Ransom Love, Caldera Co-Founder Interviewed 237
rootmon writes "The interview focuses mostly on Ransom Love's views of SCO Group's current dispute with IBM and the Free/Open Source Software Community. It also provides some insights on why Caldera purchased the UNIX business of SCO and their joint Monterey project with IBM. In summary, Love's view is 'My belief is that Unix and Linux should co-exist and should look and feel the same to application developers. Fundamentally, I would not have pursued SCO's path. You see, the challenge is building business. Litigation, no matter what side you're on, tears down businesses. Only the attorneys win. Companies should focus their energies on building their businesses, not on lawsuits. I don't see any positive outcomes.'"
Open sourcing Unix (Score:5, Interesting)
And now this company is suing others for copyright violations. It becomes more and more clear that SCO will have a hard time documenting where the code lines in question originated, that they actually have and has always held the copyright on them.
Short term investors (Score:2, Interesting)
I think Caldera investors who wanted a quick return pressured the management. They seem to think that short-term, possible gains are more important than long term ones, which is unfortunate.
I wonder who these short term investors could be. Seems they're the villains in all this.
Re:He sold his stock! (Score:1, Interesting)
> Sounds like the same game plan as Darl and the other SCO insiders!
Not hardly; they're still selling, deliberately waiting until after the price increased due to the lawsuit. RL totally divested when the lawsuit made the news.
New tactics (Score:5, Interesting)
What we need is to group the "bad" news together. Suppose IBM filed a counterclaim, RedHat did something interesting, SCO lost something overseas, and several open source leaders made more papers (and actually publicized them). The idea would be to get the stock as far down as possible in one day. We would keep a little news in reserve to drown out their PR responses the next day. Maybe by forcing the stock price down, we'd convince speculation buyers that the house of cards is falling, and perhaps get some of the private holders to pull out.
Insider Trading (Score:3, Interesting)
Last three months: 12 sells, 0 buys.
I wonder why ;)
In your face, Darl! (Score:3, Interesting)
SCOX is down 17% since then.
If it's not Consolidated Lint, It's just fuzz!
he's right and wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
The second half of that statement is completely correct: for spreading FS-software, the GPL is the perfect tool.
The first half is complete bullshit. The GPL is not in any way questionable. It is probably the most solid license in existence. The GPL is unquestionable in court because it *grants* rights not given by standard copyright law. To over-turn the GPL, you'd have to find copyright laws unconstitutional for providing too many restrictions.
Re:Open sourcing Unix (Score:5, Interesting)
This is different from Linux, where SCO is claiming that copyrighted code was used without permission. So the paper trail consists not of a bunch of copyright notices, but of alleged similarity between the two code bases.
Incidentally, lot of that third party code was contributed by Microsoft, during their brief flirtation with Unix [sourcemagazine.com]. Somehow I doubt if they'd cooperate in any attempt to make Unix open-source!