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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#221

Post by Taniwha »

robotelvis wrote: post #213

I was actually the "author" of one of the pieces of code that SCO claimed had been stolen from them - SCO's implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter. SCO had a collaboration with IBM called Project Monterey, in which SCO and IBM were merging their operating systems in order to be better positioned for IA64 (which at that point people still thought would be good). One minor detail of the Monterey deal was that SCO…

The original SCO wasn't particularly cool either, I worked for a competing company that got called in to help them when they couldn't get get the 286 MMU to work, the deal was that we would get a copy of the resulting code, we got it working but in the end got zilch

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#222

Post by noisy_boy »

emilsedgh wrote: post #48
vondur wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was pre DNF/YUM days. RedHat could be a pain installing stuff from RPM’s that had crazy dependencies back in the day.

First time I installed Linux, I was trying to Gaim on it. I managed to compile Gaim before I managed to install it from RPM packages. Using Debian was a moment of pure epiphany. Good times.

I remember using Mandrake (later Mandriva) - it also used rpm. Dependency hell was an issue there too; it probably had to do with state of rpm more than the distro itself.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#223

Post by jzb »

sgt wrote: post #219
cjensen wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SCO the "cool UNIX vendor" was not the company that sued. In 2001, the cool UNIX vendor was struggling and sold its UNIX business to Caldera. Caldera renamed itself "the SCO Group" and filed the lawsuit. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation

In my mind, I associate Caldera with that Linux distribution that was pretty OK, but nothing to write home about.

Caldera’s big trick IIRC was its installer. You could play Tetris in the installer while it copied packages onto the hard drive. It was also a better installer for new users than a lot of others. I think the desktop experience was pretty polished for the time, too.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#224

Post by jzb »

ghaff wrote: post #148
oblio wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it’s fair. They went out of their way to make the license incompatible so it couldn’t be mixed with GPL’ed code.

Had they moved sooner to open source, and embraced it instead of trying to create a moat around their stuff, they probably could’ve stayed relevant.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#225

Post by mrweasel »

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…

It would have been more interesting to see SCO/Caldera being turned into a profitable Unix company, rather than going the lawsuit route. All development of SCOs products just stopped, there were never an attempt to turn the company around.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#226

Post by nix23 »

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...

>such a better base for the Linux ecosystem than Linux ever was.

That's so true.

But OmniOS and OpenIndiana still work excellent.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#227

Post by nix23 »

JohnFen wrote: post #5
mikece wrote: post #3

How different would the history of Linux have been had FreeBSD (and its forks) not been encumbered by lawsuits in the 1990s? Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?

What an interesting question! I'm a bit glad that BSD didn't "win", because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me. I'm looking at switching to BSD (I haven't yet because that switch will be a lot of work -- I have a lot of machines) as a better alternative. So BSD looks like an escape hatch to me and I'm glad that it's there.

>because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me.

Same for me, i switched about 6 years ago to FreeBSD.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#228

Post by nix23 »

lonelygirl15a wrote: post #47
bombcar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some Unices come with things that Linux can technically do, but they were built-in, not bolt-on. ZFS is an example of one that's recognizable, you can bolt it onto linux and it (now) works quite well, but it was integrated much more into Solaris. There are also Unix platforms that fully support hot-swappable just about everything, which you CAN do with Linux but it's not as simple. Most of that stuff is gone by the w…

I seem to recall that Sun put ZFS under a license that has been deemed incompatible with the GPL by pretty much everyone except Canonical, and so that it can't be integrated with the kernel but must remain a "bolt-on" for legal reasons. It won't surprise me if one of these days Oracle decides that Canonical is a ripe lawsuit target over ZFS.

Oracle itself deploys DTRACE with it's Oracle Linux.

That whole CDDL/GPL incompatibility is BS.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#229

Post by msla »

bitcharmer wrote: post #108
dekhn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were several good versions of Red Hat (IIRC 7.3 was pretty good) and then RH9 had NPTL but unfortunately was incompatible with the rest of the world (very custom kernel, userspace, compiler). IIRC the egcs included in that led to all sorts of interesting outcomes.

I'm confused. RH9 is the latest release, how is it custom? What are you referring to exactly?

There was a distro called Red Hat, which more-or-less mutated into Fedora, which is and has always been a different distro from Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#230

Post by hnlmorg »

pianoben wrote: post #181
dwater wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slackware in the 90s was amazing. Super stable. I think I continued to run Slackware until around 2002 to 2004 (can’t say for sure but it was to run an early(ish) version of Ableton for laptop DJing - as I was creating a concept set that just wouldn’t have been possible with vinyl alone), and wanted a distro that was a little lower maintenance given the advances to Linux at that point.

I’ll always have a soft spot for Slackware even if I’d never dream of running it any longer.

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