SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 17, 2013 12:55 UTC (Mon) by xtifr (guest, #143)
In reply to: SCO v. IBM reopened by sbergman27
Parent article: SCO v. IBM reopened

Some minor (but possibly important) corrections to an otherwise decent summary:

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.

SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 17, 2013 13:59 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't consider those to be "minor" corrections. ;-) However, I intentionally only fact-checked a couple of dates, as the post was mainly intended as a personal memoir. A memory exercise.

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.

SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 17, 2013 16:44 UTC (Mon) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (1 responses)

What possible evidence do you have the Novell ever even slightly had any interest in killing Unix? I was a customer of both oldSCO and Novell at the time, and I assure you that nothing I saw at the time or since has ever made me think that. Unixware/x86 may have been a bit of a long-shot, but SysV was still big business at that point, and actually gave Novell more credibility with the big enterprises who were still somewhat scornful of the whole PC thing at that point.

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.

SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 17, 2013 23:08 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

"What possible evidence do you have the Novell ever even slightly had any interest in killing Unix?"

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.

SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 17, 2013 17:02 UTC (Mon) by ezrec (guest, #67736) [Link] (1 responses)

My favorite bit of folklore from the MS/SCO/Xenix transaction is the legend that the MS/SCO Xenix contract had a clause that prohibited MS from creating an operating system the implemented the copy-on-write semantics of the fork(2) system call.

If it were true, it would explain why MS was so gung-ho on threads....

SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 17, 2013 18:23 UTC (Mon) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

The fork(2) system call was implemented with copy-on-write semantics in the POSIX subsystem that was part of Windows NT 3.1 (the first release, in July 1993).

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.

were proprietary and lacked source

Posted Jun 17, 2013 17:59 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Except that SuSE's tool yast *always* came with source.

Yes it did have a proprietary licence, but that was to prevent derivatives, not to prevent people exercising (most of) the GNU freedoms.

Cheers,
Wol

SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 17, 2013 18:28 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

> ...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...

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.

SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:38 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

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.

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

SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 19, 2013 18:28 UTC (Wed) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link]

I seem to recall that the paid, physical CD version of RedHat 5 +/- 2 included at least a commercial X11 server, if not also things like a commercial Motif. Those distributions backed by, for lack of a better word, suits, bundled stuff with their paid versions a lot.

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.