"do any architectures other than Sparc, x86, and x86-64 even matter?"
In all honesty, no. Except for some rare exceptions... If your running on PowerPC (not macs) you're running AIX, if you're on the mainframe you're running os/390 or z/os. For all the talk about linux cheerleading from IBM, their sales people still push the proprietary OS.
Where you see the different platforms supporting linux a lot of times is when someone takes home and old box from work and get linux on it... Or makes linux work on it.
The other platforms are generally good for commercial products like linksys routers that run linux and things like that.
Personally.. I don't care what my cell phone is running. I just care that it works.
Next time I walk into a data center and see a cluster of PDAs running an ecommerce site I might change my mind. Until then, x86, Sparc, PowerPC and mainframes are king.
"Do not trust Sun with this...They paid SCO money after all, let's not forget."
This kinda trash talk about Sun is just bullshit. I'm tired of reading people complaining that they paid off SCO. They bought unix licenses from SCO.
If you've been following the SCO case, you would have seen that SCO is merely an agent in selling the licenses. Novell gets the bulk of the money from unix licenses and SCO gets like a commission.
Not trying to take SCO's side but this has to be the stupidest post I've seen modded as insightful.
"After all, it's SCO they are dealing with and to be honest, I don't know anyone who would want to deal with them, except maybe the guy with the horns and the tail."
Do you remember the days before the IBM trial when SCO didn't SCOrn the linux comminity? They were just a troubled Unix/Linux vendor. Not the type of company that you wouldn't know anyone that would trust or deal with them.
Everyone needs to just stfu and let the case proceed and then make judgements. Leave the cheerleading to the people being paid to do so, because just regurgiting their garbage is pointless and annoying.
IBM has a long, interesting history in the computer field. They're just fighting the fight in favor of what the OSS/Linux community. There was also a time in America where Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were fighting our fight and we knew they didn't have the best history either.
Especially with an election coming, it's dissapointing to see so many people just cheering for one side or the other and not looking at things objectively.
I was just reading an article about their new amd workstations and it had a picture. I wish I could find it now but a quick search didn't turn it up. They have their cpu's on a seperate board, their chipset is also on another board. The two are connected to the main board. Makes it easier and cheaper to keep the workstation up to date. I wouldn't call that outdated.
"True, but if one assigns a fair market value to tens of thousands of hours of volunteer labor reportedly spent on the project, the difference between the two becomes much smaller."
C'mon, on here, one of the biggest open source forums, do you really think people factor in "volunteer labor"?
On our side? They said they promise not to use the patents against the linux kernel UNLESS THEY HAVE TO DEFEND THEMSELVES. Just a part of a speech but it was carefully qualified.
The main point. He didn't say against open source software, he didn't even say against linux. He said against the linux kernel. So linux distributions wouldn't be covered, neither would other open source projects like MySQL.
How is this great news for open source? Maybe great news for the kernel developers, unless somehow they threaten IBM.
I don't know what Daniel Lyons has to do with this article. It was written by Gary Reback, the attorney representing Sun at the time. Do a search for him. When it comes to patents and monopolies, this guy has a lot of experience.
Found an article by Daniel Lyons regarding ibm and linux. I don't see it as anti linux in any way have a read
Seems IBM hasn't changed it's tune much when IBM compared AIX to Linux a few years back. What I find most disturbing is that Sun gets ripped on for making the same kind of statements. Granted, they could say them better.
IBM makes deal with SCO. At the time, SCO has the most advanced commercial x86 Unix around. Project Montery ends but never gets marketed because while SCO has been working with IBM, IBM has been working on integrating more linux in their business. IBM decides to go with Linux and cans monterey. IBM puts stuff it learned from Monterye into AIX (according to a quote from an IBM VP I posted above). They also claim that AIX is awesome Linux maye one day not suck as much. AIX got even better because of Monterey, Linux got much better through, who knows. That "who knows" is the issue because IBM was a big part of Linux getting to where it is now. So was SGI (mulitprocessor scaling) which was also an SVR4 licensee.
If this whole case wasn't such a circus, on both sides, it would be fun to watch.
I'm really curious as to why IBM didn't buy SuSE, instead of getting Novell to buy SuSE. The real reasoning behind that may shine some light on things.
"all licenses granted to the breaching party subject to all terms and conditions applicable hereunder, including applicable payment provisions."
and whether all terms and conditions have been adhered to is a mater for a court to decide.
I don't even know why I bother participating. I don't really care what SCO does but this whole "IBM is our hero" mentality disturbs me. IBM is doing what it's doing for IBM not for open source. The linux kernel is not the sum and total of open source software. You only have to look at some of IBM's involvement in the Apache Group to see that when IBM can take things internally and stop sharing code, they will.
"1) SCO has never claimed any such thing in any court filing. Their court filings don't make anything approaching clear claims that A didn't receive a license for code B from C or anything else you would expect in such a claim."
Their initial complaint against IBM mentions project monterey. Then there's thiw quote in the complaint from an IBM VP.
""Project Monterey was actually started before Linux did. When we started the push to Monterey, the notion was to have one common OS for several architectures. The notion actually came through with Linux, which was open source and supported all hardware. We continued with Monterey as an extension of AIX [IBM UNIX] to support high-end hardware. AIX 5 has the best of Monterey. Linux cannot fill that need today, but over time we believe it will. To help out we're making contributions to the open source movement like the journal file system. We can't tell our customers to wait for Linux to grow up.
If Linux had all of the capabilities of AIX, where we could put the AIX code at runtime on top of Linux, then we would.
Right now the Linux kernel does not support all the capabilities of AIX. We've been working on AIX for 20 years. Linux is still young. We're helping Linux kernel up to that level. We understand where the kernel is. We have a lot of people working now as part of the kernel team. At the end of the day, the customer makes the choice, whether we write for AIX or for Linux.
We're willing to open source any part of AIX that the Linux community considers valuable. We have open-sourced the journal filesystem, print driver for the Omniprint. AIX is 1.5 million lines of code. If we dump that on the open source community then are people going to understand it? You're better off taking bits and pieces and the expertise that we bring along with it. We have made a conscious decision to keep contributing."
So there's your connection between monterey code and aix code.
"2) IBM already had a license for SVR4 code at the time of montery"
Which SCO revoked.
") SCO didn't have rights to sell such a license in any meaningful sense"
Actually, according to Novell, the only thing SCO got was the right to be the administrator of unix licenses. They would charge a fee, anything above that would go to Novell. So, according to Novell, SCO did have the rights to sell SVR4 licenses.
"Actually that is explicitly not the case. There is a Chinese wall between the AIX group and the Linux group to avoid certain really copyright problems (none of which involve SCO BTW). Communication between them is controlled."
And in the face of legal concerns, they will have to show that what they did was enough and effective and that before the wall was errected, the linux developers didn't have knowledge of SVR4 code.
"There is nothing at stake. Imagine if SCO had filed a wrongful death suit against IBM and everyone could show the supposed victim was till alive. Obviously SCO would get their day in court but no one would pretend there was any merit to the case; which is the proper way of dealing with this type of nonsense lawsuit."
"As for Linux, IBM put THEIR code into linux - not SCOs. Unless SCO can show UNIX code in Linux, and then prove that they own Linux, then IBM do not have any problems at all. "
What SCO is claiming is that IBM put SVR4 code in AIX. So if IBM put "THEIR code" into linux, wouldn't that be THEIR AIX code?
"1) We need to make sure those convicted of securities violations can't collect their paychecks. The head of Fog Cutter pled guilty will collect more than a million bucks for a job he won't be showing up to (they don't let you work for the company in prison) and get a multimillion dollar bonus. If I stole from the shareholders of the company I work for, I doubt the executives would be so generous to me."
Unless of course they are rewarding you for being the fall guy and protecting the company from further scrutiny that might put more people and money at risk.
The problem is IBM was exposed to the code through a joint venture. To then prove that they came up with it on their own even though they saw SCO's code isn't easy to prove. Or in most cases beleivable. I'm flashing back to how Vanilla Ice was trying to explain how his rif was different from other songs that he copied.
I hope someone mods you up. You seem to have read the article and aren't just dismissing it based on the popular opinion that anything SCO says is bogus.
On your last point "The fact this is AIX not Linux is interesting. Essentially, this has nothing to do with SCO patent claims against Linux." may not be completely accurate, or at least it's not fair to make that assumption so quickly.
If you look at what happened, SCO and IBM teamed up to work on a 64 bit version of Unix for 64 bit intel processors. IBM backed out of the deal and in doing so SCO claims IBM also backed out of their licensing agreement for SVR4 code. Yet AIX is now an SVR4 Unix and there is no licensing agreement for it. This aspect of the case doesn't seem unreasonable enough to not give SCO the benefit of the doubt enough to let them have their day in court.
Now, IBM developers have been contributing a lot to the Linux kernel. Who do you think they got to write the kernel code? Probably a good chance that it was people that were familiar with AIX. IBM is going to have to prove that there was a clear seperation of Linux developers and developers exposed to the SVR4 and Project Monterey code. Otherwise the Linux code is at risk too from this new discovery.
There are a lot of people on here that are just going to blindly dismiss it. Also, I don't give two shits about SCO, my point is that everyone should try and look at what's going on objectively because there is a lot at stake.
"IBM, and most other huge engineering companies, have enormous patent portfolios (not just software patents) that they mostly carry for defensive purposes"
I'm trying to find a polite way to say "What are you on Crack!?!?!" but I'm coming up short. If IBM didn't invent they offensive use of software patents, they sure as hell perfected it.
My own introduction to the realities of the patent system came in the 1980s, when my client, Sun Microsystems--then a small company--was accused by IBM of patent infringement. Threatening a massive lawsuit, IBM demanded a meeting to present its claims. Fourteen IBM lawyers and their assistants, all clad in the requisite dark blue suits, crowded into the largest conference room Sun had.
The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.
After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.
IBM couldn't sue for patent violations against the Linux Kernel. They have full time developers working on it. It wouldn't stand up in court.
Now if they promised not to sue all open source projects, that might mean something. Remember, Open Source isn't just about the Linux Kernel.
Lets see them promise not to sue Jonas, JBoss, Postgresql, and any other future projects. If someone came up with an OpenSphere suite that rivaled WebSphere, do you really think they're patent lawyers will be sitting idle?
I always wonder what's going on with Microsoft and Mono. I don't think it's any secret that Miguel is pretty enamoured by MS. Microsoft has said some pretty nice things about him too. I know MS seems to be changing a little bit to not be quite the evil empire it was, or at least that's the perception their trying so hard to make, but.... You've seen the movies where one of the cool kids asks some homely, nerdy girl to the prom, only to find out it was some big joke at the end. If I was Miguel, I wouldn't spend too much on a dress.
"No. I'm talking about software here. I already stipulated that patents may help other fields. Chemistry is very different from software, because that whole "build a large scale production facilty" thing isn't major part of software publication."
No, it's very similar. When you write software, that isn't the whole point in making it succesful. You have to distribute it, you have to support it, you have to educate people on it, you have to market it, you have to keep it up to date. If it's complex, you have to get others to help you with it. Writing software isn't the end of making it successful.
It's bad enough when people buying software don't understand the hard work and contributions of the software developers, but on here we see a lot of people devaluing themselves. In what other industry do you see people giving away their work so that others may benefit. Yeah it's a social movement... well actually no it's not. It used to be. Now open source is big business. You write something, if it's could someone will find out and start marketting it. They are not obliged to pay you anything for it unless they want to. If they don't like the direction you're going with it, they can start their own branch and hire their own developers to work on it the way they want. As a developer, only if the companies making money off of it want to give you something will you get it. I've said this before, I don't understand why software developers want to work, hoping to get handouts rather then expecting to get justly compensated for their work, especially when others ARE making money off of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have to say the latter :D
Maybe they're going to switch to selling macs instead?
I don't see it happening but it's an interesting coincidence to see these speculations published on the same day.
In all honesty, no. Except for some rare exceptions... If your running on PowerPC (not macs) you're running AIX, if you're on the mainframe you're running os/390 or z/os. For all the talk about linux cheerleading from IBM, their sales people still push the proprietary OS.
Where you see the different platforms supporting linux a lot of times is when someone takes home and old box from work and get linux on it... Or makes linux work on it.
The other platforms are generally good for commercial products like linksys routers that run linux and things like that.
Personally.. I don't care what my cell phone is running. I just care that it works.
Next time I walk into a data center and see a cluster of PDAs running an ecommerce site I might change my mind. Until then, x86, Sparc, PowerPC and mainframes are king.
I'd love to see solaris running on a mainframe.
This kinda trash talk about Sun is just bullshit. I'm tired of reading people complaining that they paid off SCO. They bought unix licenses from SCO.
If you've been following the SCO case, you would have seen that SCO is merely an agent in selling the licenses. Novell gets the bulk of the money from unix licenses and SCO gets like a commission.
You could have done this for years. Solaris has been available free for development since at least solaris 8 if i'm not mistaken.
Increased water charges for all the extra flushes.
That new play station game you bought your friend so he won't show pics of that fugly girl you hooked up with.
cab fare, can't drive drunk.
gym membership, atkins book and a lot of meat and cheese to lose the beer belly
vodka, to numb the pain in the liver
and more...
There's no such thing as a free lunch or a free beer.
Not trying to take SCO's side but this has to be the stupidest post I've seen modded as insightful.
"After all, it's SCO they are dealing with and to be honest, I don't know anyone who would want to deal with them, except maybe the guy with the horns and the tail."
Do you remember the days before the IBM trial when SCO didn't SCOrn the linux comminity? They were just a troubled Unix/Linux vendor. Not the type of company that you wouldn't know anyone that would trust or deal with them.
Everyone needs to just stfu and let the case proceed and then make judgements. Leave the cheerleading to the people being paid to do so, because just regurgiting their garbage is pointless and annoying.
IBM has a long, interesting history in the computer field. They're just fighting the fight in favor of what the OSS/Linux community. There was also a time in America where Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were fighting our fight and we knew they didn't have the best history either.
Especially with an election coming, it's dissapointing to see so many people just cheering for one side or the other and not looking at things objectively.
I was just reading an article about their new amd workstations and it had a picture. I wish I could find it now but a quick search didn't turn it up. They have their cpu's on a seperate board, their chipset is also on another board. The two are connected to the main board. Makes it easier and cheaper to keep the workstation up to date. I wouldn't call that outdated.
C'mon, on here, one of the biggest open source forums, do you really think people factor in "volunteer labor"?
Imagine, gambling and strippers in space!
If they win, they'll make a profit and be able to throw one kick ass party.
If this is based on the feasibility of commercial space flights, my vote is for the one that does it first and makes money. :)
The main point. He didn't say against open source software, he didn't even say against linux. He said against the linux kernel. So linux distributions wouldn't be covered, neither would other open source projects like MySQL.
How is this great news for open source? Maybe great news for the kernel developers, unless somehow they threaten IBM.
I don't know what Daniel Lyons has to do with this article. It was written by Gary Reback, the attorney representing Sun at the time. Do a search for him. When it comes to patents and monopolies, this guy has a lot of experience.
Found an article by Daniel Lyons regarding ibm and linux. I don't see it as anti linux in any way have a read
Seems IBM hasn't changed it's tune much when IBM compared AIX to Linux a few years back. What I find most disturbing is that Sun gets ripped on for making the same kind of statements. Granted, they could say them better.
If this whole case wasn't such a circus, on both sides, it would be fun to watch.
I'm really curious as to why IBM didn't buy SuSE, instead of getting Novell to buy SuSE. The real reasoning behind that may shine some light on things.
and whether all terms and conditions have been adhered to is a mater for a court to decide.
I don't even know why I bother participating. I don't really care what SCO does but this whole "IBM is our hero" mentality disturbs me. IBM is doing what it's doing for IBM not for open source. The linux kernel is not the sum and total of open source software. You only have to look at some of IBM's involvement in the Apache Group to see that when IBM can take things internally and stop sharing code, they will.
Whether the revokation is enforable or not is a different matter.
Their initial complaint against IBM mentions project monterey. Then there's thiw quote in the complaint from an IBM VP.
So there's your connection between monterey code and aix code."2) IBM already had a license for SVR4 code at the time of montery"
Which SCO revoked.
") SCO didn't have rights to sell such a license in any meaningful sense"
Actually, according to Novell, the only thing SCO got was the right to be the administrator of unix licenses. They would charge a fee, anything above that would go to Novell. So, according to Novell, SCO did have the rights to sell SVR4 licenses.
"Actually that is explicitly not the case. There is a Chinese wall between the AIX group and the Linux group to avoid certain really copyright problems (none of which involve SCO BTW). Communication between them is controlled."
And in the face of legal concerns, they will have to show that what they did was enough and effective and that before the wall was errected, the linux developers didn't have knowledge of SVR4 code.
"There is nothing at stake. Imagine if SCO had filed a wrongful death suit against IBM and everyone could show the supposed victim was till alive. Obviously SCO would get their day in court but no one would pretend there was any merit to the case; which is the proper way of dealing with this type of nonsense lawsuit."
Unfortunately, this isn't that simple.
What SCO is claiming is that IBM put SVR4 code in AIX. So if IBM put "THEIR code" into linux, wouldn't that be THEIR AIX code?
Unless of course they are rewarding you for being the fall guy and protecting the company from further scrutiny that might put more people and money at risk.
The problem is IBM was exposed to the code through a joint venture. To then prove that they came up with it on their own even though they saw SCO's code isn't easy to prove. Or in most cases beleivable. I'm flashing back to how Vanilla Ice was trying to explain how his rif was different from other songs that he copied.
On your last point "The fact this is AIX not Linux is interesting. Essentially, this has nothing to do with SCO patent claims against Linux." may not be completely accurate, or at least it's not fair to make that assumption so quickly.
If you look at what happened, SCO and IBM teamed up to work on a 64 bit version of Unix for 64 bit intel processors. IBM backed out of the deal and in doing so SCO claims IBM also backed out of their licensing agreement for SVR4 code. Yet AIX is now an SVR4 Unix and there is no licensing agreement for it. This aspect of the case doesn't seem unreasonable enough to not give SCO the benefit of the doubt enough to let them have their day in court.
Now, IBM developers have been contributing a lot to the Linux kernel. Who do you think they got to write the kernel code? Probably a good chance that it was people that were familiar with AIX. IBM is going to have to prove that there was a clear seperation of Linux developers and developers exposed to the SVR4 and Project Monterey code. Otherwise the Linux code is at risk too from this new discovery.
There are a lot of people on here that are just going to blindly dismiss it. Also, I don't give two shits about SCO, my point is that everyone should try and look at what's going on objectively because there is a lot at stake.
I'm trying to find a polite way to say "What are you on Crack!?!?!" but I'm coming up short. If IBM didn't invent they offensive use of software patents, they sure as hell perfected it.
From A forbes article by Gary RebackNow if they promised not to sue all open source projects, that might mean something. Remember, Open Source isn't just about the Linux Kernel.
Lets see them promise not to sue Jonas, JBoss, Postgresql, and any other future projects. If someone came up with an OpenSphere suite that rivaled WebSphere, do you really think they're patent lawyers will be sitting idle?
I always wonder what's going on with Microsoft and Mono. I don't think it's any secret that Miguel is pretty enamoured by MS. Microsoft has said some pretty nice things about him too. I know MS seems to be changing a little bit to not be quite the evil empire it was, or at least that's the perception their trying so hard to make, but.... You've seen the movies where one of the cool kids asks some homely, nerdy girl to the prom, only to find out it was some big joke at the end. If I was Miguel, I wouldn't spend too much on a dress.
No, it's very similar. When you write software, that isn't the whole point in making it succesful. You have to distribute it, you have to support it, you have to educate people on it, you have to market it, you have to keep it up to date. If it's complex, you have to get others to help you with it. Writing software isn't the end of making it successful.
It's bad enough when people buying software don't understand the hard work and contributions of the software developers, but on here we see a lot of people devaluing themselves. In what other industry do you see people giving away their work so that others may benefit. Yeah it's a social movement... well actually no it's not. It used to be. Now open source is big business. You write something, if it's could someone will find out and start marketting it. They are not obliged to pay you anything for it unless they want to. If they don't like the direction you're going with it, they can start their own branch and hire their own developers to work on it the way they want. As a developer, only if the companies making money off of it want to give you something will you get it. I've said this before, I don't understand why software developers want to work, hoping to get handouts rather then expecting to get justly compensated for their work, especially when others ARE making money off of it.