91–100 of 259 posts
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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 .
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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 inex…
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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.
The next year I asked some questions on a FreeBSD usenet forum and was told to buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, and new network card. No thanks. I just stayed with Linux because the hardware support was much bigger.
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"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 lice…
In other words, all options are on the table. We're assuming that Congress does its job, for once, and being that they're politicians, they do sometimes respond to public pressure.
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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.
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> 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.
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…
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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?
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…