New Caldera Promised

An anonymous reader writes "SCO has announced their plans to release a new version of Caldera Linux by the end of the year. From the announcement: 'To provide extensive reliability and performance features, the Linux Kernel 2.5 codebase has been merged with recently developed additions to SCO's world leading UNIX core operating system. Already contained code owned by SCO is still included benefiting the stability and overall experience opposed to recent Linux kernel releases.' The question is, is anyone listening?"

GPL

[TwilightSentry]

So, seeing as their code is integrated into the Linux kernel, it has to be GPLed, right?

Re:Really?

[stinerman]

If SCO does not abide by the GPL for all code that they do not have the copyright to, then they will be in violation of the GPL and may be sued by the copyright holders of any such code.

Re:GPL

[Aadain2001]

Technically, yes.

Two things can happen with this. One, the release the new version of Caldera like a normal Linux distro, in which case SCO has actively released all the "infringing" code under GPL. The second thing that could happen is that they don't release it like a normal distro and put out a binary only version. This of course will lead to the EFF suing them into Oblivion (bada-ching) because of the copyright violations as listed under the GPL.

I guess there is a third possibility: they release Calder and the source, and continue to be asshats and try to sue everyone who uses Linux. Saddly, the third option is looking more and more likely.

The quote to read:

[TodLiebeck]

SCO is eager to be the only future provider of Linux Systems for the enterprise market.

(emphasis added)

Re:Linux Kernel 2.5 codebase

[garcia]

Why would anybody want to use a linux distro based on an old developers version of the kernel?

It's the only one that they had time to make sure that all their code was removed so that they wouldn't invalidate their desire to be distributing "their" code under the GPL.

That and it's a conversation piece (as you just made it). Who the fuck would care if they said, "we're going to release Caldera on 2.6?" Not many more people than would give a shit if they released it on 2.7 but at least it got our attention for a short time.

Now, the other question, asked in the blurb, does anyone really care? No, no one cares. No one cared when the first Caldera versions came out and no one cares now. Other distributions are way ahead of whatever SCO could come up with and the rest of us are still running what we've been running comfortably for years.

Re:Really?

[k33l0r]

Not to mention that "Linux" is a trademark owned by Linus Torvalds himself!

GPL: FSF not EFF

[weierstrass]

I think it's also likely the GP was confusing the EFF with FSF..

Re:The sad part is Caldera was a noble linux

[kimvette]

Actually, the company formerly known as SCO did not get ahold of Caldera. When management at Caldera changed (Caldera was once a great company with great products), Caldera bought SCO's old line of business (Xenix plus the right to broker licenses to Novell's IP) as the original SCO (now Tarantella) wanted to exit the Unix/UNIX market and go on to new emerging markets before the commercial UNIX/Unix market becomes too small for long-term sustainability.

In other words, Caldera IS the bad guy here, not the original SCO (Santa Cruz Operation). What is currently SCO is just Caldera renamed.

Re:The sad part is Caldera was a noble linux

[Stephan Schulz]

One of the more user-friendly distros and one of the first with a graphical install complete with a tetris game. Then SCO got a hold of it and ...

You got your history mixed up. Caldera was founded as a Linux company. Real SCO was founded as a UNIX company. Caldera used the money from their IPO to buy the SCO name and UNIX business from RealSCO (which became Tarantella and was acquired by SUN in 2005), with the idea of pushing Linux down the existing SCO sales channel. That failed, and when they noticed they created most of their revenue via the old SCO UNIX business, they renamed themselves to "The SCO group" and concentrated on UnixWare, OpenServer, and litigation.

Re:The sad part is Caldera was a noble linux

[Andrew10AE]

Acctually, SCO did not get hold of Caldera, Caldera got it's hands on SCO... It went like this

(a long long time ago in a land far far away...)

A company called The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) had a product called SCO Unix, and owned many of the original copyrights on UNIX from the AT&T System V days (how they got there is not important). The market for their product was not wonderful, so they created a product called Tarantella http://www.tarantella.com/ [tarantella.com] and decided to sell the UNIX part of the business. With that went the SCO name, and the old Santa Cruz Operation was forever to be called Tarantella... that is, untill they were purchased by old UNIX buddy Sun Microsystems...

The company that bought the UNIX stuff (and the SCO name) was a little Linux outfit called Caldera... which is now called... SCO

so the irony here is that a company that got it's start packaging and selling Linux buys the UNIX copyrights and uses them to threaten former competiters in the Linux space...

sad really, if you ask me (not that you did)

Re:Really?

[Millennium]

OTOH, why would SCO even do this? Any belief that it will give them some cash flow or some other position that benefits them is irrational.

Oh, they don't plan to release the code at all. This is a setup on their part; they want to get sued for violating the GPL. They will then attempt to argue in court that the GPL is "unenforceable" and therefore invalid. If they win in court (a very big [i]if[/i], given that this has been tried before but it's always failed), then they'll claim ownership over all of the Linux codebase and that will be that.

They'll lose, of course; it takes little more than common sense to see that. But since when has common sense ever reigned in that company?

Re:Is it a parody?

[Anonymous Coward]

traceroute shown that this IP is fsi-server.informatik.uni-erlangen.de which explains FDI INF

SCO is known to have some activities in germany so this is plasible.

The strange part is that www.uni-erlangen.de is an university.
Do they really use their server to host commercial website?

already taken care of! :)

[Xtifr]

> they want to get sued for violating the GPL.

They already are; it's one of IBM's counterclaims in SCO v IBM.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200403310 43539340 [groklaw.net]

The sixth counterclaim, to be precise. (Just search for "SIXTH".)

But of course, in a case like this (as opposed to the IBM case), you don't normally sue for "GPL violations"; you sue for simple copyright violation, and leave it up to the defense to raise the issue of the GPL if they think it will help (which it won't if they haven't followed its terms). Note that IBM also includes copyright violations for their code in Linux in their eighth counterclaim (which is going to be the basis of a motion for summary judgement as soon as expert testimony is complete).

If they want to get the GPL ruled unenforceable, they're going to need to find a better trick than distibuting someone else's code without that someone else's permission. 'Cause that's illegal whether or not the GPL is involved.

Giggle ...

[Mostly a lurker]

Try entering an invalid page for openlinux.org (e.g. this [openlinux.org]) Note that repeated requests result in different responses.

That's because this IS A FAKE

[shaneh0]

For example:

- Remove the &id=24097 from the Querystring. The page still loads this press release. Releasedetail.cfm is nothing but a static page

- Now mess w/ the URL to generate a 404. You'll get this error:

> 404
> [...]
> because Bill Gates is a Jehovah's witness and so nothing can work on St. Swithin's day.

Not to mention the whole front page is reduced to linking to this single press release? The site has no navigation.

Probably a hoax

[lightbox]

Almost definately a hoax. Proof follows: 1. The press release just has that fake "feeling" 2. Neither sco.com or caldera.com have the "press release" anywhere on their sites. 3. The server belongs to a German university. 4. The 404 page has BOFH quotes. How professional is that? 5. If you look in the source, some of the image links point directly to sco.com/images/... On most websites, wouldn't the images be linked to a local directory? Even more suspicious, on sco.com & caldera.com, the images are located locally.

IT'S A FAKE!

[martinultima]

Just try any one of these out:

http://www.openlinux.org/releasedetail.cfm?id= [openlinux.org]
http://www.openlinux.org/releasedetail.cfm?id=5435 63463 [openlinux.org]
http://www.openlinux.org/releasedetail.cfm?id=2352 561 [openlinux.org]

You can put in whatever value you want for the releasedetail.cfm id field, but either way it shows the same thing. I don't think any real company would have a Web site which worked like that – if it were real there would be some sort of error message or another press release.

And as I said earlier, I don't think it's that hard to set up an Apache virtual server [slashdot.org] and provide false information when registering a domain... depending on the registrar it may be quite a while before they realize that the domain doesn't belong to who it says it belongs to.

Besides, notice that there are (1) a lot of typos, and (2) no references on the main SCO site...

Re:Probably a hoax

[dmbtech]

Also, take a look at this, completely diferent DNS entries: dmb@downpenguin:~$ host openlinux.org openlinux.org has address 131.188.40.90 openlinux.org mail is handled by 10 openlinux.informatik.uni-erlangen.de. openlinux.org mail is handled by 50 fauern.informatik.uni-erlangen.de. openlinux.org mail is handled by 100 mailhub.rrze.uni-erlangen.de. dmb@downpenguin:~$ host sco.com sco.com has address 216.250.128.12 sco.com mail is handled by 10 mail.ut.sco.com. Sco is not based in germany. I hope that is enough proof.

looks like a prank, ignore it.

[Anonymous Coward]

see groklaw.net http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200606171 85813203 [groklaw.net]. Some of the commentors have already debunked this.

Re:Really?

[Helldesk Hound]

> It's a bet against all odds, but what have they got to lose?

SCO has nothing to lose.

It has already lost its reputation - and most of its cash reserves - and any chance of getting its user base back.

But aside from that, it is likely that this was a bogus press release - http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200606171 85813203 [groklaw.net] has information about it.

Slashdot Editors MIA?

[rm69990]

Seriously Slashdot editors, pull this story and make yourselves look less retarded.

1) SCO distributes ALL of their press releases through PR Newswire, not through some random website

2) the openlinux.org site hasn't been changed in years before this change, and has obviously been hacked, or a student at the hosting university in Germany is playing a nice prank

3) This press release is not available on SCO.com

4) The grammar in this press release is atrocious, which is highly unusual, even for SCO. Probably written by a non-native english speaker, which makes sense since this abandoned web server is hosted at a German university.

Seriously....just pull the freakin article....

Morons.

/. has been punked

[Yonder Way]

magnus@orca:~$ host www.openlinux.org
www.openlinux.org has address 131.188.40.90
www.openlinux.org mail is handled by 100 mailhub.rrze.uni-erlangen.de.
www.openlinux.org mail is handled by 10 openlinux.informatik.uni-erlangen.de.
www.openlin ux.org mail is handled by 50 fauern.informatik.uni-erlangen.de.
magnus@orca:~$ host 131.188.40.90
90.40.188.131.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer fsi-server.informatik.uni-erlangen.de.
magnus@orc a:~$

Hacked, not faked

[Anonumous Coward]

Perhaps the webserver, perhaps the DNS, Whatever. Look at the whois:

Domain Name:OPENLINUX.ORG
Created On:03-Aug-1998 04:00:00 UTC
Last Updated On:10-Nov-2004 04:47:01 UTC

Domain Name: CALDERASYSTEMS.COM
            Created on: 13-AUG-98
            Expires on: 12-AUG-06
            Last Updated on: 28-JUL-04

Not very likely for someone to anticipate in 1998 what SCO would do in 2003, register domains in their name, go unnoticed until 2006 and then use the domains for a funny press release with funnier 404 fortune cookies.

Re:Is it a parody?

[nuin]

The IP Address (131.188.40.90) belongs to the network of the University of Erlangen [uni-erlangen.org], the address resolves into fsi-server.informatik.uni-erlangen.de, hence the FSI INF (Informatik is German for Computer Science). So guys, this is most likely a joke.

Try the following commands:

• host openlinux.org
• host 131.188.40.90
• whois 131.188.40.90

Hosted at a university in Neurnberg?

[HardCase]

Check out RIPE's WHOIS [ripe.net] for 131.188.40.90. openlinux.org is hosted at a university in Neurnberg, Germany. Bogus.

-h-

There is no question any more?

[meowsqueak]

Well, when I visit the site, it freely admits it's a hoax:

"Recently, on this site a fake anouncement of Caldera Open Linux X was found.

We thought it was obvious enough that it was fake. We had to learn it was not for all people reading it. So we took it down now. Apparently, also the DNS records are changed/deleted, so soon enough you won't get to this site using openlinux.org anyways.

We thought, it would not spread from Slashdot before we stop it (ie, this weekend). It was funny to follow people speculating and finding out about this site. Some people pointed out good reasons why this is hoax/parody, some bad or wrong reasons. Overall, we hope most people concluded it indeed was a parody.

Our submit to Slashdot concluded with "Is this real?" - sadly enough, Slashdot's editor wrote up a new text without any hints about this. We can't blame him, he maby was just in a hurry..

Nothing got hacked, it's just we got a previously used IP for this machine, so why not having some fun content on it? We apologize for any inconviences arised though! We didn't suspect it would be taken so serious. Some hints in the text proving this weren't read (talking about XML on a Server OS?), others were found but still taken serious. Please stop spreading this fake news, and if you know some sites who published it, please inform them to update their content. Thanks."

Re:Is it a parody?

[stsp]

a page saying nothing but "FSI INF". "FSI INF"? WTF?
Heh. That's shorthand for "Fachschaftsinitiative Informatik". Translates roughly to "Student Council of the CS department."

Practical Joke

[Ohreally_factor]

From this post [groklaw.net] at Groklaw:

Sorry, Guys And Gals!
Recently, on this site a fake anouncement of Caldera Open Linux X was found.

We thought it was obvious enough that it was fake. We had to learn it was not for all people reading it. So we took it down now. Apparently, also the DNS records are changed/deleted, so soon enough you won't get to this site using openlinux.org anyways.

We thought, it would not spread from Slashdot before we stop it (ie, this weekend). It was funny to follow people speculating and finding out about this site. Some people pointed out good reasons why this is hoax/parody, some bad or wrong reasons. Overall, we hope most people concluded it indeed was a parody.

Our submit to Slashdot concluded with "Is this real?" - sadly enough, Slashdot's editor wrote up a new text without any hints about this. We can't blame him, he maby was just in a hurry..

Nothing got hacked, it's just we got a previously used IP for this machine, so why not having some fun content on it? We apologize for any inconviences arised though! We didn't suspect it would be taken so serious. Some hints in the text proving this weren't read (talking about XML on a Server OS?), others were found but still taken serious. Please stop spreading this fake news, and if you know some sites who published it, please inform them to update their content. Thanks.

So, basically, Scuttlemonkey fucked up.