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Will SCO's Suit Chill the Penguin? (E-Commerce Times)Will SCO's Suit Chill the Penguin? (E-Commerce Times)Posted Jun 12, 2003 19:38 UTC (Thu) by erat (guest, #21)In reply to: Will SCO's Suit Chill the Penguin? (E-Commerce Times) by ccchips Parent article: Will SCO's Suit Chill the Penguin? (E-Commerce Times) Unfortunately, I think a bigger pipe dream would be the developer community sweeping this all under the rug. Looking back over the history of Caldera's rocky relationship with FOSS developers, I think it's safe to say that no matter what they do, it won't be enough. Caldera made major contributions to Linux back when it was a Linux company. They funded RPM 1.0 (in fact, and I hope this isn't breaking any NDA that I may be under, Red Hat didn't want to produce it; they were happy with "RPP", their Perl based packaging tool that was lifted from the Bogus Linux distro), they saved Netscape browsers on Linux (yep, they paid millions for the right to maintain it when Netscape Corp. decided Linux wasn't a viable platform. Just consider what the FOSS scene would look like had there been no Netscape browser to open-source), they contributed to XFree86 and SMP development, contributed engineering resources to kernel development (PPP, SPX, IPX, some others that I don't recall off the top of my head), participated in the formation and staffing of the LSB project, on and on and on. In spite of all of this, the bulk of comments about Caldera here and in other forums (cough*SLASHDOT*cough) is that Caldera's a parasite and never gave anything back for all the stuff they took (I don't recall Caldera taking anything in all the years I worked there; when they did something wrong, they did what they could to try to fix it. The result wasn't always better, but they honestly tried). Bringing this stuff up in discussions would shut folks up for a week or so, then after they thought it was safe to revert back to the flameage Caldera would once again be the scourge of Linux. I have completely lost my faith in the long term memory (or even handedness) in the majority of the FOSS development community. Once a company like Caldera is tattooed, that's it. Nobody cares what they've funded, what they've open sourced, what they've staffed, whatever. Someone has to be the evil one, and Caldera drew the short straw. I still maintain that SCO today is not the same company as Caldera yesterday. Caldera was a good company.
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Will SCO's Suit Chill the Penguin? (E-Commerce Times) Posted Jun 12, 2003 20:10 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link] The thing that hurt Caldera's PR was Ransom Love. He would always say things to upset people.He would say things like "Linux users don't understand PR. They should try move out of their parents basements and get jobs or something. And also the GPL is stupid. People me because I'm honest." It's funny that he's been so quiet recently. But probably wise.
Will SCO's Suit Chill the Penguin? (E-Commerce Times) Posted Jun 12, 2003 21:06 UTC (Thu) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link] I don't really know what motivates people to bash based on little or nofactual information. But I think that non-bashers were somewhat cool to the way in which per-seat licensing kept popping up at various places in Caldera's business model. The was justifiable, healthy skepticism about whether that model was ultimately viable for an open source company, and hence skepticism about Caldera's commitment to open source.
Will SCO's Suit Chill the Penguin? (E-Commerce Times) Posted Jun 12, 2003 21:42 UTC (Thu) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link] The 'The' starting the last sentence above should have been a'There'. Sorry about the typo.
Will SCO's Suit Chill the Penguin? (E-Commerce Times) Posted Jun 13, 2003 2:13 UTC (Fri) by erat (guest, #21) [Link] There's a difference, though. You're talking about licenses, and I'm talking about an OS. I'll agree that Caldera had some unorthodox views of open source and free software licensing, and in the effort of seeking middle ground between open and proprietary worlds they made a few mistakes, but at all times Caldera was a pro-Linux company.
Will SCO's Suit Chill the Penguin? (E-Commerce Times) Posted Jun 13, 2003 2:59 UTC (Fri) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link] I'm talking about one key factor for why they had less than stellar P.R. with theLinux/open source community. That factor was intimately intertwined with with the community's general lack of trust. In retrospect, the community was kind of correct because the owners of company took it in a number of different directions when they decided that was a better way for them to make a buck (embedded DOS alternative, proprietary Unix, etc.). I'm not disagreeing with the points that people may have a) treated Caldera unfairly and b) shortchanged or been unaware of their contributions. But I'm saying that there were things about Caldera that always set them apart from the other Linux companies in a way that made them seem less committed to both Linux and the direction in which the bulk of the community wanted Linux to go.
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