Fwiw I think Darl may still be playing some games w his bankruptcy filings. Just an opinion but I’d be curious if he’s had multiple recent filings and if any have been dismissed (ie failure to disclose etc). I took a quick glance at a court docket - I’m no expert but it didn’t look good at first glance
The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
231–240 of 259 posts
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#232I 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…
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.
7.3 was my first Linux distro, I distro hopped for a few years and settled on Gentoo in 2004...
Flash forward to a few weeks ago, I tried installing good ol' 7.3 again and it wouldn't even finish the installer...
I don't remember if there was a trick to it, or whether bit rot and architecture changes make it not installable anymore.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ubuntu has been including quadrapassel in their installer discs for a long time, I love playing Tetris instead of watching their lame slideshow.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#234I 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…
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
Let's not forget the following [0]:
> SCO's Linux lawsuit made no sense and no one at the time gave it much of a chance of succeeding. Over time it was revealed that Microsoft had been using SCO as a sock puppet against Linux. Unfortunately for Microsoft and SCO, it soon became abundantly clear that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux and its allies.
In a way this was a proxy war of Microsoft vs Linux.
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[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sco-linux-fud-returns-from-the...
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's brilliant! I wish more installers did that.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#236I 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…
Ahh yes. We also kept our hands and feet inside the roller coaster with SLES and RHEL.
The ever-looming “threat” might be laughable in hindsight had it not stifled innovation at such an early stage of growth.
IT Directors everywhere should atone.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I also remember Gentoo, mostly from here: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge... https://web.archive.org/web/20170602132852/https://fun.irq.d...
I'm equal parts gobsmacked that funroll-loops is still around, and that it's thanks to Shlomi Fish who is still writing his creepy-ass fanfic.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#238I 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…
While I agree that the SCO FUD surrounding Linux was real at that time (we all felt it), Red Hat was one of the most respected, functional, and widely-implemented distributions for the entire time SCO was in the news headlines.
It was also a huge pain if my experiences (early-mid 2000s) with Fedora are any indicator. Red Hat and co. were great because, given enough effort, they could be tuned into unshakable systems for any purpose. And you paid for that with your time and energy (or a support contract with Red Hat itself) and occasional frustration at things that didn't work like any other distribution.
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This would be a more convincing argument if your facts weren't over half a decade out of date. DTrace for Linux was relicensed under the UPL (with kernel components under GPLv2, just like the kernel) way back in 2017.
(speaking as the guy who wrote the scripts to change all the license text, though the actual relicensing was due to a lot of work on my boss's part.)
Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oracle itself deploys DTRACE with it's Oracle Linux. That whole CDDL/GPL incompatibility is BS.
This would be a more convincing argument if your facts weren't over half a decade out of date. DTrace for Linux was relicensed under the UPL (with kernel components under GPLv2, just like the kernel) way back in 2017. (speaking as the guy who wrote the scripts to change all the license text, though the actual relicensing was due to a lot of work on my boss's part.)
Well true but Oracle Linux included DTRACE for more then half a decade.
And canonical includes ZFS, and i think they have more lawyers then you and me.
Do you really think they would take that risk especially with oracle to include ZFS (that is not even their main fs)?
Have some commonsense.