LWN: Comments on "Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary"

Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

rickmoen — Thu, 29 May 2003 20:42:53 +0000

The discussion of per-seat licensing in Caldera OpenLinux 3.1 and above glosses over a question I considered important at the time, and that Caldera Systems pointedly ignored: What property does the per-seat licence apply to?

Just before Caldera adopted the SCO Group d/b/a, I had an encounter with Caldera's "open source architect" and Linux community liaison, Ronald Joe Record, on a LUG mailing list. A guy named Calvin Chu had had some configuration problems with Caldera 3.1. A few Caldera-haters (not me!) advised him (paraphrasing) that Caldera sucks, and get a real distribution that doesn't try to rip off the community with per-seat licensing, etc.

Ronald attempted to help Calvin, as did I. In addition, Ronald attempted with some sense of long-suffering exasperation to defend Caldera Systems, Inc.'s policies and product to the assembled critics. Among these things, he defended the per-seat licensing.

This got my interest, because I was curious about what specific property the licensing covered. I'm a student of such things, and try to learn about them so I can explain them to others, e.g., at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/suse-product-strategy . I was _not_ out to get Caldera.

So, I got out my Caldera Workstation 3.1 CD, examined it, and reported to the LUG mailing list (and to Joe) what I'd found: http://lists.svlug.org/archives/smaug/2001q3/000122.html In short, I couldn't find anything on the CD that was both owned by Caldera Systems, Inc. and not under freely-redistributable licence terms. So, in the post cited above, I asked Ronald what property the per-seat licensing _does_ applied to. (Note that that couldn't really be a compilation copyright, as such terms would create licence conflict with the GPL terms of some of the constituent codebases.)

I was polite, and stipulated that neither of us was an attorney (in all likelihood), let alone was he probably authorised to address corporate legal matters. But I figured he could at least say "I don't know" or "I'll have to ask the corporate counsel". After all, Ronald did say it was his _job_ to represent the company to the Linux community. I figured it was a logical question for him to receive and pass on, if not answer.

But Ronald did something I didn't expect: He immediately unsubscribed from the entire mailing list and vanished -- and I've never heard an answer from anyone else, either. (Their later making an ISO available gratis for non-commercial usage wasn't an answer.)

I strongly suspect that no answer would have ever come, even without the present legal entanglement -- as my surmise is that Caldera's demand for per-seat licensing fees never had even the tiniest legal foundation. One strains to find a charitible interpretation under which they didn't eventually realise this.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

What about the management change?

jensend — Thu, 29 May 2003 19:23:37 +0000

LWN left out an important point: the changing of the guard shortly before the renaming. When Ransom Love left the company and McBride took over as CEO, the Caldera people had known, loved, and had spats with concerning per-seat licensing ceased to exist. Some people who were involved in SCO years ago have posted to websites saying "This isn't SCO as I knew it, it is Caldera which changed its name to SCO. SCO was a good company." Well, the new SCO isn't Caldera either.

Ransom Love and others at Caldera may have made some poor business decisions and managed to tick people off (I always thought their position on per-seat licensing was perfectly sound- you could copy any of the open source software in their distribution and use it on multiple machines, as required by the licenses, but disallowing doing the same with the entire product was perfectly reasonable) - but the real Caldera would never have been involved in any of the kind of stuff the new SCO is doing.

Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

ladislav — Thu, 29 May 2003 00:03:04 +0000

It seems that the Caldera/SCO online archives suddenly disappeared, so for the record, here is the full message posted on it on 19 May 2003 (one day after SCO announced that it would suspend its Linux-related activities):

====================
Subject: Status of support for SCO Linux 4.0 and OpenLinux 3.1.1
From: John Boland <jboland@sco.com> (SCO Support)
To: users@lists.caldera.com
Date: 19/05/2003 16:18

All,

For those of you using OpenLinux 3.1.1 products, SCO will continue to honour and renew support agreements and will continue to provide maintenance in the form of security fixes for these products up until the retirement date of the products (planned retirement date is 24th of June 2004).

For those of you using SCO Linux Release 4.0 products, SCO will continue to honour and renew support agreements for these products and will continue to provide maintenance for the products via the SCO Linux Update Service. SCO will also continue to offer maintenance renewals on the SCO Linux Release 4.0 product line.

SCO has no plans to retire SCO Linux at this time.

Regards,

John Boland
SCO Support

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Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

arcticwolf — Fri, 23 May 2003 14:20:42 +0000

What's the opposite of "rest in peace, Caldera/SCO Linux"?

How about "rest in pieces"?

Hahahaha

yodermk — Thu, 22 May 2003 21:25:15 +0000

So they'll still be releasing security updates, will they?

Well, if they haven't shot their foot off already (which they have), a security update to the kernel will have to be released under the GPL also, which shows they are STILL releasing their alleged I.P. under the GPL.

Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

dwheeler — Thu, 22 May 2003 14:00:17 +0000

If memory serves, the music underlying this
particular phrase was sung in the middle of a
Microsoft advertisement. Which just goes to show
that you'd better check the words before using
a piece of music...!

Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

AnswerGuy — Thu, 22 May 2003 10:22:11 +0000

In the immortal words of Mozart's Requiem:

Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis

(The damned, cast away, shall be consigned to the searing flames) (Y'all asked)

Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

mjd — Thu, 22 May 2003 01:18:51 +0000

> What's the opposite of "rest in peace, Caldera/SCO Linux"?

"burn in hell, Caldera/SCO Linux"???