OSCON Panel: SCO Lawsuit About the Money

viewstyle writes "Just when you had heard enough, the ongoing controversy about SCO vs. Linux has popped up over at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). According to Eweek's story, the panelists agreed that SCO is targeting companies like IBM in an attempt to raise cash. Most importantly: "if a company is not after money, suing is not the way to go.""

Your daily insider update

[eddy]

Our friends Charles Broughton [sec.gov] (Sr VP Int'l Sales), Robert Bench [sec.gov] (CFO) and Jeff Hunsaker [sec.gov] (VP, Worldwide Marketing) are selling [sec.gov], selling [sec.gov] and.. wait for it... selling [sec.gov].

Re:DUH

[sporty]

Or to get a ruling on somethign that may come up later. Two companies may arrange a trial just to see if something is ok by US law or not.

But I'm not sure if it's considered "suing". (sueing?)

Ransom Love's Linuxworld 2000 Keynote Speech

[NZheretic]

The SCO Group is currently suing IBM for breach of contract for apparently putting Unixware/Monterey "technology" in Linux. SCO/Caldera's complaint depends critically on certain historical and technical assertions which are materially false and (apparently quite intentionally) misleading [opensource.org].

The SCO group, and both Old SCO and Caldera before it, directly acknowledged and assisted IBM with the scalablity of Linux [weblogs.com]

In August 2000, just days after Caldera purchased the Old SCO server division, the then CEO of Caldera, Ransom Love, made a keynote speech at LinuxWorld 2000. A RealPlayer video stream of the event can be found at DrDobbs Journal's Technetcast [ddj.com]

In the question and answer session at the end of the keynote, Love was asked about the possible conflict over Monterey and Linux IA-64 [iwethey.org]

A mp3 capture [iwethey.org] of the following transcribed portion

Q: What happens about Project Monterey, because that conflicts with the AI-64 Linux, 64-bit Linux?

Love: OK. I don't -- if we do our job right in making Linux scale over like UnixWare to the degree that everybody, that we know we can... May I ask, some people have said, "Well, people have tried this in the past, but they haven't been that successful," may I suggest: we don't have any ulterior motives for not making it successful. Technologically has not been the reason why it hasn't done it before. There's always some other motive, right? And so to talk about Monterey, clearly we want to make sure we have the same level of Linux integration on Monterey that we would have in our Unixware product. Now, we don't control, I mean, we have a great relationship... it's a joint development relationship with IBM which we intend to preserve ... but they have similar interests and so this is really a very synergistic, uh, this transaction is great for all of the major partners as they have already wanted to embrace Linux moving forward.

Now, let me address one other aspect of your question, which is that the Monterey Project is in conflict with the IA-64 Linux Project. I don't believe it's in conflict at all. Now, clearly, we have tremendous vested interest in the IA-64 Linux Project and with the acquisition of SCO, they've been doing a lot, so you combine those, and we've got one of the more comprehensive offerings, I believe, on the IA-64 Linux. So that's clearly an area that we're very committed to. But like Unixware, there's elements of the Monterey kernel that are more scalable, OK? Now, on the IA-64 platform, I don't know how long of window that is, but today, it's a little bit more robust and more scalable than the IA-64 Linux is today. Now, I'm not saying that over time that won't change.

But, and let me address one other thing. Sorry, (laughs) you're getting all of it through one question. But clearly we are going to add components back to the Linux kernel on both IA-32 and IA-64 platforms. We'll work with Linus and everyone in order to make that available. That will take some time. And as I mentioned earlier, I don't know that over time you can have a single kernel -- in fact I know you can't -- that will scale, you know, the breadth of IT technology needs. So I think we're looking, in the Linux community, at having multiple kernels, so...

Q: Multiple Linux kernels? Or multiple UNIX kernels?

Love: Multiple Linux kernels as well, over time.

Q: Thank you.

Love: You bet.

I am not a lawyer, but even I can see that The SCO Group has put itself into an intractable situation, any judge will listen to evidence from the above and laugh the SCO group out of court.

It's about time to reexamine the recent claims of The SCO group and call in the lawyers and maybe the authorities

Sun seems to be making alot of money too.

[Gaetano]

According to this they not only are the 2nd licensee from SCO but they also received a warrent to buy 210,000 shares of SCOX at 1.83 per share!

http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1024633.html?tag =f d_top

Bastards.

Re:IP problems of Linux well known to Unix experts

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, you are assuming that given a choice with no other constraints, a knowledgeable person should choose Linux over FreeBSD, which is a rather biased perspective.

For one thing, MacOS X hasn't attracted a FreeBSD crowd because of its incorporation of parts of FreeBSD - it still is far from FreeBSD. Had it been based on Linux, it still wouldn't have been what people usually consider Linux, and I can't see how it would've attracted more users (unless Apple relied on "Linux" as a buzzword; but some of their existing customer base might have been frightened off by that).

Also remember that MacOS X is based on NeXTSTEP, which used a combined Mach + 4.3 BSD kernel and much of a 4.3 BSD userland. So they basically upgraded the BSD part of the code using the FreeBSD code base.

While it would certainly be possible to glue Linux subsystems into the Mach kernel, it would probably be a bigger job and diverge more from the original code base (making it more difficult to keep in sync with new developments). Even ignoring the historical connections, Linux is not very cleanly layered internally and its components are highly dependent on the lower-level parts...which have a very x86-oriented history.

Re:Translation please?

[NoData]

This post is an AC's ripoff ot the original here. [slashdot.org]
Translation [slashdot.org] also appeared in that thread.

Re:That might be considered to be ...

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Really? Do you have any idea what the EU is actually like? Remembrr also it is a collection of rather different cultures & languages, there is much more diversity in culture and politics than there is in the USA by orders of magnitude.