Having just spoken with a corporate attorney about this (said attorney happens to be my father), I was told that only one thing really matters in this case:
What is the dimension of copyrightability or of patentability, as it applies to computer software?
This is to say, what can SCO claim it had patented or copyrighted. Narrowly, one could say that SCO's protection applies only to the letter of its source code, not to any ancillary ideas. But SCO could counter this claim, saying that its protections extended to the UNIX "user experience." Such things as the command syntax of the Bourne shell, the Shell/Kernel design, the presence of standard utilities like awk and make, or even the something as nebulous as the "shape of the integrated whole" (the experiential architecture of a UNIX system and what it "feels" like when it is operated) could, in fact, be claimed as intellectual property.
One should realize, in defense of SCO, that all essentially all early UNIX and UNIX-like technology was developed by a small team at AT&T Bell Labs, and clearly AT&T didn't pay and fund that team simply to write code. No, that team was funded by-and-large to craft an operating system, a "user-experience," "application programming interface experience" and "overall system architecture." Indeed, these latter ideas were far more important (and valuable) than the UNIX source code itself. AT&T forced Novell, as Novell later forced SCO, to pay good money for the rights to these ideas, so if I were SCO and had paid some $500 million for the rights to such ideas, I too would be rather perturbed should an individual and an organization (Linus and the FSF) come along with the vision of creating "a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software" (source: FSF website, GNU project homepage), this is to say, creating a product that uses all of my policy, interface specification, and design ideas, without rightfully paying for them.
Everyone here should realize that Linus, RMS, and their ilk simply wrote programs that implemented policy, architecture, and user-experience specifications and ideas developed, at the cost of millions of dollars, some twenty-years before at AT&T Bell Labs. That SCO later paid millions for those ideas, something that people here seem to laugh at, should not, in my mind, be taken lightly.
In my opinion, Linux marketshare will probably overtake MacOS marketshare, and will do so soon. However (and far more importantly), the MacOS's continued ability to thrive holds profound consequences for the long-term financial viability of Linux in particular, and open-source platforms in general.
We should all remember vividly that people have predicted the demise of the MacOS since time immemorial. Both Windows 3.0 and OS/2 2.0 were supposed to be the death-knell of the MacOS, as were both Windows 95, and Apple's inability, until as late as 2001, to deliver a pre-emptive multitasking, crash-protected operating system. Yet the MacOS survived, and although Apple's relative marketshare declined, the number of MacOS installations has never dropped (to my knowledge) below some 25 million. The reason, from my experience, is Apple's appreciation of the computing process as a holistic, integrated endeavour.
Many posters on this topic seem to lament the fact that the MacOS is a closed, proprietary system, but, in my mind, this is the system's chief strength. Apple makes the whole Widget, software and hardware. Apple delivers a single, integrated, computational experience. Both software and hardware are designed, by a hierarchy of engineers, from the top down, to function together in a logically coherent, easy-to-use manner. This fact, in itself, gives the MacOS a value that far exceeds, in the minds of those who can appreciate it, anything else available in the open-source or Windows worlds.
Yes, you will pay more for a Mac. Perhaps you will pay considerably more. Perhaps it won't be as powerful, in terms of raw SPECmarks. Perhaps the selection of software won't be as plentiful. But for business users, you get a single, unified vendor of both software and hardware. You have one person to call. You have a meticulously crafted OS that is the end product of coherent, top-down design by a team of engineers united by a single corporate culture. Everything works together, and it works in predictable ways. If you can use iTunes, you can use Keynote, or iMovie, or iDVD.
The bottom line, for business users, it seems to me, is that with MacOS the whole system costs less to own. Training costs are lower, maintenance costs are lower, and users are more productive. Furthermore, there is one vendor with which to maintain a relationship, for both software and hardware.
By constrast, open-source systems, though free, aren't nearly so monolithic, and are surely more costly. Open-source operating systems are not the product of a top-down design process by engineers operating in the atmosphere of a unified corporate culture. No, by stark constrast, open-source operating systems aren't really even designed. They seem to evolve, as if "grown", the end product of the contributions of thousands of distributed programmers. Now, I'm assuming we all understand the value of distributed, pseudo-organic systems for solving many types of problems, but it doesn't seem to me that software design is one of them. Let's face it, KDE and GNOME apps don't even share the same user interface guidelines, and OpenOffice has interface guidelines all its own. When apps from the KDE and GNOME worlds run together on the same desktop, there is little integration, and the entire environment appears jumbled and incoherent. Gesture ergonomics and keystroke combinations are not portable from application to application, and inter-application data exchange is clumsy. We end up with an incoherent system that is difficult to support, maintain, and train users to understand.
An example from my own experience is useful here, so I'll interject it. I am among the founding partners of a software studio that produces custom applications in visual simulation and immersive environments. In 2000, we took the decision to get rid of our SGI IRIX-based workstations, and replace them with commodity Dell PCs running RedHat. This seemed like a brilliant plan, considering that we were paying some $21,000 (US) per SGI workstation plus an annual
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Having just spoken with a corporate attorney about this (said attorney happens to be my father), I was told that only one thing really matters in this case:
What is the dimension of copyrightability or of patentability, as it applies to computer software?
This is to say, what can SCO claim it had patented or copyrighted. Narrowly, one could say that SCO's protection applies only to the letter of its source code, not to any ancillary ideas. But SCO could counter this claim, saying that its protections extended to the UNIX "user experience." Such things as the command syntax of the Bourne shell, the Shell/Kernel design, the presence of standard utilities like awk and make, or even the something as nebulous as the "shape of the integrated whole" (the experiential architecture of a UNIX system and what it "feels" like when it is operated) could, in fact, be claimed as intellectual property.
One should realize, in defense of SCO, that all essentially all early UNIX and UNIX-like technology was developed by a small team at AT&T Bell Labs, and clearly AT&T didn't pay and fund that team simply to write code. No, that team was funded by-and-large to craft an operating system, a "user-experience," "application programming interface experience" and "overall system architecture." Indeed, these latter ideas were far more important (and valuable) than the UNIX source code itself. AT&T forced Novell, as Novell later forced SCO, to pay good money for the rights to these ideas, so if I were SCO and had paid some $500 million for the rights to such ideas, I too would be rather perturbed should an individual and an organization (Linus and the FSF) come along with the vision of creating "a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software" (source: FSF website, GNU project homepage), this is to say, creating a product that uses all of my policy, interface specification, and design ideas, without rightfully paying for them.
Everyone here should realize that Linus, RMS, and their ilk simply wrote programs that implemented policy, architecture, and user-experience specifications and ideas developed, at the cost of millions of dollars, some twenty-years before at AT&T Bell Labs. That SCO later paid millions for those ideas, something that people here seem to laugh at, should not, in my mind, be taken lightly.
In my opinion, Linux marketshare will probably overtake MacOS marketshare, and will do so soon. However (and far more importantly), the MacOS's continued ability to thrive holds profound consequences for the long-term financial viability of Linux in particular, and open-source platforms in general.
We should all remember vividly that people have predicted the demise of the MacOS since time immemorial. Both Windows 3.0 and OS/2 2.0 were supposed to be the death-knell of the MacOS, as were both Windows 95, and Apple's inability, until as late as 2001, to deliver a pre-emptive multitasking, crash-protected operating system. Yet the MacOS survived, and although Apple's relative marketshare declined, the number of MacOS installations has never dropped (to my knowledge) below some 25 million. The reason, from my experience, is Apple's appreciation of the computing process as a holistic, integrated endeavour.
Many posters on this topic seem to lament the fact that the MacOS is a closed, proprietary system, but, in my mind, this is the system's chief strength. Apple makes the whole Widget, software and hardware. Apple delivers a single, integrated, computational experience. Both software and hardware are designed, by a hierarchy of engineers, from the top down, to function together in a logically coherent, easy-to-use manner. This fact, in itself, gives the MacOS a value that far exceeds, in the minds of those who can appreciate it, anything else available in the open-source or Windows worlds.
Yes, you will pay more for a Mac. Perhaps you will pay considerably more. Perhaps it won't be as powerful, in terms of raw SPECmarks. Perhaps the selection of software won't be as plentiful. But for business users, you get a single, unified vendor of both software and hardware. You have one person to call. You have a meticulously crafted OS that is the end product of coherent, top-down design by a team of engineers united by a single corporate culture. Everything works together, and it works in predictable ways. If you can use iTunes, you can use Keynote, or iMovie, or iDVD.
The bottom line, for business users, it seems to me, is that with MacOS the whole system costs less to own. Training costs are lower, maintenance costs are lower, and users are more productive. Furthermore, there is one vendor with which to maintain a relationship, for both software and hardware.
By constrast, open-source systems, though free, aren't nearly so monolithic, and are surely more costly. Open-source operating systems are not the product of a top-down design process by engineers operating in the atmosphere of a unified corporate culture. No, by stark constrast, open-source operating systems aren't really even designed. They seem to evolve, as if "grown", the end product of the contributions of thousands of distributed programmers. Now, I'm assuming we all understand the value of distributed, pseudo-organic systems for solving many types of problems, but it doesn't seem to me that software design is one of them. Let's face it, KDE and GNOME apps don't even share the same user interface guidelines, and OpenOffice has interface guidelines all its own. When apps from the KDE and GNOME worlds run together on the same desktop, there is little integration, and the entire environment appears jumbled and incoherent. Gesture ergonomics and keystroke combinations are not portable from application to application, and inter-application data exchange is clumsy. We end up with an incoherent system that is difficult to support, maintain, and train users to understand.
An example from my own experience is useful here, so I'll interject it. I am among the founding partners of a software studio that produces custom applications in visual simulation and immersive environments. In 2000, we took the decision to get rid of our SGI IRIX-based workstations, and replace them with commodity Dell PCs running RedHat. This seemed like a brilliant plan, considering that we were paying some $21,000 (US) per SGI workstation plus an annual