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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#121

Post by ghaff »

AlbertCory wrote: post #95
ghaff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See above comment: the question is not "what does copyright law say now ?" but "is some variation of that appropriate as a replacement for patents?" 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.

Well, it's not just Congress. There's the Berne Convention which, with minor variances, governs copyright in most of the world. The US can do whatever it wants I suppose but it's not as simple as Congress saying: We're going to do our own thing. Who cares about Europe etc.?

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#122

Post by fsckboy »

mikece wrote: post #4
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.

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?

> Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is unquestionably better than Linux?

back when, unices were better at real multiuser, while linux was much faster at all sorts of I/O and CPU bound things in the personal-computer, single login context. Like massaging massive amounts text data (which everybody was doing to webify it), linux was blindingly fast, but don't trying to do much else at the same time, it would bring your machine to its knees.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#123

Post by znpy »

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…

Linux is not unix, by the way.

Besides the obvious things (linux is just a kernel), the unix specification has many mandates in terms of API (for compatibility), in terms of behaviour and even in terms of commands and utilities (a specification of a vi editor is also in the unix specification iirc).

So yeah as long ad Microsoft doesn’t try and get anything certified as unix, they’re fine I guess (but I’m not a lawyer).

Worth noting: mac os is unix (every release gets certified iirc).

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#124

Post by ok_dad »

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.

Whatever choice "zero patents for software" is. Already, no one shares their code, which would be in the spirit of the patent system. The patent system is designed to keep the design details open and public, but gives a legal monopoly to the holder of the patent. Currently, companies can write software implementations that are completely closed and secret, but still hold a patent for whatever the "thing" that algorithm does. Clicking one button to check out? Patented, and I still don't know what the detailed code implementation looks like from Amazon. The patent itself only shows the most simple, rudimentary steps as block diagrams. The most open software we have is that which is unencumbered by patents!

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#125

Post by ghaff »

bombcar wrote: post #106
ghaff wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Btrfs has also been improving. Certainly not for all use cases but it's the default for desktop Fedora now and some Synology NASs use it, among others.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#126

Post by dekhn »

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 wasn't a toy in '94: I had a full X11 with emacs, g++, and all the other goodies and easily ported scientific software from the grown-up UNIX in the lab, using it to write my undergraduate thesis. This was using Slackware from 4 floppies. At the time I was offered two pills: Slackware or BSD. I picked linux since it sounded "newer and hotter".

It was a toy in '92-93 and they still didn't have good dynamic linking in '94, and I'd argue things were pretty dicey before glibc (I stopped using debian for years during the bo->hamm transition) but it was usable for production work at the time.

(none of this should be taken as a statement that BSD wasn't in great shape in '94; I had heard of the lawsuit but I don't think it affected my decision to go linux at that time)

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#127

Post by [deleted] »

bartchamdo wrote: post #112
jedberg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#128

Post by jasoneckert »

One thing that the author of this article left out is that SCO was not SCO during this dark period of litigation.

SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) was an x86 UNIX vendor that wasn't great, but enjoyed a lot of market share. I'd estimate they were #2 to SUN in installations because it ran on commodity x86 hardware. But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the pressure from Linux. When the company was sold to Caldera in Utah, very few original SCO people stayed, and those that did left quickly because Ransom Love (yes, that was his name) made it very clear the Caldera culture was not the old SCO culture, and that you'd have to relocate to Utah.

Following this, Caldera rebranded themselves back to SCO (The SCO Group) in an effort to convince people they were the same company. After all, they needed all the help they could get.

So, essentially, litigation SCO was not the original SCO. And in many ways, litigation SCO tarnished whatever respect the original SCO had.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#129

Post by dekhn »

lizknope wrote: post #94
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I installed Slackware 2.1 in the fall of 1994. I had everything working. X11, networking, sound, Mosaic. I compiled Spice 3f4 and used it for my EE circuit sims. 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.

I wasted so much money on SCSI back in those days. This was the thing that finally killed it for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaz_drive

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#130

Post by znpy »

lizknope wrote: post #97
_skel wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think Linus would have forked it and made LinBSD and more people would have joined his effort. The Linux community was a lot more friendly and helpful to me than the BSD crowd in the mid 90's

The bsd community is still ups and downs today.

Not all the bsd communities are equally friendly.

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