The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

I hadn't heard of Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) and I looked at his LinkedIn; this is his side of the story from his time at SCO, as he puts in in his work experience section. I found it super interesting.

  All of my work experience before and after SCO was of the startup/entrepreneurial variety. Fun stuff, new, exciting and positive. Then some former colleagues on the board of SCO (previously Caldera) convinced me to come in and try and turn around a company that had fallen from a billion dollar valuation down to a measly six million. They only had $8 million of cash and they were burning $4 million per quarter so I basically had 6 months to complete the turnaround. 

  What they didn't tell me was the company was in a dispute with IBM over disputed UNIX software code. This led to us filing a lawsuit against IBM, retaining David Boies to represent us, raising $76M to fight the battle, seeing our stock go from $0.66 per share to $22 per share, then falling back down to pennies per share after losing an important trial. 

  IBM teamed up with Linux programmers worldwide to go against me and I showed up on the cover of Fortune Magazine as "Corporate Enemy Number One". Hey, at least you can say that I was number one at something huh? I was as popular in the tech industry as Donald Trump hanging out at an Oscars after party with a bunch of Hollywooders.

  The legal battle is not actually over, 15 years later, the case is in review at the 10th circuit court of appeals in Denver.

  Silver Lining: While the courtroom battles were raging, we started a mobile apps business that I later bought out of SCO with some friends. That is where Shout came from. Back to the worlds I know and love - tech startup tied to sports and entertainment.

Wow, thanks for the blast from the past, SCO were my first Unix servers along with IBM AIX ironically, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

Interesting side effect of this (to me :-)) is that when Blekko was acquired by IBM I got stuck doing what is called "Blue Washing" where IBM tracks down the licenses, origins, and usages of all the source code the acquired company is bringing to IBM. According to people I worked with when doing this, the entire process and toolset was an outgrowth of the work they did to disprove SCO's claims in the lawsuit.

I found it was both invasive and thorough, and generally engineers didn't like it when the answer was "You have to delete that, we can't verify we have rights to it."

Well, that very much depends on the UNIX in question.

If one defines UNIX as POSIX, then, for the most part, or at least a pretty good part, Linux IS UNIX, because Linux implements much of POSIX, and in some cases does it better, e.g., certain functions for which POSIX is quiet or negative about thread safety are thread-safe on Linux, and there are almost always TS versions, e.g., strtok_r.

Outside of POSIX, one has to conside OS specific features, two of which come to mind as superior, though this is a judgement call: Solaris Zones and Mac OS.

I was a Linux desktop user for years, but I found that over time the desktop just started getting in my way (this was tennish years ago, so I am sure things have changed). I’d curse how gnome or KDE had once again broken my UX, then I’d help my wife or daughter with their Macs, enjoy the experience, the curse when I got back to my machine.

One day, after a particularly frustrating battle with whatever desktop I had then (I’d gone from Ubuntu to Mint to Debian to I cannot remember what, trying to find the sweet spot), I cursed, yelled that I would be back in 90 minutes, and bought my first Mac.

They’ve been a joy to use since. If Apple does something stupid, e.g., stopping at an old, brain dead bash, well, homebrew, et al, to the rescue.

Solaris Zones were wicked. One could get full MAC with labelled networking and restricted root with ease.

It’s finally possible to get close to Zones with a mix of capability management, namespace management, SELinux, et al, but not as easily.

So, yeah, there are individual UNIXisms that are better than Linux, but overall, at least on the server side, Linux is UNIX improved.

No, that's not my position.

Given the legal frameworks we have available, copyright is the right direction, IMO. Patents seem entirely inappropriate.

But US copyright law is a royal mess and is not really a great tool. It needs to be reformed -- but as the last copyright reform demonstrated, not all reform is an improvement, so my position is that ultimately where I'd fall between those two choices depends on what, exactly, copyright laws look like.