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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#101

Post by FloayYerBoat »

morelisp wrote: post #39
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…

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".

...and he's the (real) bad guy in the Theranos story. [Bad Blood, by John Carrerou]

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#102

Post by ghaff »

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.

Why would they if they haven't already? It's not like Canonical has a lot of money. But, yes, anyone else who Oracle might actually elect to sue won't go anywhere near ZFS.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#103

Post by realitychex »

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.

You're being dismissive of issues that were far bigger than you make them look.

>like the package manager

It wasn't about, for example, dpkg vs rpm, but apt-get versus.. nothing, because Red Hat had nothing to solve dependencies. Installing software on Red Hat was a truly hellish experience.

>default filesysem

I have never in my life seen people dismiss a distro because of a default filesystem. I question whether you've truly experienced the early days of Red Hat.

They shipped broken development snapshots of GCC that led to serious compatibility issues :

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/00/10/07/0027218/gccs-respo...

They employed one of the most abrasive and divisive personality to helm the development of the libc :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2380062

They were one of the most barebones distro in terms of tooling to configure and manage them. Debian was more fully featured on the terminal tooling front, while Mandrake and SUSE had a lot of GUI wizards for people more used to the Windows ways.

Even much later in the Fedora days, when Kernel developer Alanx Cox questions the sanity of releasing a completely broken distro (version 18 of Fedora) this is what they had to answer :

>So yeah: in case you didn't get the memo, F18 has a new installer and a new upgrade tool. They are both v1.0s. As in the case of all v1.0s, you may want to exercise some frickin' caution. If you want a Fedora release whose installer and upgrade tools were stabilized over a period of several years and 20+ releases, Fedora 17 is right in the torrent list

Uh, like.. okay? but maybe don't release it, until, you know, it's not garbage?

And then there's the whole thing with what Red Had did to take over the whole userland desktop stack with systemd, logind, dbus, pulseaudio, wayland.. all of which caused more issues than they ever solved. You still can't make software like autohotkey on wayland. All those pieces of software are heavily interconnected with each other making it less and less tenable to maintain a distro that doesn't package them.

There are many, many reasons to be soured with what Red Hat contributed to linux.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#104

Post by Postosuchus »

jedberg wrote: post #28
cheekibreeki2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wrong. Two reasons actually:

1. RHEL was the first distro directed at enterprise deployment (meaning, strong preference of rock solid stability and predictability over constant churn). Which made it the only distro Dells and HPs of the world recognized and agreed to support.

2. RHEL was created on legacy of RedHat Linux, which was the best distro for non-hobbyist environments (from reproducible deployments to the breadth of packages available) - since 3.0.3 onwards. RedHat JUST. WORKED.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#105

Post by ginko »

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

I'm disappointed LWN would blindly rehash the "MS loves Linux" propaganda like this. Microsoft still doesn't love Linux. Their whole business model is still based on proprietary software.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#106

Post by bombcar »

ghaff wrote: post #102
lonelygirl15a wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would they if they haven't already? It's not like Canonical has a lot of money. But, yes, anyone else who Oracle might actually elect to sue won't go anywhere near ZFS.

Likely because they want to keep that powder dry until someone with deep pockets gets involved, Microsoft, or IBM or someone.

Because there's a moderate change that it goes against them.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#107

Post by CraigRo »

I would love to get a signed picture of Darl McBride for my bathroom. Because he paid for it. I heard about this lawsuit, called up a couple of IP lawyers, talked to a bunch of programmers, and read everything on groklaw. I called both analysts who covered the stock -- one had a price target of $5, while the other had a price target of $45 (stock was about 20 at the time). Then I shorted it with most of the money I had. It went down and I used the equity to short even more of it. In retrospect, the analysis was correct (i.e. don't sue a company that has more lawyers than you have employees without a good case), but the level of risk I took was insane, and it kept me up late at night for a long time.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#108

Post by bitcharmer »

dekhn wrote: post #42
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…

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.

I'm confused. RH9 is the latest release, how is it custom? What are you referring to exactly?

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#109

Post by mananaysiempre »

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…

Interix/SFU/SUA was only the last pre-Linux iteration of Unix on top of Windows—a POSIX subsystem was included in NT from the beginning, even if it was practically useless to the point of having no network access (I believe early design documentation explicitly says it’s there to satisfy government contract requirements).

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#110

Post by surge »

bitcharmer wrote: post #108
dekhn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm confused. RH9 is the latest release, how is it custom? What are you referring to exactly?

RH 9 is different than RHEL 9.

Just like Windows 11 is different from Windows 98 (98 doesn't mean it's newer).

They went through a rebranding from RedHat Linux to RedHat Enterprise Linux over a decade ago but after or during the SCO nonsense. Early versions of RedHat's Linux were just called RedHat Linux because at the time it was just like any other Linux distro or starting from those early hobbyist roots. RHEL was meant to be stable and have commercial add ons for big companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux (at the top it notes, not to be confused with Red Hat Linux)

What could be thought of as Red Hat Linux today is the Fedora distro (which it was spun off into), which is upstream, more frequently released or up to date (and thus less stable), and targeted at the hobbyist or enthusiast user, which I'm one of the weird people that still uses it. Once something useful goes through its paces on Fedora, it'll eventually get integrated into RHEL where reliability is of higher value than the latest features.

I started on RH 5.2 myself, in '99, and literally got it on disc for $40 at BestBuy. I also lived near RedHat's offices (in Durham, NC) at the time and got to visit them once with coworker friends. Exciting time, I was very young, and wish I knew enough to buy stock during its IPO at the time.

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