[Sussex] 5 years ago today and SCO

[Paul Tansom]

On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 23:46 +0100, Steve Dobson wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 11:08:02PM +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
> > On Sun, 2005-06-26 at 12:18 +0100, Steve Dobson wrote:
> > > On Sun, Jun 26, 2005 at 11:52:47AM +0100, Andrew Guard wrote:
> > > > Well 5 years ago SCO was about to release news about there Linux?  lol
> > > > 
> > > > The really fun part in this story was SCO was working with IBM. ;)
> > > > 
> > > > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/06/26/sco_straightens_its_linux_message/
> > > 
> > > This is oldSCO news, not newSCO news.  SCO was formally called Caldera, and
> > > changed their name 23 March 2003.
> > 
> > Indeed, and at that time Caldera, aka newSCO, already had a Linux
> > distribution!! Somewhere I have a copy of Caldera OpenLinux 1.1, which
> > was part developed (from vague memory) with Lasermoon (based in Fareham)
> > and was aiming to become a standards compliant Linux (i.e. Posix.1, SPG4
> > X/Open and probably others). How times change!
> 
> The previous workings of Caldera, oldSCO or whomever is for little
> relevance.  The litigation is clearly the brainchild of Darl McBride.
> The only thing that makes any sense to me is the McBride thought that
> IBM would just buy SCO to make the nuisance go away.

I agree, Darl McBride and the current board are/were the driving force
behind the current actions. I was more commending on how things had
changed for what once appeared to be a Linux company with some
interesting ideas - well, to me back in 1997 they did!. Back then I had
a preference for Caldera over Red Hat - that too has changed. After a
brief fling with Red Hat I now prefer Debian over Red Hat - OK, some
elements haven't changed ;)

> The problem was McBride miscalculated.  IBM didn't bite.  The only question
> left for me is why?  I can remember reading (I think it was written by Eben
> Morgan) that a license tested in court is stronger than one that is not.
> I think that IBM saw here the perfect opportunity to test the GPL in a
> US court using IBM lawyers - now that is probably worth the few million
> price tag to them - remember, they are investing billions in their Linux
> business each year.

I'm not so sure as they expected to be purchased. It is very difficult
to theorise on their reasons, but when they started it seemed as though
they were looking to repeat their success with DOS (having settled with
Microsoft over the MS-DOS v DR-DOS issue). I would suspect that the
combination of 'encouragement' from Microsoft linked parties, coupled
with the prospect of settling out of court prompted the action. I'm not
entirely sure as they really understood what they were doing though, and
didn't really have a clue about the true nature of Linux in terms of the
community, legal support (even outside IBM, you've already mentioned
Eben Moglen) and the significance of the impact it is having on the
computing industry - which is very difficult to quantify, but also very
difficult to ignore :)

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/