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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#111

Post by bitcharmer »

kkielhofner wrote: post #64
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…

There’s an entire cottage industry around this. As one example: https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/security-testing... Frequently used for things like internal audits, compliance, due-diligence during financing, etc. It’s remarkably thorough but not always completely accurate - it flagged an open source project I created that we were using as GPL. I had to correct them, which was entertaining.

They are almost always inaccurate. What they always are is expensive

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#112

Post by bartchamdo »

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.

It looks like RHEL zealots never die from the other people’s comments. RHEL had plenty of problems just like all the other OSes and distros.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#113

Post by dekhn »

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…

Side note: I purchased Interix and used it to port a million-line C++/X11/Motif/OpenGL app to windows (successfully, although there wasn't really any demand for the result). Must have been '96 or '97. I didn't find it compelling, and the authors of the code decided to rewrite a new system from scratch, using Python and Tk (along with C++ and OpenGL) to be portable to all the commonly used platforms. That worked on Windows, Linux, IRIX, and later Mac OS X for at least 2 decades(!) with very little platform-specific code (except in the Tk dependency). They finally switched to Python/C++/Qt/OpenGL a few years back which I expect will work for another 20 years.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#114

Post by frandroid »

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…

I recall the Halloween memos...

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#115

Post by ghaff »

taftster wrote: post #93
ghaff wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, but honest question, do you really think that if IBM had purchased SCO (and maybe throw Novell in there too) that Linux would have still had any chance? I don't know what the outcome, but I just think there's too many possibilities at that point for Linux to just stay hobbyist without corporate adoption (fearing now IBM licensing/lawyering at that point).

At the time of the SCO lawsuit, IBM had already made a huge bet on Linux. [1] Basically, that's why SCO sued them. And they had their own Unix (AIX) which they could have ported to x86 if they had wanted to--but they didn't.

Here's what the person who headed IBM's Linux initiative told me a couple of years back:

And I still remember very well in December of ‘99, I called Sam Palmisano, the head of IBM Systems Group. And I said, Sam, the task force recommends that we should embrace Linux. And Sam said, okay, Irving, we will do that. But you have to now come over and run an IBM Linux initiative. And I said to Sam, okay, we were pretty much done with our internet strategy. So I was no longer needed to run the Internet division And I said to Sam, when do you want to announce it? And Sam said, how about now? And I said Sam. It's the Christmas holidays. Maybe we should wait until the new year. And in the second week of January of 2000, we made a major announcement saying that IBM would embrace Linux across all of these offerings. And in fact, later that month in January of 2000, I gave a keynote at LinuxWorld, which was taking place in the Javits Center in New York City, about IBM’s Linux initiative.

[1] https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2006/01/ibms_linux_init.html

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#116

Post by znpy »

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?

No, the latest release is rhel9, not rh9.

At the time it was just “red hat linux” while today it is “red hat enterprise linux”.

The split (and the counter reset) was made to mark the split between a regular distro (fedora core, at the time) and an enterprise-oriented distro (red hat enterprise linux).

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#117

Post by znpy »

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…

> Because we had a paid license from them that included them absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux.

Not a trivial thing by the way, if you think about it.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#118

Post by dwater »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #99
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…

What were the best distros then?

When I was a CS major in 1999-2003, the big names I remember people using were RedHat, SUSE, Debian, and Mandrake was gaining market share for desktop use. The installfests I went to were all RedHat. There seem to be a lot of complaints here about RedHat after that era, but my memory is that RedHat was the main linux distro circa 2003.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#119

Post by jasoneckert »

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…

While I agree that the SCO FUD surrounding Linux was real at that time (we all felt it), Red Hat was one of the most respected, functional, and widely-implemented distributions for the entire time SCO was in the news headlines.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#120

Post by vincent-manis »

ghaff wrote: post #56
ajross wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Linux and BSD cases actually turned out to be pretty similar. There were a handful of cases of literal copying but not to anything close to the degree claimed and pretty much trivial. (And SCO also made all sorts of claims around Linux taking knowledge, including negative know-how, and techniques from Unix that were completely ridiculous.)

And, as I recall, there were allegations that some of the AT&T code was actually Berkeley code originally.
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