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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#141

Post by dekhn »

rwmj wrote: post #71
justin66 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FreeBSD didn't support shared libraries while Linux did, and that made a huge difference trying to run X11 on the 386 systems of the time, specifically because of hard disk space required.

linux's shared libraries were pretty limited in '94- I forget the technical reason but it had to do with runtime linker not being able to compute unique addresses for each .so, and so they sort of had to be assigned "ranges" that a particular .so owned (https://www.linux.co.cr/free-unix-os/review/1994/0914-a.html). Probably a.out vs. ELF.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#142

Post by oblio »

znpy wrote: post #123
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…

Amusingly, Microsoft used to sell Xenix, which was a certified Unix IIRC.

That predates the SCO lawsuit by about 2 decades.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#143

Post by oblio »

int0x2e wrote: post #96
t344344 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having worked in a Solaris shop for a while, I still wonder what could have been if Solaris made the decision to open-source about 5-10 years earlier than they did. I think Solaris would have been such a better base for the Linux ecosystem than Linux ever was. Though the licensing issues had to have been resolved for this to work out, and knowing Sun/Oracle - that would never have really worked out...

What's-his-name, the Sun CEO, hated both Microsoft and Open Source.

Even when they open sourced Solaris, after he left, they did it as a half-measure with an anti-GPL license and then I think Oracle pulled the plug and doomed Solaris to the dustbin of history.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#144

Post by snowwrestler »

One of the weird side stories from the SCO saga was that of Dan Lyons, who at the time was a reporter with a little cottage industry in stories praising the work of SCO and predicting IBM’s imminent loss and comeuppance for all the Linux neck beards.

It later turned out he was also behind the briefly-popular “Fake Steve Jobs” blog, and on the strength of that reputation he left journalism to go into tech company marketing, with a brief side job writing for the show Silicon Valley.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#145

Post by kkielhofner »

bitcharmer wrote: post #111
kkielhofner wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As CTO I generally tracked software and applicable use license(s) across the entire codebase.

My internal sheet more or less lined up with their results - with the notable exception being my project I referenced. FWIR it was something like 400 entries and I’d put it at roughly 95% accurate on this anecdotal rough estimate.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#146

Post by lizknope »

dekhn wrote: post #129
lizknope wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I ended up buying a SCSI card in fall 1995 so I could use this. The drive was about $500 but each 650MB cartridge was only $30. I could format it with a ext2 and use it as a regular filesystem. No need to make an ISO image to burn. CD burners weren't cheap yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_Dual

This technology was later turned into DVD-RAM which was never as popular as DVD+/-R(W)

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#147

Post by AlbertCory »

ghaff wrote: post #121
AlbertCory wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.?

I'm not familiar with that.

Congress passed the Sonny Bono Disney Protection Act (being facetious here). Was that before the Convention was signed?

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#148

Post by ghaff »

oblio wrote: post #143
int0x2e wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in a Solaris shop for a while, I still wonder what could have been if Solaris made the decision to open-source about 5-10 years earlier than they did. I think Solaris would have been such a better base for the Linux ecosystem than Linux ever was. Though the licensing issues had to have been resolved for this to work out, and knowing Sun/Oracle - that would never have really worked out...

What's-his-name, the Sun CEO, hated both Microsoft and Open Source. Even when they open sourced Solaris, after he left, they did it as a half-measure with an anti-GPL license and then I think Oracle pulled the plug and doomed Solaris to the dustbin of history.

McNealy was "just" chairman of the board when OpenSolaris was released. Also, I'm not sure it's fair to describe CDDL as anti-GPL unless you think the Mozilla Public License is as well.

That said, it is reasonable to ask whether Solaris should have simply been placed under the GPL or a permissive license.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#149

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jasoneckert wrote: post #128

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…

And litigation-SCO deliberately tried to confound the two, so that people assumed that litigation-SCO had all the IP rights that original-SCO once had. They didn't, though, as the court case showed.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#150

Post by politician »

hencq wrote: post #63
politician wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it'll be much easier going forward. Take a suspect piece of code, run it through an LLM to explain it, pass the explanation to another LLM to generate code from the explanation. An automated pipeline for clean room reverse engineering.

IANAL but it seems that if you rely on looking at the suspect piece of code to see what it's doing (even if done by an LLM), it's not exactly clean room.

It's a two-step process.

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

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