14 ms·

The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

332 points by chmaynard 4y ago

AlbertCory 4y ago
Here's a choice for you all: (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or -- (2) the current patent aystem, post CLS Bank, which has eliminated a lot of business method patents and some, but not all, software patents.
- mikece 4y ago
  Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is unquestionably better than Linux? And if yes, are the Linux versions of the features or capabilities a significant enough constraint to warrant using Unix instead? It seems that certain networking and NAS applications are measurably better on Unix (Netflix is still a big using of FreeBSD caching servers iirc) but can't Linux close the gap?
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    interesting but not what I asked
    - simonh 4y ago
      It’s a heady picture because there were many Unixes. Most were me-to and fairly generic for the most part, but some had novel capabilities in specific areas. IRIX for graphics, Solaris for Zones and ZFS, but none of them had everything. Often what was special was down to proprietary hardware.
  - PeterWhittaker 4y ago
    Well, that very much depends on the UNIX in question. If one defines UNIX as POSIX, then, for the most part, or at least a pretty good part, Linux IS UNIX, because Linux implements much of POSIX, and in some cases does it better, e.g., certain functions for which POSIX is quiet or negative about thread safety are thread-safe on Linux, and there are almost always TS versions, e.g., strtok_r. Outside of POSIX, one has to conside OS specific features, two of which come to mind as superior, though this is a judgement call: Solaris Zones and Mac OS. I was a Linux desktop user for years, but I found that over time the desktop just started getting in my way (this was tennish years ago, so I am sure things have changed). I’d curse how gnome or KDE had once again broken my UX, then I’d help my wife or daughter with their Macs, enjoy the experience, the curse when I got back to my machine. One day, after a particularly frustrating battle with whatever desktop I had then (I’d gone from Ubuntu to Mint to Debian to I cannot remember what, trying to find the sweet spot), I cursed, yelled that I would be back in 90 minutes, and bought my first Mac. They’ve been a joy to use since. If Apple does something stupid, e.g., stopping at an old, brain dead bash, well, homebrew, et al, to the rescue. Solaris Zones were wicked. One could get full MAC with labelled networking and restricted root with ease. It’s finally possible to get close to Zones with a mix of capability management, namespace management, SELinux, et al, but not as easily. So, yeah, there are individual UNIXisms that are better than Linux, but overall, at least on the server side, Linux is UNIX improved.
    - lizknope 4y ago
      I've been using XFCE for about 15 years. It feels like nothing has changed during that time and I think that is one of its best features.
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        That's a major benefit of numerous older desktops. XFCE is one of my own fallbacks (I usually prefer WindowMaker), though fvwm, twm(!), the boxes (open-, black-, flux-, hacked-, etc.), tiled WMs, etc., are all perfectly serviceable. Some may look* vaguely dated, but tend to be rock stable and blazingly fast. XWinMan is still live, I find: <http://www.xwinman.org/ http://www.xwinman.org/>
        lizknope 4y ago
        I'm not sure what window manager was on AIX in 1991 on an RT. Maybe it was twm. That is the first time I used Unix / X11. When I started college in 1993 our default environment was mwm but I quickly switched to vtwm and had a really cool setup. I switched to AfterStep because I loved the NeXTSTEP look and used that and WindowMaker for 10 years before moving to XFCE.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Some Unices come with things that Linux can technically do, but they were built-in, not bolt-on. ZFS is an example of one that's recognizable, you can bolt it onto linux and it (now) works quite well, but it was integrated much more into Solaris. There are also Unix platforms that fully support hot-swappable just about everything, which you CAN do with Linux but it's not as simple. Most of that stuff is gone by the wayside now, Linux is "good enough".
    - lonelygirl15a 4y ago
      I seem to recall that Sun put ZFS under a license that has been deemed incompatible with the GPL by pretty much everyone except Canonical, and so that it can't be integrated with the kernel but must remain a "bolt-on" for legal reasons. It won't surprise me if one of these days Oracle decides that Canonical is a ripe lawsuit target over ZFS.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah, but even if bolt it on (which Ubuntu does for you, any other distro it's easy to do) it's still a "bolt-on" that doesn't integrate as fully as it could if it were the native filesystem, allowing full system rollback, snapshotting, boot management, etc. It's similar to the "polish" available on macOS or Windows, Linux has all the pieces but you have to assemble them yourselves, even today.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Why would they if they haven't already? It's not like Canonical has a lot of money. But, yes, anyone else who Oracle might actually elect to sue won't go anywhere near ZFS.
        bombcar 4y ago
        Likely because they want to keep that powder dry until someone with deep pockets gets involved, Microsoft, or IBM or someone. Because there's a moderate change that it goes against them.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    > Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is unquestionably better than Linux? back when, unices were better at real multiuser, while linux was much faster at all sorts of I/O and CPU bound things in the personal-computer, single login context. Like massaging massive amounts text data (which everybody was doing to webify it), linux was blindingly fast, but don't trying to do much else at the same time, it would bring your machine to its knees.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > with cleaned up laws Which one I'd pick depends a whole lot on what those "cleaned up" laws consist of. But generally, this looks like an exercise in determining which is the lesser evil.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    "No IP protection for software at all" is your position, then?
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      No, that's not my position. Given the legal frameworks we have available, copyright is the right direction, IMO. Patents seem entirely inappropriate. But US copyright law is a royal mess and is not really a great tool. It needs to be reformed -- but as the last copyright reform demonstrated, not all reform is an improvement, so my position is that ultimately where I'd fall between those two choices depends on what, exactly, copyright laws look like.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      For proprietary software you could have licenses. In fact, the reason that IBM first licensed some of its software for the IBM/360 was that it was unclear at the time whether software could be copyrighted. However, absent copyright, it would probably be impossible (IANAL but have talked to lawyers about these topics) to enforce any usage provisions on open source software where you haven't explicitly agreed to a license. (Open source licenses basically give you rights that you wouldn't otherwise have under copyright law.)
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        See above comment: the question is not "what does copyright law say now?" but "is some variation of that appropriate as a replacement for patents?" In other words, all options are on the table. We're assuming that Congress does its job, for once, and being that they're politicians, they do sometimes respond to public pressure.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or -- I'd go with this. But ideally with a 10-20 year limit on copyright[1]. I do think that there are some software patents (RSA, for example) that seem worthwhile. But the system as a whole seems like it does more harm than good. --- 1. My ideal proposal for copyright is exponentially increasing fees (after a short initial grace period) for a linearly increasing time period. But that seems like several bridges too far.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
    IP paying property taxes would be nice. Could even let owners set the value, if it were coupled to licensing fees etc.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      Note that there are maintenance fees for patents, which are non-trivial. they're every 4 years, though.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    thanks. please note that whatever a lawyer says about copyright law now is usually limited to what the courts have said plus the latest statutes and what judges are likely to rule. The topic for today is harder: it's what should copyright law for software say? We're assuming that Congress does its job for once. The lawyers will never do it. Don't like it that Disney had a forever copyright on Mickey Mouse? Me neither, but that's because copyright law is one-size-fits-all. The proposal is a carve-out where software law is different than literary. So property taxes or shorter terms are definitely on point. "Which Unix is better" is not.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  Whatever choice "zero patents for software" is. Already, no one shares their code, which would be in the spirit of the patent system. The patent system is designed to keep the design details open and public, but gives a legal monopoly to the holder of the patent. Currently, companies can write software implementations that are completely closed and secret, but still hold a patent for whatever the "thing" that algorithm does. Clicking one button to check out? Patented, and I still don't know what the detailed code implementation looks like from Amazon. The patent itself only shows the most simple, rudimentary steps as block diagrams. The most open software we have is that which is unencumbered by patents!
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    This is actually the topic of the first of (planned) four posts on software. For you lawyers, it's section 112.
tpmx 4y ago
This article doesn't give Microsoft enough credit for funding the whole thing. I was going to write that the Internet remembers, but apparently that has its generational limitations. :(
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  It's a friend now, remember?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - surfingdino 4y ago
    Sure, we remember... https://www.junauza.com/2011/07/microsoft-fud-campaigns-against-linux.html https://www.junauza.com/2011/07/microsoft-fud-campaigns-agai...
    - bitwize 4y ago
      Interesting choice of Ballmer as Dr. Evil... I always felt that Bill Gates's speaking voice resembled that of Evil.
      - rascul 4y ago
        Ballmer did crusade against Linux for a number of years.
        bitwize 4y ago
        Even when he was CEO, though, he was Gates's Number Two.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    How's that Chrome download page hijacking thing goin'?
  - 4y ago
mikece 4y ago
How different would the history of Linux have been had FreeBSD (and its forks) not been encumbered by lawsuits in the 1990s? Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?
- JohnFen 4y ago
  What an interesting question! I'm a bit glad that BSD didn't "win", because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me. I'm looking at switching to BSD (I haven't yet because that switch will be a lot of work -- I have a lot of machines) as a better alternative. So BSD looks like an escape hatch to me and I'm glad that it's there.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me. Same for me, i switched about 6 years ago to FreeBSD.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won? From the horse's mouth: > Linus: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened. - https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html
  - dboreham 4y ago
    That's what I was thinking too: when Linux was released there was no viable Unix-like OS for the current day PC machines. Edit: actually there was SCO, but it was costly. So above really I mean "no viable free Unix-like OS for...PCs".
  - 4y ago
matrix12 4y ago
During project Monterey I had to setup all of the services that allowed SCO/IBM/Sequent on the IGS/IBM side. A few short years later I was tasked with pulling all of the IBM AIX design docs and source code for discovery going back to the beginning. One has to recall that what sued IBM was the Ray Noorda Canopy Group. Aka Caldera. Which also levied lawsuits against Microsoft. Far from the ocean view of Santa Cruz.
gemstones 4y ago
I hadn't heard of Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) and I looked at his LinkedIn; this is his side of the story from his time at SCO, as he puts in in his work experience section. I found it super interesting. All of my work experience before and after SCO was of the startup/entrepreneurial variety. Fun stuff, new, exciting and positive. Then some former colleagues on the board of SCO (previously Caldera) convinced me to come in and try and turn around a company that had fallen from a billion dollar valuation down to a measly six million. They only had $8 million of cash and they were burning $4 million per quarter so I basically had 6 months to complete the turnaround. What they didn't tell me was the company was in a dispute with IBM over disputed UNIX software code. This led to us filing a lawsuit against IBM, retaining David Boies to represent us, raising $76M to fight the battle, seeing our stock go from $0.66 per share to $22 per share, then falling back down to pennies per share after losing an important trial. IBM teamed up with Linux programmers worldwide to go against me and I showed up on the cover of Fortune Magazine as "Corporate Enemy Number One". Hey, at least you can say that I was number one at something huh? I was as popular in the tech industry as Donald Trump hanging out at an Oscars after party with a bunch of Hollywooders. The legal battle is not actually over, 15 years later, the case is in review at the 10th circuit court of appeals in Denver. Silver Lining: While the courtroom battles were raging, we started a mobile apps business that I later bought out of SCO with some friends. That is where Shout came from. Back to the worlds I know and love - tech startup tied to sports and entertainment.
- sjm 4y ago
  And today he's a Marjorie Taylor Green-retweeting bankrupt conspiracy theorist. Funnily enough his personal website <title> is "Billionaire Cheat Codes"
- morelisp 4y ago
  IDK, if I was put in charge of a company losing money like crazy and was genuinely trying to turn it around, my first thought would not be "oh, let's hire David Boies".
  - hristov 4y ago
    I know! For HN readers not familiar with the legal industry, Boies was considered the superstar of the legal world at the time and was well known to demand $50 million retainers.
SirLJ 4y ago
Wow, thanks for the blast from the past, SCO were my first Unix servers along with IBM AIX ironically, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...
jedberg 4y ago
I had to deal with fallout from this. At the time I worked at eBay, and were not allowed to use any OS except Windows or RedHat Linux. The reason we had to use RedHat? Because we had a paid license from them that included them absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux. But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time. So we were forced to use an inferior product because it came with IP indemnity. Thanks SCO!
- itomato 4y ago
  Ahh yes. We also kept our hands and feet inside the roller coaster with SLES and RHEL. The ever-looming “threat” might be laughable in hindsight had it not stifled innovation at such an early stage of growth. IT Directors everywhere should atone.
- cheekibreeki2 4y ago
  Rh 4.2 ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?
  - jedberg 4y ago
    From my experience as a Linux sysadmin? RedHat ran half the planet because they had the best sales force and legal team (as exhibited by my example), but they did not have the best technology.
    - Postosuchus 4y ago
      Wrong. Two reasons actually: 1. RHEL was the first distro directed at enterprise deployment (meaning, strong preference of rock solid stability and predictability over constant churn). Which made it the only distro Dells and HPs of the world recognized and agreed to support. 2. RHEL was created on legacy of RedHat Linux, which was the best distro for non-hobbyist environments (from reproducible deployments to the breadth of packages available) - since 3.0.3 onwards. RedHat JUST. WORKED.
      - 4y ago
ChuckMcM 4y ago
Interesting side effect of this (to me :-)) is that when Blekko was acquired by IBM I got stuck doing what is called "Blue Washing" where IBM tracks down the licenses, origins, and usages of all the source code the acquired company is bringing to IBM. According to people I worked with when doing this, the entire process and toolset was an outgrowth of the work they did to disprove SCO's claims in the lawsuit. I found it was both invasive and thorough, and generally engineers didn't like it when the answer was "You have to delete that, we can't verify we have rights to it."
- politician 4y ago
  I wonder if it'll be much easier going forward. Take a suspect piece of code, run it through an LLM to explain it, pass the explanation to another LLM to generate code from the explanation. An automated pipeline for clean room reverse engineering.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    As long as you can prove that you had a license to all the code that was used to train the LLM! :)
    - akiselev 4y ago
      Someone would first have to prove you used an LLM, no?
      - dilyevsky 4y ago
        That’s what discovery and depositions are for
    - politician 4y ago
      Hah! It appears that no one training these models is doing that. GPT doesn't generate the correct GPL/MIT/BSD/Apache license information and attribution for the source code it generates from its training set. All of these code-based LLMs are willfully violating copyright already. It's doubtful this goes anywhere in the courts, however.
heelix 4y ago
One of my greatest white elephant gifts were SCO stock certificates. Was a real challenge to figure out how to spend $20+ for a bit of paper as they were getting close to delisting. Really wish I had kept one for myself. Miss groklaw... what a loss when that shut down.
tiffanyh 4y ago
BSD BSD's were the worst hurt from all of this. Too many companies scared to use it due to lawsuit. Really unfortunate in hindsight, and Linux forever benefitted.
- ajross 4y ago
  That causality seems backwards. Linux "benefitted" because it was the target of the lawsuit in the first place, which wouldn't have been aimed at Linux had Linux not already been the market winner. It was the USL v. BSDI lawsuit of a decade earlier (which to be clear absolutely did involve copied Unix code) that effectively killed BSD in the market by holding it back as Linux left the launchpad.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The Linux and BSD cases actually turned out to be pretty similar. There were a handful of cases of literal copying but not to anything close to the degree claimed and pretty much trivial. (And SCO also made all sorts of claims around Linux taking knowledge, including negative know-how, and techniques from Unix that were completely ridiculous.)
    - vincent-manis 4y ago
      And, as I recall, there were allegations that some of the AT&T code was actually Berkeley code originally.
      - area51org 4y ago
        The packet filter, for one thing. Yup.
ahelwer 4y ago
I was recently bitten by this ghost of the past in the present day! Since the TLA⁺ project is trying to join the Linux Foundation, they've recently started enforcing Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) signing on all of the repos under the github.com/tlaplus org. The CI workflow started insta-failing on my PRs since none of my commits included a DCO. Fixing this isn't terribly difficult, github gives you a rebase command to run so you re-apply every commit locally with DCO signoff, then force-push. Then in the future you have to remember to run git commit -s -am "commit msg" instead of git commit -am "commit msg". The -s flag adds a DCO message to the commit.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
criddell 4y ago
I wonder if anybody here can correct my memory. When Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO, I seem to recall that part of the deal was Microsoft agreeing to not compete in the Unix market. Today, Microsoft is embracing Linux with their WSL stuff and that certainly impacts the Unix market. Maybe the 1997 agreement between the two companies ended Microsoft's exile from Unix-land or maybe when Caldera bought SCO's Unix business the Microsoft agreement didn't transfer? And I realize that, unlike macOS, Linux isn't Unix but it does compete in that market.
- quags 4y ago
  That sounds like Apple agreeing not to go into the music business with their settlement with apple music - and then just doing what they want any way. Microsoft being so large, could just do it and settle later.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Back in 1999 Microsoft bought Interix, and marketed it as Windows Services for Unix under their own banner. So the agreement was probably non-binding as of 1999 at the latest. Microsoft just didn't see Unix, and especially Linux, as competition because they felt what they built was better. Interix/SFU was a compatibility path to migrate Unix devs to Windows NT more than anything; it was more like Cygwin than like WSL. They figured that Linux, and the dirty hippies that built it, would be easily swept away by Microsoft's mighty hand. Only when the Gates-Ballmer dynasty stepped down would the company be convinced otherwise.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    There was definitely a period in the 90s when a lot of people and companies expected/were resigned to Windows NT completely dominating both the desktop and the server. Even companies like IBM that were probably less convinced had backup plans like Monterey in IBM's case which factored into the SCO lawsuit.
    - taftster 4y ago
      And what's interesting, if the SCO lawsuit had gone any other way, Windows NT would probably have ended up completely dominating. Linux wouldn't be here and probably neither would SCO Linux either. What a dire state that would be.
ivzhh 4y ago
Providing legal protection for lawsuits can be a lucrative business. However, I'm not aware of any BSD-based companies that have capitalized on this opportunity. Are there any untold stories?
- sangnoir 4y ago
  Microsoft had the same approach to fighting Android: it threatened OEM with patent lawsuits, but never made the patents it was hanging public. Some of the settlements included agreements to manufacture Windows Mobile devices - an operating System that was clearly on its deathbed.
taftster 4y ago
This is a hilarious quote, in the article, attributed to Linus, related to the concept of source code pedigree and the developer certification of origin for any contribution. > For example, in the case of "ctype.h", what made it so clear that it was original work was the horrible bugs it contained originally, and since we obviously don't do bugs any more (right?), we should probably plan on having other ways to document the origin of the code. The concept that bugs would prove the origin makes me giggle. Because yes, if the code was stolen, it would have been stolen without the bugs included.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Well, mapmakers often sneak errors here and there to catch plagiarists. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement
- manquer 4y ago
  It works both ways, very similar bug patterns can be strong indication of copying does it not ?
ginko 4y ago
>Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company. I'm disappointed LWN would blindly rehash the "MS loves Linux" propaganda like this. Microsoft still doesn't love Linux. Their whole business model is still based on proprietary software.
- ranger207 4y ago
  I think that line is sarcasm. Corbet has a pretty dry sense of humor
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    IMO the high-water mark was set in "Debian and the Hot Babe Problem": The Debian developers raised the obvious, predictable objection to the inclusion of this utility: the associated images were covered by a non-free license. <https://lwn.net/Articles/113644/ https://lwn.net/Articles/113644/> That was ... also very nearly 20 years ago. The story left its mark.
CraigRo 4y ago
I would love to get a signed picture of Darl McBride for my bathroom. Because he paid for it. I heard about this lawsuit, called up a couple of IP lawyers, talked to a bunch of programmers, and read everything on groklaw. I called both analysts who covered the stock -- one had a price target of $5, while the other had a price target of $45 (stock was about 20 at the time). Then I shorted it with most of the money I had. It went down and I used the equity to short even more of it. In retrospect, the analysis was correct (i.e. don't sue a company that has more lawyers than you have employees without a good case), but the level of risk I took was insane, and it kept me up late at night for a long time.
- dekhn 4y ago
  OK, that beats my "I made $25,000 on the VA Linux IPO simply because I was an early sourceforge user and got invited to the friends and family program".
  - jedberg 4y ago
    I had a buddy in college who made $25K on the VA Linux IPO for the same reason. He used it to pay for a used car and a couple year's tuition. Good times.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      ours paid for part of a new car. I later ended up working with the people who set all this up- VA Linux employees- and they got nothiung because the stock crashed after that.
  - jboy55 4y ago
    Eric Raymond (ESR) was a director of VA Linux. I remember seeing on Yahoo Finance in '00, but haven't been able to find again, that on Dec 30th or 31st, 1999 he exercised options for a 'gain' of around $2 million. He was locked from selling until around April. At that point all of his stock was worth around $6 million, which might have covered the AMT tax bill. Edit: Found the log, not sure if "Aquired via Exchange" was a taxable event. If it is, there are a bunch https://web.archive.org/web/20000617155153/http://biz.yahoo.com/t/l/lnux.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000617155153/http://biz.yahoo....
jasoneckert 4y ago
One thing that the author of this article left out is that SCO was not SCO during this dark period of litigation. SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) was an x86 UNIX vendor that wasn't great, but enjoyed a lot of market share. I'd estimate they were #2 to SUN in installations because it ran on commodity x86 hardware. But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the pressure from Linux. When the company was sold to Caldera in Utah, very few original SCO people stayed, and those that did left quickly because Ransom Love (yes, that was his name) made it very clear the Caldera culture was not the old SCO culture, and that you'd have to relocate to Utah. Following this, Caldera rebranded themselves back to SCO (The SCO Group) in an effort to convince people they were the same company. After all, they needed all the help they could get. So, essentially, litigation SCO was not the original SCO. And in many ways, litigation SCO tarnished whatever respect the original SCO had.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  And litigation-SCO deliberately tried to confound the two, so that people assumed that litigation-SCO had all the IP rights that original-SCO once had. They didn't, though, as the court case showed.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the pressure from Linux. They were savaged by Windows NT before Linux became an appreciable factor. Which was one of the main arguments against Linux causing faux-SCO (as an industry colleague of mine liked to refer to them as) economic harm even if their claims were true--which they weren't. But also, yeah, charting the corporate identities through that period was hard to keep straight. There was also a branch of Santa Cruz desktop products that ended up with Sun.
- rascul 4y ago
  Caldera even had a Linux distro for a time, before the lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux
  - tomku 4y ago
kanzenryu2 4y ago
Anybody know anything about the part where SCO actually won? I'm referring to the final event years later where IBM made a settlement payment to them. I assume it didn't make up for the years of effort, but I'd love to know what it was based on.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  I think it was based on claims from the Project Monterrey contract. In fact, I think it kind of had to be - there weren't any other claims that were still active in the case, IIRC.
snowwrestler 4y ago
One of the weird side stories from the SCO saga was that of Dan Lyons, who at the time was a reporter with a little cottage industry in stories praising the work of SCO and predicting IBM’s imminent loss and comeuppance for all the Linux neck beards. It later turned out he was also behind the briefly-popular “Fake Steve Jobs” blog, and on the strength of that reputation he left journalism to go into tech company marketing, with a brief side job writing for the show Silicon Valley.
- burnte 4y ago
  He DID admit he was completely wrong with his predictions, so it's not like he was a blind cheerleader.
  - area51org 4y ago
    Only when forced to.
    - burnte 4y ago
      It's still better than lying.
- area51org 4y ago
  Lyons has also made a "career" out of hating on technology and SV in general. Besides writing for the TV show, he's also written several books about why technology and SV really, really suck and are to blame for practically everything wrong in the world (e.g. Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us). Oddly, he did actually try to work at a high-tech startup on the east coast, and when he was booted out for incompetence, he wrote a book about why startups are just such bullshit, man. I have personally spoken to him, by sheer coincidence and long before any of this came to pass, and he was very interested in working at a startup someday, although he was writing for Forbes at the time. In other words, if you want my take, dude has serious envy and has spent years trying to exorcise it by punishing everyone who has what he covets.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
I missed the SCO v. Novell verdict by 5 minutes. Got a heads-up phone call from a Groklaw contact and ran for my car, but didn't quite make it.
FoomFries 4y ago
The use of acronyms without definition is exhausting. A three letter one which has multiple uses all the more so.
- jwmcq 4y ago
  As someone who works building technology for commodity trading in the energy industry... you get used to it. Kinda.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  SCO? It's the name of the company. Like IBM.
  - LBJsPNS 4y ago
    Formerly Santa Cruz Operation... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation
talkingtab 4y ago
Personally, the most interesting thing about that event was groklaw. (http://www.groklaw.net/index.php http://www.groklaw.net/index.php) It is hard now to reconstruct the experience of having a website dedicated to something I cared passionately about. Groklaw is an example, in my opinion, of what the internet could be, should be and isn't. A website that provided a community for people with a common cause. I don't mean to diminish the importance of Linux at all.
- elkos 4y ago
  I really miss Groklaw. Sometimes I wish they could come back, the insight of the author and the community around the site was really valuable and allowed me to have a more informed opinion.
29athrowaway 4y ago
SCO was just a sockpuppet of Microsoft. They were providing the financial ammo.
hddqsb 4y ago
If you like Star Wars, check out the "bit of fun" that the author linked in the article's comments: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20120415121413.111a7461@lwn.net/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20120415121413.111a7461@lwn.net...
robotelvis 4y ago
I was actually the "author" of one of the pieces of code that SCO claimed had been stolen from them - SCO's implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter. SCO had a collaboration with IBM called Project Monterey, in which SCO and IBM were merging their operating systems in order to be better positioned for IA64 (which at that point people still thought would be good). One minor detail of the Monterey deal was that SCO got the right to port IBM's superior networking stack into SCO's operating systems. One part of IBM's networking stack was their implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter, and that was one of the parts I ported over (I'm pretty sure the file still had a BSD copyright notice on it). That was back in the days when SCO was a cool UNIX vendor that thought of itself as an extension of UC Santa Cruz. Back then employees couldn't really imagine it turning evil, and it made me wary of what my subsequent employers (Google and Facebook) could turn into.
- cjensen 4y ago
  SCO the "cool UNIX vendor" was not the company that sued. In 2001, the cool UNIX vendor was struggling and sold its UNIX business to Caldera. Caldera renamed itself "the SCO Group" and filed the lawsuit. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation
  - noisy_boy 4y ago
    I remember seeing original SCO unix in our server room in 1998 - they were a legitimate player then but I also remember seeing all new orders going for SunOS (and later for Sun Solaris).
    - robennals 4y ago
      Internally, SCO used to joke that they were “the most popular operating system you haven’t heard of”. It was (at that time) the best Unix on cheap x86 hardware, so it was deployed everywhere. In gas station pumps, in cash registers, in ATMs, in back office databases. I think SCO made up the majority of Oracle database instances. Most people interacted with SCO code on a daily basis but didn’t know. Of course they rapidly lost the x86 UNIX crown to Linux. At the time I was there SCO could still do a lot of stuff well that Linux couldn’t, but the advantages were rapidly going down and the writing was on the wall.
rlt 4y ago
Thanks, now I feel old.
onphonenow 4y ago
Fwiw I think Darl may still be playing some games w his bankruptcy filings. Just an opinion but I’d be curious if he’s had multiple recent filings and if any have been dismissed (ie failure to disclose etc). I took a quick glance at a court docket - I’m no expert but it didn’t look good at first glance
browsertasker 4y ago
Amazing read.

332 points by chmaynard 4y ago

Here's a choice for you all: (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or -- (2) the current patent aystem, post CLS Bank, which has eliminated a lot of business method patents and some, but not all, software patents.

mikece 4y ago
Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is unquestionably better than Linux? And if yes, are the Linux versions of the features or capabilities a significant enough constraint to warrant using Unix instead? It seems that certain networking and NAS applications are measurably better on Unix (Netflix is still a big using of FreeBSD caching servers iirc) but can't Linux close the gap?
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  interesting but not what I asked
  - simonh 4y ago
    It’s a heady picture because there were many Unixes. Most were me-to and fairly generic for the most part, but some had novel capabilities in specific areas. IRIX for graphics, Solaris for Zones and ZFS, but none of them had everything. Often what was special was down to proprietary hardware.
- PeterWhittaker 4y ago
  Well, that very much depends on the UNIX in question. If one defines UNIX as POSIX, then, for the most part, or at least a pretty good part, Linux IS UNIX, because Linux implements much of POSIX, and in some cases does it better, e.g., certain functions for which POSIX is quiet or negative about thread safety are thread-safe on Linux, and there are almost always TS versions, e.g., strtok_r. Outside of POSIX, one has to conside OS specific features, two of which come to mind as superior, though this is a judgement call: Solaris Zones and Mac OS. I was a Linux desktop user for years, but I found that over time the desktop just started getting in my way (this was tennish years ago, so I am sure things have changed). I’d curse how gnome or KDE had once again broken my UX, then I’d help my wife or daughter with their Macs, enjoy the experience, the curse when I got back to my machine. One day, after a particularly frustrating battle with whatever desktop I had then (I’d gone from Ubuntu to Mint to Debian to I cannot remember what, trying to find the sweet spot), I cursed, yelled that I would be back in 90 minutes, and bought my first Mac. They’ve been a joy to use since. If Apple does something stupid, e.g., stopping at an old, brain dead bash, well, homebrew, et al, to the rescue. Solaris Zones were wicked. One could get full MAC with labelled networking and restricted root with ease. It’s finally possible to get close to Zones with a mix of capability management, namespace management, SELinux, et al, but not as easily. So, yeah, there are individual UNIXisms that are better than Linux, but overall, at least on the server side, Linux is UNIX improved.
  - lizknope 4y ago
    I've been using XFCE for about 15 years. It feels like nothing has changed during that time and I think that is one of its best features.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      That's a major benefit of numerous older desktops. XFCE is one of my own fallbacks (I usually prefer WindowMaker), though fvwm, twm(!), the boxes (open-, black-, flux-, hacked-, etc.), tiled WMs, etc., are all perfectly serviceable. Some may look* vaguely dated, but tend to be rock stable and blazingly fast. XWinMan is still live, I find: <http://www.xwinman.org/ http://www.xwinman.org/>
      - lizknope 4y ago
        I'm not sure what window manager was on AIX in 1991 on an RT. Maybe it was twm. That is the first time I used Unix / X11. When I started college in 1993 our default environment was mwm but I quickly switched to vtwm and had a really cool setup. I switched to AfterStep because I loved the NeXTSTEP look and used that and WindowMaker for 10 years before moving to XFCE.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Some Unices come with things that Linux can technically do, but they were built-in, not bolt-on. ZFS is an example of one that's recognizable, you can bolt it onto linux and it (now) works quite well, but it was integrated much more into Solaris. There are also Unix platforms that fully support hot-swappable just about everything, which you CAN do with Linux but it's not as simple. Most of that stuff is gone by the wayside now, Linux is "good enough".
  - lonelygirl15a 4y ago
    I seem to recall that Sun put ZFS under a license that has been deemed incompatible with the GPL by pretty much everyone except Canonical, and so that it can't be integrated with the kernel but must remain a "bolt-on" for legal reasons. It won't surprise me if one of these days Oracle decides that Canonical is a ripe lawsuit target over ZFS.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah, but even if bolt it on (which Ubuntu does for you, any other distro it's easy to do) it's still a "bolt-on" that doesn't integrate as fully as it could if it were the native filesystem, allowing full system rollback, snapshotting, boot management, etc. It's similar to the "polish" available on macOS or Windows, Linux has all the pieces but you have to assemble them yourselves, even today.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Why would they if they haven't already? It's not like Canonical has a lot of money. But, yes, anyone else who Oracle might actually elect to sue won't go anywhere near ZFS.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Likely because they want to keep that powder dry until someone with deep pockets gets involved, Microsoft, or IBM or someone. Because there's a moderate change that it goes against them.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is unquestionably better than Linux? back when, unices were better at real multiuser, while linux was much faster at all sorts of I/O and CPU bound things in the personal-computer, single login context. Like massaging massive amounts text data (which everybody was doing to webify it), linux was blindingly fast, but don't trying to do much else at the same time, it would bring your machine to its knees.
JohnFen 4y ago
> with cleaned up laws Which one I'd pick depends a whole lot on what those "cleaned up" laws consist of. But generally, this looks like an exercise in determining which is the lesser evil.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  "No IP protection for software at all" is your position, then?
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    No, that's not my position. Given the legal frameworks we have available, copyright is the right direction, IMO. Patents seem entirely inappropriate. But US copyright law is a royal mess and is not really a great tool. It needs to be reformed -- but as the last copyright reform demonstrated, not all reform is an improvement, so my position is that ultimately where I'd fall between those two choices depends on what, exactly, copyright laws look like.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    For proprietary software you could have licenses. In fact, the reason that IBM first licensed some of its software for the IBM/360 was that it was unclear at the time whether software could be copyrighted. However, absent copyright, it would probably be impossible (IANAL but have talked to lawyers about these topics) to enforce any usage provisions on open source software where you haven't explicitly agreed to a license. (Open source licenses basically give you rights that you wouldn't otherwise have under copyright law.)
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      See above comment: the question is not "what does copyright law say now?" but "is some variation of that appropriate as a replacement for patents?" In other words, all options are on the table. We're assuming that Congress does its job, for once, and being that they're politicians, they do sometimes respond to public pressure.
nordsieck 4y ago
> (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or -- I'd go with this. But ideally with a 10-20 year limit on copyright[1]. I do think that there are some software patents (RSA, for example) that seem worthwhile. But the system as a whole seems like it does more harm than good. --- 1. My ideal proposal for copyright is exponentially increasing fees (after a short initial grace period) for a linearly increasing time period. But that seems like several bridges too far.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  IP paying property taxes would be nice. Could even let owners set the value, if it were coupled to licensing fees etc.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Note that there are maintenance fees for patents, which are non-trivial. they're every 4 years, though.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  thanks. please note that whatever a lawyer says about copyright law now is usually limited to what the courts have said plus the latest statutes and what judges are likely to rule. The topic for today is harder: it's what should copyright law for software say? We're assuming that Congress does its job for once. The lawyers will never do it. Don't like it that Disney had a forever copyright on Mickey Mouse? Me neither, but that's because copyright law is one-size-fits-all. The proposal is a carve-out where software law is different than literary. So property taxes or shorter terms are definitely on point. "Which Unix is better" is not.
ok_dad 4y ago
Whatever choice "zero patents for software" is. Already, no one shares their code, which would be in the spirit of the patent system. The patent system is designed to keep the design details open and public, but gives a legal monopoly to the holder of the patent. Currently, companies can write software implementations that are completely closed and secret, but still hold a patent for whatever the "thing" that algorithm does. Clicking one button to check out? Patented, and I still don't know what the detailed code implementation looks like from Amazon. The patent itself only shows the most simple, rudimentary steps as block diagrams. The most open software we have is that which is unencumbered by patents!
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  This is actually the topic of the first of (planned) four posts on software. For you lawyers, it's section 112.

tpmx 4y ago

This article doesn't give Microsoft enough credit for funding the whole thing. I was going to write that the Internet remembers, but apparently that has its generational limitations. :(

sam_lowry_ 4y ago
It's a friend now, remember?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- surfingdino 4y ago
  Sure, we remember... https://www.junauza.com/2011/07/microsoft-fud-campaigns-against-linux.html https://www.junauza.com/2011/07/microsoft-fud-campaigns-agai...
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Interesting choice of Ballmer as Dr. Evil... I always felt that Bill Gates's speaking voice resembled that of Evil.
    - rascul 4y ago
      Ballmer did crusade against Linux for a number of years.
      - bitwize 4y ago
        Even when he was CEO, though, he was Gates's Number Two.
- hinkley 4y ago
  How's that Chrome download page hijacking thing goin'?
- 4y ago

mikece 4y ago

How different would the history of Linux have been had FreeBSD (and its forks) not been encumbered by lawsuits in the 1990s? Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?

JohnFen 4y ago
What an interesting question! I'm a bit glad that BSD didn't "win", because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me. I'm looking at switching to BSD (I haven't yet because that switch will be a lot of work -- I have a lot of machines) as a better alternative. So BSD looks like an escape hatch to me and I'm glad that it's there.
- nix23 4y ago
  >because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me. Same for me, i switched about 6 years ago to FreeBSD.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won? From the horse's mouth: > Linus: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened. - https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html
- dboreham 4y ago
  That's what I was thinking too: when Linux was released there was no viable Unix-like OS for the current day PC machines. Edit: actually there was SCO, but it was costly. So above really I mean "no viable free Unix-like OS for...PCs".
- 4y ago

matrix12 4y ago

During project Monterey I had to setup all of the services that allowed SCO/IBM/Sequent on the IGS/IBM side. A few short years later I was tasked with pulling all of the IBM AIX design docs and source code for discovery going back to the beginning. One has to recall that what sued IBM was the Ray Noorda Canopy Group. Aka Caldera. Which also levied lawsuits against Microsoft. Far from the ocean view of Santa Cruz.

gemstones 4y ago

I hadn't heard of Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) and I looked at his LinkedIn; this is his side of the story from his time at SCO, as he puts in in his work experience section. I found it super interesting. All of my work experience before and after SCO was of the startup/entrepreneurial variety. Fun stuff, new, exciting and positive. Then some former colleagues on the board of SCO (previously Caldera) convinced me to come in and try and turn around a company that had fallen from a billion dollar valuation down to a measly six million. They only had $8 million of cash and they were burning $4 million per quarter so I basically had 6 months to complete the turnaround. What they didn't tell me was the company was in a dispute with IBM over disputed UNIX software code. This led to us filing a lawsuit against IBM, retaining David Boies to represent us, raising $76M to fight the battle, seeing our stock go from $0.66 per share to $22 per share, then falling back down to pennies per share after losing an important trial. IBM teamed up with Linux programmers worldwide to go against me and I showed up on the cover of Fortune Magazine as "Corporate Enemy Number One". Hey, at least you can say that I was number one at something huh? I was as popular in the tech industry as Donald Trump hanging out at an Oscars after party with a bunch of Hollywooders. The legal battle is not actually over, 15 years later, the case is in review at the 10th circuit court of appeals in Denver. Silver Lining: While the courtroom battles were raging, we started a mobile apps business that I later bought out of SCO with some friends. That is where Shout came from. Back to the worlds I know and love - tech startup tied to sports and entertainment.

sjm 4y ago
And today he's a Marjorie Taylor Green-retweeting bankrupt conspiracy theorist. Funnily enough his personal website <title> is "Billionaire Cheat Codes"
morelisp 4y ago
IDK, if I was put in charge of a company losing money like crazy and was genuinely trying to turn it around, my first thought would not be "oh, let's hire David Boies".
- hristov 4y ago
  I know! For HN readers not familiar with the legal industry, Boies was considered the superstar of the legal world at the time and was well known to demand $50 million retainers.

SirLJ 4y ago

Wow, thanks for the blast from the past, SCO were my first Unix servers along with IBM AIX ironically, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

jedberg 4y ago

I had to deal with fallout from this. At the time I worked at eBay, and were not allowed to use any OS except Windows or RedHat Linux. The reason we had to use RedHat? Because we had a paid license from them that included them absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux. But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time. So we were forced to use an inferior product because it came with IP indemnity. Thanks SCO!

itomato 4y ago
Ahh yes. We also kept our hands and feet inside the roller coaster with SLES and RHEL. The ever-looming “threat” might be laughable in hindsight had it not stifled innovation at such an early stage of growth. IT Directors everywhere should atone.
cheekibreeki2 4y ago
Rh 4.2 ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?
- jedberg 4y ago
  From my experience as a Linux sysadmin? RedHat ran half the planet because they had the best sales force and legal team (as exhibited by my example), but they did not have the best technology.
  - Postosuchus 4y ago
    Wrong. Two reasons actually: 1. RHEL was the first distro directed at enterprise deployment (meaning, strong preference of rock solid stability and predictability over constant churn). Which made it the only distro Dells and HPs of the world recognized and agreed to support. 2. RHEL was created on legacy of RedHat Linux, which was the best distro for non-hobbyist environments (from reproducible deployments to the breadth of packages available) - since 3.0.3 onwards. RedHat JUST. WORKED.
    - 4y ago

ChuckMcM 4y ago

Interesting side effect of this (to me :-)) is that when Blekko was acquired by IBM I got stuck doing what is called "Blue Washing" where IBM tracks down the licenses, origins, and usages of all the source code the acquired company is bringing to IBM. According to people I worked with when doing this, the entire process and toolset was an outgrowth of the work they did to disprove SCO's claims in the lawsuit. I found it was both invasive and thorough, and generally engineers didn't like it when the answer was "You have to delete that, we can't verify we have rights to it."

politician 4y ago
I wonder if it'll be much easier going forward. Take a suspect piece of code, run it through an LLM to explain it, pass the explanation to another LLM to generate code from the explanation. An automated pipeline for clean room reverse engineering.
- jedberg 4y ago
  As long as you can prove that you had a license to all the code that was used to train the LLM! :)
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Someone would first have to prove you used an LLM, no?
    - dilyevsky 4y ago
      That’s what discovery and depositions are for
  - politician 4y ago
    Hah! It appears that no one training these models is doing that. GPT doesn't generate the correct GPL/MIT/BSD/Apache license information and attribution for the source code it generates from its training set. All of these code-based LLMs are willfully violating copyright already. It's doubtful this goes anywhere in the courts, however.

heelix 4y ago

One of my greatest white elephant gifts were SCO stock certificates. Was a real challenge to figure out how to spend $20+ for a bit of paper as they were getting close to delisting. Really wish I had kept one for myself. Miss groklaw... what a loss when that shut down.

tiffanyh 4y ago

BSD BSD's were the worst hurt from all of this. Too many companies scared to use it due to lawsuit. Really unfortunate in hindsight, and Linux forever benefitted.

ajross 4y ago
That causality seems backwards. Linux "benefitted" because it was the target of the lawsuit in the first place, which wouldn't have been aimed at Linux had Linux not already been the market winner. It was the USL v. BSDI lawsuit of a decade earlier (which to be clear absolutely did involve copied Unix code) that effectively killed BSD in the market by holding it back as Linux left the launchpad.
- ghaff 4y ago
  The Linux and BSD cases actually turned out to be pretty similar. There were a handful of cases of literal copying but not to anything close to the degree claimed and pretty much trivial. (And SCO also made all sorts of claims around Linux taking knowledge, including negative know-how, and techniques from Unix that were completely ridiculous.)
  - vincent-manis 4y ago
    And, as I recall, there were allegations that some of the AT&T code was actually Berkeley code originally.
    - area51org 4y ago
      The packet filter, for one thing. Yup.

ahelwer 4y ago

I was recently bitten by this ghost of the past in the present day! Since the TLA⁺ project is trying to join the Linux Foundation, they've recently started enforcing Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) signing on all of the repos under the github.com/tlaplus org. The CI workflow started insta-failing on my PRs since none of my commits included a DCO. Fixing this isn't terribly difficult, github gives you a rebase command to run so you re-apply every commit locally with DCO signoff, then force-push. Then in the future you have to remember to run git commit -s -am "commit msg" instead of git commit -am "commit msg". The -s flag adds a DCO message to the commit.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

criddell 4y ago

I wonder if anybody here can correct my memory. When Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO, I seem to recall that part of the deal was Microsoft agreeing to not compete in the Unix market. Today, Microsoft is embracing Linux with their WSL stuff and that certainly impacts the Unix market. Maybe the 1997 agreement between the two companies ended Microsoft's exile from Unix-land or maybe when Caldera bought SCO's Unix business the Microsoft agreement didn't transfer? And I realize that, unlike macOS, Linux isn't Unix but it does compete in that market.

quags 4y ago
That sounds like Apple agreeing not to go into the music business with their settlement with apple music - and then just doing what they want any way. Microsoft being so large, could just do it and settle later.
bitwize 4y ago
Back in 1999 Microsoft bought Interix, and marketed it as Windows Services for Unix under their own banner. So the agreement was probably non-binding as of 1999 at the latest. Microsoft just didn't see Unix, and especially Linux, as competition because they felt what they built was better. Interix/SFU was a compatibility path to migrate Unix devs to Windows NT more than anything; it was more like Cygwin than like WSL. They figured that Linux, and the dirty hippies that built it, would be easily swept away by Microsoft's mighty hand. Only when the Gates-Ballmer dynasty stepped down would the company be convinced otherwise.
- ghaff 4y ago
  There was definitely a period in the 90s when a lot of people and companies expected/were resigned to Windows NT completely dominating both the desktop and the server. Even companies like IBM that were probably less convinced had backup plans like Monterey in IBM's case which factored into the SCO lawsuit.
  - taftster 4y ago
    And what's interesting, if the SCO lawsuit had gone any other way, Windows NT would probably have ended up completely dominating. Linux wouldn't be here and probably neither would SCO Linux either. What a dire state that would be.

ivzhh 4y ago

Providing legal protection for lawsuits can be a lucrative business. However, I'm not aware of any BSD-based companies that have capitalized on this opportunity. Are there any untold stories?

sangnoir 4y ago
Microsoft had the same approach to fighting Android: it threatened OEM with patent lawsuits, but never made the patents it was hanging public. Some of the settlements included agreements to manufacture Windows Mobile devices - an operating System that was clearly on its deathbed.

taftster 4y ago

This is a hilarious quote, in the article, attributed to Linus, related to the concept of source code pedigree and the developer certification of origin for any contribution. > For example, in the case of "ctype.h", what made it so clear that it was original work was the horrible bugs it contained originally, and since we obviously don't do bugs any more (right?), we should probably plan on having other ways to document the origin of the code. The concept that bugs would prove the origin makes me giggle. Because yes, if the code was stolen, it would have been stolen without the bugs included.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Well, mapmakers often sneak errors here and there to catch plagiarists. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement
manquer 4y ago
It works both ways, very similar bug patterns can be strong indication of copying does it not ?

ginko 4y ago

>Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company. I'm disappointed LWN would blindly rehash the "MS loves Linux" propaganda like this. Microsoft still doesn't love Linux. Their whole business model is still based on proprietary software.

ranger207 4y ago
I think that line is sarcasm. Corbet has a pretty dry sense of humor
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  IMO the high-water mark was set in "Debian and the Hot Babe Problem": The Debian developers raised the obvious, predictable objection to the inclusion of this utility: the associated images were covered by a non-free license. <https://lwn.net/Articles/113644/ https://lwn.net/Articles/113644/> That was ... also very nearly 20 years ago. The story left its mark.

CraigRo 4y ago

I would love to get a signed picture of Darl McBride for my bathroom. Because he paid for it. I heard about this lawsuit, called up a couple of IP lawyers, talked to a bunch of programmers, and read everything on groklaw. I called both analysts who covered the stock -- one had a price target of $5, while the other had a price target of $45 (stock was about 20 at the time). Then I shorted it with most of the money I had. It went down and I used the equity to short even more of it. In retrospect, the analysis was correct (i.e. don't sue a company that has more lawyers than you have employees without a good case), but the level of risk I took was insane, and it kept me up late at night for a long time.

dekhn 4y ago
OK, that beats my "I made $25,000 on the VA Linux IPO simply because I was an early sourceforge user and got invited to the friends and family program".
- jedberg 4y ago
  I had a buddy in college who made $25K on the VA Linux IPO for the same reason. He used it to pay for a used car and a couple year's tuition. Good times.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    ours paid for part of a new car. I later ended up working with the people who set all this up- VA Linux employees- and they got nothiung because the stock crashed after that.
- jboy55 4y ago
  Eric Raymond (ESR) was a director of VA Linux. I remember seeing on Yahoo Finance in '00, but haven't been able to find again, that on Dec 30th or 31st, 1999 he exercised options for a 'gain' of around $2 million. He was locked from selling until around April. At that point all of his stock was worth around $6 million, which might have covered the AMT tax bill. Edit: Found the log, not sure if "Aquired via Exchange" was a taxable event. If it is, there are a bunch https://web.archive.org/web/20000617155153/http://biz.yahoo.com/t/l/lnux.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000617155153/http://biz.yahoo....

jasoneckert 4y ago

One thing that the author of this article left out is that SCO was not SCO during this dark period of litigation. SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) was an x86 UNIX vendor that wasn't great, but enjoyed a lot of market share. I'd estimate they were #2 to SUN in installations because it ran on commodity x86 hardware. But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the pressure from Linux. When the company was sold to Caldera in Utah, very few original SCO people stayed, and those that did left quickly because Ransom Love (yes, that was his name) made it very clear the Caldera culture was not the old SCO culture, and that you'd have to relocate to Utah. Following this, Caldera rebranded themselves back to SCO (The SCO Group) in an effort to convince people they were the same company. After all, they needed all the help they could get. So, essentially, litigation SCO was not the original SCO. And in many ways, litigation SCO tarnished whatever respect the original SCO had.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
And litigation-SCO deliberately tried to confound the two, so that people assumed that litigation-SCO had all the IP rights that original-SCO once had. They didn't, though, as the court case showed.
ghaff 4y ago
>But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the pressure from Linux. They were savaged by Windows NT before Linux became an appreciable factor. Which was one of the main arguments against Linux causing faux-SCO (as an industry colleague of mine liked to refer to them as) economic harm even if their claims were true--which they weren't. But also, yeah, charting the corporate identities through that period was hard to keep straight. There was also a branch of Santa Cruz desktop products that ended up with Sun.
rascul 4y ago
Caldera even had a Linux distro for a time, before the lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux
- tomku 4y ago

kanzenryu2 4y ago

Anybody know anything about the part where SCO actually won? I'm referring to the final event years later where IBM made a settlement payment to them. I assume it didn't make up for the years of effort, but I'd love to know what it was based on.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
I think it was based on claims from the Project Monterrey contract. In fact, I think it kind of had to be - there weren't any other claims that were still active in the case, IIRC.

snowwrestler 4y ago

One of the weird side stories from the SCO saga was that of Dan Lyons, who at the time was a reporter with a little cottage industry in stories praising the work of SCO and predicting IBM’s imminent loss and comeuppance for all the Linux neck beards. It later turned out he was also behind the briefly-popular “Fake Steve Jobs” blog, and on the strength of that reputation he left journalism to go into tech company marketing, with a brief side job writing for the show Silicon Valley.

burnte 4y ago
He DID admit he was completely wrong with his predictions, so it's not like he was a blind cheerleader.
- area51org 4y ago
  Only when forced to.
  - burnte 4y ago
    It's still better than lying.
area51org 4y ago
Lyons has also made a "career" out of hating on technology and SV in general. Besides writing for the TV show, he's also written several books about why technology and SV really, really suck and are to blame for practically everything wrong in the world (e.g. Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us). Oddly, he did actually try to work at a high-tech startup on the east coast, and when he was booted out for incompetence, he wrote a book about why startups are just such bullshit, man. I have personally spoken to him, by sheer coincidence and long before any of this came to pass, and he was very interested in working at a startup someday, although he was writing for Forbes at the time. In other words, if you want my take, dude has serious envy and has spent years trying to exorcise it by punishing everyone who has what he covets.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

I missed the SCO v. Novell verdict by 5 minutes. Got a heads-up phone call from a Groklaw contact and ran for my car, but didn't quite make it.

FoomFries 4y ago

The use of acronyms without definition is exhausting. A three letter one which has multiple uses all the more so.

jwmcq 4y ago
As someone who works building technology for commodity trading in the energy industry... you get used to it. Kinda.
KerrAvon 4y ago
SCO? It's the name of the company. Like IBM.
- LBJsPNS 4y ago
  Formerly Santa Cruz Operation... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation

talkingtab 4y ago

Personally, the most interesting thing about that event was groklaw. (http://www.groklaw.net/index.php http://www.groklaw.net/index.php) It is hard now to reconstruct the experience of having a website dedicated to something I cared passionately about. Groklaw is an example, in my opinion, of what the internet could be, should be and isn't. A website that provided a community for people with a common cause. I don't mean to diminish the importance of Linux at all.

elkos 4y ago
I really miss Groklaw. Sometimes I wish they could come back, the insight of the author and the community around the site was really valuable and allowed me to have a more informed opinion.

29athrowaway 4y ago

SCO was just a sockpuppet of Microsoft. They were providing the financial ammo.

hddqsb 4y ago

If you like Star Wars, check out the "bit of fun" that the author linked in the article's comments: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20120415121413.111a7461@lwn.net/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20120415121413.111a7461@lwn.net...

robotelvis 4y ago

I was actually the "author" of one of the pieces of code that SCO claimed had been stolen from them - SCO's implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter. SCO had a collaboration with IBM called Project Monterey, in which SCO and IBM were merging their operating systems in order to be better positioned for IA64 (which at that point people still thought would be good). One minor detail of the Monterey deal was that SCO got the right to port IBM's superior networking stack into SCO's operating systems. One part of IBM's networking stack was their implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter, and that was one of the parts I ported over (I'm pretty sure the file still had a BSD copyright notice on it). That was back in the days when SCO was a cool UNIX vendor that thought of itself as an extension of UC Santa Cruz. Back then employees couldn't really imagine it turning evil, and it made me wary of what my subsequent employers (Google and Facebook) could turn into.

cjensen 4y ago
SCO the "cool UNIX vendor" was not the company that sued. In 2001, the cool UNIX vendor was struggling and sold its UNIX business to Caldera. Caldera renamed itself "the SCO Group" and filed the lawsuit. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  I remember seeing original SCO unix in our server room in 1998 - they were a legitimate player then but I also remember seeing all new orders going for SunOS (and later for Sun Solaris).
  - robennals 4y ago
    Internally, SCO used to joke that they were “the most popular operating system you haven’t heard of”. It was (at that time) the best Unix on cheap x86 hardware, so it was deployed everywhere. In gas station pumps, in cash registers, in ATMs, in back office databases. I think SCO made up the majority of Oracle database instances. Most people interacted with SCO code on a daily basis but didn’t know. Of course they rapidly lost the x86 UNIX crown to Linux. At the time I was there SCO could still do a lot of stuff well that Linux couldn’t, but the advantages were rapidly going down and the writing was on the wall.

rlt 4y ago

Thanks, now I feel old.

onphonenow 4y ago

Fwiw I think Darl may still be playing some games w his bankruptcy filings. Just an opinion but I’d be curious if he’s had multiple recent filings and if any have been dismissed (ie failure to disclose etc). I took a quick glance at a court docket - I’m no expert but it didn’t look good at first glance

browsertasker 4y ago

Amazing read.