Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Are you stating that someone’s identity is an excuse for them being disagreeable
Isn't that the current definition of neuro-divergent tolerance?
The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
201–210 of 259 posts
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#202Earlier 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…
You bring back memories. In my early Linux days, every attempt to upgrade an RPM based distribution lead to me needing to wipe the system.
The first time I did a major version upgrade on Ubuntu, I was shocked it worked.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#203I had to deal with fallout from this. At the time I worked at eBay, and were not allowed to use any OS except Windows or RedHat Linux. The reason we had to use RedHat? Because we had a paid license from them that included them absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux. But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time. So we were forced t…
Aaaaah, so that's why used RHEL!
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#204SCO was just a sockpuppet of Microsoft.
They were providing the financial ammo.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#205This is a hilarious quote, in the article, attributed to Linus, related to the concept of source code pedigree and the developer certification of origin for any contribution. > For example, in the case of "ctype.h", what made it so clear that it was original work was the horrible bugs it contained originally, and since we obviously don't do bugs any more (right?), we should probably plan on having other ways to docum…
It works both ways, very similar bug patterns can be strong indication of copying does it not ?
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was definitely a period in the 90s when a lot of people and companies expected/were resigned to Windows NT completely dominating both the desktop and the server. Even companies like IBM that were probably less convinced had backup plans like Monterey in IBM's case which factored into the SCO lawsuit.
And what's interesting, if the SCO lawsuit had gone any other way, Windows NT would probably have ended up completely dominating. Linux wouldn't be here and probably neither would SCO Linux either. What a dire state that would be.
As I recall, Sun Microsystems was fond of reminding everyone that they'd bought and paid for a perpetual, irrevocable license to Unix, so there wasn't and couldn't be any legal issue with Solaris.
I found a commentary (https://landley.net/writing/halloween9.html) that says something similar:
> UnixWare and OpenServer were always minor versions of Unix, the versions belonging to other vendors have always been more important and more lucrative: Sun's Solaris, HP's HP-UX, and IBM's AIX being three surviving profitable examples. All of these companies have purchased "irrevocable, perpetual" licenses to AT&T's old Unix codebase, and will never owe SCO another dime for it.
So, if SCO had managed to kill Linux, then Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX could have stepped in to compete with Windows NT.
One of the reasons Linux was eating commercial Unix's lunch was that x86 hardware was cheaper than RISC workstations and had finally hit a point where it performed as well (and eventually better). RISC systems were on their way out, and commercial Unix companies didn't seem to want to give up that fight.
So commercial Unix vendors would have needed to sell x86 ports of their Unix systems to compete with Windows NT, but as a technical matter, those x86 ports already existed (Solaris x86 certainly did).
TLDR: If Linux had been killed, there would be other Unix options to compete with Window NT.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#207I was recently bitten by this ghost of the past in the present day! Since the TLA⁺ project is trying to join the Linux Foundation, they've recently started enforcing Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) signing on all of the repos under the github.com/tlaplus org. The CI workflow started insta-failing on my PRs since none of my commits included a DCO. Fixing this isn't terribly difficult, github gives you a rebase c…
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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#208Earlier 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…
I think you are exaggerating.
Computers of all stripes are more reliable now. In the late nineties I ran apache + mod-perl built from source.
We had a lot of problems, but I cannot recall ever having a problem with those two.
We tested every update, of course, but it was not a huge burden.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Dells and HPs of the world didn't recognize it [Debian] because it was not a company.
IIRC Debian maintainers formed companies for that reason.
I was a Debian user because it suited me. It was obvious (to me at the time) that suits were going to choose RedHat, and we ran it a bit to have experience.
How wrong I was. Ubuntu made Debian every bit as much as a "choice of the suits" as Redhat.