Wired on McBride 221
leifbk writes "Wired has a very interesting feature article on how Darl McBride and his sidekick Mike Anderer rose to fame. Some particularly juicy parts are about Anderer: 'He's supercompetitive,' said one. 'If he knows you'll faint at the sight of blood, he'll cut himself just to watch you pass out.'" A very thorough retelling of the legend that is SCO.
Quick! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Quick! (Score:2)
McBride (Score:2, Funny)
Any relation to Ronald McDonald's Bride?
Re:No (Score:2, Funny)
Moll.
McBride is passe (Score:5, Insightful)
McBride is about as bland as you get. He is the CEO of a company that produces nothing. He is fighting a movement arguably composed of nothing. He is the Don Quixote of the software world except he doesn't have half the attractiveness.
Leave him to his money, he's got plenty of it. Linux will survive this idiotic onslaught, and whatever other challenges there are to come.
Let's focus on making Linux better for all of us, rather than fighting windmills.
Good idea, eh muchacho?
Re:McBride is passe (Score:2)
Re:McBride is passe (Score:5, Funny)
Meesa say yousa owe $699. Meesa say "pump and dump".
He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:5, Insightful)
To be honest, if it wasn't going to be McBride, it would be someone else down the line that would exploit this little problem. Most open source advocates would hate to say it, but with this kind of question looming over Linux as an operating system, some bigger companies won't look at it in the same light as they would, say, Microsoft Windows or Sun Solaris. It is good that, not unlike a band-aid, this is getting done now so that even the big corporations can know what most of us already do; without a question or a doubt, Linux is safe to use.
I see no windmills here, but a true dragon that needs to be slayed.
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:3, Interesting)
From my recollection, contained is the right word, but it has been a while. A quick Google turned up: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/19/05641/735
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:2)
So far as I know, every patch tracks back to someone in the kernel, but I'm not aware of how well a patch is documented that comes via a proxy dev. (ie dev looks it over, adjusts it and submits it).
Code in question has even been tracked back to SCO/Caldera when they were in a supportive mood.
The only thing they have ever mentioned of worth is maillist reply that it wa
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:3, Interesting)
Given the the codebase of all their products I think it's pretty much inevitable that there is some GPLed code somewhere in there. Lucky for them not too many people see the code and those that do probably don't know the linux codebase.
Maybe one day somebody will actually find which part of windows contains GPLed code and all hell will break loose. I would not want to be a MS shareholder on that day.
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:2)
If the US DOJ can't do much vs. Microsoft, why do you think finding a GPLed smoking gun in their code will hurt them?
I'm not trolling, this is an honest question. How could a GPL-oriented legal action be more harmful or threatening to Microsoft than a Federal antitrust action?
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:3, Informative)
Similar GPL situations have already happened with NEXT whose NEXTSTEP now forms the core of MacOS X,
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:2)
I mean, after all, whether the typical programmers read it or not, it seems like someone would have caught on, if there was any...
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:3, Interesting)
if it wasn't going to be McBride, it would be someone else down the line that would exploit this little problem
One could argue that this problem has been exploited already in a smaller scale, and people involved in Linux should worry about it getting worse and worse.
In many ways, what Darl is doing feels a lot like what William Della Croce, Jr. [linuxgazette.com] did in 1996. That took about a year to get resolved.
First a false trademark infringement claim. Now a false copyright infringement claim. I really fear the
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:2)
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:2)
searching for quote....
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:2)
well, well, well, if it isn't my old friend, underrage drinking....
Son, if we dont enforce the drinking age the excitement of sneaking around to get wasted might disappear forever! Do you want that on your shoulders pal?
Clone High
OTOH... (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows is 10 times worse (Score:2)
Wait a minute... if I recall correctly, in one of its anti-trust trials Microsoft said that it was not able to turn over the source code to certain older versions of Windows because it could no longer find the code! And Linux is "poorly documented" in comparison to what again?!?! Why on earth would organizations demand a paper trail of who submitted all the little patches that got rolled into L
Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't (Score:5, Informative)
There are a zillion books in the book stores, there are a zillion howto's on the web, there is documentation on all the download pages.
Not that kind of documentation, you big freak!
In this case, "not well documented", refers to the record of where the source code came from and who originally wrote it.
Still misses the point about Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Sheesh.
At least this is better than your average mainstream coverage.
Re:Still misses the point about Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
I think what he's talking about here is the fact that Linus doesn't have super psychic powers to be able to descern that when code is submited it is really unique and not merely that he knows who submitted the code.
But that propriatary software makers do.
We can confirm this for ourselves by applying our own super psychic powers against propriatary code. If you do this you will find that you cannot detect
Faint at the sight of blood (Score:5, Funny)
I'll faint if he cut his own neck, I swear!
class clown (Score:5, Funny)
So he's like that kid from grade school who would turn his eyelids inside-out? Charming.
Anderer: Hey, look what I can do. Bleh-Bleh!
Everyone: Ewww!!!!
Re:class clown (Score:3, Insightful)
In the story text, he's described as "supercompetitive." I think a more straightforward description would be that he's a sociopath.
w-w-w-ired (Score:5, Funny)
Re:w-w-w-ired (Score:5, Funny)
Competetive? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Competetive? (Score:5, Insightful)
From the Slashdot post: Some particularly juicy parts are about Anderer: 'He's supercompetitive,' said one. 'If he knows you'll faint at the sight of blood, he'll cut himself just to watch you pass out.'
Being an aggressive asshole is the way to get ahead! Now move out of my way, you fucking peons! Don't get between me and my yacht!
These wunderkinds don't create anything. They haven't discovered anything. They don't even seem to make particularly astute business decisions.
All they're good at is blundering ahead, kissing the asses of those with power, back-slapping their "friends", and intimidating everyone else.
But we've allowed them to succeed despite the fact that they've never contributed a damn thing.
Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine. Did he ever become as rich as Darl McBride or Mike Anderer?
Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie wrote the Unix Operating System that Darl claims gives him the rights to Linus Torvalds's linux.
Where are Thompson's or Ritchie's or Torvalds's millions?
Well, Thompson and Ritchie got paychecks from AT&T, and AT&T sold Unix to Novell which sold it to Darl's company. So, according to the magic of capitalism -- and the recent additonal idea that corporate CEOs deserve the lion's share of their companies' profits --, the millions belong to Darl.
Torvalds is (according to capitalism) a dumb-ass -- smart enough to write linux, but a dumb-ass nonetheless -- because he gives linux away for free. So no millions for Linus.
Now an good capitalist will tell you that Thompson and Ritchie preferred regular paychecks to working on their own and owning Unix outright. And the capitalist would be right: when all capital is concentrated in the hands of the sons and grandsons of the guys who stole it in the first place, Thompson and Ritchie were free -- to starve.
And a good capitalist will explain to you that the marketplace has determined -- correctly, because the marketplace can't be wrong, that's an axiom of capitalism -- that Darl McBride is socially;y far more valuable than Thompson or Ritchie or Torvalds. Even though without those peons, Darl McBride wouldn't have even a claim to his money.
I'm no socialist., no communist. I see a value to capitalism, to the way the Market allows those with needs to meet those with the means to supply those needs. I think we'd be in deep shit if government tried to "manage" what the market takes care of so handily. And I even see a need to generously pay those CEOs and MBAs whose work makes the Market work so efficiently.
But something is out of kilter when the heroes aren't the innovators, the discovers, the creators, but the MBAstard who can best throw his weight around.
Do I have a solution to propose? Not really.
Maybe we should adjust patent law such that inventors always retain some stake in their invention, even after assigning a patent -- sort of the way European copyright law recognizes creators' rights that can be sold and other rights that can't given up under any contract.
Perhaps we ought to say that after the first ten million in profits to a corporation on a patent, five percent of remaining profits belong to the original inventor, no matter how the patent has been assigned.
Perhaps we ought to establish a national version of the Nobel prizes, and give them to men like Dennis Ritchie.
Or maybe we should just mandate that CEOs can't make more than, say 1000 times what their lowest paid employee makes. If the lowest paid employee makes $20,000 a year, the CEO would be limited to twenty million a year.
I don't have the answers. But I know that something's wrong here.
Re:Competetive? (Score:5, Informative)
In the so-called "robber baron" era of raw, unfettered capitalism, the late 19th century, when people like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller amassed huge fortunes, a CEO typically was paid about 40 times as much as the median employee. (It makes more sense to use the median as the benchmark instead of the lowest-paid because it's a more stable number).
A CEO who pays himself more than 40 times the median salary at his company is basically stealing. I see no problem with a law which says that "compensation" in excess of 40x the median salary is prima facie evidence of theft. Mr Grasso comes to mind.
Of course, a CEO could rebut the presumption of theft by showing that he had increased company profits commensurately with his salary. But, studies seem to show that a company's change in profitability is not significantly correlated with the CEO's salary.
Makes no sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Then the CEO of McDonalds would make less than his lawyers. Let's think this through.
Re:Makes no sense (Score:2)
And in light of the quality of the product that he produces, that seems like very fair renumeration to me.
In fact, a much more reasonable way to reward him would be to make his salary commensurate with the homeless guy shaking a cup in the street outside his shops.
Re:Competetive? (Score:2)
Re:Competetive? (Score:4, Interesting)
Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine. Did he ever become as rich as Darl McBride or Mike Anderer?
As you point out, this is not exactly a new phoneomena, it's interesting that some of the most important poeple in the history of of our species either weren't interested in money or got screwed over financially....
Re:Competetive? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe we should just mandate that CEOs can't make more than, say 1000 times what their lowest paid employee makes. If the lowest paid employee makes $20,000 a year, the CEO would be limited to twenty million a year.
I agree with most of your comment, but a 1000-to-one difference is still insane. IIRC, in the sixties, CEOs of large companies typically made no more than 60 times the average worker's salary. Aside from huge egos, insatiable greed, a lack of shame, and complete dishonesty and disregard f
Re:Competetive? (Score:2)
Re:Competetive? (Score:2)
Thompson and Ritchie got paychecks from AT&T, and AT&T created a subsidary USL to sell UNIX, and USL sold UNIX to Novell, and Novell sold limited rights to UNIX to SCO and SCO is not Darl's company, and SCO sold an unknown subset of their already limited rights to UNIX to Darl's company which is either Caldera or TheSCOGroup, depending on the context.
Important Factoid #1:
By What Right? (Score:2)
What right do you have (or I, since you're obviously speaking for me also, when you use "we"...or maybe you have a tapeworm) to limit what CEO's make? That right is vested in the shareholders -- not someone who has no contacts with the company. I fail to see where, exactly, it's in governm
Scientific Society (Score:2)
Read "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It's an alternate history located in London exploring the time line of "what if computers were created 100 years earlier?" The results were a society of scientists, where those who contribute to science become royalty (it's what's in your mind, not the color of your blood). There still
Re:Competetive? (Score:5, Funny)
DARL: Thank you for listening. I'm now willing to field any questions from the attendees.
SMART-ASS NERD: I don't like accidentally looking at the goatse picture everytime I read Slashdot. It disgusts me.
DARL: I don't how this concerns SCO.
MIKE: Wait, a minute, Darl, there are people here who don't like the goatse picture? Well, have a look at this. [drops pants and proceeds to insert fingers into unpleasant-looking anatomy]
Darl: Uh, um, are there any other questions?
S.A.N. #2: I don't like people who hit themselves over the head with a hammer.
Mike: You don't, eh? It just so happens I have a ballpeen hammer right here... Ow! Ooh! Ouch!
AUDIENCE (IN UNISON): We hate the thought of lynching Darl McBride!
I'll leave the rest to oyur imagination...
Solomon Chang
Been theree, read that... (Score:5, Informative)
It's a wonderful story, and lends a *METRIC ASSLOAD* of information that gets inside why The SCO Group decided to change uniforms and start playing for the wrong team in the middle of the game. Darl's just a litigious sonofabitch who happened to find another litigious sonofabitch to help dream up this scheme whereby we try to make money off *everyone else's* ideas.
Re:Been theree, read that... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Been theree, read that... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Been theree, read that... (Score:3)
Wow... (Score:5, Informative)
A very interesting article overall, showing that Darl was involved in many other situations before SCO where he was involved in trying to make revenue by nothing but IP violation claims and other lawsuits. It tends to focus on a lot of the linux stuff (obviously) but I find the earlier history much more interesting.
From these "humble beginnings" to intentionally thinking up ideas to patent, simply to take people to court over infringement, we can see that clearly he was the best man to pull SCO's slumping sales up with the last-resort tactic of trying to enforce some concocted IP violations. Only this time, he appears to have bitten off more than he can chew.
I'm thinking there's a very good chance we'll see history repeat itself. ;)
It's all a game... (Score:2)
First of all Darl, you have to PLAY to win. Constantly appealing to the judges for a decision doesn't score you 'points' in anyone's book. Why not simply produce a better product and instead of bitching about OSS - STOP USING IT in your company's software. O
Re:Wow... (Score:2)
The SCO story... (Score:4, Funny)
Blake Stowell, the Director of Public Relations for The SCO Group, told Newsforge in an email:
I think his comment should have been more like this:
"I just wanna clarify what's goin' on over here. Over in the casino, after I had those nine beers, I showed this crumpled piece of paper that read:
The three lines above are source code in our very own UNIX System V. Here are three lines from the Linux kernel:
As you can plainly see, these portions of the Linux source code are exactly identical to our UNIX System V code. All of our programmers, Bob and Jim, told me so themselves, and both of them are highly trained MCSE's. We don't appreciate that the community rejects this as evidence of wrongdoing. Linus is obviously an idiot because his coding skills don't match what Bob and Jim can do in VisualBASIC 2003."
Upon reading this post, one realizes that it closely resembles going to dinner with a buddy, asking, "How's business?" and writing it off as a business expense. Further, this post closely resembles a sandwich that appears large but, once eaten, proves unsatisfyingly small. A staid, steadfast comment, it resembles a pantomime of images.
Because this post is supposed to be about SCO, Darl McBribe / McBlackmail / McExtort / McThreaten / McLose / Mc-Go-To-Jail-Do-Not-Pass-Go-Do-Not-Collect-Two-Hu ndred-Billion-Dollars. But the meat of this post is decidedly unsatisfying: SCO is trying to play hard ball with the big boys when SCO, unfit even to be called a little boy, is barely a hole in some dead goat's ass. (See what I mean about "pantomime of images?" And that's a pretty gross image, if you ask me.)
There were all the press releases issued by SCO:
For immediate release:
Smoking Crack Operation (NASCRACK: SCO) announced legal action against Microsoft Corporation for violating SCO intellectual property. The lawsuit comes on the heels of legal action targeting IBM, all the Fortune 500 companies, the governments of two world superpowers and six third world nations, millions of computer users worldwide, and God.
"Microsoft is using underground hacker software called Linux," said SCO CEO Darl McBluff. "They are using Linux to develop operating system software, codenamed Microsoft Windows, which violates our intellectual property rights. Competition from Microsoft and other companies is eating away at our sales," McBluff said. "Die fuckers!!!"
According to an SCO spokesperson, Linux violates SCO copyrights by using code developed, trademarked, copyrighted and patented by IBM. Microsoft Windows violates SCO's self-proclaimed right to eternal, perpetually increasing profits.
Experts from the Gartner Group suggested that all users of Linux, Windows, IRIX, Plan-9, CP/M, Palm OS, OS/390, UNICOS, TOPS-20, Mac OS, DOS and OS/2 immediately pay SCO a nomin
Re:The SCO story... (Score:3, Funny)
Why!?!
Comedy Latinum (Score:2)
Holy Fucking Shit, where's the windex, there's beer all over my monitor!
rice_burners, you ROCK! That is the funniest damned thing I've ever read here.
Been working on it a while?
SB
(Yeah, I said I quit, but this article got linked to in my google news email updates, and I just had to read it. Glad I did
Father ?? (Score:5, Funny)
God help us!
Re:Father ?? (Score:5, Funny)
Could you imagine being him and trying to teach your kids how to share and play nicely with each other?
Daddy! Jimmy took my toy! He gave it to me, and then he took it back!
Jimmy - did you assign all rights to that toy to your brother, or did just permit him to reap enjoyment from it while you're not using it?
Re:Father ?? (Score:3, Insightful)
don't believe me? Read the books yourself.
Re:Father ?? (Score:2)
he helped himself closer to godhood by having 7 children, actually.
At the expense of his wives, poor women.
Re:Father ?? (Score:2)
Admit to Extortion (Score:5, Interesting)
As I and others pointed out on groklaw when this was first posted back in an OT line, this quote shows that they admit to pulling this job in the hopes of being bought out. Blepp said the same at his university interview in Germany. Definately illegal trying to extort money this way.
Happy Trails
Re:Admit to Extortion (Score:2, Interesting)
OK on to my second comment/question.
If I'm not mistaken, and I very well may be, didn't Novell look at placing Unix into the public domain, but because of all the legal issues and copyrights that exist for all the different parts of Unix they decided that it eather A. was not possa
SCO Saga vs Dallas (Score:2, Funny)
I mean - both are adictive - both have goodies and baddies - and both are completely weird in the plot....
I mean - Darl McBride almost looks like JR Ewing! (Well sort of).
You never know - matbe this is all part of Pamela's dream ... :)
Re:SCO Saga vs Dallas (Score:2, Funny)
JR Who?
I thought E-Wing was a Star Wars fighter.
Re:SCO Saga vs Dallas (Score:2)
Please, no. I do not want to wake up to Patrick Duffy using my shower.
Can I Supersize That? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Can I Supersize That? (Score:3, Funny)
last paragraph sums it up (Score:5, Insightful)
When your company is dying, change its name and start suing people. Yep, SCO is very much an influential leader in the technology industry. No wonder so many people want to use their products.
IP and patents (Score:5, Interesting)
A few days ago a Managment friend of mine who used to be CS and I were talking about IP and patents. Suprisingly we agreed that the system is out of whack.
For example, if I built a washing mahcine that got clothes clean by rinsing them every 5 minutes I can get a patent for it. Then if he takes my design but instead of every 5 minutes his rinses every 3 minutes and also reverses the spin it is a new design and i cant sue him. Now lets go to the current digital state. If I made a program that defragmented a disk drive using algorithim x I can get a patent. Now if he dreates a defrag program that uses algothim y I can sue him and win even though our programs are as different as the two earlier washing mahcines.
Secondsun
PS:(I know a defrag program is not the best analogy but it demonstrates my point)
Re:IP and patents (Score:2)
There was something about a refrigerator maker patenting the idea of shelves in the door. They got the patent on an *idea* and completely dominated the market for years.
Kenmore or maytag or someone. Totally ran the competition out of bidness.
Not quite like your 3 minute 5 minute washing machine, but similar. If you have a novel idea, you patent it in a general way so you dominate the market. That is what patents are about. Crazy stuff. Some seem silly, and you could have patented that,so why didn;t
Re:IP and patents (Score:2)
Re:IP and patents (Score:2)
Maybe the specific implementation of "shelves in the door" was specific / general enough to give advantage while allowing the limited monopoly.
The idea is novel, and no one else can implement shleves in a fridge door without impending the existing patent. Maybe drawers would be novel, but not shelves. Crazy.
why hire somebody like this? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find curious is why a company would hire somebody with McBride's background. Suppose you're the board of what is now SCO. You've got a declining proprietary Unix business and need somebody who can turn the company around. Presumably you'd look for somebody with a combination of good management skills and the combination of technical and market knowledge to figure out what direction the company should move in. McBride has none of this. From his record it looks like he wasn't much good as a manager. IKON fired him for his M&A work, which doesn't suggest that he has good market sense. He clearly has no understanding of the technology. It looks like the only thing he did well was when he was Novell's guy in Japan. I don't see why he would be attractive for SCO unless the board planned an IP scam from the outset and wanted somebody with experience in that area. If that's the case, it isnt the case that obtaining value from their IP was McBride's idea and that they discovered the alleged infringement after he came on board.
Re:why hire somebody like this? (Score:3, Insightful)
What I find curious is why a company would hire somebody with McBride's background.
If you're a dying company in Lindon, Utah with no money, you put an ad in the Nickel Shopper for a CEO. Darl knocks the meadow muffins off his boots, walks down the block, and applies for the job. End of story.
Oh that's nice (Score:4, Funny)
He really seems like a nice guy...honestly...I'm not joking...
Not Unfounded, *UNPROVEN* (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to remind you, the details of SCOs claims were outed by CT magazine in AUGUST 20th 2003:
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.h
At this point it was clear SCO claims were junk. Not least because SCO story changed repeatedly, eventually claiming it was an example of code *like* the code shown by CT but not the actual code itself.
LATER, in OCTOBER Baystar & RBC made the completely irrational investment. At this time it was clear SCO wouldn't prevail and their investiment simply kept them going.
http://news.com.com/SCO+gets+%2450+million+inve
So a claim that Baystar did it because it believed SCO would make money from the lawsuits doesn't sound plausible.
Since then we had the Opera settlement, where Microsoft paid Opera 12.75 million and a term of the deal seemed to have been that they keep the money secret (only revealed by a leak).
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+behind+$12+millio
So this seems to show that indeed Microsoft can and does hide money payments.
The Linux Show (Score:5, Informative)
McBride the McWhore (Score:3, Interesting)
If you can believe what he says, you can believe anything. SCO has no case. The article gives him and his case too much credit.
He's doing what he's doing for money, not because he believes he's right. He's trying to steal hundreds of people's work and charge money for it. An honest man would have produced the infringing code before they went to court. SCO's been in court for more than a year
Wrong, wrong, wrong. But... (Score:5, Insightful)
The article contains about a billion inaccuracies, but I'm hoping that at least McBride's quotes haven't been altered, or this fact for that matter: Caldera was spending $4 for every $1 it made. Think about that for a second. Redhat is making money from selling services on top of GNU/Linux. IBM is making money from selling services on top of GNU/Linux. But, Caldera is losing money.
Why is that? Could it be that Caldera's business model was boxing and and selling software through regular retail channels? Could it be that Caldera wasted a lot of development effort trying to take ownership of a product that was mostly GNU (read: industry standard) at the core by attempting to build proprietary extensions on it? I've reserved personal judgment about McBride up until this point: He's a shithead, pure and simple. No one will ever be able to convince him of that, but perhaps SCO shareholders could convince him that he's not working for fucking Microsoft, so that business model doesn't apply to his company. Attention dumbfuck McBride: Pick a business model that's profitable!
Let's imagine for a moment some other famous CEO reacted the same way when the status quo began to crumble. Let's take Andy Grove on example. When Intel was losing ground the Japanese memory manufacturers, did they fold up shop, cancel R&D, and refuse change while suing both makers and buyers or foreign memory chips? Sure they dabbled in some protectionist tactics, but eventually they just changed their focus to something that the Japanese could not readily produce cheaply in mass quantities.
I'd predicted last year that SCO's purpose was not a stock pump-and-dump scheme, but an attempt destroy open source, specifically those projects that fall under the GPL; An attack on the common infrastructure of the "enemy". The article contains, in McBride's own words, an admission of such.
Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong. But... (Score:3, Interesting)
Darl is strictly a litigious bastard, and stuck with trying to extort money from the rest of the Linux world.
Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong. But... (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM not OSS hero (Score:5, Insightful)
First, what MS is prompting is software licensing, not closed software. They want everyone to pay a fee to gain the privilege to use a piece of software, and in the process agree to certain things that will insure a future cash-flow. All MS wants is money in exchange for software. This was somewhat of a new idea. The software itself was the product. It was no longer part of a service. If you wanted service, that will cost extra. It extended this concept through licensing with third parties. The purchaser of a system was now entitled to no MS support. The fee only covered the use of the software. Closed source or whatever is just a means to that end. One advantage to this is that hardware, software, and services are sold separately, which creates a confusion about responsibility and minimizes support costs.
IBM, OTOH, sells services. They want to sell you the hard and soft ware as well, but they are a solutions provider. As far as I know, they always have been. Obviously back in the 70's there was no software, so they had to write it. This worked until MS told everyone that MS could provide the same service for a lesser price, which was more or less a lie, but whatever. Now IBM is just trying to make the business model work. They can put their solutions around whatever OS. They just want to sell the solutions. It turns out that the best way they can gain market-share back from MS is by supported OSS. MS really has no defense against this because they have no reputation as a service provider.
Sun is just trying to survive. The settlement is part of that survival and cannot be taken as evidence of anything. Sun has been abused as much as SCO. They have had as much technology 'misappropriated'. Unlike SCO, they are not carpet bombing the industry. They are working hard to create a competetive product.
Additionally, there are often question of why IBM did not buy out SCO. My belief is that we cannot assume they did not try. Until recently a majority of SCO stock was held by insiders, and much of the rest by institutional investors. I believe this means that it would have been very hard for IBM to just buy a block of stock at market prices, then go in and replace the board. They would have had to negotiate with the board, and one assumes that the board would have laughed at a 20 million, or even 80 million, dollar offer, which was the SCO market cap.
Re:IBM not OSS hero (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM has a reputation to keep here - to be accused of theft and contract irregularities and not to prove the charges as false would be a very bad business move.
Re:IBM not OSS hero (Score:3, Insightful)
If IBM truly intends to use FOSS as a vehicle to (legitimately) make money then they need the trust of the developers as well as their customers.
All that and SCO's accusations are not to be tolerated. IBM also has to maintain
Re:IBM not OSS hero (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know if you saw it on page 3 of the article or not, but even Anderer appears to've commented that he was expecting IBM to buy out SCO:
Re:IBM not OSS hero (Score:2)
I think that looking at anything in oversimplistic terms, black-vs-white, good-vs-evil ("They hate the USA because they hate freedom") is often a mistake.
The world is a complex place, and only simple minds need simple categorizations.
For those who try to probe and think and then come to a conclusion.
Having said that, there are things that Sun did that makes it not popular with the Open Source community. Their recent agreement with Microsoft to drop the law suits and settle for some money is seen as a
More Information... (Score:2, Informative)
On Darl McBride [wikipedia.org], SCO [wikipedia.org], and the SCO vs. IBM [wikipedia.org] lawsuit.
Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
McBride and Anderer are two business world vagrants that made their millions from aquisition bonuses. Neither is particularly adept at actually running a business. The SCO situation blew up in their faces. The end.
Interesting coincidence (to me at least) (Score:4, Interesting)
Suing random startups over BS patents and now suing Linux users over BS claims.
McBride of Frankenstein and Senator "Let's let the RIAA to hack file sharers legally" Hollings are some of the highest profile Mormons in their little church. I hope they get excommunicated (but then, they would lose all that tithing).
The scary thing is that McBride has seven kids. I hope that being a prick isn't genetic. I really hope that his kids see what kind of human being their dad is and don't follow in his footsteps.
SCO sold Linux under GPL, how can they resind it? (Score:5, Interesting)
The very day that McBride took the job as CEO in 2002, the company, then a friendly Linux reseller known as Caldera Systems,
I rememder seeing Caldera Linux in Compusa. (For some reason, I seem to remember reading it was based on Debian, of all distributions. Maybe I'm wrong here, tho'.) Comes in a shrink-wrap box, screenshots on the cover, manuals, cdroms, same as any other distribution. And thus , like any other distribution, has the GPL , and all the sourse code with it (presumably-- I don't have it in my possession)
What I'm getting at, is the very company in question, SCO, sold the product under those terms. So how can they now go back on it?
You could imagine a defense lawyer asking McBride in court: Is it not the case that your company sold the product 'Linux' under those very terms, the GPL? And, thus, those customers have the right, under the terms you sold it under, to copy and distribute it, with likewise GPL applying to those copies?
Am I being redundant?
THEY sold it (including the kernel and src) under GPL, so GPL has to apply. And if they didn't sell it under GPL, under what license did they sell it? And can't the kernel copyright holder sue Caldera/SCO for changing the kernel license?
it's all rediculous.
Cutting through the confusion (Score:4, Insightful)
It is always a temptation to a lawyer-armed corporation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We filed a suit last night -- we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich corporation,
To puff and look important and to say:--
"Though we know we should defeat you, it would cost too much to beat you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptations in the path of corporations,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to says:--
"We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
Corporations that play it are lost!"
Re:Cutting through the confusion (Score:2)
Shadowbearer raises a beer to you for that wonderful and insightful filk, and goes back into treatment... er... lurk-mode. Damn slashdot anyway
Salut!
SB
(Knowing some filkers of note that I do, do you mind if I pass that on - with attribution, of course, mind you!
Re:Cutting through the confusion (Score:2)
Go right ahead; I'm flattered.
Caldera in the printing industry (Score:4, Interesting)
We almost got a "TCO Box" that connects an OCe printer with native Bus & Tag (old IBM mainframe technology) to a TCP/IP network. It ran Caldera Linux. Which they're in the process of switching to Suse (though, that's not set in stone).
One interesting thing is that in the price breakdown the "Linux operating system" was $700! I asked what type it was, but never got a response. I wouldn't have known it was Caldera unless I was there to see the tech boot it up and configure it.
While I'm happy to see any company see the light of Linux, it's too bad they succumed to the dim light that Caldera turned into.
He'll Cut Himself?!?! (Score:2)
What do you mean "supercompetitive" (Score:2)
but for most of the history of software engineering, Anderer is normal.
Wife committing suicide? Writing bombastic emails at all hours?
Lighting fires under his butt. Slitting his wrists to win arguments.
He sounds like a normal, every day programmer in 2004, 1991, and 1980.
Guys like Anderer are the reality of the business.
But Darl has an anti-gravity gun! (Score:2)
And distortion of space into another dimension (Score:2)
Interesting ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? Except for the eternal optimists hanging onto SCO stock, no one cares.
We're all just quietly waiting for the corporate equivalent of the sound of quick fried mosquito as SCO hits the Big Blue bug zapper.
It's not a totally useless article though.
It will serve as a great "See this? don't depend on this behavior as a business model, mmmkay?" warning in years to come.
~G
David Boies.. successful? (Score:2, Interesting)
But everyone else has their own reality TV show. . (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:2)
To those wondering, author of "The Art of War," written long time ago. Probably worth reading at least once in your life.
Re:IBM funneled money to Novel? (Score:2)