SCO vs. IBM Battle Over Linux May Finally Be Over (networkworld.com) 231
JG0LD writes with this news from Network World: A breach-of-contract and copyright lawsuit filed nearly 13 years ago by a successor company to business Linux vendor Caldera International against IBM may be drawing to a close at last, after a U.S. District Court judge issued an order in favor of the latter company earlier this week.
Here's the decision itself (PDF). Also at The Register.
Here's the decision itself (PDF). Also at The Register.
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Burn the remnants of SCO and then stir the ashes.
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I'm pretty sure I read this same headline on a Slashdot story maybe six or seven years ago - so I'll believe it when the lawyers say they're done.
This lawsuit is their only product, after all.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, here it is, from 2008. However my memory didn't completely serve - this was PJ warning us that it wasn't over, even though most of the net thought SCO was toast.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
Jesus... even Duke Nukem Forever was finished before this lawsuit was!
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Yeah, what a f'king mess .. SCO that is, not Duke Nukem..
No no, both can be considered interchangeable in the sentence.
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
dump into the biggest volcano you can find, then nuke it until there's nothing left but ...wait...for...it...a caldera.
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Stake through the heart, silver bullet, and then hachet decapitation! I think the latter is probably the way to go, it's been a zombie lurching along for the last 10 years.
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Trap their souls on electronic tape and send them to watch bad pop psych movies and bad science fiction.
Call it the wall of fire... or Incident 1.
Then make it a religion.
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Nah, make them listen to boy bands....it's the worst we can do to them.
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systemd has done far more harm to Linux than SCO could have ever managed to do.
It shall be forked when the time comes.
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Can I start the flame war now please?
Will it be systemE
or does everyone prefer systemd++
Disclaimer: I use OpenBSD
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Still, Lennart's latest attempt at linux domination is flawed in many ways and still not ready for release yet but we are stuck with either using it or using old distros. Notice how many commercial operations are doing the latter and still stuck on RHEL6 to avoid systemd? Doing anything with Fedora outside of the norm (eg. running ZFS or usin
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
absolutely (Score:2)
They will soon have 100% free time, after everything they work on is also absorbed into systemd, Borg-style.
"You've been systemd!!"
Red Hat will go down in F/OSS history as their Benedict Arnold.
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This shit of hanging with no log available and then finding that just unplugging an RF mouse dongle is the secret to the booting or not is not what we are looking for in a modern system. Lots of things writing in parallel to a binary log? The 1960s called and said something about obvious failures wait to happen due to race
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So basically, you're saying you like the way the old system failed instead of how the new system fails. Gotcha. How about something more productive than whining about the change? Help out and push for better output, error control and reporting in the new system. It's new and needs the rough edges worked out, help out if you don't like it as is.
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Re:systemd has done more harm to Linux than SCO di (Score:5, Insightful)
SysV and the flusterfuck dyslexic script hackery behind SysV was a constant nightmare with a mountain hardware complaints leading back to it.
Even so the clusterfuck of rc scripts in most redhat derivatives was Red-Hat's creation. People aren't using init, via inittab, properly and now the reason cited to replace init is because the rc system, and the script hackery behind it created by red-hat is disliked. Keh?
Wouldn't a better rc system work better?
Here is a thought, why not learn how to use the shell properly so that shell hackery is not required. Or another idea, learn how to implement design patterns in bash/sh/ksh/zsh. Init is a simple elegant idea, people are arguing for it's removal because they aren't skilled enough writing *shell scripts*. It seems a bit silly to me that people who can't write something so simple have any business modifying the way the OS initializes.
It would be great to get Ken Thopson's opinion on the situation.
However, since we have the attention of many systemd advocates, can someone please throw a use case at me that init doesn't satisfy that systemd does? I'm really trying to understand why it is supposed to be better than something that is as tested as init. I don't mind using it, but why it is supposed to be so compelling?
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SysV and the flusterfuck dyslexic script hackery behind SysV was a constant nightmare with a mountain hardware complaints leading back to it.
Even so the clusterfuck of rc scripts in most redhat derivatives was Red-Hat's creation. People aren't using init, via inittab, properly and now the reason cited to replace init is because the rc system, and the script hackery behind it created by red-hat is disliked. Keh?
Wouldn't a better rc system work better?
Here is a thought, why not learn how to use the shell properly so that shell hackery is not required. Or another idea, learn how to implement design patterns in bash/sh/ksh/zsh. Init is a simple elegant idea, people are arguing for it's removal because they aren't skilled enough writing *shell scripts*. It seems a bit silly to me that people who can't write something so simple have any business modifying the way the OS initializes.
It would be great to get Ken Thopson's opinion on the situation.
However, since we have the attention of many systemd advocates, can someone please throw a use case at me that init doesn't satisfy that systemd does? I'm really trying to understand why it is supposed to be better than something that is as tested as init. I don't mind using it, but why it is supposed to be so compelling?
I miss the simplicity of the bsd-like init config scripts sitting on top of SysV in Arch, before they adopted systemd. So much could be configured from rc.conf, the daemon commands were simple, and I never had problems booting.
gah
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I miss the simplicity of the bsd-like init config scripts sitting on top of SysV in Arch, before they adopted systemd. So much could be configured from rc.conf, the daemon commands were simple, and I never had problems booting. gah
Yielding the power of UNIX has always laid in creating your systems inittab file, I thought everyone did that. I used to look upon rc scripts as an unnecessary complication of the system and wondered why they were there. If a service needs to be up, init makes sure it's up. If you want to take the service down, tell init to take it down. vim /etc/inittab && kill -1 1 then get on with the rest of your day.
Network services, is good example, a shell script handled by rc, is a prime candidate for a
Systemd and SysV (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not just systemd that is destroying SysV. It's also Solaris, OS X, PC-BSD, and FreeBSD -- we can probably say well over 90% of the major Unix platforms. For better or worse, OpenRC is also making many of the same choices as systemd, including heavy dependence on C libraries, dependency resolution, parallel startup, and cgroup support. The critical failure of SysV init is the pidfile. It was always a bad hack — perhaps necessary for cross-platform support in a world without real process tracking,
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It seems a bit silly to me that people who can't write something so simple have any business modifying the way the OS initializes.
Write scripts? OS initializes? What are you talking about man all I want it my program to start on boot. Why is it that I can do that for Apache with one click in window's service manager, but not on its native platform?
Why is it that when I download a program and compile it from source I need to trawl through the documentation page to be presented with 10 different scripts for 10 different distributions to get the program to start .... or one systemd unit file?
As for use cases I noticed you said init. You
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Yes things will break but just like when the car replaced the horse and buggy that scared children with its noise and smoke we will realise the streets are no longer filled with horse shit.
Yeah, because camel shit is such a fucking upgrade.
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Well, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco makes cigarettes out of it.
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I've already burned my mod points so I can post normally. It doesn't matter if you agree with it, it's off-topic and just looking to start a fight. -1 is where it belongs.
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Paraside Lost (Score:5, Funny)
Somewhere buried in all of this was an opportunity for Netcraft to finally be right about something. Maybe that story has yet to surface, and will appear all in due course in tomorrow's feed bag.
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More like the day after tomorrow.
And again, two days after that.
Somewhere... (Score:4, Insightful)
PJ is toasting yet again.
Maybe in another couple years' time, she'll have another decision to toast some more!
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Too bad they pushed Love out (Score:2)
But he did open up 32v, giving us all the 3 and 4 BSD as truly open source.
SYS V needs to go open next, not that overloaded slowlaris, but lean mean SYS V
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I cut my Unix teeth on Xenix, so System V would be pretty cool.
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Re:Too bad they pushed Love out (Score:5, Interesting)
SYS V needs to go open next, not that overloaded slowlaris, but lean mean SYS V
I was under the impression that the entire POINT of SYS V was for the major UNIX vendors to re-implement the guts of Unix as a clearly, enforceably, proprietary product (after the CONTU recommendations and the resulting copyright law changes explicitly extended copyright to software), then move to it and orphan the original development thread. (This might make opening it a hard sell to the members of the consortium.)
There were at least a couple issues with the proprietary status of the AT&T code:
One issue was that AT&T was still a government-regulated utility monopoly and there were some requirements about disclosing and releasing non-telephone-related inventions they came up with.
The big issue was that, before copyright applied and before software patents were hacked up (by recasting software as one embodiment of, or a component of, a patentable machine or process), the only protection was trade secret and the related contract law. Trade secrets generally stop being enforceable when the secret out of the bag (with some details about whether the claimant contributed to the leak). Bell Labs had shipped code to a LOT of educational institutions. When the U of New South Wales used the System 6 kernel code and an explanation of it as the two-volume text for an Operating System class, the textbooks became an underground classic. This, along with AT&T's benign-neglect licensing policies, led to the burst of little, cheap, generic UNIX boxes, as this was also when microcomputer chips were just becoming powerful enough to do the job.
Up to then a big barrier to entry was that every new machine needed a custom O.S. to deploy, and these were enormous, machine specific, and mostly in assembler. That made it an expensive, undertaking, suitable only for financial giants. But all but under 2,000 lines of Unix was in C, and the entire kernel, which included essentially all the platform-specific code as a subset, was well under 10,000 lines of code. If you had a C compiler and assembler for your new machine, it was a matter of a few man-months to port it and get it up and running. Essentially ALL the utilities and applications came right over. You didn't have to train users, either, because they all worked pretty much just like what they'd used in college.
The game was:
1. Grab a bootleg copy of the code.
2. Port it to your machine and get it working.
3. Go to AT&T and ask for a license "to port Unix to our new machine and sell it."
4. AT&T, as a matter of policy, completely ignores any "violations" you may have committed during the porting phase and cuts you a license at a very reasonable price.
5. You "port Unix in an AMAZINGLY short time" (like the ten minutes it takes to tell Sales to go to market) and you're in business.
6. You (with your new business) and AT&T (with their small cut) slap each other on the back and laugh all the way to the bank. PROFIT! for you. (profit) for AT&T.
7. Because of the policy in 4., everybody ELSE manearly everbody's king a new machine knows they can do the same thing. So many do. AT&T gets a rakeoff from ALL of them. PROFIT! for AT&T. Far more than if they went dog-in-the-manger, held up the first few for all the traffic would bear, and got no more customers for Unix.
And because of this, it was in nearly everbody's interest to NOT challenge the AT&T-proprietary status of Unix. And it stayed this way until SCO's management screwed up and altered step 4. (Even then the case turned on other issues, so it never did come to the point of attacking AT&T's claim that Unix code was proprietary.)
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I was under the impression that the entire POINT of SYS V was for the major UNIX vendors to re-implement the guts of Unix as a clearly, enforceably, proprietary product (after the CONTU recommendations and the resulting copyright law changes explicitly extended copyright to software), then move to it and orphan the original development thread. (This might make opening it a hard sell to the members of the consortium.)
To which version of System V are you referring? The original one, SVR2, SVR3, or SVR4 and later?
Geez, it's like clamydia (Score:5, Insightful)
SCO is never going away. Fifty billion years from now, long after the last human is dead, alien successors-in-interest will still be suing each other over it.
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Double-tap to the head - it's the only way to be sure. Geez, doesn't anybody watch monster movies anymore?
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>Double-tap to the head
Lawyers routinely survive this and go on to more career success. See previous instructions re fire, acid, sun, black hole.
Q: Why do they user lawyers as lab rats now?
A: There are some things the rats simply won't do.
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You watch the wrong movies. Any avid movie follower knows that gunshots, wherever they are directed, are completely useless against zombies.
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I am surprised we haven't seen the rulings in Oracle vs Google over APIs used by SCO (or whoever has inherited it all). Arguing that Linux copying the Unix APIs is a copyright violation and that Stalman and Torvalds broke the law in creating the GNU project and Linux kernel...
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM... [groklaw.net]
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Except that in other, prevous rulings, it was long ago found that SCO did not own the SysV UNIX copyrights. They still belonged to Novell, which had only sold licensing to SCO, not the actual UNIX copyrights. SCO should have been forwarding part of the previously collected licensing fees to Novell, which they had not been doing. As best I can tell from the analyses on Groklaw, SCO had no standing to file suit.
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that speedy trials should probably have been guaranteed for civil cases as well.
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Speedy trial doesn't have anything to do with length of the trial itself. It has to do with being guaranteed that the trial starts within a timely period after being indicted.
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> Speedy trial doesn't have anything to do with length of the trial itself.
It certainly can. Lengthy delays in the court proceedings can be very prejudicial to the defendant. There are many interesting analyses of the trade-offs to ensure the defendant has the right to a speedy trial, but also has the time to examine the charges and prepare a meaningful defense. The results have often been unfortunate, as we can see in the USA with the number of young black men arrested and incarcerated on minor drug cha
Whatever happened to Groklaw? (Score:5, Insightful)
The groklaw coverage was so good. I know that PJ closed the site down. Did anything ever spring up in its place?
Re:Whatever happened to Groklaw? (Score:5, Informative)
Groklaw is not completely closed down - just running in stealth mode. All the recent court filings still show up there. Other updates show up now and again. Note that the link in the summary to the decision itself takes you to ... groklaw. Commentary and discussions do continue on other boards and forums, but not with the same focus that groklaw brought.
Whiplash (Score:5, Interesting)
PJ and Groklaw would be a huge boon for slashdot if you could somehow reach out to her and bring her back.
Re:Whiplash (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Whiplash (Score:5, Informative)
Damn it is that what happened? I had no idea.
I thought it was just too much work for too little return.
Copied straight from Wikipedia for those like me who didn't know.
Jones was widely respected by journalists and people inside the Linux community. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote, "Jones has made her reputation as a top legal IT reporter from her work detailing the defects with SCO's case against IBM and Linux. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that her work has contributed enormously to everyone's coverage of SCO's cases." [23]
Despite the high regard of Jones' peer journalists and the Linux community (or possibly in part because of it), a number of prominent attacks against Groklaw and Jones occurred. These attacks were documented and addressed in detail, on Groklaw and other web sites and also in court as part of the SCO litigation.
During the first week of May 2005, Maureen O'Gara, writing in Linux World, wrote an exposé claiming to unmask Jones. Two weeks before O'Gara's publication, McBride said that SCO was investigating Jones' identity.[22] The article included alleged, but unverified, personal information about Jones,[24] including a photo of Jones' supposed house and purported addresses and telephone numbers for Jones and her mother.[25] After a flood of complaints to the publisher, lobbying of the site's advertisers, and claims of a denial-of-service attack launched against the Sys-Con domain,[26][27] Linux Business News' publisher Sys-Con issued a public apology,[28] and said they dropped O'Gara and her LinuxGram column. Despite this assertion, O'Gara remained with Sys-Con; as of 2009, she is the Virtualization News Desk editor at Sys-Con Media, who describe her as "[o]ne of the most respected technology reporters in the business" and has her work published in multiple magazines owned by Sys-Con Media.[29]
SCO executives Darl McBride and Blake Stowell also denigrated Jones, and claimed that she worked for IBM.[30] Jones denied this allegation,[31] as did IBM in a court filing.[32] During an SCO conference call on April 13, 2005, McBride said, "The reality is the web site is full of misinformation, including the people who are actually running it" when talking about Groklaw, adding also "What I would say is that it is not what it is purported to be". Later developments in the court cases showed that McBride's statements to the press regarding the SCO litigation had limited credibility; very few such statements were ever substantiated and most were shown to be false. For example, McBride claimed that SCO owned the copyrights to UNIX, and SCO filed suit to try to enforce these claims.[33] The outcome went against McBride's claims. The jury found that SCO had not purchased these copyrights.[34][35] SCO appealed this ruling and lost.[36] McBride also made a claim to the press that there was a "mountain of code" misappropriated to create Linux.[37] When SCO finally presented their evidence of infringement, which centered on nine lines of error name and number similarities in the file errno.h, Judge Wells famously said "Is this all you've got?"[38] Professor Randall Davis of MIT later made a convincing demonstration that there were no elements of UNIX which might be copyright protectable present in the Linux source code.[39]
Re:Whiplash (Score:5, Informative)
Damn it is that what happened? I had no idea.
Yes, it happened (though the investigators found the wrong Pamela Jones). The reason PJ closed down Groklaw was because of NSA spying. The general supposition, based on her final Groklaw article [groklaw.net], is that she received an NSA demand to spy on her users, but her conscience would not allow her to do so. So she stopped doing Groklaw so she wouldn't have anything to spy on.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too.
There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.
What to do?"
So the unavailability of secure email effectively stopped the site.
License fee (Score:4, Funny)
Re: License fee (Score:2)
I wanted to buy one, under the condition I can have real access to sysv, and redistribute. Surprisingly, never heard back.
Re: License fee (Score:5, Interesting)
Open source SCO (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever used SCO?
I have. It wasn't a bad system. I didn't like it as well as Solaris, but it was stable and reliable and pretty well documented. For a long time, they had a good product and supported it pretty well.
Yeah, the company sucked, but all that work, good programming, is now going to waste. What I'd like to see is IBM take ownership and open source all of it, have it relicensed under GPL and MIT licenses. Ultimately, I'd like to see a lot of that code legally incorporated into Linux.
Why? Just to make the people responsible for the fiasco the lawyers and executives of the company SCO weep.
Re:Open source SCO (Score:5, Funny)
Have you ever used SCO?
I have. It wasn't a bad system. I didn't like it as well as Solaris, but it was stable and reliable and pretty well documented. For a long time, they had a good product and supported it pretty well.
It was kind of like Debian stable but not nearly as cutting edge.
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OH COME ON INTERNET. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation) that produced SCO Xenix, SCO OpenServer, and SCO UnixWare is TOTALLY UNRELATED to the SCO Group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group), except they have three letters in common.
Posting anonymous - though I worked quite happily for the former and left a few years before the latter came into existence.
You're collective lack of understanding is most dispiriting, given that there's plenty of facts available
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Why? Just to make the people responsible for the fiasco the lawyers and executives of the company SCO weep.
Why? They all got their paycheck and moved on. The investors lost some money. Darl McBride is now the CEO of ShoutTV. I'm never going to work there.
I do remember when SCO was a respectable member of the Linux community, and Caldera was seen as a reasonable distro alternative. Suse was in there, too.
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Remember Mandrake? That was some great shit.
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Re:Open source SCO (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a nice guy.
I've got no idea why anyone other than a crony would every employ him.
Re:Open source SCO (Score:4, Insightful)
With all the money Darl and his brother sucked out of that company they never need to work again. His "business model" was to start a case that could not be won, give the legal work to his brother's firm, string it out for max legal fees then take a golden parachute. Not a nice guy. I've got no idea why anyone other than a crony would every employ him.
Well, that's the problem with corporate Capitalism. It works great until you run out of other people's money.
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Have you ever used SCO?
I have. It wasn't a bad system.
Bad is a strong word. What it was? Dumb. It had old versions of everything and a non-standard mail daemon that totally failed to make anything easier than just using sendmail... so why not just use sendmail? They also wanted $INFINITY dollars for a compiler, which ultimately let Linux kill them. You want people to pay hundreds for the OS and pay hundreds again for a single compiler license while Linux will give it all to you for free and do everything SCO Unix does, to boot? HAHAHAAHAHAHA.
SCO Xenix was by f
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Thanks for reminding me - Compaq servers, and Tru64.
I tried to forget that period of my life - I had to migrate a DEC Alpha to Tru64.
Then I had the privilege of installing Win NT 4.0 on the Alpha, so it could run Exchange 5.0
{deep breath} It was the most stable instance of a Windows server + Exchange I've ever seen. Yep, MS server software, plus exchange, running on DEC Alpha hardware. No BSODs, and exchange went down ONCE, when it was upgraded to 5.5. The first thing to crap out was a network adapter. I t
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Yes, back when you had to stop all services just to do a full backup of the mail stores - yet it was version 5.0 and not pre-release beta software!
What that meant was that no mail could go in or out for the duration of the real backup which would typically take hours, sometimes most of non-work hours if you had early risers. Most people either lived dangerously doing partial backups or had adult supervision of a *nix box as a gateway doing spam filtering and catching all ingoing
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Old SCO sold Unixware and Openserver to Caldera Systems, then became Tarantella. Caldera Systems became SCO and started sueing their customers. M'kay?
Tagged fatladysings? (Score:2)
Out of curiosity I clicked on the tag, and two thirds of the other stories that showed up were also about SCO.
So maybe this isn't over after all.
This deserves... (Score:2)
Not possible (Score:2)
IBM and SCO have been doomed to eternally fight each other, we will see another legal battle every 4-5 years for the rest of eternity.
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IBM and SCO have been doomed to eternally fight each other, we will see another legal battle every 4-5 years for the rest of eternity.
And SCO will keep losing, but every time it will proclaim "It's just a flesh wound!" [wikipedia.org]
And... Emacs Wins!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
And... Emacs Wins, Vi loses!!!!
Oops, sorry... wrong battle.
Everybody loses (except VMS) (Score:2)
Because of course VMS crushes all competition from inferior OSs like UNIX, EDT is the real winner!
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Because of course VMS crushes all competition from inferior OSs like UNIX, EDT is the real winner!
Umm... is that by any chance the same EDT as on BS2000 (Fujitsu / former Siemens mainframe)?
That one would be a contender for vi...
Not over yet (Score:3)
Sadly this case is not over yet, reading the summary of the order there are still outstanding counts, this order only addresses Counts VII and IX. Furthermore SCO still has appeal rights. That said, looking through the summary, it's pretty safe to say that SCO will loose the whole case.
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Where is Darl McBride? (Score:2)
Still pursuing his millions, at least in 2013:
http://archive.sltrib.com/stor... [sltrib.com]
I'm surprised (Score:2)
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You won't.
Xinuos owns SCO Assets (Score:5, Funny)
Many of my customers are still using SCO Open Desktop. For new licenses and users I now deal with XINUOS http://www.xinuos.com/ [xinuos.com] . They acquired the assets of SCO from the bankruptcy proceedings. They are pretty good people to deal with. The best part is that I can use the same platform that I have used since 1981 when I was supporting AT&T 3B2 computers (with technical upgrades, of course). Open Desktop is the name of the System V 3.2 architecture. It is now time to stop denigrating SCO (the OS) and see it as a viable commercial alternative to Linux or xxxBSD, and is a stable, strongly usable platform for getting actual work done.
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Many of my customers are still using SCO Open Desktop. For new licenses and users I now deal with XINUOS http://www.xinuos.com/ [xinuos.com]
So what are you going to do when they implode?
Simple car analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux was just the distraction for an old fashioned two man scam.
Gotta love ridiculously inaccurate reporting (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot headline: "May Finally Be Over"
Referenced source: The Register.
from The Register article: "the case isn't over"
"IBM"... (Score:2)
...is much more concise than "the latter company". Former and latter should be used when they are the simplest solution.
MS+Redhat partnership: same as SCO but much worse (Score:4, Informative)
It is nice to see scox lose, even if it is over a decade after it has any relevance.
As I have been saying for a long time, this is much more a msft scam, than scox scam. For msft, $100 million to stomp (if not eliminate) a competitor is money well spent.
Let's not forget that some scox insiders, like Riamondi, were selling their shares when scox was at $16. None of the guilty have been really punished, and they never will be.
As to insiders losing everything, and scox becoming worthless: scox lasted a lot longer, and scox's shares went up a lot higher, than would have happened without the scox scam.
Msft is still doing the same IP scamming. Only now it may be more effective. Msft and redhat have partnered. This makes redhat - and only redhat - immune from patent infringement lawsuits from msft. Sound familiar? It should. It is the scox extortion racket all over again - only this time with more credibility.
> "Only Days After Red Hat Legitimised Microsoft’s Patents Against Linux Another Linux-Using Company Falls Victim to Microsoft’s Patent Extortion"
http://techrights.org/2015/11/10/star-micronics-and-patents/
Of course, msft rarely sues in court, they don't have to. You either quietly settle, or get sued out of existence.
Once non-redhat distros become irrelevant, msft may turn on redhat. Or, maybe not. I think msft is okay with competitors, as long as those competitors can be dealt with, and are not too threatening. In 1998, Apple seemed to be okay as a competitor.
Brief summary of the ruling (Score:5, Informative)
The court has already decided many of the claims against SCO including copyrights and ownership. The claim in this order was about tortious interference: Did IBM, by hardening Linux and porting code over to Linux, maliciously interfere with SCO's customers and business relationships?
Like many of SCO claims, the tortious interference were ambiguous and ever changing and lacked any detail. The number of parties that SCO alleged that IBM had caused interference changed by the month despite IBM asking repeatedly (and the court ordering SCO to respond repeatedly) to name the parties and the detail the interference. It was as low as 3 and as high as 150 with 150 being a number that SCO only claimed because one IBM email mentioned that it had 150 new customers on Linux.
Similarily to other claims, SCO brought almost no evidence to the case despite years of discovery. In fact it was often contradicted by indisputable evidence that IBM brought. For example, SCO claims that IBM damaged SCO's Unix by communicating to their third parties like their investor, Baystar, that IBM was supporting Linux and that the third parties should abandon Unix. Almost all customers third parties swore to the court that they never had communications with IBM on the topic. The only party that acknowledged it had any discussions with IBM was Hewlett-Packard and they testified that the discussion did not change their relationship with SCO so there was no damage.
The theory that SCO offered as motivation was that IBM wanted to damage SCO by hardening Linux and porting Unix code. Former SCO employees testified against SCO in that they did not believe damaging SCO was ever the motivation for supporting Linux. Their analysis was that IBM was competing against the likes of Sun and Microsoft by offering a cheaper Unix-like OS on cheaper Intel hardware that was nearly as good or better than Unix.
There are still a few claims left but at this point the pattern keeps repeating: SCO loses on summary judgements because they never had a case.
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing is over until we decide it is!
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Hell, no!
I think you posted to the wrong discussion. [slashdot.org]