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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#191

Post by tomku »

rascul wrote: post #167
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

Fond memories of OpenLinux because (iirc) the installer had off-brand Tetris you could play while it laboriously copied files from CD to HDD. Always thought that was a little funny given the antics they got up to later.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#192

Post by LBJsPNS »

KerrAvon wrote: post #190
FoomFries wrote: post #177

The use of acronyms without definition is exhausting. A three letter one which has multiple uses all the more so.

SCO? It's the name of the company. Like IBM.

Formerly Santa Cruz Operation...

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

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#193

Post by unixhero »

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.

You are not wrong...

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#194

Post by btilly »

Postosuchus wrote: post #104
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.

Wrong. Two reasons actually: 1. RHEL was the first distro directed at enterprise deployment (meaning, strong preference of rock solid stability and predictability over constant churn). Which made it the only distro Dells and HPs of the world recognized and agreed to support. 2. RHEL was created on legacy of RedHat Linux, which was the best distro for non-hobbyist environments (from reproducible deployments to the bre…

My experience disagrees strongly.

1. Debian always had more stability and predictability than Red Hat in practice. Too much so. The Dells and HPs of the world didn't recognize it because it was not a company.

2. My impression was again that Debian was technically better than RedHat in every way I might care about. We happily installed it at $work, and the experienced Unix sysadmins I knew could use RedHat but didn't like it so much.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#195

Post by jboy55 »

dekhn wrote: post #134
CraigRo wrote: post #107

I would love to get a signed picture of Darl McBride for my bathroom. Because he paid for it. I heard about this lawsuit, called up a couple of IP lawyers, talked to a bunch of programmers, and read everything on groklaw. I called both analysts who covered the stock -- one had a price target of $5, while the other had a price target of $45 (stock was about 20 at the time). Then I shorted it with most of the money I h…

OK, that beats my "I made $25,000 on the VA Linux IPO simply because I was an early sourceforge user and got invited to the friends and family program".

Eric Raymond (ESR) was a director of VA Linux. I remember seeing on Yahoo Finance in '00, but haven't been able to find again, that on Dec 30th or 31st, 1999 he exercised options for a 'gain' of around $2 million. He was locked from selling until around April. At that point all of his stock was worth around $6 million, which might have covered the AMT tax bill.

Edit: Found the log, not sure if "Aquired via Exchange" was a taxable event. If it is, there are a bunch https://web.archive.org/web/20000617155153/http://biz.yahoo....

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#196

Post by ranger207 »

ginko wrote: post #105

>Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company. I'm disappointed LWN would blindly rehash the "MS loves Linux" propaganda like this. Microsoft still doesn't love Linux. Their whole business model is still based on proprietary software.

I think that line is sarcasm. Corbet has a pretty dry sense of humor

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#197

Post by xtracto »

gemstones wrote: post #12

I hadn't heard of Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) and I looked at his LinkedIn; this is his side of the story from his time at SCO, as he puts in in his work experience section. I found it super interesting. All of my work experience before and after SCO was of the startup/entrepreneurial variety. Fun stuff, new, exciting and positive. Then some former colleagues on the board of SCO (previously Caldera) convinced me to com…

>retaining David Boies to represent us,

That name!!!

I followed the SCO lawsuit closely through Groklaw and /. back in the day.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#198

Post by dredmorbius »

ranger207 wrote: post #196
ginko wrote: post #105

>Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company. I'm disappointed LWN would blindly rehash the "MS loves Linux" propaganda like this. Microsoft still doesn't love Linux. Their whole business model is still based on proprietary software.

I think that line is sarcasm. Corbet has a pretty dry sense of humor

IMO the high-water mark was set in "Debian and the Hot Babe Problem":

The Debian developers raised the obvious, predictable objection to the inclusion of this utility: the associated images were covered by a non-free license.

https://lwn.net/Articles/113644/>

That was ... also very nearly 20 years ago. The story left its mark.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#199

Post by dredmorbius »

lizknope wrote: post #100
PeterWhittaker wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that very much depends on the UNIX in question. If one defines UNIX as POSIX, then, for the most part, or at least a pretty good part, Linux IS UNIX, because Linux implements much of POSIX, and in some cases does it better, e.g., certain functions for which POSIX is quiet or negative about thread safety are thread-safe on Linux, and there are almost always TS versions, e.g., strtok_r. Outside of POSIX, one has…

I've been using XFCE for about 15 years. It feels like nothing has changed during that time and I think that is one of its best features.

That's a major benefit of numerous older desktops.

XFCE is one of my own fallbacks (I usually prefer WindowMaker), though fvwm, twm(!), the boxes (open-, black-, flux-, hacked-, etc.), tiled WMs, etc., are all perfectly serviceable.

Some may look* vaguely dated, but tend to be rock stable and blazingly fast.

XWinMan is still live, I find: http://www.xwinman.org/>

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#200

Post by ethbr0 »

surge wrote: post #137
bartchamdo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're romanticizing it. Until RHEL and LTS releases for Debian/Ubuntu, most distros you never knew if running and update was going to break something because there simply wasn't effective quality control testing in the hobbyist distros. Best you could do was run a version behind, but that hurt if you needed security updates. There were plenty of people and small highly knowledgeable shops and academics that…

My Redhat experience always seemed to devolve into "this package that I want has a dependency that isn't listed yet..." (cue 2 hours of recursively and manually tracking down dependencies on the early web).

But I was a lot younger and didn't know a lot of what I do now, so was probably doing everything RPM wrong.

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