Honestly, Groklaw was one of the most awesome outcomes for good to come out of the whole SCO fiasco, and it was almost entirely down to PJ. Good on her for focusing on principles rather than personalities. She seems to have maintained her personal privacy, which is entirely fitting. For me, Groklaw was one of the last bastions of the "old" internet. The site is still there for anyone who wants a fantastic understanding of the legal issues and discussions around FOSS licensed software. She made a difference. Thanks PJ!
I think the best way out for SCO was if IBM bought them. But, if IBM did so, other companies could try the same attack in other opportunities. So, IBM took a route that could crush it to death, but we are almost two decades after it all began and the zombie has not been shot in the head. Hope the case effectively finishes this time.
It is really a shame. Caldera looked like a good distro:
Caldera was a decent distro in its day. It had some potential (it was funded initially by Ray Noorda's Canopy VC which gave it a little leg up), but its fall off/acquisition by SCO was fast, hard and ugly.
It was other way around. SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) sold off its UNIX business to Caldera, and renamed itself Tarantella (it was sold to Sun some years later). After some business failures Darl McBride took over as CEO in Caldera, renamed Caldera to TSG (The SCO Group) and started these lawsuits.
Truly the company with the best name and shittiest business model (post 2003).
It's too bad they ended up going that way. We used SCO OpenServer back in the late 90s and early 00s because it was a UNIX that ran on consumer PC equipment. That was a really big deal for installs in rural and remote sites where accessing custom hardware from Sun or SGI or whoever might've been tricky.
It was an interesting time, because seemingly overnight SCO went from being the company that made UNIX for the little guy into the biggest heels on the internet. We migrated most of our customers over to Red Hat and Postgres (from OpenServer/Informix), but still had some SCO sites running when I moved on in 2006ish. I can't imagine anyone moving back now. Linux killed them, and after how they behaved it's hard to shed a tear.
I used to work for a regional distributor for SCO, and my first Unix related job was to support SCO products. It was a nice product at a time when Linux was just starting to become capable of running server workloads.
Even though I had long left the SCO world when all the lawsuits happened, but I still felt disappointed that it had come to that.
I'm not sure how long the sad shell that is now Xinuos can last. I poked around their website, and it's like a ghost town with empty employment pages, partner list pages that require a login, and the last news item prior to this lawsuit is "Xinuos Releases 2019 Year in Review".
Some companies have the possibility to survive because of clients which are dependent on their solutions. The OpenServer case includes big names like fujitsu, mcdonalds and kwait petroleum: https://web.archive.org/web/20040207073246/http://www.sco.co...
I'm sure it's possible they are still using it, but that's just saying McDonald's used it in 2004.
For example, even this current page http://www.sco.com/5reasons/ has a claim that McDonald's is using it. But the quote is from John Doty, who last worked at McDonalds in 2001.
Edit: Googling around a bit, it seems like they switched to something called "New-POS", which runs on Windows. It was originally from a company called Savista, later re-named Torex. The software was purchased outright with source code and is now maintained in-house, and called "NP6". So it seems unlikely McDonald's has any real amount of SCO left. Apparently McDonald's was their largest client, so that's notable.
Is your complaint 'Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to "Unix and Unix-related patents"'?
If so, this seems like very reasonable 'leave us alone' money that absolutely shouldn't be required but I can completely understand why they paid that to make the problem go away as a business decision in the world we currently live in. I'd probably have done the same myself.
Why criticise them for protecting themselves?
Do you think this funded SCO's legal activities further? $6M seems like a very very small amount for this kind of legal action and I can't imagine it funded anything except the paperwork required to get them to pay it. How many corporate lawyers does $6M pay for? Not many.
AFAIK, microsoft was never threatened by SCO and the payment was entirely voluntary. So, they were effectively giving money to a group that was attacking open source and free software.
Maybe you know more than I do, but Microsoft has always had services running on unix-like systems - even back then I'm sure they had Linux servers in places. So they know they would have been next. $6M was just administrative money for them back then and they would have just paid it to make it a non-issue.
And again, $6M isn't really funding any serious legal action, is it? A couple of lawyers' lunch expenses, maybe!
I'm 32 and the original SCO drama was _barely_ within my comprehension at the time it occurred: another thread reminded me of it, the poster seemed overwrought, my first reaction was "hah that's silly, it wasn't _that_ conspiratorial"...spent about an hour doing a deep dive on it, and yeah, it was pretty bad, $8 mil is the tip of the iceberg. Lotta intentional nonsense, and I'm not exactly wedded to FOSS ideals
The current CEO of Microsoft was an executive VP with then 10 years of work with Microsoft at the beginning of the scandal as well it seems a strange ask to for us to imagine that an executive who looked the other way during criminal conspiracy is supposed to be leading the new more ethical Microsoft.
I think they are still in the Embrace and Extend phases, putting a lot of work into the Linux kernel to make sure it plays well with Windows machines so bringing Azure tons of money, adding WSL so that devs don't need to switch to bare-metal Linux in order to do their work, making GitHub's position stronger so that all Open Source development is concentrated on their platform. This is all a coherent strategy aiming at maximizing value while controlling the situation (making sure Linux is unbootable after you install Windows next to it etc.).
What would be the first stages of the Extinguish stage? If I were them, I would start from neutralizing Stallman. He is the pillar of Free Software, a smart hacker who created GCC and devoted his life towards values that are completely at odds with Microsoft's vision. I would use every occasion to discredit him and eliminate him from exerting any influence.
It seems TSG was bleeding around $7M per quarter, and legal fees with Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP were capped at $31M [0]. Microsoft seems to paid more than $6M, eg. this article [1] cites $16.6M figure. It should be possible to check these amounts in SEC fillings, but it is cumbersome, there isn't single summary table but multiple fillings mention various payments in different quarters. [2]
It seems that licensing fees from Microsoft were not insignificant part of litigation costs.
More than the $6M direct from Microsoft, was them using their influence to acquire more than an order of magnitude more cash from VC funds.
> I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar.
> ...
> Microsoft also indicated there was a lot more money out there and they would clearly rather use Baystar "like" entities to help us get signifigantly more money if we want to grow further or do acquisitions
They offered to underwrite a 50 million dollar investment in a lawsuit and helped them raise 10s of millions more to fund what they knew enough to know was a felony pump and dump scam and a criminal attack on their competitors.
There isn't much daylight between what they did and a restaurateur paying the mafia to burn their competitor out of business if the mafia employed arsonists so incompetent they tried to effect their crime in broad daylight with zippos.
Keep in mind that while people are talking about the new and improved Microsoft that current ceo Satya Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 whereas this whole SCO debacle begins 10 years later while he was working in a leadership role within Microsoft.
The criminal culture never left Microsoft and their current leadership is at best tolerant of criminal acts.
I think you are going too far. Microsoft has been using tons of immoral and unethical actions, but most of the time they were trying to cover their asses and avoid doing anything illegal. Of course their aggressive strategy means they were often investigated and lost their cases in court, but in this particular case, I bet they played it in a way that nobody could make a legal case against them, even though what they did is public knowledge.
Dang. In all this time, I've always wondered why it was worth the money to pursue this litigation. I knew that the execs at SCO were making money through the whole thing, but I never paid attention to the stock price, and insider trading. That makes a lot of sense. It's probably too hard to go back and research that angle now. Do you have any links to such information?
In all honesty, the first smartphones comparable to the iPhone were Windows Phones. The problem is that the low responsiveness, the unintuitive Desktop computer style UI, need for a stylus, the high weight, the ugly designs, the fragile screens and lack of an app store made them in practice unusable for the common person.
The original SCO case dragged on because the law firm screwed-up and foolishly offered their services for free, indefinitely. This time around, I can't imagine Xinuos will stumble upon such an amazing deal and instead will have to bleed money to fund an obviously hopeless lawsuit.
You're asking for details from ages ago. Not many sources still online and not easy to find.
"[SCO] has cut a deal with the law firm Boise Schiller and Flexner to cap its legal fees at a maximum of $31 million in return for the legal lads getting a bigger cut of the spoils should they win."
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2325008/sco-s-case-does...
"In return for agreeing to cap its legal fees, Boise, Schiller & Flexner is now entitled to a larger percentage of any legal settlement that may be reached in SCO's lawsuit over IBM's contributions to the Linux operating system. The law firm will now be paid between 20% and 30% of any settlement, depending on the amount awarded, McBride said."
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566954/sco-caps-legal...
This is actually kind of great. Now that Linux is a hyper-corporate big name OS with everybody from Huawei to MS being Platinum Level Foundation Members, I'm ready for an excellent legal fight.
The only thing more ridiculous than this lawsuit is my first thought - that it's a karmic punishment for IBM/RH for stopping donations for the FSF and joining the anti-Stallman mob.
Facepalm. I don't know what b-school geniuses think it's a good idea to revive this, but the execs at what-became-a-holding-company of SCO made millions throughout the trial, so I guess it makes sense to someone, somewhere, in a twisted, patent-troll like way. Maybe it's just that the claims are so grand, that, if they can get a fraction of the damages they claim, they'll get a return on the litigation investment.
As someone who was trying to evangelize Linux in my Fortune 250 at the time, I was dismayed by this whole saga, because it had its intended effect. One particular manager (who simply didn't like me) used news of the trial to cast FUD on my efforts to promote that we should be doing more with Linux, and less with Windows.
I've read every bit of news on this. I digested Groklaw daily at the time. I've bitched about it time and time again on this forum, and many others. In all of this reporting and commenting, I've never seen any reference to WHO was behind helping SCO, inside of Microsoft. I want to know who the people were that made these decisions, and greenlit the transfer of money. I want f*king names. I mean, I'm sure Bill and Steve had to sign off on the amount of money involved, but who engineered it, and brought it to them? I want to know what else they've done in their career. Were they professional hatchet men? Or were they otherwise successful product people?
67 comments
[ 34.1 ms ] story [ 2449 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243081
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
http://groklaw.net/
It is really a shame. Caldera looked like a good distro:
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sco
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2013/03/27/caldera-open-l...
It was other way around. SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) sold off its UNIX business to Caldera, and renamed itself Tarantella (it was sold to Sun some years later). After some business failures Darl McBride took over as CEO in Caldera, renamed Caldera to TSG (The SCO Group) and started these lawsuits.
It's too bad they ended up going that way. We used SCO OpenServer back in the late 90s and early 00s because it was a UNIX that ran on consumer PC equipment. That was a really big deal for installs in rural and remote sites where accessing custom hardware from Sun or SGI or whoever might've been tricky.
It was an interesting time, because seemingly overnight SCO went from being the company that made UNIX for the little guy into the biggest heels on the internet. We migrated most of our customers over to Red Hat and Postgres (from OpenServer/Informix), but still had some SCO sites running when I moved on in 2006ish. I can't imagine anyone moving back now. Linux killed them, and after how they behaved it's hard to shed a tear.
Even though I had long left the SCO world when all the lawsuits happened, but I still felt disappointed that it had come to that.
For example, even this current page http://www.sco.com/5reasons/ has a claim that McDonald's is using it. But the quote is from John Doty, who last worked at McDonalds in 2001.
Edit: Googling around a bit, it seems like they switched to something called "New-POS", which runs on Windows. It was originally from a company called Savista, later re-named Torex. The software was purchased outright with source code and is now maintained in-house, and called "NP6". So it seems unlikely McDonald's has any real amount of SCO left. Apparently McDonald's was their largest client, so that's notable.
They weren't the only company to have a bit of difficulty in 2020.
If so, this seems like very reasonable 'leave us alone' money that absolutely shouldn't be required but I can completely understand why they paid that to make the problem go away as a business decision in the world we currently live in. I'd probably have done the same myself.
Why criticise them for protecting themselves?
Do you think this funded SCO's legal activities further? $6M seems like a very very small amount for this kind of legal action and I can't imagine it funded anything except the paperwork required to get them to pay it. How many corporate lawyers does $6M pay for? Not many.
And again, $6M isn't really funding any serious legal action, is it? A couple of lawyers' lunch expenses, maybe!
What would be the first stages of the Extinguish stage? If I were them, I would start from neutralizing Stallman. He is the pillar of Free Software, a smart hacker who created GCC and devoted his life towards values that are completely at odds with Microsoft's vision. I would use every occasion to discredit him and eliminate him from exerting any influence.
It seems that licensing fees from Microsoft were not insignificant part of litigation costs.
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566954/sco-caps-legal... [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2563673/update--micros... [2] https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/#/q=Microsoft&dateRange=all...
> I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar.
> ...
> Microsoft also indicated there was a lot more money out there and they would clearly rather use Baystar "like" entities to help us get signifigantly more money if we want to grow further or do acquisitions
http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween10.html
Microsoft was obviously playing a very significant role in their funding, more than would be expected of someone just paying licensing fees.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2820340/baystar-exec-s...
They offered to underwrite a 50 million dollar investment in a lawsuit and helped them raise 10s of millions more to fund what they knew enough to know was a felony pump and dump scam and a criminal attack on their competitors.
There isn't much daylight between what they did and a restaurateur paying the mafia to burn their competitor out of business if the mafia employed arsonists so incompetent they tried to effect their crime in broad daylight with zippos.
Keep in mind that while people are talking about the new and improved Microsoft that current ceo Satya Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 whereas this whole SCO debacle begins 10 years later while he was working in a leadership role within Microsoft.
The criminal culture never left Microsoft and their current leadership is at best tolerant of criminal acts.
I think you are going too far. Microsoft has been using tons of immoral and unethical actions, but most of the time they were trying to cover their asses and avoid doing anything illegal. Of course their aggressive strategy means they were often investigated and lost their cases in court, but in this particular case, I bet they played it in a way that nobody could make a legal case against them, even though what they did is public knowledge.
"[SCO] has cut a deal with the law firm Boise Schiller and Flexner to cap its legal fees at a maximum of $31 million in return for the legal lads getting a bigger cut of the spoils should they win." https://www.networkworld.com/article/2325008/sco-s-case-does...
"In return for agreeing to cap its legal fees, Boise, Schiller & Flexner is now entitled to a larger percentage of any legal settlement that may be reached in SCO's lawsuit over IBM's contributions to the Linux operating system. The law firm will now be paid between 20% and 30% of any settlement, depending on the amount awarded, McBride said." https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566954/sco-caps-legal...
Maybe instead of the monkeys and other stuff, MS logo appears from the middle of the Jumanji game board?! :D
When the SCO lawsuit unfolded I was always looking forward for the Friday afternoon threads on heise about the latest news about that suitcase.
As someone who was trying to evangelize Linux in my Fortune 250 at the time, I was dismayed by this whole saga, because it had its intended effect. One particular manager (who simply didn't like me) used news of the trial to cast FUD on my efforts to promote that we should be doing more with Linux, and less with Windows.
I've read every bit of news on this. I digested Groklaw daily at the time. I've bitched about it time and time again on this forum, and many others. In all of this reporting and commenting, I've never seen any reference to WHO was behind helping SCO, inside of Microsoft. I want to know who the people were that made these decisions, and greenlit the transfer of money. I want f*king names. I mean, I'm sure Bill and Steve had to sign off on the amount of money involved, but who engineered it, and brought it to them? I want to know what else they've done in their career. Were they professional hatchet men? Or were they otherwise successful product people?