Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 259 posts

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#61

Post by quags »

criddell wrote: post #57

I wonder if anybody here can correct my memory. When Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO, I seem to recall that part of the deal was Microsoft agreeing to not compete in the Unix market. Today, Microsoft is embracing Linux with their WSL stuff and that certainly impacts the Unix market. Maybe the 1997 agreement between the two companies ended Microsoft's exile from Unix-land or maybe when Caldera bought SCO's Unix business t…

That sounds like Apple agreeing not to go into the music business with their settlement with apple music - and then just doing what they want any way. Microsoft being so large, could just do it and settle later.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#62

Post by bitwize »

criddell wrote: post #57

I wonder if anybody here can correct my memory. When Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO, I seem to recall that part of the deal was Microsoft agreeing to not compete in the Unix market. Today, Microsoft is embracing Linux with their WSL stuff and that certainly impacts the Unix market. Maybe the 1997 agreement between the two companies ended Microsoft's exile from Unix-land or maybe when Caldera bought SCO's Unix business t…

Back in 1999 Microsoft bought Interix, and marketed it as Windows Services for Unix under their own banner. So the agreement was probably non-binding as of 1999 at the latest.

Microsoft just didn't see Unix, and especially Linux, as competition because they felt what they built was better. Interix/SFU was a compatibility path to migrate Unix devs to Windows NT more than anything; it was more like Cygwin than like WSL.

They figured that Linux, and the dirty hippies that built it, would be easily swept away by Microsoft's mighty hand. Only when the Gates-Ballmer dynasty stepped down would the company be convinced otherwise.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#63

Post by hencq »

politician wrote: post #24
ChuckMcM wrote: post #16

Interesting side effect of this (to me :-)) is that when Blekko was acquired by IBM I got stuck doing what is called "Blue Washing" where IBM tracks down the licenses, origins, and usages of all the source code the acquired company is bringing to IBM. According to people I worked with when doing this, the entire process and toolset was an outgrowth of the work they did to disprove SCO's claims in the lawsuit. I found…

I wonder if it'll be much easier going forward. Take a suspect piece of code, run it through an LLM to explain it, pass the explanation to another LLM to generate code from the explanation. An automated pipeline for clean room reverse engineering.

IANAL but it seems that if you rely on looking at the suspect piece of code to see what it's doing (even if done by an LLM), it's not exactly clean room.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#64

Post by kkielhofner »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #16

Interesting side effect of this (to me :-)) is that when Blekko was acquired by IBM I got stuck doing what is called "Blue Washing" where IBM tracks down the licenses, origins, and usages of all the source code the acquired company is bringing to IBM. According to people I worked with when doing this, the entire process and toolset was an outgrowth of the work they did to disprove SCO's claims in the lawsuit. I found…

There’s an entire cottage industry around this. As one example:

https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/security-testing...

Frequently used for things like internal audits, compliance, due-diligence during financing, etc.

It’s remarkably thorough but not always completely accurate - it flagged an open source project I created that we were using as GPL. I had to correct them, which was entertaining.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#65

Post by ivzhh »

Providing legal protection for lawsuits can be a lucrative business. However, I'm not aware of any BSD-based companies that have capitalized on this opportunity. Are there any untold stories?

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#66

Post by bitwize »

surfingdino wrote: post #40
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a friend now, remember?

Sure, we remember... https://www.junauza.com/2011/07/microsoft-fud-campaigns-agai...

Interesting choice of Ballmer as Dr. Evil... I always felt that Bill Gates's speaking voice resembled that of Evil.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#67

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

nordsieck wrote: post #26
AlbertCory wrote: post #2

Here's a choice for you all: (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or -- (2) the current patent aystem, post CLS Bank , which has eliminated a lot of business method patents and some, but not all, software patents.

> (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or -- I'd go with this. But ideally with a 10-20 year limit on copyright[1]. I do think that there are some software patents (RSA, for example) that seem worthwhile. But the system as a whole seems like it does more harm than good. --- 1. My ideal proposal for copyright is exp…

IP paying property taxes would be nice. Could even let owners set the value, if it were coupled to licensing fees etc.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#68

Post by quags »

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…

http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM-835-Exhibit_224.pdf follows a good explaination of sco's tactics at the time. During the lawsuit a dedicated server company rackshack (later ev1 servers) bought a license for all their users between. According to the owner Robert Marsh later in the trial, he felt in the end SCO was misleading and provided false information.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#69

Post by MereInterest »

cheekibreeki2 wrote: post #25
jedberg wrote: post #15

I 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…

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 system”, but is frequently interpreted as “this is a sane platform for current development”.

Re: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

#70

Post by ianbicking »

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…

If the stock went so low, couldn't IBM or whoever just buy SCO? Or were not there not a controlling number of shares available?
Post reply on HN