Sat Aug 18, 2007 11:36 am
so Farewell, Sco-Unix..
those of us with an interest in such things have been watching the matter of Sco-Unix' attempts to claim rights to Unix for itself for some years now. Sco bought certain aspects of Unix and it's trademarks from Novell about 12 years ago iirc, but then proceeded to claim copyright to both Unix and Linux, and tried to charge Unix and Linux users licence fees.
This was always going to be on shaky ground, as Unix was invented in the 60's at Berkeley, California by two academics, so I'd always believed, and Linux itself has always been open-source. Inevitably the matter went into court and has been there for several years, with arguments being bandied back and forth and corporate lawyers getting very rich indeed. It's perhaps worth mentioning now that Sco's bizarre claim went legal not long after Micro$oft took a controlling stake in Sco, which had seen its' market-share declining over the years and had become a shell of a software company with nothing new to offer. Make of this coincidence what you will!
It certainly had an effect. Once Sco started sending out letters demanding licencing fees to Unix and Linux users, several Unix/Linux-happy big corporations, such as IBM and Daimler-Benz, gave up their plans to go completely Unix/Linux due to the understandable concern that they'd find themselves faced with a huge bill for licences OR that they'd have to go through years of court with Microsoft bankrolling Sco's lawyers. Also, sympathetisers with the open-source community (and inveterate M$ haters) hit back with, for example, Vindoze vorms which DoS'd M$ servers on specific days.
Unfortunately for the Microsoft\Sco alliance, the copyrights were still plainly owned by Novell, who proceeded to drag Sco kicking and screaming into court where eventually last week the judge confirmed that a/Novell still held their copyrights and that b/Sco didn't and that it's claim for licencing fees and threats of legal action or actual legal action were null and void. Moreover, that there wasn't a case and copyright ownership was clearly defined as Novell's in the paperwork.
....and so to the delight of observers, 70% was wiped off Sco's share price overnight. I imagine that Micro$oft will somehow soon decide that Sco no longer fits into it's business model and that Sco will be looking for a new buyer before too long. Not that anyone would want it, I mean, Sco-Unix? No-one's bothered with that for years! Anyway in reality Sco is Caldera, Caldera was a spin-off from Novell and bought up Sco lock stock and barrel. They were known for a time after the buyout as Caldera, and the Caldera people were largely running the show. Much of what old SCO had bought from Novell was bought on a "conditional fee" - they only kept it under conditions of the contract. One of those conditions was that control of the company could not change without voiding large swathes of the contract. Novell would have had to approve the changes in ownership and such in order to waive the nullification, and that never happened. So Caldera had even fewer rights than the old SCO did.
Then, Caldera decided to revive the SCO name. They tried to claim they were old SCO, but they were clearly Caldera, purchaser of old SCO, just changing the label on the package. Then Micro$oft bought a huge swathe of Sco\Caldera only to find out (unless they knew all the time) that they (Sco) didn't have any right to sell licences except as an agent of Novell.
But will Sco pay back all the licence fees it has extorted out of companies with its' false claims? Will they pay back the legal fees for firms they've terrorised with the wallets of Gates and Ballmer? Have they even apologised for any of the trouble they've caused? Of course not, and even in January this year when it was looking obvious to one and all that they didn't have a case anymore, they still persisted, were still threatening Unix and Linux users, and were still selling shares in a company that they knew had a very finite future, shares that they knew would nose-dive if and when they lost their case (and that's blatant exploitation of the investors.)
It's a very shabby affair and diplays some very sharp business practices. One wonders whether this was part of the M$ game plan all along - to use Sco's ownership of some aspects of Unix to claim rights to Unix and Linux, scare off potential users, milk existing users for cash, milk investors for cash too, then dump it once it had outlived it's usefulness - the purchase of Sco being only a drop in the M$ pool of cash, yet potentially having the ability to kybosh it's main competition at least for a while and all "hands-off." I find it hard to believe that a sharp operation like M$ didn't know exactly what Sco's "ownership" of Unix actually consisted of (but if they really didn't, then they need to get some new lawyers.)
Well, it's the end of Sco, and good riddance I say; I shall never forget the incredulity and insult I felt on the day that the firm I worked for at the time got a letter from Sco's UK office saying we owed them money for the Unix system we'd been using for the last 15 years - a letter that I treated with the derision it deserved. After all, this isn't just some excuse to indulge in a spot of M$-bashing, fun thought that can be - this was some fairly major extortion that netted a not inconsiderable sum and it was entirely based on a lie. Your Mullah detects even further M$' complicity in that just as it became obvious that Sco had no case re: Unix or Linux, M$ crawled into bed with Novell. There's a fair old chunk of Unix in Vindoze esp in the networking so is it fair to speculate that IF M$ hadn't cut a deal with Novell, Novell could have sued M$ for wonga made from Vindoze over the years?
Ah we can but speculate, now that the Land of the Purple Dinosaur has paid it's enormous danegeld to Novell and sacrificed its' underling Sco
(but I do feel sorry for Sco's employees and smaller shareholders who are now all right royally scr*wed.)
Edited by - Tawakalna on 8/19/2007 5:44:03 AM
This was always going to be on shaky ground, as Unix was invented in the 60's at Berkeley, California by two academics, so I'd always believed, and Linux itself has always been open-source. Inevitably the matter went into court and has been there for several years, with arguments being bandied back and forth and corporate lawyers getting very rich indeed. It's perhaps worth mentioning now that Sco's bizarre claim went legal not long after Micro$oft took a controlling stake in Sco, which had seen its' market-share declining over the years and had become a shell of a software company with nothing new to offer. Make of this coincidence what you will!
It certainly had an effect. Once Sco started sending out letters demanding licencing fees to Unix and Linux users, several Unix/Linux-happy big corporations, such as IBM and Daimler-Benz, gave up their plans to go completely Unix/Linux due to the understandable concern that they'd find themselves faced with a huge bill for licences OR that they'd have to go through years of court with Microsoft bankrolling Sco's lawyers. Also, sympathetisers with the open-source community (and inveterate M$ haters) hit back with, for example, Vindoze vorms which DoS'd M$ servers on specific days.
Unfortunately for the Microsoft\Sco alliance, the copyrights were still plainly owned by Novell, who proceeded to drag Sco kicking and screaming into court where eventually last week the judge confirmed that a/Novell still held their copyrights and that b/Sco didn't and that it's claim for licencing fees and threats of legal action or actual legal action were null and void. Moreover, that there wasn't a case and copyright ownership was clearly defined as Novell's in the paperwork.
....and so to the delight of observers, 70% was wiped off Sco's share price overnight. I imagine that Micro$oft will somehow soon decide that Sco no longer fits into it's business model and that Sco will be looking for a new buyer before too long. Not that anyone would want it, I mean, Sco-Unix? No-one's bothered with that for years! Anyway in reality Sco is Caldera, Caldera was a spin-off from Novell and bought up Sco lock stock and barrel. They were known for a time after the buyout as Caldera, and the Caldera people were largely running the show. Much of what old SCO had bought from Novell was bought on a "conditional fee" - they only kept it under conditions of the contract. One of those conditions was that control of the company could not change without voiding large swathes of the contract. Novell would have had to approve the changes in ownership and such in order to waive the nullification, and that never happened. So Caldera had even fewer rights than the old SCO did.
Then, Caldera decided to revive the SCO name. They tried to claim they were old SCO, but they were clearly Caldera, purchaser of old SCO, just changing the label on the package. Then Micro$oft bought a huge swathe of Sco\Caldera only to find out (unless they knew all the time) that they (Sco) didn't have any right to sell licences except as an agent of Novell.
But will Sco pay back all the licence fees it has extorted out of companies with its' false claims? Will they pay back the legal fees for firms they've terrorised with the wallets of Gates and Ballmer? Have they even apologised for any of the trouble they've caused? Of course not, and even in January this year when it was looking obvious to one and all that they didn't have a case anymore, they still persisted, were still threatening Unix and Linux users, and were still selling shares in a company that they knew had a very finite future, shares that they knew would nose-dive if and when they lost their case (and that's blatant exploitation of the investors.)
It's a very shabby affair and diplays some very sharp business practices. One wonders whether this was part of the M$ game plan all along - to use Sco's ownership of some aspects of Unix to claim rights to Unix and Linux, scare off potential users, milk existing users for cash, milk investors for cash too, then dump it once it had outlived it's usefulness - the purchase of Sco being only a drop in the M$ pool of cash, yet potentially having the ability to kybosh it's main competition at least for a while and all "hands-off." I find it hard to believe that a sharp operation like M$ didn't know exactly what Sco's "ownership" of Unix actually consisted of (but if they really didn't, then they need to get some new lawyers.)
Well, it's the end of Sco, and good riddance I say; I shall never forget the incredulity and insult I felt on the day that the firm I worked for at the time got a letter from Sco's UK office saying we owed them money for the Unix system we'd been using for the last 15 years - a letter that I treated with the derision it deserved. After all, this isn't just some excuse to indulge in a spot of M$-bashing, fun thought that can be - this was some fairly major extortion that netted a not inconsiderable sum and it was entirely based on a lie. Your Mullah detects even further M$' complicity in that just as it became obvious that Sco had no case re: Unix or Linux, M$ crawled into bed with Novell. There's a fair old chunk of Unix in Vindoze esp in the networking so is it fair to speculate that IF M$ hadn't cut a deal with Novell, Novell could have sued M$ for wonga made from Vindoze over the years?
Ah we can but speculate, now that the Land of the Purple Dinosaur has paid it's enormous danegeld to Novell and sacrificed its' underling Sco
(but I do feel sorry for Sco's employees and smaller shareholders who are now all right royally scr*wed.)
Edited by - Tawakalna on 8/19/2007 5:44:03 AM
.