[Nottingham] Sun's financial support for SCO (12% of SCO's revenue)

[Robert Postill]

Well, I have to admit I'm tied in knots over this... It's like whichever 
way you turn you hear something different. This morning I picked up a 
story from linux today, it's an e-week article (I know they're not my 
favourite site either) in which they talk to Sun's Jonathan Schwatrz 
(http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1274638,00.asp). On page two:
*eWEEK:* Some critics are saying that it's not just Microsoft funding 
SCO but also Sun, citing the fact that you acquired another license from 
them recently, received warrants to buy shares in SCO and are losing the 
most customers in the migration from Unix to Linux. It thus makes 
enormous sense for Sun to fund SCO, their logic goes. How do you respond 
to that?
*Schwartz:* We took a license from AT&T initially for $100 million as we 
didn't own the IP. The license we took also made clear that we had 
rights equivalent to ownership. When we did the deal with SCO earlier 
this year we bought a bunch of drivers and when we give money to a 
company oftentimes we get warrants, which is part of the negotiations. I 
have warrants in 100 different companies, we have a huge venture 
portfolio. I can't do anything about the perception that's out there and 
to be blunt, I don't care as those people aren't going to drive our 
future—customers are.

So did they did buy drivers and got other stuff chucked in for free...or 
are they trying to keep Solaris out of Linux's reach? I'll definitely 
agree that I can't imagine SCO has such top class drivers that Sun need 
to pay them so much money. However it does occur to me that this issue 
(of drivers) may have been kicking around in Solaris x86 for a while and 
that's why Sun was so keen to kill off Solaris x86 last year.

I'd certainly like a definitive, truthful answer to this. I can't stand 
the dishonesty around the whole thing. SCOs stance is reprehensible and 
the sooner we can get back to using Linux unmolested the better.

Robert.

Robert Davies wrote:

>Another nail in the coffin of this theory :
>
>http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6293
>
>"The change by Caldera to leverage the SCO brand and SCO products has a sound 
>foundation but some short-term problems. These problems revolve around the 
>fact that neither Caldera nor device manufacturers are spending much in the 
>way of resources to support SCO Open Server or UnixWare products. The 
>bottom-line is it's an old OS. It's going to take time for the new SCO Group 
>to re-assess and then come out with a new version of the main SCO products. 
>So, what does a company do to get its channel re-invigorated and its house in 
>order? "
>
>Seems very unlikely SCO would have any drivers worth even the outstanding $2.5 
>million, never mind the full amount.
>
>Rob
>  
>