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Caldera Linux Business Operating Systems Software Unix

Ransom Love, Caldera Co-Founder Interviewed 237

Posted by michael from the not-as-idiotic-as-he-usually-sounds dept.
rootmon writes "The interview focuses mostly on Ransom Love's views of SCO Group's current dispute with IBM and the Free/Open Source Software Community. It also provides some insights on why Caldera purchased the UNIX business of SCO and their joint Monterey project with IBM. In summary, Love's view is 'My belief is that Unix and Linux should co-exist and should look and feel the same to application developers. Fundamentally, I would not have pursued SCO's path. You see, the challenge is building business. Litigation, no matter what side you're on, tears down businesses. Only the attorneys win. Companies should focus their energies on building their businesses, not on lawsuits. I don't see any positive outcomes.'"
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Ransom Love, Caldera Co-Founder Interviewed More

Ransom Love, Caldera Co-Founder Interviewed

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  • Ransom Love? (Score:4, Funny)

    by CausticWindow ( 632215 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:07PM (#7066641)

    That must be one of the most bizarre names I've ever heard.

  • Open sourcing Unix (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MoonFog ( 586818 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:09PM (#7066666)
    Indeed, at first we wanted to open-source all of Unix's code, but we quickly found that even though we owned it, it was, and still is, full of other companies' copyrights.

    And now this company is suing others for copyright violations. It becomes more and more clear that SCO will have a hard time documenting where the code lines in question originated, that they actually have and has always held the copyright on them.
    • And now this company is suing others for copyright violations. It becomes more and more clear that SCO will have a hard time documenting where the code lines in question originated, that they actually have and has always held the copyright on them.

      Exactly... I'll bet the current SCO/Caldera management has NO idea what's in the Unix code base that they "own." At the very least, that statement by RL makes it clear that there is considerable code that, while IN unix, SCO/Caldera does NOT own the copyright
      • After all, if it's so encumbered by other companies code that they couldn't open source it if they wanted too, that code base has to be a gigantic fucking mess from a copyright standpoint.
        A very good point, and my thought exactly. My guess is that this so called "patter recognition" group SCO used also "got lost" in the code somewhere. Cause, if the code is such a mess that they couldn't figure out which parts to open source, how can they find 1 million lines of code which has been illegally implemented i

    • Re:Open sourcing Unix (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @05:07PM (#7067231) Homepage Journal
      Either I'm missing something or you are. When Love says that Unix is "full of other companies' copyrights" he means code that says, "copyright xyz, used by permission." Caldera/SCO has the right to use this code, but not the right to give away the right to use it. To do that, they'd have to get permission of every copyright holder. Even if they could get everybody's permission, doing it would cost a fortune in legal fees. Another reason to regret the death of fixed-term copyrights.

      This is different from Linux, where SCO is claiming that copyrighted code was used without permission. So the paper trail consists not of a bunch of copyright notices, but of alleged similarity between the two code bases.

      Incidentally, lot of that third party code was contributed by Microsoft, during their brief flirtation with Unix [sourcemagazine.com]. Somehow I doubt if they'd cooperate in any attempt to make Unix open-source!

      • My point is simply that is appears Caldera/SCO is not sure themselves of which code belongs to whom. If they did, they could open source the parts to which they held the copyright. IMHO it appears they've lost control along they way. Like what has been said about the presentation SCO held, it seems that they have stripped the copyright notice and added their own.
        • You seem to think that "open source" is just shorthand for "free source code." Giving people access to a product's source code (all its source code) is only part what you have to do to make the product open source. You might want to read the OSI's official definition [opensource.org].
    • And now this company is suing others for copyright violations. It becomes more and more clear that SCO will have a hard time documenting where the code lines in question originated, that they actually have and has always held the copyright on them.

      Actually SCO hasn't sued anyone for copyright infringement and it is unlikely that they ever will. They themselves have been sued(IBM added to their countersuit), and I think we can expect to see more of that as other Linux copyright holders start suing for

  • He sold his stock! (Score:5, Funny)

    by floppy ears ( 470810 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:10PM (#7066677) Homepage
    When news of the IBM lawsuit broke, I sold the last of my stock.

    Sounds like the same game plan as Darl and the other SCO insiders!
    • Hey, I did the same thing. Wish now that I'd been able to forsee the idiotic runaway price buildup so that I could've sold around $10 instead of $4. But hey, I didn't lose any money over it, which is better than I suspect most of the people buying at $17 will be able to say once the dust settles.

    • Re:He sold his stock! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sandnor ( 682360 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:19PM (#7066782)
      What you failed to mention is that he sold back when this mess first started. He sold when it was far below even it's current downward level. What you've just witnessed is someone with at least some moral fibre left. For that I applaud him. In a day and age when profit seems to be the driving force for most in America, he gave up a rather good chunk. This is not to say the man didn't make a profit, as I'm sure he made a butt load during the IPO/Post-IPO days. But it's far better then the current members of the company and their pumpers who are robbing the stupid blind. It's a rare find in this day and age to someone pass by profits in the name of moral high ground. Credit where credit is due.
      • "Credit where credit is due."

        We'll see about that when this is all done; think - the history of the victorious; it may not be right but it will be the one which is remembered.

      • Re:He sold his stock! (Score:4, Informative)

        by MrResistor ( 120588 ) <.peterahoff. .at. .gmail.com.> on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:47PM (#7067048) Homepage
        It seems so out of character considering some of the statements he's made in the past (per-seat Linux licensing, anyone?). I think this is the first interview with him I've read where he comes off as a reasonable human being.

        Moral fibre is not something I would have expected from him. Sometimes it's nice to be suprised.

        • There is nothing evil with per-seat linux licensing, except that it's probaby a bad business decision, considering that others could offer the same value & service for much less, or for free. In order to get wide acceptance they'd need to distribute dirt cheap to end users, and charge a competitive price to corporate customers who would pay extra for support.

          • I wasn't saying that it was evil in itself, just that it was unreasonable, and the kind of exploitive thinking that leads to the evil currently being perpetrated by SCO. Love clearly pointed the way to SCOs current path, but it's nice to hear that he thought it led somewhere else.

            Incidentally, I have no problem per-seat support contracts, that just makes sense, but that is NOT how Love presented it when he first broached the idea. It was presented as per-seat licensing for Linux itself, which is entirely u
      • You're also seeing pure bullshit considering that caldera bought novell dos pretty much just for the privilege of suing microsoft.
  • and so do those that sell stocks at the right time. <cough>stock scam</cough>

  • Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

    by El ( 94934 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:12PM (#7066699)
    The idea was to enable developers to write for both Unix and Linux with a common Application Programming Interface (API) and common Application Binary Interface (ABI).
    I thought that we already had that, and that it was called POSIX. Am I missing something here?

    • Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

      by weston ( 16146 ) <westonsd@@@canncentral...org> on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:25PM (#7066843) Homepage
      I thought we already had that, and that it was called POSIX. Am I missing something here?

      Yes. Whatever standards compliance POSIX brings to various operating systems, it doesn't necessarily mean you have commen API/system calls, and definitely doesn't guarantee binary compatibility across systems. You've probably noticed that apps don't always make/compile across *NIX systems (let alone other POSIX compliant systems like WinNT) -- hence the need for autoconf and its ilk.

      It sounds like their initial goal was to open up the UNIX stuff they got from SCO, building a better Linux in the process. When they found they couldn't do that without IP encumbrance, they changed their goal: to create a UNIX product which had whatever edges they thought they'd inherited but would also run Linux apps on IA32/64, no problem.

      And when their plans with IBM went awry -- and it sounds like Love thinks IBM wasn't ethical -- they stopped, and the current folks decided to pick legal fights with IBM and the open source community.

      • ... they stopped, and the current folks decided to pick legal fights with IBM and the open source community.

        It's always seemed obvious to me that current SCO management sees these legal fights as an actual core business. They're certainly not going to make much money selling SCO Unix, or any of the software products Caldera was working on before they bought SCO. I won't say "I can't blame them", since we're all getting royally screwed by this game. But this kind of situation is more or less inevitable, wh

        • Filling false claims in a court and defemation are crimes. SCO / Caldera had plenty of opportunity to engage in legal business even after IBM for example:

          a) Service / support for existing SCO installations (and there are lots and lots of these)

          b) Assisting SCO customers in migrating to Linux and or NT (Unisys for example makes a ton of money helping people port old Unisys applications to NT).

          c) Buying the rights to defunct SCO applications and selling them with Caldera using the SCO compatability bin
          • Yeah, yeah, there a bunch of assholes. But it's naive to think that accusing them of "filing false claims" settles the legal argument. Nuisance lawsuits are a very profitable business. The defendents always dismiss the claims as bogus, and indeed many of them are. But proving that a claim is filed in bad faith is never easy. (If it were, the claim wouldn't have been filed!) If SCO is ever punished for its misdeeds, it will only be after somebody has spent a lot of money on a civil or criminal prosecution. I
            • Its very easy for a DA to prove that they intentionally filed a false claim. All it takes is will for the political system, and its the executive branch that needs to change. Dig up Harry Truman and make him president again :-) And no I don't think SCO will ever be punished. We don't go after white collar criminals much at all
    • No the Application Binary Interface (ABI) is the ELF format. They wanted to run linux apps without the need to recompile. Most OS's are only compliant with a subset of POSIX, I'm not sure how completely compliant linux is. There has been alot of information out about SCO's Linux Personality Kit (LPK), they have to have a complete distribution of GNU/Linux libraries in /Linux and they chroot linux processes to that. In addition they actually copy the shared library from linux to be able to use the ELF format

      • Re:ABI issues (Score:4, Informative)

        by greed ( 112493 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:43PM (#7067020)
        ELF isn't even enough to specify an ABI. ELF simply gives you the linker and loader format.

        You still have to deal with minor issues like:
        - Which way does the stack grow?
        - Which register is the stack pointer (not always dictated by the hardware, especially on RISC chips)
        - Which register is used for globals? How is global data accessed? (TOC and GOT are two techniques; load-time address mapping is another one.)
        - How are structure members laid out in memory? Padding and alignment requirements are influenced by the hardware, but that doesn't always mean the ABI is the most obvious interpretation of the hardware specs.
        - What function arguments are in registers, which are on the stack? How are "ellipsis" functions handled? How are K&R argument promotions handled? How are aggregates passed? Are small aggregates (such as char[4]) are passed in a register, on the stack, or by pointer. Same with large floats, is a quad float passed by address or value?
        - Setjmp/longjmp, how do they work?
        - How does a stack frame look? If this isn't standard, exception handling can't unwind the stack, debuggers can't do a backtrace, and so on.
        - Where's the heap? Register pointer, fixed segment, what?

        While it is possible to have an ABI that is common across operating systems on the same CPU architecture, it is impossible to have the same ABI across CPU architectures. You just can't use R31 as a stack pointer on IA32; there isn't one. You can't use SPARC register windows on PowerPC. And so on.
        • Not to mention it does just cover the very basic things. It does not say anything about e.g. hjow to talk to an LDAP server. It doesn't specify an API for snmp, or pam, or.. etc..

        • Re:ABI issues (Score:2, Informative)

          by Trepalium ( 109107 )

          While it is possible to have an ABI that is common across operating systems on the same CPU architecture, it is impossible to have the same ABI across CPU architectures.

          Not entirely. Things like Java bytecode and .NET CLR are ABIs that are portable across CPU architectures, and even OS's. Both of them, however, severely limit what forms of access you have to the machine. Writing a driver in either of them would likely be nearly impossible (if not completely impossible on some types of systems).

          The o

      • See Solaris's lxrun utility... Runs x86 linux binaries on solaris for intel.

    • Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

      by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:35PM (#7066930)
      POSIX doesn't require the OS interface to be the same. It specifies a set of functions that a programmer must be able to use, and a set of userland programs that must exist. How those functions are implemented differs greatly. Many of them don't actually exist in the OS, but are created from simpler primitives by the libc library.
    • yes, Posix certanly does not standarize everything, and it certanly does not specify an ABI, just an API.
    • The idea was to enable developers to write for both Unix and Linux with a common Application Programming Interface (API) and common Application Binary Interface (ABI).

      I thought that we already had that, and that it was called POSIX. Am I missing something here?

      (In addition to POSIX not specifying an ABI, as has already mentioned in another post.)

      Linux has a few deviations from the POSIX standard.

      Some of them are accidental: Linus didn't want to shell out for the expensive POSIX document while a star

    • Re:Huh? (Score:2)

      by erat ( 2665 )
      You're missing something, yes.

      The "common API" was essentially supposed to be whatever's on a base Linux system (like at the glibc level) plus Qt and a few other libraries, standardized on one version of the GNU toolchain... The "common ABI" (for Unixware and OpenServer, at least) was supposed to be LKP, the Linux Kernel Personality. You write your application native to Linux, then run it either on Linux or through LKP. That's not quite the same as straight POSIX development which -- as far as coding go

  • ASDF! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:16PM (#7066743)
    Okay.. we've finally done it.. that's a first.

    Two SCO stories SIDE BY SIDE on the FRONT PAGE. With no buffer.

    And to top it off, they're *both relevant*, and neither are reposts, and as far as i can tell weren't even rehashes of links posted in previous articles' comments.

    I am amazed. This is some kind of cosmic convergance. I await the falling of the stars into the sea.
  • This bit Ransom says seems very mysterious:

    I think Caldera investors who wanted a quick return pressured the management. They seem to think that short-term, possible gains are more important than long term ones, which is unfortunate.

    I wonder who these short term investors could be. Seems they're the villains in all this.

  • consistant (Score:5, Informative)

    by YouHaveSnail ( 202852 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:23PM (#7066811)
    Those comments seem pretty consistant with what Mr. Love has said in the past. Here are some other interviews he's done:

    LWN at Comdex 2000: http://old.lwn.net/2000/features/Comdex/RansomLove .php3 [lwn.net]

    Linux Journal, Aug. 2000: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406 [linuxjournal.com]

    • Those comments seem pretty consistant with what Mr. Love has said in the past.

      Which is the obvious reason he isn't with the company anymore.
      People who make self-consistent remarks have no place in SCO management.

  • Speaking of Stock price... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Erik_the_Awful ( 675368 ) * on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:25PM (#7066840) Journal
    SCO is taking on water. Looks like Wall Street finally figured out that investing in SCO == big loss. Check http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=SCOX" [yahoo.com]
    • After IBM initially filed a countersuit on August 7, SCO stock fell for about 3 days from $12 to about $8.75. That's almost %30 percent there. You could've said Wall Street was on to them earlier, but I think you're still wrong. Darl just wiped his ass called it a press release and suddenly his stock price jumped over the next few...erm, well until today.

      The more I look at it, the better the deal for Darl and Pals, they can let IBM sue them or amend their case every once in a while. They let the stock

  • Bullhonkey... (Score:5, Informative)

    by fuqqer ( 545069 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:25PM (#7066846) Homepage
    With regards to the quote..."Only the attorneys win. "

    Reginald Broughton, the Senior VP of SCO, has made approximately $1,493,650 since June 20, 2003 in stock sale.

    Man, I wish I had the balls/money to perpetuate this scam. The worst they'll get is a slap on the wrist. If the Enron execs have gotten as little punishment as they have, what makes slashdotters think that the Federal SEC is gonna give a crap. Especially since it's a puny company perpetuating a stock scam based on a computer OS barely anybody outside of the technical realm has heard of.

    Not trolling, but at least it makes a lot of publicity for Linux in the business world and no publicity is bad publicity.

    -non trolling sig- You're already read this...it's too late not to finish.
    • I dunno about just getting a slap on the wrist for this one. It feels to me like there's not a lot of tolerence for stock shenanigans anymore. What with the head of the NYSE stepping down and mounting pressure to replace the entire board of directors. I think the financial market is tired of the BS.

      Besides I don't think SCOX is quite as sophisticated in their stock scam as Enron was. I think it'll be easier to see, demonstrate and prosecute.

      Heck, I can hope for it anyway.
      • Every settlement and "executive step-down" always leaves more money in their pockets than any fines. Richard Grasso is not giving back his $140MM, The Big-4 accounting firms settled for much less than what they took from their dotcom shenanigans, and SCOX will continue to profit from their actions. Nobody will do anything about it and beyond that, I wouldn't be surprised if it was legal anyway.
    • Reginald Broughton, the Senior VP of SCO, has made approximately $1,493,650 since June 20, 2003 in stock sale... The worst they'll get is a slap on the wrist... Especially since it's a puny company perpetuating a stock scam based on a computer OS barely anybody outside of the technical realm has heard of.

      Part of me entirely agrees with you... the executives at SCO and the Canopy Group are total scum and shouldn't be allowed to get away with this. This clearly looks like a scam, and hopefully some smoking
      • If say Harry Truman were president the charges would be simple:

        Knowingly filling false information with the court,
        Encouraging investors to take actions based on information known to be false,
        etc...

        Its not hard to prosecute these kinds of crimes. A DA can supena low level people in SCO. Under oath they will state that they knew the information in the press was total BS and that their superiors knew so. Then work your way up the chain (same way you go after drug dealers).

    • Re:Bullhonkey... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by blang ( 450736 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @10:53PM (#7069539)
      The sad thing is the injustice when dealing with white collar crime. People who steal a few cars can get years of proson sentence, maybe as much as 5 years for every $10,000 they stole. Now, look at the white collar criminals. Since people really can't fathom number over one million or so, penalties are on a logarithmic scale, untill they become erratic because the really big crooks have huge legal teams.

      Steal 10,000 get 5 years
      Steal 100,000 get 10 years
      Steal 1 million get 15 years
      Steal 5 milions get 2 years
      Steal 1 billion get 4 years.
      Steal 50 billion settle for 2 billion, admit no wrongdoing and get 0 years.

      • Your forgot the biggest injustice:

        Steal a purse or wallet containing $20 and get 6 years.

        Steal a purse or wallet containing $20 and get caught three times in the wrong state, and get life.

        This is as fsked up as file swapping and riaa.
    • If they get that one in, the execs are guilty of criminal activities (i.e. Criminal Infringement of Copyright)- which could land them in at least Club Fed for 5-20.

  • Maybe I'm just cynical, (Score:4, Funny)

    by idontgno ( 624372 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:26PM (#7066854) Journal
    but it sounds a little to disingenuous to me.

    "...it's not the path I, or our group, would have gone down."

    "Not my idea, I told them it was a bad idea, I warned them, I had nothing to do with it, I wanted no part in this abortion of a business plan, please don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player." That scrambling sound you hear is everyone fleeing the foxhole as the grenade lands at their feet.

    Yeah, never mind, I'm just cynical.

  • personally i wasnt aware that IBM had backed out on its deal with the IA64 and the OS to run on it....
    i'd be pissed too...

    probably not enough to sue for IP infringement, but maybe a flaming bag of shit on IBMs doorstep....

  • New tactics (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nucleon500 ( 628631 ) <tcfelker@example.com> on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:31PM (#7066898) Homepage
    With this interview and IBM's most recent counterclaim, SCO fell [yahoo.com] about 20 precent. But I have a feeling they will bounce back.

    What we need is to group the "bad" news together. Suppose IBM filed a counterclaim, RedHat did something interesting, SCO lost something overseas, and several open source leaders made more papers (and actually publicized them). The idea would be to get the stock as far down as possible in one day. We would keep a little news in reserve to drown out their PR responses the next day. Maybe by forcing the stock price down, we'd convince speculation buyers that the house of cards is falling, and perhaps get some of the private holders to pull out.

  • And Stock (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Jack Auf ( 323064 )

    Litigation, no matter what side you're on, tears down businesses. Only the attorneys win.

    Unless of course you have stock in the company, and you sell off blocks of it after every press release.

  • Insider Trading (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zo0ok ( 209803 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:43PM (#7067018) Homepage
    The Nasdaq [nasdaq.com] site tells how many trades [nasdaq.com]there have been in SCO(X) last 3 months / 12 months.

    Last three months: 12 sells, 0 buys.

    I wonder why ;)

  • In your face, Darl! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jvollmer ( 456588 ) * on Friday September 26, 2003 @04:52PM (#7067088)
    Statement must've come out around 11:00.
    SCOX is down 17% since then.

    If it's not Consolidated Lint, It's just fuzz!

  • he's right and wrong (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dh003i ( 203189 ) <`dh003i' `at' `gmail.com'> on Friday September 26, 2003 @05:05PM (#7067214) Homepage Journal
    The GPL might be questionable in court, but for what Richard Stallman intended, it's not flawed at all.

    The second half of that statement is completely correct: for spreading FS-software, the GPL is the perfect tool.

    The first half is complete bullshit. The GPL is not in any way questionable. It is probably the most solid license in existence. The GPL is unquestionable in court because it *grants* rights not given by standard copyright law. To over-turn the GPL, you'd have to find copyright laws unconstitutional for providing too many restrictions.

    • He says "might be" because he's not a lawyer, not because he thinks the GPL actually is vulnerable in court; otherwise he probably wouldn't have complied with the license when he was in the business. His only beef with the GPL appears to be that he thinks the "simple copyleft" licenses like the LGPL and the "variations on a theme of public domain" licenses like BSD are more condusive to different business models, and thus also more condusive to non-volunteer development of projects under those licenses, tha

      • "simple copyleft" licenses like the LGPL and the "variations on a theme of public domain" licenses like BSD are more condusive to different business models, and thus also more condusive to non-volunteer development of projects under those licenses, than the GPL.

        The first part is true, but the second part after 'thus' is not and does not follow.

        A BSD licensed program, for instance, is more conducive to different business models, because it gives one the option to close the source and use it to pursue a p

    • The legal question of what constitutes a derivative work remains to be answered. So yes, the GPL is, in part, questionable in court.
      • The only possible legal interpretation of "derivative work" in the case of the GPL is any new work in which some portion or portions were previously copyrighted and released under the terms of the GPL by someone else. Copyright does not apply to ideas.
      • Derivative works of the GPL are based on GPL'ed code-base, with a few modifications. It's pretty obvious that that's a derivative work.

    • Re:he's right and wrong (Score:3, Informative)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      The GPL does not grant any rights not governed by standard copyright law. Copyright law says that you cannot distribute copies of a work without permission from those entities authorized by the copyright holder. Copyright law leaves the nature of what people should do to acquire permission *ENTIRELY* under the discretion of the copyright holder. The GPL only states what is required to obtain that permission. If you don't agree to those terms, then you don't have rights to distribute a GPL'd work. End o
      • under copyright law is that you *do not* have permission to distribute copyrighted works from the author. The GPL grants you those rights under certain terms, thus it gives you something you the legal right to do something you would not have had the right to do if you just found the software without a license.
        • Wrong.

          You appear to be misinformed about what copyright law is.

          The copyright act exists solely to prevent (or at least limit) unauthorized distribution of works protected by that act. That's all there is to it, really. The copyright act *ONLY* makes it illegal to distribute copyrighted works if one does not have permission from the copyright holder. The copyright act further leaves it up to the holder of the copyright to dictate exactly what terms or conditions he or she wishes to make on what should

  • Co-exist? Hardly. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ogerman ( 136333 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @05:17PM (#7067310)
    My belief is that Unix and Linux should co-exist and should look and feel the same to application developers.

    It's pretty silly that people still espouse this viewpoint. Every flavour of proprietary Unix is quickly dying. Linux and BSD have become technical equals and there is simply no more need for the remaining non-free "true Unix" relics. (nor is there any real money left in maintaining them) Expensive proprietary unices are why Microsoft won the desktop and was poised to conquer the server as well, had the free alternatives not risen up to save the day.

    Proprietary "Unix" is dead. End of story. There's no need to co-exist. Out with the old, in with the new. That's progress.
    • Well, the proprietary Unix implementations need to stay around until we get Linux/BSD running reliably on machines with several hundred CPUs. (and please don't point to clusters, I mean one machine with a buttload of CPU's like really high end Sun and IBM mainframes.) Thankfully we have IBM working on making Linux work in this role, but it's not there yet.

  • Irony: IHateSco Loves Love (Score:3)

    by ihatesco ( 682485 ) on Friday September 26, 2003 @05:38PM (#7067458)
    Ok a little ot before starting the comment: I laughed out loud reading the Anonymous Coward comment on the difference between Bob Goatse and Darl Mc Bride (can't find it tough :( ...)

    Anyway, back ontopic. Ransom Love's article is well written. It makes some valid points and it also shows that no matter what, in 2004 we will not hear anymore about Sco (I will rename myself ILoveLove when it will happen... well... nope, it's too stupid as nickname :D).

    The part that please me most about this article are:
    The quick recount about Project Monterrey's failure (tough it has foregone that Monterrey wasn't only a Sco and IBM venture... there was a third company in there... Sequent? Compaq? Can't remember who :() and his final words about the lawsuit devastating the company as a controlled fire gone wrong are clear and actual.

    The only thing that gets my perplexity are the fact that even under Love, Caldera was reknown for some stupid, anti-gpl errors (do you remember the "closed-source with NDA beta"?) or a mostly anti-opensource community stance (Caldera was the first distro not to have a public release... there must be a reason if today Redhat, Debian, Gentoo and Mandrake are the most known linux distros)... anyway... we can't underestimate the importance that Love's Caldera had in the Linux scenario.

    At least because with the Sco buyout demonstrated that Unix is a dying operating system that will be surpassed by linux.

    Too bad that SCO is prey of a venture that is going to play the inflate-the-price, divide-the-company, sell-the-pieces. Just like Commodore in the past...

    + + + +
    I didn't find it :(
    The trollpost I was telling you before stated more or less this... (now don't mod me down because of this...)

    Subject: what is the difference between Bob Goatse and Darl Mc Bride?
    The first HAS the widest asshole on earth
    The second IS the widest asshole on earth.

  • I'm slightly surprised but I'm willing to take his word for it.

    Caldera *did* have a good business oriented linux distro back when (1998ish). TFA really shows how things got to where they are now with only the spinmeisters left at SCO (and IBM for that matter).

    Sorry folks, no excuse to not RTFA this time, it's too good to miss.
  • "Ransom Love" sounds like the pseudonym for the frontman of a heavy metal band. Surely it can't be his birth name; it's too cool for that!

    Cooler than "Vin Diesel"? You bet your ass.

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