I was recently bitten by this ghost of the past in the present day! Since the TLA⁺ project is trying to join the Linux Foundation, they've recently started enforcing Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) signing on all of the repos under the github.com/tlaplus org. The CI workflow started insta-failing on my PRs since none of my commits included a DCO. Fixing this isn't terribly difficult, github gives you a rebase command to run so you re-apply every commit locally with DCO signoff, then force-push. Then in the future you have to remember to run git commit -s -am "commit msg" instead of git commit -am "commit msg". The -s flag adds a DCO message to the commit.
The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
41–50 of 259 posts
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#42I 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…
There were several good versions of Red Hat (IIRC 7.3 was pretty good) and then RH9 had NPTL but unfortunately was incompatible with the rest of the world (very custom kernel, userspace, compiler). IIRC the egcs included in that led to all sorts of interesting outcomes.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As long as you can prove that you had a license to all the code that was used to train the LLM! :)
Hah! It appears that no one training these models is doing that. GPT doesn't generate the correct GPL/MIT/BSD/Apache license information and attribution for the source code it generates from its training set.
All of these code-based LLMs are willfully violating copyright already. It's doubtful this goes anywhere in the courts, however.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#44I 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…
> But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time.
There's no better microcosm of the early Linux world than this. "Yeah, that giant market-driving lawsuit was bad, I was there too and suffered along with the rest of you. But that's not the important thing: let me tell you about how bad RPM is compared to DPKG! Did you know the underlying archive format was cpio? CPIO!"
That's not intended to be too much of a barb (I was a Debian nut too, FWIW), but really, all that stuff seems pretty silly in hindsight.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#45Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#46This 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.
> but it's a short article and it gets most of the high points.
I disagree. It's a pretty detailed article (~1800 words) and Microsoft's role just gets a passing mention.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
I seem to recall that Sun put ZFS under a license that has been deemed incompatible with the GPL by pretty much everyone except Canonical, and so that it can't be integrated with the kernel but must remain a "bolt-on" for legal reasons.
It won't surprise me if one of these days Oracle decides that Canonical is a ripe lawsuit target over ZFS.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rh 4.2 ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?
This was pre DNF/YUM days. RedHat could be a pain installing stuff from RPM’s that had crazy dependencies back in the day.
First time I installed Linux, I was trying to Gaim on it.
I managed to compile Gaim before I managed to install it from RPM packages.
Using Debian was a moment of pure epiphany.
Good times.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#49BSD BSD's were the worst hurt from all of this. Too many companies scared to use it due to lawsuit. Really unfortunate in hindsight, and Linux forever benefitted.
That causality seems backwards. Linux "benefitted" because it was the target of the lawsuit in the first place, which wouldn't have been aimed at Linux had Linux not already been the market winner. It was the USL v. BSDI lawsuit of a decade earlier (which to be clear absolutely did involve copied Unix code) that effectively killed BSD in the market by holding it back as Linux left the launchpad.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#50I 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 com…
IDK, if I was put in charge of a company losing money like crazy and was genuinely trying to turn it around, my first thought would not be "oh, let's hire David Boies".
I know! For HN readers not familiar with the legal industry, Boies was considered the superstar of the legal world at the time and was well known to demand $50 million retainers.