SCO Fiasco Over For Linux, Starting For Solaris? 264
kripkenstein writes "We have just heard that the SCO fiasco is finally going to end for Linux. But Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at DesktopLinux.com points out that the favorable result for Linux may cause unpleasant consequences for rival open-source operating system OpenSolaris: 'At one time, Sun was an SCO supporter ... Sun's Jonathan Schwartz — then Sun VP of software and today Sun's president and CEO — said in 2003 that Sun had bought "rights equivalent to ownership" to Unix. SCO agreed. In 2005, SCO CEO Darl McBride said that SCO had no problem with Sun open-sourcing Unix code in what would become OpenSolaris. "We have seen what Sun plans to do with OpenSolaris and we have no problem with it," McBride said. "What they're doing protects our Unix intellectual property rights." Sun now has a little problem, which might become a giant one: SCO never had any Unix IP to sell. Therefore, it seems likely that Solaris and OpenSolaris contains Novell's Unix IP.'"
Re:McBride: "...we have no problem with it..." (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not really about the FUD, though. The real question is whether Novell will sue Sun or not for misappropriating their intellectual property by open sourcing OpenSolaris. My guess is probably not. I don't think Novell has anything to gain from it. They aren't making money off UNIX, really. They seem to have bet the farm on Linux and were willing to defend it against companies trying to bury it (because their livelihood depends on it), but I'm not convinced they'd stoop so low as to pull a SCO themselves and try to sue away the competition. That's just not how responsible businesses operate.
Besides, Novell isn't really making money off of Linux, either. They're making money off their higher level bits---bits that run on both Linux and Solaris. Thus, suing Sun would actually be hurting Novell. That would be pretty silly.
Of course, I'd love to see Novell drive a stake through SCO by releasing the UNIX copyrights into the public domain, but I don't see it happening. Would be fun to watch, though.
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun also, through greed, vaulted GCC into the mainstream. When Sun decided to no longer include compilers with the base operating system, GCC really took off.
Now then, the community may have a legitimate beef with Sun today, but let us not forget how much Sun has helped the community.
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just one question.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Making an interoperability deal - even if it includes "patent protection" and money changing hands - does not seem to me to indicate any sort of "control".
Last I heard, despite Novell's profitability problems with the Linux side of the business, Novell is still relatively cash rich and entirely a viable company at this point. They're not SCO, dying on the vine and desperately looking for a way out. They might be that way in another five years if they can't get Linux moving fast enough, but they're not there yet.
And obviously it would be ridiculous for Novell to "inhibit Linux growth" since they're betting the farm on Linux - unless you're one of the conspiracy theorists like Bruce Perens who think Novell only made the deal to tempt Microsoft into buying them out. I call tin-foil hat conspiracy theory on that notion.
More trouble for SCO, actually (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, I believe that Sun and Microsoft really didn't buy anything, they were just funneling money to SCO.
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Interesting)
I need Open Source. I make my living with Linux. I need Linux to be strong and healthy. I need Apache and PHP. I need Bluefish, Kate and Quanta Plus. I contribute financially to a couple of products, although I don't have much to give. I learned how to do what I do by following Open Source documentation, asking questions on web forums, and mostly by downloading and installing the software to learn to use it for free. I never could have afforded to buy Windows Server 2003 with IIS as ASP just to learn, but it took me one evening to install and start learning debian, apache, mysql and php, and now I make my living with those tools. Do you understand how liberating that is? I was a sand-pounding infantryman for god's sake, and now a year later I am a skilled worker in the IT industry, thanks to Open Source.
If different members of the development community (and Sun is and continues to be a huge member of that community) perpetually sue each other, it hurts the Open Source reputation (which equals fewer customers and fewer developers) and it prevents them from working together toward the common goal of a better set of software for everybody.
The prospect of that is horrifies me.
Re:Troll Article (Score:5, Interesting)
You do not remember correctly. Sun most definitely got an SV license at least as far back as SunOS 3.2, which picked up a large chunk of System V code (yes, even before SunOS 4.0). I don't remember what UNIX license they had earlier, but even in 3.0 there was, as I remember, some SV code (I think the SunOS 3.0 Bourne shell was an SVR2 Bourne shell tweaked to be more V7/BSD-compatible and the SunOS 3.0 Berkmail was SVR2 mailx - itself based on Berkmail - tweaked similarly).
The SVR4 project whence SunOS 5.x came was an AT&T/Sun joint project, and Sun hardly would have wanted to avoid getting an SVR4 license. It was most definitely based on AT&T code - although a lot of the "AT&T code" in SVR4 was, in turn, based on Sun code (e.g., SVR4's VM system was derived from SunOS 4.x's).
(Oh, and Solaris 1 was based on SunOS 4.1[.x]; Solaris 2 was the name for the Solaris that used the SVR4-based SunOS 5.x, and, until SunOS 5.7, Solaris 2.x had SunOS 5.x as its core OS - eventually, I guess Sun decided that "Solaris 3" in the sense of a complete rewrite with the OS becoming "SunOS 6.0" wasn't going to happen any time soon, so they got rid of the no-longer-very-interesting "2." and just went to "Solaris 7", followed by Solaris 8, 9, and 10.
In addition, the license purchase didn't have anything to do with the "start of a stable Solaris" - that was, from everything I know, the result of a lot of people at Sun doing a lot of work on the OS to beat it into shape.)
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Does anybody run OpenSolaris on non-Sun hardwar (Score:3, Interesting)
My experience with packages on Red Hat has left me of the opinion that I'd rather find the original distributions from wherever Red Hat got them and roll my own distro than deal with the Red Hat Package Manager or anything that uses it ever again. If I didn't have experience with better free UNIX packaging schemes (which, as far as I can tell, means everything else) I might be inclined to assume the whole idea was a scam.
Re:McBride: "...we have no problem with it..." (Score:3, Interesting)
Its not the more open that you need. You need less open for ZFS to make it part of linux.
Once Apple adopts ZFS as well as BSD it won't be long before it goes to linux.
I do realise that this post sits on a fine line between insightful, troll and flamebait - but bear in mind I'm just commenting on how most good user features on OS X are now also available on Linux. And apple does have a way of making low level stuff useful to the user without a command line. I have little doubt that Time Machine on Lepoard will be reproduced on Linux rapidly, and this will be a good thing. Time Machine doesn't require ZFS (just a modification of HFS was sufficient), but it doesn't hurt it either, and it will prompt everyone to look long and hard at file systems.
So, you don't need more open to get ZFS into the linux kernel. You need apple to do it. This is perhaps a sad commentary on open source that they will end up following when they should be leading, but I'm pretty sure that this is what will happen.
For those that doubt, bookmark this comment and come and talk to me in a year.
Michael.
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:2, Interesting)
I have to hand it to the Eclipse folks, when editing Java, that's a better IDE than Visual Studio was before 2K5. The main thing I liked about Eclipse was the refactoring support; I wish the C++ editors I use would support that. 2K5 does have refactoring support, though there seem to be less options than I remember in Eclipse. The ones I used most often though are in Java.
I should also say that I haven't done all that much with C#, just made a couple programs for myself with it. I just know that I got very frustrated with some things in the Java language, and C# would have gone a long way toward helping with those frustrations.
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:2, Interesting)
Now take a minute for that to sink in.