things is going to cause people to switch who weren't already strongly inclined to switch anyway. The desktop PC battle is over and Microsoft won. However look at tablets and phones and Linux has a real opportunity there through Android. Tablets are making a huge dent in desktop PC sales and Android tablets are a big part of that.
But I'm a satanist, you insensitive clod.
Funny how that works isn't it?
Almost as if a bunch of Red Hat shills are here to spew their propaganda, and try to suppress all valid criticism of MS/Redhat scams.
> On March 6, 2003, the SCO Group (formerly known as Caldera International and Caldera Systems) filed a $1 billion lawsuit in the United States against IBM for allegedly “devaluing” its version of the UNIX operating system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._International_Business_Machines_Corp.
whipslash, if you're reading this, can you please investigate what walterbyrd is talking about? I too find it suspicious how systemd-related comments in this submission and others so often get modded down, even when they're completely on-topic, relevant, insightful and informative.
This is a case where anyone who modded down any of the systemd-related comments for this submission has committed mod abuse, should have all of the downmods they've ever made undone, and should be banned from ever moderating again. What they've done has harmed the discussion here, and that's inexcusable.
€‘’öóíúüëéåäáßðfghïøñb®©£½¼¾÷¦”“ÖÓÍÚÜËÉÅÄÁÐFGHÏ‘B®ÆÆ
Then there are HTML entities like < ± — – and even & are in there.
If you're (or anyone else) curious as to how to input them, then hit reply and quote parent. Then you should see what goes into it. The first row is via keyboard input using AltGr keys and the second is via HTML. Not all HTML works, not all keyboard entry works. Quoting should reveal some of the ones that do not work.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
SCO - Software Company Out-of-Business....
I wonder how much each side spent to get this decision and the total of all the other various lawsuits closed where the companies paid up or didn't pay yet?
Is the CEO and Board of Directors bankrupt, homeless and eating at the soup kitchen? Or, how much do they still have in their bank accounts that went untouched? I wonder how many job hits the ex-CEO and BOD got on their job resumes on LinkedIn?
History should record that the whole SCO fiasco was the brain child of this scam artist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It was a patent submarine attack and one of history's ugliest. The guy is now the CEO of some company he made up in his garage. Check out this garbageL https://www.crowdfunder.com/sh... What a joke. He got what he deserved.
Woo Motherf**kin' Hoo!
With apologies to Oz
SCO's scattered, shattered and burnt remains will find each other, cohere and reform Darl McBride. He cannot be destroyed except in a crucible made from a Red Hat and filled with molten intellectual property!
That's great that Caldera, later rebranded as SCO, is dead. Now what about the actual perpetrators of that Linux debacle, Darl McBride and Chris Sonntag?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Did someone drive a stake through the body? Then burn it. Then drive a stake through the ashes and bury them. And then drive a stake through the ground where they were buried?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What a huge waste... IBM's startup disks used to be Linux based. Boot, configure RAID, etc was all Linux. Now it's some stripped down Windows device code that takes 10 times longer to load, has less features and is less user friendly. ... pointless....
Micro$soft must have had a huge bounty up to get big blue to switch... all rendering this case rather
What a jerk Darl McBride was / is / and will be -- forever -- for running SCO into the ground.
On April 27, 2007, NASDAQ served notice that the company would be delisted if SCO's stock price did not increase above $1 for a minimum of 10 consecutive days over the course of 180 business days, ending October 22, 2007.
Sep 14, 2007
http://www.unixresources.net/linux/clf/linuxtalk/archive/00/00/65/85/658554.html
"Stick a fork in SCO. They're done."
Nov 24, 2008
http://www.cnet.com/news/ding-dong-sco-is-dead/
"Ding, dong SCO is dead"
Apr 14, 2011 ..."
http://www.zdnet.com/article/sco-is-dead-sco-unix-lives-on/
"SCO is dead
Aug 13, 2011
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/SCO-vs-Linux-it-s-over-1333900.html
"SCO vs Linux: it's over"
Aug 8, 2012
http://www.zdnet.com/article/sco-is-finally-dead-parrot-dead/
"SCO is finally 'Dead Parrot' Dead"
Aug 8, 2012
http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/is-linux-nemesis-sco-finally-dead-now.html
"Is Linux Nemesis SCO *FINALLY* Dead Now?"
Feb 29, 2016
http://fossforce.com/2016/02/sco-is-undeniably-and-reliably-dead/
"SCO Is Undeniably and Reliably Dead"
If you google for erocS or even 5:erocS, you can try to guess what the Unicode "fun" posters and trolls did that forced the implementation of the whitelist.
If that's all they did, it's not like slashdot had to scrub high bits everywhere. Just the comment subjects would've been enough, wouldn't it?
I'd probably just have scrubbed those RTL and LTR overrides and two-codepoint composite characters (the ` part in e + ` = è) and leave it at that.
There is always the fact the Windows security is abysmal.
Which again is something people clearly don't care much about. Certainly not enough to switch to linux. And it's not as if the security on linux devices is universally bullet proof. It's better than Windows in many ways (talk about damning with faint praise...) but there are still plenty of security issues. Outside of certain security conscious organizations (like the DoD), security is a second or third order consideration.
The DoD has been replacing Windows for mission critical systems for some years now.
I could point out plenty of organizations that have found linux to be a better solution for their particular needs than Windows. Wall street is making pretty heavy use of linux too. That said, Windows still has somewhere around 90%+ of the desktop market and somewhere around 30% of the server market and those numbers have held steady for quite some time. Anecdotal stories of particular organizations (even large ones) switching doesn't tell us anything very useful. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of linux. Merely pointing out that it simply isn't going to win the fight on the desktop against Windows and that Windows isn't capturing meaningful market share from linux on servers.
Sorry, but I won't believe SCO is really, truly dead until they drive a stake through its heart.
I searched & got links back to this thread. Please tell a noob what happened? (for learning's sake thanks).
Was it just jibberish as one poster noted? €‘’öóíúüëéåäáßðfghïøñb®©
I am hoping for at least some kind of hidden message ala 1337 5p33k or something.
thanks!
I know they've been kicking the dead horse for the last few years, but if they are finally letting the old beast lie in peace, I'm going to miss the occasional news to bring back memories of this circus. Who would have though a small entity like SCO could even last this long against big Blue? Come on, a company who's annual revenue is less than another's legal budget?
Have the Munckins declared SCO most sincerely dead? Please protect Toto from the gruesome image of the crushed SCO as it curls up its toes!