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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#251

Post by ethbr0 »

ok123456 wrote: post #247
ethbr0 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Using redhat before yum, meant visiting rpmfind.net and manually collecting what you needed. In some ways, RHEL is still like that, because popular packages are usually a major version or two behind if they're even there at all. You have to hunt down an EPEL that has whatever you need.

Yeah, I don't miss the old days. Like another poster though, I remember apt-get being decent while pre-yum RedHat was still pretty bad.

But I also realize my perspective was that of a hobbyist, not an enterprise sysadmin who was probably upgrading to well-known versions through known paths.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#252

Post by dagw »

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, pre SCO, was actually pretty sold 'professional' desktop OS. A place I worked at used it and we had a bunch of developers and researchers with Windows backgrounds that were using Linux for the first time and they all found it a pretty smooth and polished desktop and development experience over all.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#253

Post by ok123456 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #251
ok123456 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using redhat before yum, meant visiting rpmfind.net and manually collecting what you needed. In some ways, RHEL is still like that, because popular packages are usually a major version or two behind if they're even there at all. You have to hunt down an EPEL that has whatever you need.

Yeah, I don't miss the old days. Like another poster though, I remember apt-get being decent while pre-yum RedHat was still pretty bad. But I also realize my perspective was that of a hobbyist, not an enterprise sysadmin who was probably upgrading to well-known versions through known paths.

I worked with sysadmins who used rpm based distros back then and their experience was basically mine: hunting down the right rpms that both satisfied the constraints and actually worked.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#254

Post by lizknope »

dredmorbius wrote: post #199
lizknope wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ >

I'm not sure what window manager was on AIX in 1991 on an RT. Maybe it was twm. That is the first time I used Unix / X11.

When I started college in 1993 our default environment was mwm but I quickly switched to vtwm and had a really cool setup. I switched to AfterStep because I loved the NeXTSTEP look and used that and WindowMaker for 10 years before moving to XFCE.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#255

Post by hackandthink »

t344344 wrote: post #87
ghaff wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.

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.

I was surprised by the success of Linux around 2000.

NT or Solaris were actually better and BSD variants had been around for a while.

Samba and Apache were the driving forces back then. In Germany, SUSE had great influence.

But Linux success is still amazing.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#257

Post by ubermonkey »

morelisp wrote: post #39
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…

IDK, if I was put in charge of a company losing money like crazy and was genuinely trying to turn it around, my first thought would not be "oh, let's hire David Boies".

It's weird. Boies got a great rep vs. Microsoft representing the Justice department, and obviously for working on the side of angels in Bush v. Gore, but he's also taken on some really ethically questionable clients -- among them, obviously, is SCO, but also tobacco companies. And, not for nothing, he both represented and served as a director for THERANOS.

And that's without even MENTIONING his involvement with Weinstein and the use of Israeli private intel company Black Cube to dredge up dirt on both Harvey's victims and the reporters covering the case.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#259

Post by int_19h »

MereInterest wrote: post #69
cheekibreeki2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rh 4.2 ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?

My main experience with RedHat has been needing to bend over backwards to support its wildly outdated library versions. Because RedHat “supports” operating systems for about a decade, there’s always an argument that a library should be written to support whatever toolchain is provided by the oldest supported RHEL version. RHEL’s “support” should be seen as “your software will continue to run unmodified when on this s…

For a while, Python binary wheels (packages) for Linux had a standard that was defined, essentially, in terms of RHEL (or rather, CentOS) as a baseline platform for this exact reason.

https://peps.python.org/pep-0513/

https://peps.python.org/pep-0571/

https://peps.python.org/pep-0599/

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