SCO v. IBM reopened
SCO v. IBM reopened
Posted Jun 16, 2013 15:39 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)Parent article: SCO v. IBM reopened
Who is a clever bunch? I've lost track. It's probably worth going over the whole history, since many who followed Groklaw even back when it mattered, might not be aware of the earlier parts.
Xenix was a Microsoft effort to get into Unix, which it then saw as the future of the computer server. This is a bit before my time, so I can't really say much about it from personal experience. Microsoft lost interest, and sold the Xenix trade name, copyrights, etc. to a small group called the Santa Cruz Operation. And for many years what SCO was to me was a respectable company doing a good job of keeping Unix alive on x86. In retrospect, what they were effectively doing was keeping Unix alive on x86 until Linux and the *BSDs were ready. My life as a Unix'Linux advocate would likely have been very different had it not been for the Santa Cruz Operation (usually known just as "SCO"). I suppose I might be pushing Microsoft solutions today had it not been for their efforts.
Novell bought... something... in the early 90s with the intent of killing Unix, and then sold... something... to SCO in 1995. Whatever it was, it allowed them access to AT&T Unix System V v4 technology, in the form of Novell's UnixWare product.
Times got tough for SCO, when Linux began to mature. And the upper management came to realize that the game was up. They could not compete with Linux. Someone at SCO published a letter, or was quoted in the press, portraying Linux developers as a bunch of stringy-long-haired hippies that you wouldn't want to trust your business to. This provoked the response you'd pretty much expect (total outrage) from our OSS community. And the CEO of SCO (I think it was still founder, Doug Michaels) acted swiftly, issuing a personal letter of apology to the Linux developers in particular, and OSS community in general, for that faltering of demeanor on the part of the company he managed. (I was quite impressed with the honesty and candidness exhibited in the letter.) SCO was, at that time, managed by people of integrity, who realized that they were beat by a competitor which they didn't have the means to fight. And they ended up surrendering gracefully.
At about this time (2000) Linux company "Caldera Systems" decided that they could benefit from access to the more mature technologies in SCO Open Server 5 and UnixWare. It wasn't a totally crazy idea, as Linux did have notable shortcomings as an enterprise OS back them. They bought the Santa Cruz Operation's OS division. And the Santa Cruz Operation's guys went off to continue development on their "Tarantella" project, which was a sort of thin-client thing that they thought they had a better chance of succedding with. I'm not sure. But I think they did manage reasonable success, and ended up being bought by Sun for a reasonable amount of money (IIRC).
Now Caldera's then-CEO, Ransom Love, was not a bad guy. But he was popularly vilified in the Linux community for having had the audacity to say that, in his opinion, there were times that BSD was a more appropriate license, for particular kinds of software, than was GPL. Caldera was a great company which did a lot for business Linux back in the late 90s and very early 2000s. And in my opinion, it was, like the Santa Cruz Operation, managed by people of integrity. Right up the time that management team was ousted.
In 2002, the "shit really hit the fan", as they say. Love and his management team were ousted. (No satisfying reasons for this were ever given. Ransom said he "wanted to spend more time with his family".) A new team was put into place, headed by Darl McBride, and Caldera switched gears entirely. The company's name was changed to "The SCO Group". And this is when the grand old name of "SCO" started getting dragged through the mud. Note that this is not only a completely different company than "Old SCO", but a completely different cast of characters than the original Caldera. It's bad enough that one good company's name has been besmirched by "The SCO Group". But Caldera was destroyed by the same cancer as besmirched the SCO name.
I suppose most people know the rest. If not, the story is covered in gory detail over at Groklaw, if you have the stomach for that kind of reading. Darl was eventually ousted. There was a bankruptcy (The SCO Group's) several years ago. (Section 11? 7? Does it matter? There wasn't much left to reorganize or to salvage.) Somebody else bought the remains of SCO. I assumed that it was all over. And, of course, it is, any real sense, since none of it really matters anymore.
I've lost track and pretty much stopped caring. I have no idea who "SCO" is today, or how clever they might or might not be.
Anyway, that's my personal recollection of this epic saga in the history of Unix on x86, which involved so many different casts of characters over the many years. Good people, with impressive personal integrity, villains, and lots and lots of folks who were just ordinary people, doing their jobs at the various incarnations of these companies.
Posted Jun 16, 2013 19:19 UTC (Sun)
by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
[Link]
Thanks for the informative post—I never knew SCO could trace its history to Microsoft's Xenix (but that doesn't surprise me). Linux enjoys a lot of success these days, but, alas, that is sour grapes for some companies. Can't Linux co-exist peacefully with other Unices?
Posted Jun 16, 2013 19:37 UTC (Sun)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 16, 2013 19:54 UTC (Sun)
by stumbles (guest, #8796)
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Posted Jun 16, 2013 23:38 UTC (Sun)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (29 responses)
Posted Jun 17, 2013 2:47 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
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Posted Jun 17, 2013 8:10 UTC (Mon)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link] (26 responses)
Posted Jun 17, 2013 12:36 UTC (Mon)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (25 responses)
Details of the relationship between SCO, Tarantella, The SCO Group and Caldera are, of course, already described in the detailed comment earlier in the thread. For the casual observer, it is perhaps more accurate to regard the litigious party as "Caldera", and a point I was making was that there may have been intent amongst certain parties to marginalise Linux both at Novell and later at "Caldera", perhaps because of a belief that it "wasn't fair" that GNU/Linux could just come along and take away the market share of "official Unix" without paying dues to the owner of Unix.
In other words, at Novell there may have been a desire amongst some to kick Linux out and have nothing to do with it, perhaps out of delusions that "official Unix" was the superior product and that Linux might even go away without big vendor support, and later at "Caldera" there seems to have been a view that if people really want Linux then they should have to go via "Caldera" to get it. Naturally, the former plan failed because a big vendor in the form of IBM came along and gave Linux a big push, being joined later by the likes of Novell. It shouldn't be a huge surprise that IBM and Novell later become embroiled in the litigation featured in the latter plan.
Posted Jun 17, 2013 13:17 UTC (Mon)
by viro (subscriber, #7872)
[Link] (21 responses)
FWIW, what I suspect (and obviously cannot prove) is that SCO went to MS, Sun *and* IBM with the same pitch. Basically, "we are choosing the target for lawsuit; merits, shmerits - you decide whether you want your product being attacked in court and by massive smear campaign or you'd rather see that done to product of your competitors". Stick and carrot, the latter being the competitors being ones to get hit instead... MS and Sun folded, IBM decided to fight it out and SCO hadn't backed off until it was too late.
Posted Jun 17, 2013 14:09 UTC (Mon)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (4 responses)
It's probably just as well to reiterate that the company who sued IBM was not »SCO« (as in »The Santa Cruz Operation«) but (Caldera renamed to) »The SCO Group«.
From what we hear, the original Santa Cruz Operation in their time (before the Caldera/Tarantella split) were basically good guys who don't deserve their name to become tarnished by the later sleazefest, even if »The SCO Group« tried to benefit from the original SCO's reputation.
Posted Jun 17, 2013 18:02 UTC (Mon)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
Just as there were two SCOs, there were also two (or more) Calderas.
Cheers,
Posted Jun 17, 2013 18:20 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
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Posted Jun 18, 2013 17:57 UTC (Tue)
by shentino (guest, #76459)
[Link] (1 responses)
History will remember the old sco as the ones who sold out to caldera and gave them the ammo.
Posted Jun 18, 2013 18:20 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
And this is part of the problem
The Caldera that the old SCO sold things to was a strong Linux company. It was only later, after a management change that they turned evil.
There was no reason at all to be concerned about the sale to Caldera at the time it happened.
Posted Jun 17, 2013 17:58 UTC (Mon)
by JoeF (guest, #4486)
[Link] (15 responses)
Posted Jun 17, 2013 20:03 UTC (Mon)
by viro (subscriber, #7872)
[Link] (14 responses)
As for "way better" part... I can only admire your ability to make distinction between one pile of garbage and another such pile. I've used both and there's too much CP/M in all of them. Junk is junk...
Posted Jun 17, 2013 20:05 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (13 responses)
Posted Jun 17, 2013 21:05 UTC (Mon)
by viro (subscriber, #7872)
[Link] (12 responses)
It implemented things that would be a part of the kernel on any sane OS, ran with the priveleges equal to those of what passed for kernel there and dealt with very crappy userland running with the same priveleges and not shy of messing with the hardware directly. Trying to debug such a thing is a job for masochists and they apparently had failed. I had very little contact with that thing, but I'd seen enough hangs and crashes. I can believe that DR-DOS had been close enough to give more or less the same frequency of crashes when combined with that thing, but in the place of MS masoch^Wdevelopers I would try very hard to filter out all bug reports of that kind. OTOH, I can't imagine being desperate enough to work on such project in the first place...
Said that, my memories of that story had been of "nasty message" variety; it had been a long time ago and having seen the wonderful stability of aforementioned Windows I never had been interested in it - *DOS had been able to run text editor, C compiler and uucp clone, so lousy as it had been it was usable for some work and adding a crash-prone multitasker and GUI had been very low on my wishlist... I had dealt with DR-DOS (they had the damn thing installed in a school where I taught an after-hours optional class for a couple of years) and from what I remember it was just as lousy as MS-DOS. TBH, I'd rather forget both sorry excuses of an OS, along with all the shite spawned by CP/M...
Posted Jun 17, 2013 21:35 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (11 responses)
But for those of us who did not have access to real *nix machines DR-DOS had numerous advantages over MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 was a significant step forward.
Also remember that at that point in time, Windows was not an OS, it was a shell running on top of DOS, including on the pre-386 x86 machines that could not do a good job of providing the OS safety you are used to.
A license for Xenix of Unix cost several thousand dollars (I remember being thrilled at being able to pick up a copy for "only" $1000 at a clearance sale when I got my first 386 computer around '94). I discovered Linux shortly after that, but was not able to make really good use of it for a couple more years due to video limitations. There's only so much you could do with Linux in those days without a graphics display or an Internet connection.
This wasn't checking a hash of the kernel, this was a simple check for the string MS-DOS at one particular address. And this wasn't in a beta, this was in the finished retail version. (although, you could argue that Windows is still in an extended public Beta, but that's a different discussion ;-p )
Posted Jun 17, 2013 22:36 UTC (Mon)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
The response from Microsoft was to tie two separate products and undermine any remaining pretense of product interoperability on the PC platform. One can always claim that a vendor has no obligation to make its products work with anything other than ones it prefers, but when that vendor indulges in anticompetitive behaviour in other areas, any tying of products should be scrutinised properly and in a timely fashion, not years after the damage has been done.
(And in case anyone cares, I never used DOS in any serious way. A lot of people who grew up using microcomputers regarded DOS as a complete joke, presumably because they only ever got to see the Microsoft version and not the ones that tried to evolve with the availability of increased computing power and hardware functionality.)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 12:23 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (8 responses)
Wikipedia disagrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
Larry Osterman has a blog entry from 2004 that has a little more: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2004/08/12/...
Posted Jun 18, 2013 12:27 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 15:17 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
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Posted Jun 18, 2013 13:51 UTC (Tue)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (2 responses)
Certainly, if by "clone" it is meant that something behaves like something else, then things like DR-DOS were clones, but the negative connotations of the word denies the origins of MS-DOS and the viability of the other DOS products. It almost asserts that the only legitimate DOS product was Microsoft's own.
Given that microcomputer technology stacks were often tightly integrated, with the hardware, operating system and applications often originating from or being delivered by the same vendor, the reaction to the AARD code is an indication of how attitudes were gradually changing, leading to what I'd like to think is a more enlightened perspective on such matters that many people have today.
Posted Jun 18, 2013 14:49 UTC (Tue)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (1 responses)
MS-DOS started out as a »clone«, or, more exactly, a reimplementation of CP/M for the 8088 processor. (CP/M was originally for the 8080/Z80 series of 8-bit microprocessors.) This actually made reasonable sense at the time since the 8088 assembly language was close enough to that of the Z80 to allow for automatic transliteration of existing (Z80) CP/M programs to 8088 assembly; the only thing needed was a way of making the system calls work, and that was exactly what MS-DOS provided.
Various advanced features like a hierarchical directory scheme and stream-oriented IO (both arguably inspired by Unix) only came along with MS-DOS 2, which is why many software packages at the time stipulated a minimum requirement of »MS-DOS 2.11«. This is why we have »\« as a path separator on MS-DOS/Windows, since »/« was already spoken for through MS-DOS's heritage from CP/M (and further back to the DEC operating systems that inspired CP/M).
Digital Research (the company behind CP/M) actually came out with a version for the 8088 and 8086 processors called CP/M-86, but that never really went anywhere because of the success of the IBM PC (with PC-DOS a.k.a. MS-DOS). There were various 808x-based computers in the 1980s that weren't actually compatible to the IBM PC, and these generally used MS-DOS (rather than »PC-DOS«, which was the same but for the IBM PC) or CP/M-86, among other less important operating systems.
Posted Jun 18, 2013 16:34 UTC (Tue)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
I'm sure you have more hands-on familiarity with CP/M and DOS (from different vendors), whereas my experiences were with other microcomputer operating systems, but it's interesting to note that it was Digital Research DOS Plus that was shipped on the Amstrad PC1512 (which was rather successful in the UK and Europe), and Concurrent DOS was also offered for some systems.
Certainly, Digital Research were a viable competitor to Microsoft in a market that itself had only developed because of cloning of the original hardware platform.
Posted Jun 18, 2013 15:16 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
I never had access to any beta software from Microsoft, but I did buy and run DR-DOS and Windows 3.x
I ran into this bug personally and had to patch to work around it.
Posted Jun 18, 2013 15:21 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 19:24 UTC (Tue)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
And like the GP - I wasn't using beta software - I had no access to it. I fail to see how you can accuse him of mis-remembering something as big and unusual as manually patching a commercial binary.
Cheers,
Posted Jun 22, 2013 9:02 UTC (Sat)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
You get the same phenomenon when someone buys an expensive car. It's night impossible to get him to admit any serious car default while the budget scars are still bleeding.
Posted Jun 18, 2013 12:23 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 13:08 UTC (Tue)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (1 responses)
The stuff that belonged to Novell (UnixWare and the USL copyrights) presumably still belongs to Novell, since The SCO Group never actually owned it; they just owned some distribution rights (although they pretended otherwise in the »SCO vs. IBM« lawsuit).
I don't know about SCO OpenServer, a.k.a. SCO Unix; according to Wikipedia that hasn't yet been sold off.
Posted Jun 18, 2013 13:52 UTC (Tue)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
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Posted Jun 17, 2013 9:48 UTC (Mon)
by fandom (subscriber, #4028)
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Posted Jun 17, 2013 12:55 UTC (Mon)
by xtifr (guest, #143)
[Link] (9 responses)
SCO v. IBM reopened
SCO v. IBM reopened
I have often thought since it became clear what the SCO executives, their lawyers, Microsoft and wasn't there a bank or two involved (?) were doing. If "ordinary" folk like us tried such a scheme we would have been arrested in short thrift for racketeering, failure to follow company bylaws, theft and any other similar skulduggery type actions.
SCO v. IBM reopened
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Caldera was not Caldera
Wol
Caldera was not Caldera
SCO v. IBM reopened
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With Windows 3, MS didn't allow it to run if the OS was DR-DOS.
I have been around at that time, and saw the message box.
That was classic Microsoft anti-competitive behavior.
DR-DOS was way better than MS-DOS.
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Wol
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Some minor (but possibly important) corrections to an otherwise decent summary:
SCO v. IBM reopened
Novell bought... something... in the early 90s with the intent of killing Unix
What they bought was Unix System Laboratories, a spin-off AT&T had launched to manage the Unix business, since AT&T was forbidden from entering the OS market because of their consent decree.
As for "intent of killing Unix"--I think Novell was more concerned with Microsoft. Novell's founder and chairman, Ray Noorda, hated Bill Gates with a deep and abiding passion. Windows for Workgroups (aka Win3.1), the first version of Windows with built-in networking, had just been released a year earlier, and was threatening Novell's dominance over the LAN. I don't think Novell wanted to kill Unix; I think they wanted to investigate the possibility of using it to flank MS.
Now Caldera's then-CEO, Ransom Love, was not a bad guy. But he was popularly vilified in the Linux community for having had the audacity to say that, in his opinion, there were times that BSD was a more appropriate license, for particular kinds of software, than was GPL.Hardly. He was vilified for not seeming to care about free software at all, and for pandering to the suits instead of the community. Preferring BSD licenses over the GPL was hardly something people were vilified for. Caldera's first product, before they got into the OS business, was a non-free desktop environment, the Caldera Network Desktop. And Caldera OpenLinux came with a proprietary X server instead of XFree86, and was bundled with the non-free Motif libraries. No source code at all for these products, under either BSD or copyleft, was provided.
Other vendors had small, non-free bits. SuSE and Mandrake both had installation and/or configuration tools that were proprietary and lacked source. But Caldera went way beyond that, and that is the main reason they were vilified.
Posted Jun 17, 2013 13:59 UTC (Mon)
by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
[Link] (4 responses)
As for Novell being intent on defending against MS, rather than on killing Unix, you may be right. I suspect it was probably both. BTW, Windows 3.1 is not the same as "Windows for Workgroups". Windows for Workgroups was a different product, and the most commonly referenced version is 3.11. Windows 3.1 users were still downloading Trumpet Winsock and the Spyglass browser if they needed more than Netbui.
I strongly disagree with what you say about Ransom Love. He clearly did care about OSS. The original Caldera management cared. But when your job is to promote OSS as a business, with employees expecting paychecks, things are a lot more complicated than promoting OSS from an armchair in your living room. No one, not even Red Hat, had a clue about OSS business models back then. (Red Hat execs back then said that they expected 80% of their future revenue to come from a Netscape-style portal.)
The majority of FOSS advocates, then and now, are of the home living room variety. (Linux is strongest as a server, but most users and FOSS advocates you see in forums are home users.) And use terms like "freedom software" in a very idealistic way. But just watch them when their employer misses getting them a paycheck. The original Caldera experimented with ways to balance idealism with pragmatism. So does Red Hat today. When you're running a business and have concrete financial responsibilities, and are doing it in unexplored territory, you can't always act in a way which pleases the armchair idealists. With real-world experience, you can get better at it, though. A lot has happened between then and now.
Posted Jun 17, 2013 16:44 UTC (Mon)
by xtifr (guest, #143)
[Link] (1 responses)
As for Love, I admired the man. I wasn't trying to criticize him. I was explaining why people who criticized him did so. It had nothing to do with his liking for BSD licenses.
Posted Jun 17, 2013 23:08 UTC (Mon)
by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
[Link]
Not much, to be honest. Only my perceptions at the time. You were quite correct to remind me that Microsoft was their immediately threatening executioner. As a Unix proponent at the time, I was more concerned about their sudden turn from interest in DOS to interest in Unix. Corporate interests tend to be so ephemeral. I've never been able to figure them out.
Regarding Love... well... I see him as neither a hero nor a villain. He was a manager, doing the best he could do, in an interesting and challenging environment. Ordinary people doing the best they can are routinely both over and under rated by our community.
Posted Jun 17, 2013 17:02 UTC (Mon)
by ezrec (guest, #67736)
[Link] (1 responses)
If it were true, it would explain why MS was so gung-ho on threads....
Posted Jun 17, 2013 18:23 UTC (Mon)
by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
[Link]
Of course, Microsoft dropped the POSIX subsystem like a hot potato once the government procurement requirement for POSIX compliance (FIPS 151-2) went away. It was no great loss, because the POSIX subsystem wasn't actually useful for anything.
Posted Jun 17, 2013 17:59 UTC (Mon)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Yes it did have a proprietary licence, but that was to prevent derivatives, not to prevent people exercising (most of) the GNU freedoms.
Cheers,
Posted Jun 17, 2013 18:28 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
As someone who was using Linux in business at that time, I can say that both of these things were seen as advantages, not disadvantages.
There was quite a bit of commercial Motif software around and Lestif was not always good enough to work (and definitely not good enough to be able to get support from the software vendors)
Similarly, at that point in time XFree86 was not as good in many ways as the proprietary X servers that were in use.
things have changed since then. Letif has matured, a lot of the commercial software that depended on Motif has vanished (replaced by free software in most cases), and XFree86/x.org has matured.
Caldera Linux also shipped with a copy of WordPerfect.
But at the time, these decisions were fairly reasonable attempts at making the Linux desktop be a good replacement for the commercial *nix desktops.
As it turned out, software vendors decided to ignore OS capabilities and take the attitude that they supprted software running on RedHat only (with a small percentage of more enlightened ones supporting SuSE, and a tiny fraction supporting more). Caldera also made other mistakes that kept them from succeeding widely.
But at the time they were doing good work on Linux (including in the kernel), and when they purchased SCO and announced that they were releasing the Unix codebase (which they did), and would work on integrating features that companies were asking about from Unix to Linux, this was seen as a good thing.
Remember that at the time, SCO Unix had a very wide market penetration in business Point of Sale systems. The Caldera plan to migrate those users to Linux was a reasonable strategy to try and take. Unfortunately the reluctance to upgrade, the end of the .com bubble, and other similar things lead to the management change. And it was the new management team (with McBride running things) that took what was a good, but struggling Linux company and changed it to what SCO is today.
Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:38 UTC (Wed)
by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
[Link]
By some folks, I guess. However, Caldera's general attitude prevented them from winning the market competition with Red Hat. What Linux to run was generally recommended to companies by people inside the company who had become involved with Linux on their own time. These folks were in general offended by things said and done by Caldera. I remember a particular painful incident, in which Ransom (who was a nice guy personally but far from the sharpest knife in the drawer) talked about himself as a father of 8 and about Caldera being the wise dad and the Open Source community being like Ransom's teen-agers. I was offended on multiple levels. I doubt I was the only one in that audience who felt that way. But it was an accurate representation of how Caldera treated its relationship with Linux and Open Source. Bruce
Posted Jun 19, 2013 18:28 UTC (Wed)
by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492)
[Link]
And there are borderline cases such as xv, pine (pico), etc. I'm sure that e.g. Slackware included packages like this.
Recall that Debian was born of this age, making it very clear it was absolutely devoid of non-OSS software. Not only a philosophical stance born from nothing, but as a direct differentiation from, well, everyone else.
Posted Jun 17, 2013 18:01 UTC (Mon)
by JoeF (guest, #4486)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jun 17, 2013 21:47 UTC (Mon)
by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
[Link] (1 responses)
Yes, GCC etc. was more trouble to get working on real Unix than it was worth, back then. Much has changed over the years. By the time of early Open Server 5, you'd have an argument that support for the tool chain which is common today should have been better. But not during the SCO Unix 3.2v4.x years. Very few cared.
Posted Jun 19, 2013 18:32 UTC (Wed)
by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492)
[Link]
For anyone who doubts how absurd the Unix universe was, back in the day, the necessity of the checks done by autoconf should be all the proof they need.
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were proprietary and lacked source
Wol
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As someone who was using Linux in business at that time, I can say that both of these things were seen as advantages, not disadvantages.
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It was relatively bad then already.
The lab where I worked as an undergrad had a SCO Unix license, but we mostly worked with HP-UX, AIX, Apollo, etc.
Back then, I tried to get the GNU toolchain running on SCO Unix, and had tons of problems with it.
Then, I found Linux, version 0.12, and it already came with all the GNU tools. I never looked back...
SCO v. IBM reopened
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