Notes From The SCO Roadshow's First Stop 382
compactable writes "Just got back from the first half of the SCO roadshow's first stop in Toronto. No unfurling of IP, no NDA, however an interesting view of what's running this litigious blip of a corporation. Full details at my weenie write-up (feel free to mirror the contents so that my ISP doesn't kill me)."
Hahahahahah (Score:1, Insightful)
All you long term sco investors better sell tomorrow are you can say by by to your $$$.
I would have though that SCO... (Score:2, Insightful)
Would have managed a more potent marketing ploy considering that they really don't have any product to be selling. They needed to be able to field technical questions, in detail, and were unable to. This hurts their credibility with those who oppose them.
They needed to secure the support of their resellers, without whom they have no income, however basically it sounds like they snubbed them to their faces.
And as a final pedantic note, we all know UNIX is in Linux. In case they forgot, they released System III under a BSD-like license, and Linux subscribes to many of the UNIX philosophies. (Do one thing and do it well). This isn't even an interesting point.
I still remain unimpressed by SCO.
Re:If the audience was primarily SCO resellers, .. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A minor nit... (Score:2, Insightful)
Only patents expire (Score:2, Insightful)
those rights work very differently from other property rights. For example, they expire. You should think of them more as a temporary contract
Temporary? Trademarks registered in the USPTO don't expire as long as the holder keeps filling the meter, and neither do trade secrets. Copyrights will not expire in the United States as long as The Walt Disney Company continues to use proceeds from home video sales to pay off legislators [pineight.com]. In other words, only patents expire.
We should *all* go to this (Score:5, Insightful)
I think its a six hour drive to the one nearest to me, but I should go just to ask pointed questions. I'm more or less enjoying my eighteenth year of Unix use (BSD on Vax 11/780
I doubt if most
SCO ignored what people needed for a long, long time, and agreeing to be the punching bag in M$'s proxy war against Linux is the last gasp of the last for pay unix workalike on intel hardware. BSDi went quietly, Sun & SGI are going to kick and fuss
Nice write-up, except for... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that a lot of IT workers are out of touch with the retail industry, but this seems a little arrogant.
Designing a stable, reliable point-of-sale system for long-term use (because retail corporations tend to replace POS systems on the order of once every twenty years) is a huge challenge. I'm involved with a project like that now.
Cash registers are where the money comes into a retail corporation. If they're broken because the designer figured that 80% reliability was good enough, then you don't take in money that day, or you use a notepad, pen, and manual credit card imprinter. A lot of your customers will walk out your door and down the street to someone who bought a better system.
The POS system we're replacing was bought in 1983. The servers are the size of washing machines and have 8.5" disk drives. They're still running. How many of you are working on systems you expect to last that long?
I'm not saying that SCO's system is any good, just that I've noticed a tendency for tech geeks not to understand why making a good POS system is a challenge, and something you'd want to mention as an achievement.
Re:Acquisition using Cap not possible (Score:5, Insightful)
SCO purchases a Canopy company with newly created shares at a nominal value (yes they have provision for a massive share expansion). The Canopy shareholders - ie Noorda and Yarro then sell the SCO stock at its market price and make a killing.
A worthless Canopy company has been turned into a fortune in cash and the suckers who have been paying through their nose to buy SCO stock have been defrauded.
So it goes.
Re:From the article... (Score:3, Insightful)
The GPL'D! Linux kernel.
Im putting money into that bet.... FSF, its time to go in for a BIG class action lawsuit now that they still have their money.
Think about how they see this thing.
"Linux is ours, so we can use it as we see fit"
They are switching SCO *ix to Linux, thats how they are getting the cool new features.
B A S T A R D S
Re:Disturbing side to their "GPL is invalid" ravin (Score:4, Insightful)
It's happened. There's this company you might have heard of called International Business Machines [slashdot.org] that has sued SCO for copyright infringement on their code in the Linux Kernel. They even registered the copyright, so SCO is liable for statutory damages. Interestingly, it looks as though it's no longer possible to download the kernel source from the SCO website, which suggests that their lawyers are worried. (I was going to suggest that people download the sources in order to drive up SCO's liability, but it looks as though they thought of that, too.)
Importantly, though, that doesn't have any bearing on any other software under the GPL. The fact that SCO has violated the license on Linux does not prevent them from distributing any other GPLed software. Otherwise they probably would have been sued by several other Free Software developers. ISTR that the SAMBA team is particularly pissed at them and would love a legitimate excuse for preventing them from including SAMBA in their Unix line.
Re:NOTE TO OTHERS (Score:2, Insightful)
i'm not sure if it acually matters in this case but they might pull the personal web service from him because of too much trafice. (it happens that way at most other places)
Re:DAMN!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Only patents expire (Score:2, Insightful)
If we had Global Government that functioned by the same rules the US Government does, you would have seen the same pattern as you currently see in copyrights where IP rights are effectively equal to P rights.
Re:Avaya, Lucent, and Walgreens (Score:3, Insightful)
IIRC, it is walgreens. But, it is serviced by IBM. IBM was not in a hurry back then, to get customers off of a working (and paying) system. It was their customer drug database. Not one to be triffled with. But I am quite certain that IBM has made the choice to move by now (I need to talk to some of my old co-workers to find out).
As to the list of customers, yeah, they have a large list, but they also know that all (or nearly all) of their customers are busy moving off of them to either Linux or BSD. That is why they are sueing. But as to calling Linux immature, well, Sun and MS still claim that Linux is for the edge servers (at best), but disregard the facts that
- Linux is running (and selling) on the smallest devices including commercial stuff.
- Linux runs on the biggest of machines - IBM mainframes.
- Linux runs on some of the fastest machines (top500 as you pointed out).
- Linux is used by companies that are now profitable (or back to profitability) on the internet (google, Walmart, amazon, etc).
- Linux has the security design of Unix (as compared to Windows) therefor low security costs.
- Linux has the lowest TCO on DBs (according to spec marks)
- Linux has similar run-time costs to Unix (they are the lowest of low).
- Linux (and BSD) has the lowest initial cost.
No matter what companies like MS, Sun, and SCO keep saying about Linux, it will keep steam rolling. History has showed that companies that ignore it will die.Re:The real question is (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Speaking of "Old..." (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounded to me that reseller was completely aware of how far SCO is behind and was trying to get them to admit they were copying Linux (and Solaris, but SCO copying Linux has more impact).
Re:Abuse (Score:5, Insightful)
Disrupting SCO's road shows won't do the Open Source community any good. The best tactic is simply to attend and report. Maybe one or two pointed questions during Q&A, but anything more than that will get in the way of the attendees coming to their own conclusions. No need to interrupt your enemy when he is shooting himself in the foot.
Re:From the article... (Score:5, Insightful)