[Sussex] 5 years ago today and SCO

[Steve Dobson]

Morning Paul

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 12:47:59AM +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 23:46 +0100, Steve Dobson wrote:
> > 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 ;)

I see your point, but to me nothing much has changed.  One company has
a change of CEO (and other board members) and then they try to play a
different game - that's business.  I'm not saying that I like it, or
that I agree with it, just that that is the way the (western) world works.

> > 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 :)

Oh, I agree that my theories are speculative at best.  But a settlement
out of court would have been between SCO & IBM - McBride would not see
an huge increase in his personal wealth.  But IBM (or anyone else) buying
SCO would allow McBride to significantly increase his wealth - via his
SCO stock options.

Personally I doubt that M$ is doing much behind the scenes.  If found out
the damage to M$ would be (IMO) greater than the advantages - and remember
all the stuff M$ was(is) fighting when SCO filed (like the EU anti-trust).
Sure, M$ did buy a SCOlicense, but not many have.   One could ask (and I
do), why haven't more M$ controlled companies bought SCOlicense?

The answer I came up with is that M$ want SCO to fail, to stop trading as
a results of damages awarded to IBM.  The reason is clear - M$'s FUD machine
can create merry hell over the first Linux company to destroyed over a
GPL issue.  In a way you are part of that FUD story with your switch from
Caldera to RedHat to Debian.  

Paul, please don't think that I am saying that you have done anything
wrong.  All I am saying is that M$ will put the best spin on the SCO vs IBM
case they can - and that is just good business.  Just as it is good 
business for the Linux community to put the best spin it can on the virus
problem.

At the end of the day I think that the SCO vs ??? cases have one simple
driving force: greed.  The greed of McBride and his friends to increase
their personal wealth.

Steve
-- 
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets.
		-- L. Zadeh
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