The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#2Here's a choice for you all:
(1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or --
(2) the current patent aystem, post CLS Bank, which has eliminated a lot of business method patents and some, but not all, software patents.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#3How different would the history of Linux have been had FreeBSD (and its forks) not been encumbered by lawsuits in the 1990s? Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#4Here's a choice for you all: (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or -- (2) the current patent aystem, post CLS Bank , which has eliminated a lot of business method patents and some, but not all, software patents.
Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is unquestionably better than Linux? And if yes, are the Linux versions of the features or capabilities a significant enough constraint to warrant using Unix instead? It seems that certain networking and NAS applications are measurably better on Unix (Netflix is still a big using of FreeBSD caching servers iirc) but can't Linux close the gap?
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#5How different would the history of Linux have been had FreeBSD (and its forks) not been encumbered by lawsuits in the 1990s? Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?
What an interesting question!
I'm a bit glad that BSD didn't "win", because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me. I'm looking at switching to BSD (I haven't yet because that switch will be a lot of work -- I have a lot of machines) as a better alternative.
So BSD looks like an escape hatch to me and I'm glad that it's there.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#6How different would the history of Linux have been had FreeBSD (and its forks) not been encumbered by lawsuits in the 1990s? Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?
> Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?
From the horse's mouth:
> Linus: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#7Here's a choice for you all: (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or -- (2) the current patent aystem, post CLS Bank , which has eliminated a lot of business method patents and some, but not all, software patents.
> with cleaned up laws
Which one I'd pick depends a whole lot on what those "cleaned up" laws consist of. But generally, this looks like an exercise in determining which is the lesser evil.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#8During project Monterey I had to setup all of the services that allowed SCO/IBM/Sequent on the IGS/IBM side. A few short years later I was tasked with pulling all of the IBM AIX design docs and source code for discovery going back to the beginning.
One has to recall that what sued IBM was the Ray Noorda Canopy Group. Aka Caldera. Which also levied lawsuits against Microsoft. Far from the ocean view of Santa Cruz.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#9How different would the history of Linux have been had FreeBSD (and its forks) not been encumbered by lawsuits in the 1990s? Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?
IIRC, the BSD lawsuits were mostly about userspace stuff, ISTR the kernel was known clean. I wonder how big the license incompatibility was thought to be at that time to prevent releasing a BSD with a GNU userspace. I don't even know if the GNU stuff was complete enough.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#10Here's a choice for you all: (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or -- (2) the current patent aystem, post CLS Bank , which has eliminated a lot of business method patents and some, but not all, software patents.
Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is unquestionably better than Linux? And if yes, are the Linux versions of the features or capabilities a significant enough constraint to warrant using Unix instead? It seems that certain networking and NAS applications are measurably better on Unix (Netflix is still a big using of FreeBSD caching servers iirc) but can't Linux close the gap?
interesting but not what I asked