Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 259 posts

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#21

Post by bombcar »

mikece wrote: post #4
AlbertCory wrote: post #2

Here'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?

Some Unices come with things that Linux can technically do, but they were built-in, not bolt-on.

ZFS is an example of one that's recognizable, you can bolt it onto linux and it (now) works quite well, but it was integrated much more into Solaris.

There are also Unix platforms that fully support hot-swappable just about everything, which you CAN do with Linux but it's not as simple.

Most of that stuff is gone by the wayside now, Linux is "good enough".

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#22

Post by ghaff »

AlbertCory wrote: post #11
JohnFen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"No IP protection for software at all" is your position, then?

For proprietary software you could have licenses. In fact, the reason that IBM first licensed some of its software for the IBM/360 was that it was unclear at the time whether software could be copyrighted.

However, absent copyright, it would probably be impossible (IANAL but have talked to lawyers about these topics) to enforce any usage provisions on open source software where you haven't explicitly agreed to a license. (Open source licenses basically give you rights that you wouldn't otherwise have under copyright law.)

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#23

Post by bombcar »

tpmx wrote: post #13

This article doesn't give Microsoft enough credit for funding the whole thing. I was going to write that the Internet remembers, but apparently that has its generational limitations. :(

> Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company.

They could go into more detail how SCO vs IBM ended up being a proxy war for larger corporations and interests, but it's a short article and it gets most of the high points.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#24

Post by politician »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #16

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…

I wonder if it'll be much easier going forward. Take a suspect piece of code, run it through an LLM to explain it, pass the explanation to another LLM to generate code from the explanation. An automated pipeline for clean room reverse engineering.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#25

Post by cheekibreeki2 »

jedberg wrote: post #15

I had to deal with fallout from this. At the time I worked at eBay, and were not allowed to use any OS except Windows or RedHat Linux. The reason we had to use RedHat? Because we had a paid license from them that included them absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux. But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time. So we were forced t…

Rh 4.2 ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#26

Post by nordsieck »

AlbertCory wrote: post #2

Here'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.

> (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or --

I'd go with this. But ideally with a 10-20 year limit on copyright[1].

I do think that there are some software patents (RSA, for example) that seem worthwhile. But the system as a whole seems like it does more harm than good.

---

1. My ideal proposal for copyright is exponentially increasing fees (after a short initial grace period) for a linearly increasing time period. But that seems like several bridges too far.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#28

Post by jedberg »

cheekibreeki2 wrote: post #25
jedberg wrote: post #15

I had to deal with fallout from this. At the time I worked at eBay, and were not allowed to use any OS except Windows or RedHat Linux. The reason we had to use RedHat? Because we had a paid license from them that included them absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux. But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time. So we were forced t…

Rh 4.2 ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?

From my experience as a Linux sysadmin? RedHat ran half the planet because they had the best sales force and legal team (as exhibited by my example), but they did not have the best technology.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#30

Post by hinkley »

cheekibreeki2 wrote: post #25
jedberg wrote: post #15

I had to deal with fallout from this. At the time I worked at eBay, and were not allowed to use any OS except Windows or RedHat Linux. The reason we had to use RedHat? Because we had a paid license from them that included them absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux. But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time. So we were forced t…

Rh 4.2 ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?

Windows ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?
Post reply on HN