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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#161

Post by morelisp »

Linosaurus wrote: post #91
morelisp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point isn’t that McBride was doing something financially irresponsible, my point is that he’s obviously lying .

He’s technically only claiming that turning the company around was his job description when recruited. Is that this was a lie told to him.

Even if he's getting fed nothing but lies by someone else about how IBM really did steal their source code and winning this is in the bag and will totally turn the company around, and somehow has no ability to discern the truth himself, you still don't hire David Boies to deal with that.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#162

Post by ghaff »

AlbertCory wrote: post #147
ghaff wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I am not a copyright law expert. But the Berne Convention originally dates to 1886.

There is apparently some flexibility within the Berne Convention on copyright terms. There are also limitations on public domain works in continental Europe that differ from common law countries like the US. However, it does govern copyright in broad strokes. For example, the US used to require that a creator explicitly assert copyright while most of the rest of the world did not.

In any case, the US is generally aligned with copyright in most of the rest of the world. So any broad change in copyright law (other than perhaps somewhat shortening terms) would make it an outlier.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#163

Post by MereInterest »

surge wrote: post #139
MereInterest wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main experience with RedHat has been needing to bend over backwards to support its wildly outdated library versions. Because RedHat “supports” operating systems for about a decade, there’s always an argument that a library should be written to support whatever toolchain is provided by the oldest supported RHEL version. RHEL’s “support” should be seen as “your software will continue to run unmodified when on this s…

Current development was better done on Fedora, the upstream of RHEL, I think they were pretty clear that's what it was for. RHEL was for when you needed everything to work no matter what. Fedora was for new development and latest and greatest.

The problem with needing “everything to work no matter what” is that it just doesn’t exist. The type of stability that RHEL provides is conditional on never using third-party libraries. RHEL backpoets security fixes to packages that it provides, but you’re on your own for anything else. For example, RHEL 7 was released in 2014, has production support for another year, and extended support until 2026. As libraries are requiring C++17 support today, maintaining compatibility with stock RHEL 7 requires running older versions of a library.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#164

Post by MereInterest »

oblio wrote: post #140
MereInterest wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main experience with RedHat has been needing to bend over backwards to support its wildly outdated library versions. Because RedHat “supports” operating systems for about a decade, there’s always an argument that a library should be written to support whatever toolchain is provided by the oldest supported RHEL version. RHEL’s “support” should be seen as “your software will continue to run unmodified when on this s…

They're talking about stuff that predates RHEL by half a decade.

True, more adding it as agreement on RedHat being consistently and intentionally behind the curve.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#165

Post by kjs3 »

morelisp wrote: post #161
Linosaurus wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s technically only claiming that turning the company around was his job description when recruited. Is that this was a lie told to him.

Even if he's getting fed nothing but lies by someone else about how IBM really did steal their source code and winning this is in the bag and will totally turn the company around, and somehow has no ability to discern the truth himself, you still don't hire David Boies to deal with that.

You've decided to throw down with IBM with a lawsuit that could result in billions in damages. You've convinced yourself you're going to win, lies or no. Microsoft is shoveling money at you to do it. And......you aren't going to go hire a gold-plated superstar litigator, the guy whose already spanked Microsoft in court, "to deal with that"?

With all due respect...the hell you aren't.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#166

Post by Narishma »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #19
tpmx wrote: post #13

This article doesn't give Microsoft enough credit for funding the whole thing. I was going to write that the Internet remembers, but apparently that has its generational limitations. :(

It's a friend now, remember?

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#167

Post by rascul »

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…

Caldera even had a Linux distro for a time, before the lawsuit.

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

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#168

Post by snapetom »

hoherd wrote: post #73
ianbicking wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the stock went so low, couldn't IBM or whoever just buy SCO? Or were not there not a controlling number of shares available?

The LWN article discusses this point: > it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. ... > IBM, though, refused to play that game; the com…

I shit on a lot that IBM does, but at the end of the day, I will always give them respect for what they did against SCO. If they rolled over, that would have given validity to SCO's claims and who knows where Linux would be today.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#169

Post by morelisp »

kjs3 wrote: post #165
morelisp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if he's getting fed nothing but lies by someone else about how IBM really did steal their source code and winning this is in the bag and will totally turn the company around, and somehow has no ability to discern the truth himself, you still don't hire David Boies to deal with that.

You've decided to throw down with IBM with a lawsuit that could result in billions in damages. You've convinced yourself you're going to win, lies or no. Microsoft is shoveling money at you to do it. And......you aren't going to go hire a gold-plated superstar litigator, the guy whose already spanked Microsoft in court, "to deal with that"? With all due respect...the hell you aren't.

> gold-plated

In 2003? Boies was probably best known for losing one of the most watched court cases in American history.

He's a great choice... if you want an savvy operator with a weak moral compass to pump your stock. Not so much if you want to win because you believe the company is in the right and has a promising future. (He might do that too, but no better than dozens of other effective lawyers.)

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#170

Post by morelisp »

realitychex wrote: post #103
jacobr1 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It wasn't about, for example, dpkg vs rpm

No, it totally was. APT vs. nothing was a big deal, but RPM per se had a lot of mistakes. Debian also had massively better standard tooling around conffiles, diversions, alternatives, etc. They also had publicly-published packaging standards so even out-of-distro debs were often pretty good, while third-party RPMs were a garbage fire.

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