SCO Says No Way To a GPL Solaris, Moves Trial Back 429
penguino writes "Looks like it didn't take long for SCO to formally respond to claims by Sun that it will open source Solaris. According to SCO 'they [Sun] still have licence restrictions that would prevent them from contributing our licensed works wholesale to the GPL'. The company has also released a statement dated June 8 that 'SCO is making a motion to move the scheduled trial date to September 2005 and split IBM's counterclaims into a separate case'. Also quoted is AUUG president and FreeBSD developer Greg Lehey who recommends 'that the best thing for IBM to do would be to print out every single version as requested and send the resultant 20 tonnes or so of paper to SCO. That would keep them quiet for a while'."
Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
An element of truth? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are we going to see SCO try and claim the work that Sun have done on high quality SMP, multi-path support, hardware partitioning etc. as their "Intellectual Property" in the same way that they are attempting for the NUMA and JFS stuff.
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, or something.
Have you any clue as to how many years more advanced than Linux Solaris is at the high end?
Sun is already using Linux at the low end, where it has it's niche. It's called the Java Desktop System.
Re:Ummm... (Score:5, Interesting)
No more stalling! (Score:5, Interesting)
That would keep them quiet for a while.
We don't WANT to keep them quiet for a while. We want IBM to go in for the kill and cut their tongue out to keep them quiet for GOOD. No more stall tactics, and definitely don't aid them in their stall tactics by giving them something to do. If they get even the faintest air of legitimacy again, rest assured some moron with more money than brains is going to pump funds into their hot air balloon to help reinflate it. I don't think I an take another year and a half of these stories every day like they were coming for awhile...
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed, but how much of that "high-end Solaris" is under SCO license restrictions? (None, or it would be in SCO's products.) While Sun may not be able to open source Solaris due to SCO license restrictions, as soon as a judge declares that IBM enhancements to AIX are not the property of SCO, Sun can roll whatever "high-end Solaris" code they have into Linux. This would have the added benefit of destroying whatever is left of SCO.
Re:It might keep them quiet... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd prefer SCO being able to take their time and make that hole bigger rather than being able to make a good appeal.
Bite the bullet and buy the damn thing (Score:2, Interesting)
They have paid $100 million over the years to a company that has a market cap of $78 million (market close yesterday). $78 Million! IBM (Not sun) probably spent that on toilet seat covers last year. How is it that a company that could be wiped out (yes I get the irony of wiping andthe toilet seat cover) of existence for $30-40 million is bringing in $100 million in fees from sun and causing lawsuit problems for IBM. I realize that for IBM it is giving SCO just what they want as far as paying them off, but why not have Sun, IBM, Red Hat, SuSe and whoever else is pissed at SCO get together and spend 78 million and buy the bastards? Then open up the source to the world and laugh at what a dumbass Darl was.
but... (Score:3, Interesting)
what happens to the IP of a company that goes backrunpt (does it go to their investors maybe?)
OSS License (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:5, Interesting)
Why bother, when it's already in Solaris?
Because the stated goal was to Open Source Solaris... Without that, this whole exercise is meaningless.
While bolting on Solaris functionality to Linux would be a formidable task, it would also put Sun squarely in the middle of Linux development as a strong Linux consulting and implementation partner. Pretty cool way to beef up your Linux "street cred" if you ask me...
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:5, Interesting)
Conspiracy Theory (Score:2, Interesting)
1 - MS "funds" SCO to sue IBM (but really to screw Linux)
2 - Sun adds to SCO fund via license agreement
3 - Time passes, SCOX drops like a rock, party nearly over
4 - MS settles with Sun over long standing issue ($$$ -> Sun)
5 - Sun offers (threatens?) to open source Solaris, allowing SCO to delay the inevitable, all while generating more new PR
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Search the Archives (Score:1, Interesting)
Which,
Anyhow, the short answer is, it goes through probate. By which I mean, just like when a human being dies, when a company dies all there assets get assigned by the courts to 'heirs' according to an established pecking-order.
Something to the effect of Lawyers that are owed money by the company have first dibs (of course - law is made by lawyers), then I think it is creditors (people/institutions that loaned money to the company, or provided goods or services on credit who never got payed), then Preferred Shareholders, then whatever paltry worthless thing is left is split between the common shareholders, or something like that. I may have the order wrong.
Point is, there is always *someone* who can claim rights over whatever IP a company had when it went bankrupt. If it has any immediate monetary value (like a competitor is interested in the IP) it will usually be sold or licensed immediately, and the proceeds claimed by someone who had an interest in the company).
If it doesn't have any immediate, obvious monetary value, it usually gets forgotten about. Well, sort of - because if anyone else picks up that IP, spends time, money, and/or effort on adding value to that IP, and then tries to make money off of it, the people who neglected it for so long will immediately turn around and scream bloody-murder and demand huge royalties/settlements.
The best scenario I can think of would be for someone to do everything they humanly could to find who is the succesor-in-interest for the IP in question, if it is viewed as worthless, and offer the successor some small amount of cash up-front in order to buy the copyright and trademarks, or patents, or whatever, in whole for the product, and *then* do whatever they want with it.
You have to convince the original 'owner' of the IP that they aren't getting *anything* for it from anyone else, but you are willing to give them *something* for it. If they bite, you get the rights to it, and if it turns out to be worth something later, too bad for them - they no longer have a legal right to sue you after they have signed the instrument of conveyance that transfers ownership to you.
More misunderstandings of the "viral" effect (Score:5, Interesting)
"You can use it, but you can't give it away." So much for ownership.
Re:Reverse (Score:3, Interesting)
Soon, Sun will have fewer products than these guys [yahoo.com].
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:3, Interesting)
They get free of SCO, the customer upgrade path from cheap Linux pc hardware to high-end Sun servers will be simpler, they get free access to all the improvements made by the other backers of Linux, in particular device drivers and other hardware support. Including XFS and JFS which would help lure some IBM and SGI customers to Sun. They will no longer have to duplicate every innovation made by others themselves in order to stay at the front. Running a vendor independend OS will help fight the FUD factor of whether Sun will be around.
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:5, Interesting)
Update as of Wednesday ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think Darl's dream of prolonging the FID will come to any fruition. The court has replied to one of their attempts at delay, as reported on Groklaw today [groklaw.net]:
IBM had argued that SCO didn't need a delay because "two of the witnesses scheduled next week ... are former employees of AT&T, not IBM. .... Similarly, Mr. Rodgers was employed by Sequent, not IBM, and IBM does not have any of his documents. The final deponent, BayStar, is an investor in SCO, wholly unrelated to IBM, and that deposition apparently will not go forward." Today Judge Wells agreed and denied SCO's attempt to prolong the FUD. This guy really seems to understand the importance of getting these decisions out sooner rather than later, since the claims are enormous and the business impact could be huge. Their arguments to postpone the trial date are equally without merit, so expect more embarassing setbacks for SCO soon.
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:5, Interesting)
SGI is already bolting 200+ cpu NUMA support onto Linux, so any "help" they might get from Sun would be irrelevant.
Other vendors such as Veritas are also already contributing to the (Linux) stew. Before too long, "all those years" of Sun "superiority" may be moot.
Future of Patents and Derivative Works (Score:4, Interesting)
If enough new code is written to replace original code, is the resultant work still considered to be a derivative of the original? It may be inspired by it, but is it still legally hemmed in under the original copyright?
Maybe in this case Sun feels that enough of the licensed work has been re-written (and vastly improved) by their own staff that it no longer resembles the original System V.
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:3, Interesting)
It's certainly better, but the margin isn't as great as it once was. Solaris still scales better to reasonably large (50+) numbers of CPUs. Solaris also (until recently) had better threading support. With NPTL, though, Linux appears to be at the top of the pile. Sun also claim that their TOE support in Solaris 10 will give them better network throughput for supporting huge amounts of bandwidth. Whether this actually plays out in the real world remains to be seen. I also haven't seen an equivalent of things like IP multipathing[1] in Linux yet (although they may be there -- I just haven't looked).
[1] Effectively redundant arrays of network cards, with a highly available IP address, so if there's a failure on one card (be it the card itself or just a cable failure), the machine transparently fails over to using one of the others. Tru64 also had something like this, called NetRAIN.
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Death of Trees (Score:1, Interesting)
Trees for paper are grown specially for that purpose.
If we didn't use trees as a crop the acreage they occupy would likely be paved over for some sort of development.
Without the paper industry there would be far fewer trees in the world.
Re:LOAD the bullet and SHOOT the damn thing (Score:1, Interesting)
I think there's a fine point you're overlooking: IBM is saying "if you allege we behave inappropriately with our partners and file suit against us, we WILL crush you. Just to clear our good name."
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:3, Interesting)
If Sun added their IP into Linux, then all of their competitors would benefit from it. It would be in Sun's best interest to implement their IP into one of the three BSD distributions, rename it "Solaris" and start selling it. Ditch their existing Unix and tell SCO to pound sand. Hey, it works for Apple.
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:4, Interesting)
True enough -- Linux just happens to be a particularly widely available implementation of various open standards such as POSIX APIs, shell, thread processing, etc. AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, etc. provide their own implementations of those same APIs.
Within reason I don't care what the kernel and vendor are -- I care about the tools that sit on top of it and the programming APIs used to create applications and services. Were Microsoft to provide those APIs instead of trying to force proprietary (but equivalent) APIs, they might even find they have a shot at the data center.
I don't know that it's even an issue of what a kernel/OS "is good at". Businesses buy hardware to service a need -- in the vast majority of cases the details of a particular OS' benefits don't matter to the business. As long as it is stable and backed by a solid vendor with good support and maintenance, customers don't care much who provides it.
Eventually IBM et. al. will abandon the proprietary kernels because it's not a profitable business. It's far cheaper to ensure a shared core has all the functionality needed, with the ability to turn off bits and pieces you don't want or need. That way the individual vendors only provide hardware-specific support and perhaps a handful of their own admin/maintenance tools. Far, far cheaper than developing and maintaining "proprietary features" which aren't even a selling point with most of your customer base.
Who cares about one vendor's add-a-user tool versus another when the authentication and authorization are actually on another server that might not even run the same OS? Who cares that it's fully pre-emptive or a fine-grained network stack, provided it does the job? What does one particular vendor's backup facilities matter when your drives are in EMC or equivalent data servers?
I wish they'd open X/NeWS. (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite a while back the Grasshopper Group (which was working on a NeWS for Macintosh at a garage-shop level) contracted with Sun to combine it with X as a Sun product. It didn't catch on. But the contract resulted in Sun having enough IP rights over the codebase that the developers couldn't open-source it. Since then they have tried several times to get Sun to allow them to release the code. But nothing ever came of it.
X is already open and NeWS is currently moribund. None of Sun's current or likely future market advantages are the restult of its windowing system, and an open version of NeWS wouldn't be any threat to Sun. (Even if it caught on big time Sun could just grab the open version and use it - and an open project would no doubt include a good Sun port anyhow.)
So if Sun is really interested in contributing to Open Source, here's something they can do on the cheap: Free the orphan.
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:4, Interesting)
Solaris may still be ahead on the high end, but Linux is definitely catching up, with IBM and SGI, among others, working on it. Oracle seems to be betting on Linux passing Solaris soon. It may not be long before Sun has to give up on Solaris and embrace Linux in order to sell high-end systems. On the other hand, they don't list servers on their web page with more than 104 processors, so they might not have systems that still count as "high-end" before long.
Been there, done that, lost the T-shirt (Score:2, Interesting)
IBM thought that way, until about 30 years ago.
At the time, IBM was the big bully of the computer industry. When victims sued, a standard IBM tactic was to flood the plaintiff with documents: a great indiscriminate memo dump from one of the world's biggest bureaucracies. Finding anything relevant would be like finding a particular needle in a needle factory.
When Control Data produced the CDC 6600 [microsoft.com], IBM responded by announcing a supercomputer of its own, hurting sales of the 6600 as potential customers waited for IBM. IBM didn't actually have any such machine in the works. Eventually CDC sued IBM, and, as usual, IBM sent documents by the trainload.
But IBM's lawyers forgot about progress and CDC's freakin' big computers. Cray hired an army of typists and began building a database of memos' dates, subjects, authors, and recipients. (Later, CDC spun off this group; it still exists [quorum.com].) When IBM found out, it didn't even pause to change its collective underwear before settling the suit, on condition that the database be destroyed [lib.de.us] (warning very long document; only click if you really care).
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, like Ken Brown (AdTI), The SCO executives, etc.
Of course you cannot just rip the code out and put it in another UNIX or UNIX clone, expecially when the clone is NOT based on the same codebase. However, this is not what IBM is doing, so the original poster's comment that Sun should follow IBM's footsteps and make Linux the successor of Solaris does hold, I think, as long as we are clear with regard to what that means.
IBM, SGI, etc. are spending quite a bit of R&D applying the experience they have built on designing their versions of UNIX toward making Linux that advanced on the high-end. Linux is still a toy on the high-end but not for long. This does NOT generally mean copying code, but rather using the concepts which they developed in house for their versions of UNIX and applying it to Linux.
Why is IBM doing this? Not to sound like a troll but proprietary UNIX is dying. It is dying because the proprietary development model is subject to a huge economy-of-scale factor which drives up the prices for low-volume markets. As Windows and Linux begin to be competitive on servers that traditionally run proprietary versions of UNIX, the proprietary UNIX's simply cannot compete, even if they are technically superior. This, I think, is one of the main reasons for the SCO suit.
(Off Topic: BTW, the BSD's are losing market share in key markets to Linux, but this is slower than the loss of the proprietary UNIX's and may be due not to a reduction in actual installations but simply slower growth than Linux in this market. I actually think that the eradication of proprietarty UNIX which Linux and Windows are causing will be a benefit long-term to the BSD crowd.)
Sun should abandon Solaris to Linux in the long term because they are tied inexorably to its economy of scale. This means that a single unit of Solaris sold costs Sun much more than it would have cost them if the unit had been Linux instead. This means that they cannot compete long-term with the prices which IBM or SGI will be able to offer on Linux-based systems. This will slowly mean the decline of Sun unless they are better at being able to develop a contributor pool for a GPL'd solaris than IBM or Linus is for Linux. Somehow I doubt it.
Re:Serves them right (Score:4, Interesting)
The company on top always fights standards, and the companies below it all claim "standards are good".
Even in recent history Microsoft has flip-flopped on this in instant messaging, because they were not number 1 in this, AOL was.
I fully agree that if IBM "wins" they will turn quite evil. And Microsoft will turn into the good guys so fast it will make everybody's head spin. Smarter people are trying to make sure that IBM truly gives away enough stuff so they cannot become entirely evil, such as officially saying that open source is allowed to use their patented technology. So far IBM has not been stupid enough to do that, but there is hope...
People thinking the GPL on Linux will save them are deluded. The design of the Intel 486 is documented quite well and can be duplicated (AMD did so) yet this did not mean that Microsoft could not run a closed-source Windows atop it. In the same way a fully open-source Linux bottom level would not prevent a closed-source upper layer from being written, much like OS/X's user interface code.
Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure about other versions, but the Solaris version of tar has been broken for years.
Have an archive with nested directories? Too bad, if the path is too long (I forget how long, but not that long) it fails. This includes files I've downloaded from Sun. They recommend using GNU tar.
Since it's the version that works, I'd call that the standard.
Re:The only solution (Score:3, Interesting)
At this point SCO has nothing to offer but whatever value is left in the SysV codebase, and the Novell case is determining whether SCO even has the copyrights or simply licensing rights. By the time these various lawsuits sort out, it's likely the only thing left of SCO will be a glowing hole in the ground. The key will be ensuring that the rights to SysV revert to either of Novell or The Open Group and get (finally) released under some flavor of OSS license.
Re: Sue and then request a postponement? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not split the database? (Score:3, Interesting)
> that banks and telcos use. When you have to track
> every single phone call made or received by every
> cellphone subscriber in the US in one huge billing database
Why not split the database into segments, like alphabetically into a,b,c,...,z customers, and then put each one on a separate PC with one master PC routing the calls? I bet it would be just as fast, if not faster than your monolithic system.
You are missing the point (Score:3, Interesting)
Not at all; the point was check your search key and direct the search to the machine that owns the database containing the entries matching that range of the key. Each server is still searching its own database, but the database is 1/26th in size and the incoming requests are only 1/26th in volume. I think that would more than compensate for the extra link, which can be over a very high speed cable. You might not win much in latency, but you will definitely win in throughput and cost.