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SCO Threatens Red Hat and SuSE
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Apr 23, 2003 03:24 PM
from the court-battles-are-fun dept.
from the court-battles-are-fun dept.
Guy Smith writes "CRN reports that SCO will target SuSE and Red Hat with lawsuits after they are finished with IBM (providing that IBM allows them live). To quote Sco, "There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done." They seem bent on destroying the Open Source community and they deserve to hear the community's opinion on the matter."
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SCO Threatens Red Hat and SuSE
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Beautiful (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://homepage.mac.com/inertia186/iblog/ | Last Journal: Monday February 09 2004, @08:06PM)
Ya think? As you may or may not recall [sourcemagazine.com], SCO had ties to Microsoft back in the day, when it was called XENIX. So I guess it's still in it's blood to threaten the other operating systems on the block.
Re:Beautiful (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Beautiful (Score:5, Informative)
(http://homepage.mac.com/inertia186/iblog/ | Last Journal: Monday February 09 2004, @08:06PM)
Link 1 [martin-studio.com]
Re:Beautiful (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 24 2005, @09:37PM)
What message DID resonate with IT managers? The possibility of being sued for Linux/OSS patent voilations.
"Linux patent violations/risk of being sued" struck a chord with US and Swedish respondents. Seventy-four percent (74%) of Americans and 82% of Swedes stated that the risk of being sued over Linux patent violations made them feel less favorable towards Linux. This was the only message that had a strong impact with any audience.
Hmmm... the only thing that might work is very public lawsuits and threats about patent voilations and what begins to happen?
But M$ would never actually bribe another company to sue (and threaten to sue) the companies that represent the biggest threats to them just as a marketing ploy would they?
This was the only message that had a strong impact with any audience.
Would they?
=tkk
Re:Beautiful (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.example.net/)
May I quote a stable space opera move Star Wars?
So, before you think that successfully suing Microsoft is proof against future alliance with Microsoft against Open Source, remember Yoda's words:
Re:Beautiful (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://stefanco.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 14, @11:09AM)
You're making the assumption that the Halloween VII memo is an authentic, unaltered memo from Microsoft. How do you know it's not a forgery? Where's the proof?
I have an email from Bill Gates that says he'll give me $1000 if I forward the email to all my friends, but I don't think it's real.
Re:Beautiful (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 24 2005, @09:37PM)
Are these for real?
Yes. Microsoft has acknowledged the authenticity of these documents. Halloween I, II, III and VII are real;
[VII is the one I cited.]
M$ has openly acknowledged that several of them are, in fact, true leaks of M$ memos. I don't have a specific link for that document but someone probably does - ESR says it is and I think it's too boring and buzzowrd compliant to be fake.
But feel free to show us as wrong.
=tkk
Re:Beautiful (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Beautiful (Score:4, Funny)
(http://music.download.com/fearofzero | Last Journal: Saturday November 03, @08:55AM)
Re:Beautiful (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
If L is the installed base of Linux, then dL/dt is the net rate of adoption. and if you were to decelerate the adoption, then that would be a negative value of d2L/dt2. But he said de-accelerate which would be a negative value of d3L/dt3, but a positive va....ok I'll go back to sitting in the corner and muttering to myself..
From the interview: (Score:5, Interesting)
McBride: In our case, Linux comes from Unix and we own the Unix operating system. How this plays out with other code bases, I don't know.
CRN: What are you trying to do? Some say you are trying to compete against Linux by destroying it.
McBride: We will use our best efforts to protect our source code.
If that's not a battle cry, what is?
I probably won't join the flamewar on their inbox, but in EVERY circumstance where I find their products from this point forward I will offer that client a special discount on the hours I spend replacing it with any other product that will do the job.
Re:From the interview: (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.daphne-emu.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 30 2005, @05:59PM)
SCO appears to be trying to change their primary source of revenue to be that which they get from lawsuits rather than actually selling services like they used to be doing. I don't know how viable of a business strategy this is, but even if they were to successfully sue every linux company into bankruptcy (hypothetically) they would eventually run out of people to sue and go bankrupt themselves. It's like a virus that feeds on other living cells until it has no more hosts. Once it runs out of hosts, it must itself die.
Re:From the interview: (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday December 01 2006, @10:51AM)
No they don't (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://benambra.org/)
From a business perspective, such a policy can make good sense. According to a book I once read, Xerox came to the same conclusion. Back in the 60's and 70's, they chased after everybody that might be violating their patents, but in the 1980's they decided that chasing people through the courts was a distraction from their main business and more trouble than it was worth.
Re:From the interview: (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.doublefine.com/)
Oh lordy. If suing Linux vendors is their new business plan... okay. Makes sense. Because, as we know, packaging and selling Linux distributions is such a profitable business that SCO is bound to cash in big time with this strategy.
*snicker*
Re:From the interview: (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.capybara.org/~hylaride)
"our source code." (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.ringworld.org/~zibby | Last Journal: Wednesday August 27 2003, @04:17PM)
Seems like their issue isn't the kernel, but the software being distributed with the kernel.
Remember folks, Linux is the kernel, not the OS. Distributions are the OS. SCO is after distributers, not the kernel. If anyone tells you Linux is an operating system, they're wrong.
If you read the lawsuit.. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
SCO DOES believe that IBM has illegally taken SCO Intellectual Property and deliberately fed it into the linux community. If you read the complaint the scenario goes something like this...
SCO and IBM enter into agreement to produce 'hardened' Unix for the Intel Platform. When this development is done, and SCO expects IBM to market it, IBM says "nevermind we don't want to go in that direction anymore". Months later IBM announces an initiative to help the linux community 'harden' linux
SCO claim that IBM illegally used what they learned from SCO to make IP contributions to Linux. So even if the code wasn't copied the knowhow was illegally transfered from a private partnership with huge NDA coverage, to a public project without SCO's consent. If this is true, they have a case against IBM
I do not know what there case may be against Red Hat etc.
Re:From the interview: (Score:5, Informative)
(http://web.abnormal.com/)
Re:From the interview: (Score:5, Informative)
(http://cstefan.multiply.com/ | Last Journal: Monday December 03, @12:09PM)
Not exactly.
BSD was based on version 7. Over the years the AT&T and BSD codebases diverged quite a bit. Many UNIX vendors including AT&T copied bits of the BSD codebase back into their implementations of the AT&T codebase. The BSD TCP/IP stack is probably the best known of these.
Flash forward to the early 90's, BSD 4.4 is released, AT&T sues BSDI and the University of California for copying it's source code. After much lawyering the case is eventually settled and the handful of files that still contain AT&T source are removed leading to the 4.4-lite release.
In the interim AT&T has sold the UNIX source code and trademarks to Novell. A couple of years later Novell sells the UNIX code to SCO and donates the UNIX trademarks to X/Open. A few years later SCO sells its UNIX OS businesses to Caldera and Caldera changes its name to SCO.
So the current batch of idiots isn't really SCO but Caldera who has managed to get it's grubby hands on the old AT&T codebase.
Re:Community Response? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.grown-up.org/)
As opposed to posting direct contact information like names and email addresses... and including people with *absolutely no involvement* with the decision, and encouraging people to spam them. And there was spamming involved on the forums, as well, which interfered with other *users*.
We're talking apples and oranges here.
Re:Community Response? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's pretty despicable to realize your product can't stand on its own merits and thus to resort to lawsuits, on the basis of the argument that your "competition" must have stolen your code because their product improved too much too fast. I think people in the Open Source community should be polite when trying to resolve disputes or negotiate with companies or organizations that have committed license violations unknowingly, or otherwise skirted around the rules, and should generally give others the benefit of the doubt initially - the light touch is usually the best first approach with anybody.
SCO has gone beyond the point of getting the benefit of the doubt, however. There can be no doubt about the intentions of their actions, or about their attitude towards Linux and its backers. If they were willing to point to specific code that has been lifted, or other specific copyright violations, which they've been asked repeatedly, I think the majority of the Linux community would support removing those portions from the codebase. However, SCO has been unable and unwilling to do that, and has not only brought this to the courts, but is threatening widening their lawsuit against pretty much everybody who has financially benefitted from and supported the Linux community. I say fuck SCO and the horse they rode in on. Of course, I think emailing them is pretty much guaranteed to be useless and I wouldn't even bother - let IBMs lawyer's eat these fuckers for lunch, but I don't see any hypocrisy in differentiating between these two situations.
Summary (Score:5, Funny)
A: Yes.
Re:Summary (Score:4, Funny)
SCO abviously a superior product..... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.softwarearchitects.ca/)
Contact Us
The SCO Group
355 South 520 West
Suite 100
Lindon, Utah 84042 USA
801-765-4999 phone
801-765-1313 fax
Choose Location:
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Re:SCO abviously a superior product..... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/~joe_bruin/ | Last Journal: Wednesday April 14 2004, @09:25PM)
Re:SCO abviously a superior product..... (Score:5, Funny)
netcraft.com reports:
The site www.sco.com is running Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.0.3pl1 on Linux. FAQ
Cheers,
cdc
Re:SCO abviously a superior product..... (Score:5, Funny)
After they're finished with IBM... (Score:5, Funny)
"Hey, you! When I'm done kickin' these four bouncers' asses, you're next! You and your huge friends, there!"
Re:Chances? (Score:5, Insightful)
But if there is significant proprietary code in open source that the owner did not put some type of open license
Which is exactly what sco themselves does when distributing OpenLinux. Any claim they may have had on any part of the code is uninteresting now since they themselves (as copyrightholders) have distributed the source under GPL (and other lisences).
If they never themselves ditributed linux they might have had the snowball's chance, now they haven't even got that.
Astounding. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.buildhigh.com/)
Believe me, all the feedback in the world won't matter to the SCO folks. They want attention. They want everyone up in arms. They want this to hinder the adoption of Linux in business.
Why? They want to be bought. SCO figures that if IBM's linux related sales start to drop (and IBM makes a fair amount of cash on linux related sales) IBM may just buy SCO to shut them up and end the lawsuit. It's pretty slimy on SCO's part. It's downright microsoftish.
I'm not saying don't send SCO feedback. I'm saying that whatever you send won't matter to them. They're not interested in using linux for anything other than making a quick buck and exiting the market. They're like LinuxONE was, just a lot more insidious and poisonous.
Re:Astounding. (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday December 01 2006, @10:51AM)
As much as I dislike MS (and SCO), this really is not an MS tactic. Overall MS remains "ethically challenged", but I have noticed that the courts are a true last resort for them. I am actually quite impressed by that.
Re:SCO is a piece of garbage. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.sigsegv.cx/)
1. SCO was slower
2. SCO was horrible to maintain
3. The file system hierarchy had nothing in common neither with system V, nor with posix, nor with anything else for that matter
4. It was so ridden with security holes that it could be hacked by script kiddiez on the fly. Raising the sec to higher levels (C2) even made the job easier for them beacause half of executables were setuid to maintain the functionality for C2 and almost every one of them had a buffer overrun.
5. The only thing it was useful for was running Oracle on a PC.
Since then, linux has got better. And as 5 is no longer the case SCO is dying. Frankly it deserves anything it gets. All IBM needs is an injunction preventing SCO from enforcing the 100 day clause in its contract. After that it is game over.
Sure they will... (Score:4, Insightful)
What parts do they have a problem with? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://spf.pobox.com/)
Re:What parts do they have a problem with? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.cs.utah.edu/~andersbr/)
Now, the simple fact is that SCO's code base is irrelevant. Many of the "high performance" features (SMP, NUMA, journalled file systems, etc.) that they claim IBM put into Linux aren't present in the original Bell Labs code, or even in SCO's latest-and-greatest OS offering.
So my impression is that SCO is actually claiming ownership of all of IBM's improvements, and charging that those improvements were illegally added to Linux.
Sounds stupid? It is.
[Note: any errors of fact are directly attributable to me not knowing of what I speak.]
Don't they? (Score:5, Interesting)