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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#81

Post by giantrobot »

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?

It's not really a matter of Linux or BSD "winning" in the 90s. It wasn't the kernel and base system that was super important but what you could run it on and what you could run on it. A Free Unix(like) was an important base component but went hand in hand with FOSS software running on top.

With the likes of Apache and Samba PCs running Linux (or a BSD) could replace many thousands of dollars in software licenses for server products for zero licensing dollars. It didn't really matter if the base OS was a BSD or Linux, as long as the services ran on top on relatively inexpensive hardware it was a massive win for a lot of organizations.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#82

Post by taftster »

ghaff wrote: post #75
bitwize wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what's interesting, if the SCO lawsuit had gone any other way, Windows NT would probably have ended up completely dominating. Linux wouldn't be here and probably neither would SCO Linux either. What a dire state that would be.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#83

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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.

> Linux distros were still toys at that point.

I had Slackware 1.1 running in 1Q94. It had X11 and you could run Mosaic on it plus all of the shell userland. It was pretty usable.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#84

Post by jacobr1 »

biorach wrote: post #55
ajross wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> me tell you about how bad RPM is compared to DPKG! I'm pretty sure the person you're replying to was taking about the distro as a whole, not the package file format

Yes, but the arguments of that era always seemed to revolve around minutiae like the package manager, or default filesysem, or choice of default desktop.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#85

Post by ghaff »

taftster wrote: post #82
ghaff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what's interesting, if the SCO lawsuit had gone any other way, Windows NT would probably have ended up completely dominating. Linux wouldn't be here and probably neither would SCO Linux either. What a dire state that would be.

I'm pretty sure that even if SCO had all the rights to Unix that it thought it did [0], IBM would have found some way to make the problem go away even if involved buying SCO or effectively paying it protection money. Though from what I've seen of SCO's claims (I co-wrote one of the expert witness reports), it's hard for me to imagine they had much of a chance, Boies or no Boies.

[0] Which remains one of the most inexplicable aspects of the whole case to this day whether Novell pulled a fast one and/or SCO's lawyering was just incompetent.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#86

Post by AlbertCory »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #67
nordsieck wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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 exp…

IP paying property taxes would be nice. Could even let owners set the value, if it were coupled to licensing fees etc.

Note that there are maintenance fees for patents, which are non-trivial.

they're every 4 years, though.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#87

Post by t344344 »

ghaff wrote: post #75
bitwize wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair around WinNT 4.0 and Win2k, Microsoft had much better operating system compared to Linux. FreeBSD and Solaris were much better competitors.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#88

Post by AlbertCory »

nordsieck wrote: post #26
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 exp…

thanks.

please note that whatever a lawyer says about copyright law now is usually limited to what the courts have said plus the latest statutes and what judges are likely to rule.

The topic for today is harder: it's what should copyright law for software say? We're assuming that Congress does its job for once. The lawyers will never do it.

Don't like it that Disney had a forever copyright on Mickey Mouse? Me neither, but that's because copyright law is one-size-fits-all. The proposal is a carve-out where software law is different than literary.

So property taxes or shorter terms are definitely on point. "Which Unix is better" is not.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#89

Post by biorach »

jacobr1 wrote: post #84
biorach wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> me tell you about how bad RPM is compared to DPKG! I'm pretty sure the person you're replying to was taking about the distro as a whole, not the package file format

Yes, but the arguments of that era always seemed to revolve around minutiae like the package manager, or default filesysem, or choice of default desktop.

Nah, RH was very much it's own little world. Many of us were forced to use it because they offered a package (indemnification, support) that appealed to the bean counters and lawyers. For a few years they patched _everything_ that mattered (compilers, kernel, core libraries) to a massive extent in an attempt to differentiate and to give the appearence of adding value. I don't have fond memories.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#90

Post by patwolf »

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 was at IBM around the time of the SCO lawsuit and had to help out with blue washing a few projects. It was also around that time that there had been some high-profile cases of GPL code getting shipped accidentally. We had a tool that basically grepped through all the source for keywords like "Copyright", "License", or "GPL", and then we had to compile a report and get the lawyers to sign off on it. It didn't seem to me to be a very thorough way of proving provenance because it relied on proper attribution.
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