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.
Mandrake! What a blast from the past. I also remember Gentoo and Slackware from around the same time, though apparently the latter predates the former by a decade or so.
Providing legal protection for lawsuits can be a lucrative business. However, I'm not aware of any BSD-based companies that have capitalized on this opportunity. Are there any untold stories?
Microsoft had the same approach to fighting Android: it threatened OEM with patent lawsuits, but never made the patents it was hanging public. Some of the settlements included agreements to manufacture Windows Mobile devices - an operating System that was clearly on its deathbed.
I don't think "Wrong" is a very interesting, helpful, or productive response to someone's lived experience.
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Wrong. Two reasons, actually:
1. Culture is a dynamic and malleable thing, and through thoughtful criticism, it's possible to help people not be pedantic assholes on internet message boards.
2. If a post is both unnecessarily abrasive, and doesn't meaningfully engage with the post it's responding to, it adds no value to the conversation, and thus is not worth defending.
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 mark…
He DID admit he was completely wrong with his predictions, so it's not like he was a blind cheerleader.
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 mark…
Lyons has also made a "career" out of hating on technology and SV in general. Besides writing for the TV show, he's also written several books about why technology and SV really, really suck and are to blame for practically everything wrong in the world (e.g. Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us). Oddly, he did actually try to work at a high-tech startup on the east coast, and when he was booted out for incompetence, he wrote a book about why startups are just such bullshit, man. I have personally spoken to him, by sheer coincidence and long before any of this came to pass, and he was very interested in working at a startup someday, although he was writing for Forbes at the time. In other words, if you want my take, dude has serious envy and has spent years trying to exorcise it by punishing everyone who has what he covets.
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.
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
Anecdotally I have observed the same but I don't understand the problem. Why is that? It seems like one could fairly easily search for code in the older project, find it in the new project, and link to it in the report. What am I missing?