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Xinuos, founded by former SCO leaders filed a lawsuit against IBM & Red Hat, back in April https://lwn.net/Articles/851315/ https://lwn.net/Articles/851315/ (no

Xinuos, founded by former SCO leaders filed a lawsuit against IBM & Red Hat, back in April https://lwn.net/Articles/851315/ https://lwn.net/Articles/851315/ (no, it wasn't an april fool's day joke). https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/ https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/, alleging anti-competitive behaviour etc. Xinuous produces newer versions of *nix based OSs that the SCO Group used to produce, the OpenServer and UnixWare brands. So even though SCO group is finally (finally?!) dying, everything is still pretty much business as usual.

smorgusofborg 5y ago
I'm confused, if SCO sold off its rights to a new company the settlement should go to the new company? If the price didn't reflect the potential of this settlement then that could have been an accounting crime against the now bankrupt SCO, but I don't see why SCO would be entitled to any duplicate claims.
- ch_123 5y ago
  SCO only sold the IP for Unixware and OpenServer to Xinuos, retaining whatever rights were needed to continue the lawsuits with IBM and others. I believe at that point, the leftovers of SCO were called TSG (short for “The SCO Group”). In their early days, Xinuos would make a point of stating that the old SCO lawsuits were nothing to do with them.
  - smorgusofborg 5y ago
    That would make sense but this is the quote on their own website: “While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property,” said Sean Snyder, President and CEO of Xinuos. “It is also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community, and innovation itself.” Edit- unless you are saying their claim is that someone would rip off new code at this late a point in their dead branch of UNIX? That would be possible I guess, but they would have to be delusional to a point that strains credulity.
    - scns 5y ago
      How come i get the feeling of listening to a scumbag talking out of his behind? Does Xinuos have more than one employee?
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      No, it's not about Xinuos's code (if any). It's about rights to the property that they bought from SCO. That purchase lets Xinuos say "our", even though it's not theirs by authorship.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - axiolite 5y ago
      Things are confusing because Xinuos recently launched a brand new lawsuit against IBM and IBM owned RedHat. Xinuos' claims in that case are all about anti-competitive behavior and nothing about TSG's historical accusations of code theft and breach of contract. I'd actually say the lawsuit is about Xinuos' failed business model: * The infamous SCO vs Novell & IBM lawsuit soured everyone on SCO, so companies got their software off of OpenServer/UnixWare as quickly as they could. * Those few who continue to use SCO products have existing OS & user licenses that will remain valid in perpetuity (or until the 2038 bug renders them unusable), and virtualization allows continued use of those old OSes on modern hardware without help from Xinuos. * Their "V" (VMWare virtualization) releases amount to pre-installed disk drivers and small performance tweaks, and for that they switched to an annual subscription model that it seems nobody will buy-in to. * Some of their releases like OpenServer 6 broke some backwards compatibility. Newer releases like OpenServer 10 are just rebadged FreeBSD with a bit of SCO legacy binary compatibility thrown-in. * The ascendancy of Linux made SCO and Xinuos' expensive commercial OS products increasingly irrelevant before the IBM/Novell lawsuits, and only ever more so today.
  - cstross 5y ago
    The irony here is that the real, original SCO (or rather, the Santa Cruz Operation) sold their IP and Unix business to a company called Caldera -- who had already successfully sued Microsoft over the DR-DOS/Windows 95 lawsuit started back in the day by Digital Research, whose IP rights they'd purchased. Caldera were an also-ran Linux distributor who ran out of capital in the 1996-98 time frame (I forget precisely when) and pivoted into litigation. The Microsoft lawsuit victory gave them the money to buy the SCO IP and go after IBM, which turned out to be a Really Bad Idea because IBM's legal department back then made Microsoft's look like a teddy bear. The original SCO changed their name (Tarantella? I think?) and were eventually absorbed by what was left of Borland. Irony: I worked at (original, non-litigious, UNIX-developing) SCO circa 1991-95; if SCO's execs had their eye on the ball they could have rolled out their own Linux distro with a ton of valuable extras backported from Open Server and cleaned Red Hat's clock. But instead, despite half of the UNIX dev team moonlighting on open source projects, the official line was that Linux was an amateur-hour hobbyist project that nobody would ever pay for.
    - segfaultbuserr 5y ago
      > But instead, despite half of the UNIX dev team moonlighting on open source projects, [...] +1. The original SCO didn't have such a bad reputation. Quite a few Unix hackers worked here. It also had a big Unix conference, Linus Torvalds was an invited speaker. The reputation damage caused by the rogue SCO to their former employees must be big.
      - p_l 5y ago
        Wasn't Unixware (under whatever name it was running in the given year) something of the go-to choice for proper Unix on x86 till Linux got more complete? I think ESR even maintained a how to on it.
        segfaultbuserr 5y ago
        I think so, I remember seeing the list of Unixware bugs (also maintained by ESR) while looking for historical files on the web.
krylon 5y ago
Well, IBM certainly is no stranger to anti-competitive behavior. If SCO had focused on breach of contract from the beginning, their case actually would have had some merit, IMHO. But then they went bananas and made fools of themselves with the whole Linux-copyright-violation bit, destroying their case more thoroughly than IBM's lawyers could have done.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  they were paid to do that by microsoft as a fud war? This case was never about merit.
  - krylon 5y ago
    As far as I know - which isn't very far! - Microsoft started to support SCO only after they had dragged IBM to court. SCO had pretty much bet the future of the company on their and IBM's joint Itanium Unix, and when IBM pulled out of the project, SCO was rather screwed[0]. Suing IBM for breach of contract was a sensible decision, as far as I can tell. [0] Considering what a phenomenal failure Itanium became, I suspect they were screwed either way.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Very different case and fact pattern of course, but HP won a $3B lawsuit against Oracle because of the latter dropping Itanium support. Fun personal fact. Apparently HP actually used an analyst report I wrote as one of their exhibits in that case.
  - cptskippy 5y ago
    It seems Microsoft did funnel money to SCO by first agreeing to pay a $16m licensing fee to SCO for something that they fought against having to pay in the 80s and for which SUN only paid $9m. They also gave $50-60m to an investment firm which intern gave it to SCO. Beyond financing the fight, there hasn't been any other evidence of their involvement. Anything else is just conspiracy theories.

smorgusofborg 5y ago

I'm confused, if SCO sold off its rights to a new company the settlement should go to the new company? If the price didn't reflect the potential of this settlement then that could have been an accounting crime against the now bankrupt SCO, but I don't see why SCO would be entitled to any duplicate claims.

ch_123 5y ago
SCO only sold the IP for Unixware and OpenServer to Xinuos, retaining whatever rights were needed to continue the lawsuits with IBM and others. I believe at that point, the leftovers of SCO were called TSG (short for “The SCO Group”). In their early days, Xinuos would make a point of stating that the old SCO lawsuits were nothing to do with them.
- smorgusofborg 5y ago
  That would make sense but this is the quote on their own website: “While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property,” said Sean Snyder, President and CEO of Xinuos. “It is also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community, and innovation itself.” Edit- unless you are saying their claim is that someone would rip off new code at this late a point in their dead branch of UNIX? That would be possible I guess, but they would have to be delusional to a point that strains credulity.
  - scns 5y ago
    How come i get the feeling of listening to a scumbag talking out of his behind? Does Xinuos have more than one employee?
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    No, it's not about Xinuos's code (if any). It's about rights to the property that they bought from SCO. That purchase lets Xinuos say "our", even though it's not theirs by authorship.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - axiolite 5y ago
    Things are confusing because Xinuos recently launched a brand new lawsuit against IBM and IBM owned RedHat. Xinuos' claims in that case are all about anti-competitive behavior and nothing about TSG's historical accusations of code theft and breach of contract. I'd actually say the lawsuit is about Xinuos' failed business model: * The infamous SCO vs Novell & IBM lawsuit soured everyone on SCO, so companies got their software off of OpenServer/UnixWare as quickly as they could. * Those few who continue to use SCO products have existing OS & user licenses that will remain valid in perpetuity (or until the 2038 bug renders them unusable), and virtualization allows continued use of those old OSes on modern hardware without help from Xinuos. * Their "V" (VMWare virtualization) releases amount to pre-installed disk drivers and small performance tweaks, and for that they switched to an annual subscription model that it seems nobody will buy-in to. * Some of their releases like OpenServer 6 broke some backwards compatibility. Newer releases like OpenServer 10 are just rebadged FreeBSD with a bit of SCO legacy binary compatibility thrown-in. * The ascendancy of Linux made SCO and Xinuos' expensive commercial OS products increasingly irrelevant before the IBM/Novell lawsuits, and only ever more so today.
- cstross 5y ago
  The irony here is that the real, original SCO (or rather, the Santa Cruz Operation) sold their IP and Unix business to a company called Caldera -- who had already successfully sued Microsoft over the DR-DOS/Windows 95 lawsuit started back in the day by Digital Research, whose IP rights they'd purchased. Caldera were an also-ran Linux distributor who ran out of capital in the 1996-98 time frame (I forget precisely when) and pivoted into litigation. The Microsoft lawsuit victory gave them the money to buy the SCO IP and go after IBM, which turned out to be a Really Bad Idea because IBM's legal department back then made Microsoft's look like a teddy bear. The original SCO changed their name (Tarantella? I think?) and were eventually absorbed by what was left of Borland. Irony: I worked at (original, non-litigious, UNIX-developing) SCO circa 1991-95; if SCO's execs had their eye on the ball they could have rolled out their own Linux distro with a ton of valuable extras backported from Open Server and cleaned Red Hat's clock. But instead, despite half of the UNIX dev team moonlighting on open source projects, the official line was that Linux was an amateur-hour hobbyist project that nobody would ever pay for.
  - segfaultbuserr 5y ago
    > But instead, despite half of the UNIX dev team moonlighting on open source projects, [...] +1. The original SCO didn't have such a bad reputation. Quite a few Unix hackers worked here. It also had a big Unix conference, Linus Torvalds was an invited speaker. The reputation damage caused by the rogue SCO to their former employees must be big.
    - p_l 5y ago
      Wasn't Unixware (under whatever name it was running in the given year) something of the go-to choice for proper Unix on x86 till Linux got more complete? I think ESR even maintained a how to on it.
      - segfaultbuserr 5y ago
        I think so, I remember seeing the list of Unixware bugs (also maintained by ESR) while looking for historical files on the web.

krylon 5y ago

Well, IBM certainly is no stranger to anti-competitive behavior. If SCO had focused on breach of contract from the beginning, their case actually would have had some merit, IMHO. But then they went bananas and made fools of themselves with the whole Linux-copyright-violation bit, destroying their case more thoroughly than IBM's lawyers could have done.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
they were paid to do that by microsoft as a fud war? This case was never about merit.
- krylon 5y ago
  As far as I know - which isn't very far! - Microsoft started to support SCO only after they had dragged IBM to court. SCO had pretty much bet the future of the company on their and IBM's joint Itanium Unix, and when IBM pulled out of the project, SCO was rather screwed[0]. Suing IBM for breach of contract was a sensible decision, as far as I can tell. [0] Considering what a phenomenal failure Itanium became, I suspect they were screwed either way.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Very different case and fact pattern of course, but HP won a $3B lawsuit against Oracle because of the latter dropping Itanium support. Fun personal fact. Apparently HP actually used an analyst report I wrote as one of their exhibits in that case.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  It seems Microsoft did funnel money to SCO by first agreeing to pay a $16m licensing fee to SCO for something that they fought against having to pay in the 80s and for which SUN only paid $9m. They also gave $50-60m to an investment firm which intern gave it to SCO. Beyond financing the fight, there hasn't been any other evidence of their involvement. Anything else is just conspiracy theories.