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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.
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.