I think you're giving small businesses too little credit. Only the tiniest of businesses don't have someone to take care of their computer systems. Whether they outsource it, have someone internally, or use the owner's egghead nephew. Some of my clients have only a single computer. But I've yet to encounter a business that didn't have *someone* knowledgeable to handle these things for them.
And FWIW, they all know about license issues. They may not *care*, but they all know.
If you're talking about the "Ancient UNIX" sources, that was SCO the first, not Caldera. They didn't exactly open source it, although the code is freely available.
This is news? Wake me when he actually goes inside the drive to get it to spin-up. Anyone working in IT has probably done this at least once. But since this guy is a slack-jawed Windows home user he thought that this process was terribly clever. Clever enough to post a web page about it. Not news, move along.
After reading the actual countersuit filing, it looks like an even bigger, more comprehensive smackdown than even was speculated yesterday. IBM is fully ready to press SCO's GPL transgressions, talks at length about the failure of SCO's business, makes clear in several locactions the difference between Old SCO (Tarantella) and Caldera/New SCO, they even mention that some of SCO's claims have exceeded the statute of limitations. IBM has clearly been tracking SCO FUD and mentions specific quotes from SCO execs that are damaging. They also reiterate that IBM's UNIX license is perpetual and irrevokable, but they also say that even if that wern't the case SCO still can't revoke IBM's license because SCO has not followed the agreement on the procedure to revoke the license. SMACK, SMACK, SMACK!
...I always took it for granted that SCO obtained permission from IBM to use RCU, NUMA,... in their OS. (I am assuming that those are the patents that IBM is accusing SCO of violating.)
You could assume that, or your could RTFA:
The patents cover a data compression technique, a method of navigating among program menus using options arranged in a graphical tree, a method for verifying that an electronic message was received and a method for monitoring computing systems linked in a cluster.
The infringing SCO software, IBM said, is its UnixWare and OpenServer operating systems, its SCO Manager remote administration tool and its Reliant HA package for letting one computer in a cluster take over if another fails.
BTW- Don't you just love how general all of those sound? I'd love to see patent numbers, but it sounds like almost any OS might infringe on one or two of those.
Actually Novell has gone back-and-forth with UNIX support for GroupWise. At one time the GW Agents even ran on some UNIX variants. So porting the whole business to run on Linux probably won't be a huge deal.
...since the Novell stuff will run on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, I would think this means they'd have to recompile it for at least the IA-64...
Novell could just as easily hand wave all of that away by only approving IA-32. I guess that brings up another point. Novell's Nterprise Services for Linux will run on either Red Hat AS or SuSE ES. But when NetWare 7 rolls around, will it include "Novell Linux" or will you still need a separate distro to install the Novell services on?
...Linux has amazingly broad hardware support. Novell could take advantage of this and break into new markets...
I don't think that will happen any time soon. Novell has been focused on x86 for more than a decade. Some of Novell's eDirectory products already run on other architectures. But for Novell to release a non-Intel operating system (and provide support for it) is waaayyyy down the line, I'd think. Even Red Hat only supports x86 (do they still have Itanium and s390? Haven't seen either in a while).
This really shouldn't shock anyone. Novell has already stated that NetWare 7 will allow the installer to choose between Linux or NetWare kernels. Can you say migration path?
The recent Novell Connections magazine talked about their Linux strategy up to NetWare 7. So far, no one has talked much about what comes after. With Novell's history of shifting strategies, I think I'll just take it one day at a time.
LINDON, Utah-August 6, 2003-The SCO(R) Group (SCO) (Nasdaq: SCOX), the owner of the UNIX operating system, its derivatives, copies, and work-alikes as well as the methods, standards (de facto or de jure), and paradigms that encompass the UNIX operating system announced today that it has filed legal action against God (NYSE:GOD) in the State Court of Utah, for misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract. The complaint alleges that God has directly infringed upon SCO's UNIX intellectual property.
In 1995, SCO purchased the rights and ownership of UNIX and UnixWare that had been originally owned by AT&T. This included source code, source documentation, software development contracts, licenses and other intellectual property that pertained to UNIX-related business. SCO became the successor in interest to the UNIX software licenses originally licensed by AT&T Bell Laboratories to all UNIX distributors, including HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and many others.
As a result of God's unfair competition and the marketplace injury sustained by SCO, SCO is requesting damages in an amount to be proven at trial, but no less than ownership of all existence, together with additional damages through and after the time of trial.
SCO is also demanding that God cease these anti-competitive practices based on specific requirements sent in a notification letter to God. If these requirements are not met, SCO will have the authority to revoke God's license of creation as well as God's license to keep the cosmos in motion.
SCO's letter and complaint have been filed by the law firm of Boies, Schiller and Flexner. SCO announced in January that the law firm had been retained to research and investigate possible violations of SCO's intellectual property.
"SCO is in the enviable position of owning the UNIX operating system," said Darl McBride, president and CEO, SCO. "It is clear from our stand point that we have an extremely compelling case against God. SCO has more than 30,000 contracts with UNIX licensees and upholding these contracts is as important today as the day they were signed."
A copy of SCO's complaint is on file with the State Court of Utah and can also be found at www.sco.com/scosource.
Teleconference SCO has scheduled a teleconference regarding this announcement for 11:00 a.m. Eastern time on August 7, 2003.
Ever try to migrate NT to NDS or vice versa? What a pain in the ass! NDS for NT was anything but the "click of a button"!
NDS for NT was one of the most elegant products Novell has ever shipped. It replaced one (1) dll that redirected all calls to the SAM over to NDS. Migration was simple and the provided tools worked very well.
Migrating from NDS to NT worked fairly well with the tools provided with NT4. I really wouldn't expect Novell to provide support for leaving their system, would you?
Novell's new Account Management, on the other hand, is a nightmare of interlocking dependancies. Lessee, it requires eDirectory, LDAP, DirXML, Certificate Server, NAM Core Services (Manager, Agent, and Event Listener), and NAM Platform Services. Yuck.
From SCO's reply to Novell's copyright allegations: "Copyrights and patents are protection against strangers. Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights.... SCO intends to protect and enforce all of the contracts that the company has with more than 6,000 licensees."
So now SCO wants me to have a contract with them, by purchasing a UnixWare license? Why, so they can use it as a more effective weapon against me later? No thanks, Darl.
I think "view source/view xml" might be equivalent/more appropriate.
I could probably live with that. So long as I could edit in that window. A nice thing about the WP reveal codes is that you got your WYSIWYG doc in a large top panel and the reveal codes in a smaller panel at the bottom. Editing in either panel automatically updated the other.
You can do this by firing up your text editor now, since the OO files are just xml files
That's what I thought, but I just tried it and it looks like the file is converted into some sort of binary (compressed?). Or am I just doing something wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
How much capital do they have? How long will it take for them to bleed dry?
How many licenses can Microsoft buy from them?
I think you're giving small businesses too little credit. Only the tiniest of businesses don't have someone to take care of their computer systems. Whether they outsource it, have someone internally, or use the owner's egghead nephew. Some of my clients have only a single computer. But I've yet to encounter a business that didn't have *someone* knowledgeable to handle these things for them.
And FWIW, they all know about license issues. They may not *care*, but they all know.
Why on Earth would an engineer be redistributing corporate resources without authorization?
Nevermind. Looks like Caldera superceded the SCO license with what amounts to a BSD license:
http://www.lemis.com/grog/UNIX/
If you're talking about the "Ancient UNIX" sources, that was SCO the first, not Caldera. They didn't exactly open source it, although the code is freely available.
The Ancient UNIX license is here.
And the code is here.
Mind? Some of us feel that it was Sun that bought the first UNIX license from SCO.
And some of us are about a month behind: Sun Revealed as SCO's Secret Licensee.
This is news? Wake me when he actually goes inside the drive to get it to spin-up. Anyone working in IT has probably done this at least once. But since this guy is a slack-jawed Windows home user he thought that this process was terribly clever. Clever enough to post a web page about it. Not news, move along.
Hey everyone, thanks for not beating me up for misspelling "Groklaw". duh.
Thanks, AC. That's even better. Plain text = searchable and easy on the bandwidth. For those of you flying under the radar:
AC sez-
The full text of the agreement can also be found at lwn.
I can't find the damned link now, but Eben Moglen is consulting with IBM on their case. Why not let IBM do the heavy lifting here?
Grocklaw has an overview of the IBM countersuit. And for added fun, the whole 46 page filing is available in multipage TIFF or pdf.
T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4,814,746.WKU.&OS=PN/4,814,746&RS =PN/4,814,746 T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4,821,211.WKU.&OS=PN/4,821,211&RS =PN/4,821,211 T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4,953,209.WKU.&OS=PN/4,953,209&RS =PN/4,953,209 T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,805,785.WKU.&OS=PN/5,805,785&RS =PN/5,805,785
The patents are at:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
After reading the actual countersuit filing, it looks like an even bigger, more comprehensive smackdown than even was speculated yesterday. IBM is fully ready to press SCO's GPL transgressions, talks at length about the failure of SCO's business, makes clear in several locactions the difference between Old SCO (Tarantella) and Caldera/New SCO, they even mention that some of SCO's claims have exceeded the statute of limitations. IBM has clearly been tracking SCO FUD and mentions specific quotes from SCO execs that are damaging. They also reiterate that IBM's UNIX license is perpetual and irrevokable, but they also say that even if that wern't the case SCO still can't revoke IBM's license because SCO has not followed the agreement on the procedure to revoke the license. SMACK, SMACK, SMACK!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=73837&cid=6630 305
After threatening IBM and the US government, it's really all that SCO has left.
...I always took it for granted that SCO obtained permission from IBM to use RCU, NUMA, ... in their OS. (I am assuming that those are the patents that IBM is accusing SCO of violating.)
You could assume that, or your could RTFA:
The patents cover a data compression technique, a method of navigating among program menus using options arranged in a graphical tree, a method for verifying that an electronic message was received and a method for monitoring computing systems linked in a cluster.
The infringing SCO software, IBM said, is its UnixWare and OpenServer operating systems, its SCO Manager remote administration tool and its Reliant HA package for letting one computer in a cluster take over if another fails.
BTW- Don't you just love how general all of those sound? I'd love to see patent numbers, but it sounds like almost any OS might infringe on one or two of those.
Actually Novell has gone back-and-forth with UNIX support for GroupWise. At one time the GW Agents even ran on some UNIX variants. So porting the whole business to run on Linux probably won't be a huge deal.
...since the Novell stuff will run on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, I would think this means they'd have to recompile it for at least the IA-64...
Novell could just as easily hand wave all of that away by only approving IA-32. I guess that brings up another point. Novell's Nterprise Services for Linux will run on either Red Hat AS or SuSE ES. But when NetWare 7 rolls around, will it include "Novell Linux" or will you still need a separate distro to install the Novell services on?
...Linux has amazingly broad hardware support. Novell could take advantage of this and break into new markets...
I don't think that will happen any time soon. Novell has been focused on x86 for more than a decade. Some of Novell's eDirectory products already run on other architectures. But for Novell to release a non-Intel operating system (and provide support for it) is waaayyyy down the line, I'd think. Even Red Hat only supports x86 (do they still have Itanium and s390? Haven't seen either in a while).
This really shouldn't shock anyone. Novell has already stated that NetWare 7 will allow the installer to choose between Linux or NetWare kernels. Can you say migration path?
The recent Novell Connections magazine talked about their Linux strategy up to NetWare 7. So far, no one has talked much about what comes after. With Novell's history of shifting strategies, I think I'll just take it one day at a time.
LINDON, Utah-August 6, 2003-The SCO(R) Group (SCO) (Nasdaq: SCOX), the owner of the UNIX operating system, its derivatives, copies, and work-alikes as well as the methods, standards (de facto or de jure), and paradigms that encompass the UNIX operating system announced today that it has filed legal action against God (NYSE:GOD) in the State Court of Utah, for misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract. The complaint alleges that God has directly infringed upon SCO's UNIX intellectual property.
In 1995, SCO purchased the rights and ownership of UNIX and UnixWare that had been originally owned by AT&T. This included source code, source documentation, software development contracts, licenses and other intellectual property that pertained to UNIX-related business. SCO became the successor in interest to the UNIX software licenses originally licensed by AT&T Bell Laboratories to all UNIX distributors, including HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and many others.
As a result of God's unfair competition and the marketplace injury sustained by SCO, SCO is requesting damages in an amount to be proven at trial, but no less than ownership of all existence, together with additional damages through and after the time of trial.
SCO is also demanding that God cease these anti-competitive practices based on specific requirements sent in a notification letter to God. If these requirements are not met, SCO will have the authority to revoke God's license of creation as well as God's license to keep the cosmos in motion.
SCO's letter and complaint have been filed by the law firm of Boies, Schiller and Flexner. SCO announced in January that the law firm had been retained to research and investigate possible violations of SCO's intellectual property.
"SCO is in the enviable position of owning the UNIX operating system," said Darl McBride, president and CEO, SCO. "It is clear from our stand point that we have an extremely compelling case against God. SCO has more than 30,000 contracts with UNIX licensees and upholding these contracts is as important today as the day they were signed."
A copy of SCO's complaint is on file with the State Court of Utah and can also be found at www.sco.com/scosource.
Teleconference
SCO has scheduled a teleconference regarding this announcement for 11:00 a.m. Eastern time on August 7, 2003.
That's all well and good, but you do realize that Minix has been able to do all of that for many years, right?
http://minix1.hampshire.edu/
I've been running Minix i86 on my IBM 5150 for years now. Including telnet and httpd daemons.
Ever try to migrate NT to NDS or vice versa? What a pain in the ass! NDS for NT was anything but the "click of a button"!
NDS for NT was one of the most elegant products Novell has ever shipped. It replaced one (1) dll that redirected all calls to the SAM over to NDS. Migration was simple and the provided tools worked very well.
Migrating from NDS to NT worked fairly well with the tools provided with NT4. I really wouldn't expect Novell to provide support for leaving their system, would you?
Novell's new Account Management, on the other hand, is a nightmare of interlocking dependancies. Lessee, it requires eDirectory, LDAP, DirXML, Certificate Server, NAM Core Services (Manager, Agent, and Event Listener), and NAM Platform Services. Yuck.
Thank you, Mr. Quayle. Please sit down now.
Yep, but sadly TopGun only supports SSH 1. I would really like to see an SSH 2 client for Palm OS.
From SCO's reply to Novell's copyright allegations:
"Copyrights and patents are protection against strangers. Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights.... SCO intends to protect and enforce all of the contracts that the company has with more than 6,000 licensees."
So now SCO wants me to have a contract with them, by purchasing a UnixWare license? Why, so they can use it as a more effective weapon against me later? No thanks, Darl.
You do know that OpenOffice.org runs on Windows,
Which made it easy to change her PC in stages. Replace MS Office with OOo. Then replace Win with Linux later.
and that MS Ofiice runs superbly on Linux w/ Wine
With all of the drawbacks of MS Office still intact (upgrade treadmill, exorbitant pricing, format lock-in). No thanks.
I think "view source/view xml" might be equivalent/more appropriate.
I could probably live with that. So long as I could edit in that window. A nice thing about the WP reveal codes is that you got your WYSIWYG doc in a large top panel and the reveal codes in a smaller panel at the bottom. Editing in either panel automatically updated the other.
You can do this by firing up your text editor now, since the OO files are just xml files
That's what I thought, but I just tried it and it looks like the file is converted into some sort of binary (compressed?). Or am I just doing something wrong?