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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#71

Post by rwmj »

justin66 wrote: post #52
mikece wrote: post #3

How 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?

BSDI was legally in the clear in January 1994 and FreeBSD had an unencumbered version out by the end of 1994. Linux distros were still toys at that point. I think it's fair to say that the lawsuits didn't help BSD, but the lawsuits don't seem like they should have been a decisive reason for Linux overtaking them in mindshare and marketshare.

FreeBSD didn't support shared libraries while Linux did, and that made a huge difference trying to run X11 on the 386 systems of the time, specifically because of hard disk space required.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#72

Post by _skel »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #6
mikece wrote: post #3

How 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…

I suspect that if Linus had tried to actively contribute to BSD he might have gotten fed up and done his own thing anyway.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#73

Post by hoherd »

ianbicking wrote: post #70
gemstones wrote: post #12

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 com…

If the stock went so low, couldn't IBM or whoever just buy SCO? Or were not there not a controlling number of shares available?

The LWN article discusses this point:

> it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. ...

> IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had invested heavily into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#74

Post by chubot »

ianbicking wrote: post #70
gemstones wrote: post #12

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 com…

If the stock went so low, couldn't IBM or whoever just buy SCO? Or were not there not a controlling number of shares available?

If you can win, why set that precedent? The negative result for SCO is very useful to the rest of society.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#75

Post by ghaff »

bitwize wrote: post #62
criddell wrote: post #57

I wonder if anybody here can correct my memory. When Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO, I seem to recall that part of the deal was Microsoft agreeing to not compete in the Unix market. Today, Microsoft is embracing Linux with their WSL stuff and that certainly impacts the Unix market. Maybe the 1997 agreement between the two companies ended Microsoft's exile from Unix-land or maybe when Caldera bought SCO's Unix business t…

Back in 1999 Microsoft bought Interix, and marketed it as Windows Services for Unix under their own banner. So the agreement was probably non-binding as of 1999 at the latest. Microsoft just didn't see Unix, and especially Linux, as competition because they felt what they built was better. Interix/SFU was a compatibility path to migrate Unix devs to Windows NT more than anything; it was more like Cygwin than like WSL…

There was definitely a period in the 90s when a lot of people and companies expected/were resigned to Windows NT completely dominating both the desktop and the server. Even companies like IBM that were probably less convinced had backup plans like Monterey in IBM's case which factored into the SCO lawsuit.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#76

Post by nix23 »

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?

That was Debian and FreeBSD not RH.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#77

Post by morelisp »

kjs3 wrote: post #58
morelisp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

As I recall, Microsoft put up a ton of money to fund the SCO lawsuit. They didn't hire Boies out of Unix profits.

My point isn’t that McBride was doing something financially irresponsible, my point is that he’s obviously lying.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#78

Post by bombcar »

lonelygirl15a wrote: post #47
bombcar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but even if bolt it on (which Ubuntu does for you, any other distro it's easy to do) it's still a "bolt-on" that doesn't integrate as fully as it could if it were the native filesystem, allowing full system rollback, snapshotting, boot management, etc.

It's similar to the "polish" available on macOS or Windows, Linux has all the pieces but you have to assemble them yourselves, even today.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#79

Post by taftster »

This is a hilarious quote, in the article, attributed to Linus, related to the concept of source code pedigree and the developer certification of origin for any contribution.

> For example, in the case of "ctype.h", what made it so clear that it was original work was the horrible bugs it contained originally, and since we obviously don't do bugs any more (right?), we should probably plan on having other ways to document the origin of the code.

The concept that bugs would prove the origin makes me giggle. Because yes, if the code was stolen, it would have been stolen without the bugs included.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#80

Post by chungy »

ajross wrote: post #44
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…

> 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 fo…

> Did you know the underlying archive format was cpio? CPIO!

And what's wrong with that? deb's underlying format is ar, which is basically the same class of simple archives that cpio is.

It solves the problem with two nice benefits:

1. You're not reinventing an archive format, the existing ones are perfectly adequate.

2. If your system is borked enough that you don't even have a working package manager, you can manually extract your package manager from a package file with nothing more than the cpio or ar programs.

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