|
| marcodiego wrote:
| Who will pay? Who will get the money?
| peepohpoopah wrote:
| The lawyers will get the money.
| jepler wrote:
| "The Estates" are the corpse of SCO, and "The Trustee" is the
| court-appointed trustee for The Estates. So, it would seem that
| IBM is going to pay $14 million to the corpse of SCO.
| phire wrote:
| And I wouldn't be surprised if the corpse of SCO will pay all
| of it to their lawyers.
|
| Though there is a slim chance there will be some left over,
| and will go to the shareholders.
| axiolite wrote:
| > And I wouldn't be surprised if the corpse of SCO will pay
| all of it to their lawyers.
|
| That's not how it's supposed to work:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693487
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| And what are they paying for? Case was always described as
| meritless.
| ghaff wrote:
| IANAL but I assume to close the books and be able to stop
| paying their own lawyers on anything related to the case,
| however relatively minor--and perhaps to mitigate any future
| risk, however minor.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Thanks, wonder why there was no final ruling yet.
| natas wrote:
| This is probably the best ending the Linux community could have
| hoped for; however, I'm dismayed that SCO burnt itself in flames,
| it was actually a very good operating system; not GNU/Linux-good,
| but very good back in the days. I understand they lost a lot of
| business to Linux (so did Microsoft etc.) and that's how the
| system works; but they were "stuck" because they couldn't open it
| as it held files with various copyrights (AT&T, Novel, etc.) whom
| wouldn't have agreed to this. What could/should have they done
| instead? Well, I can't think of anything as most of the
| commercial unix vendors are gone now (Irix, Solaris, Tru64,
| etc.).
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| That SCO isn't the one that launched the suit. It was
| Caldera/SCO that did it and already had a business selling
| support for their Linux distro.
| ghaff wrote:
| The whole thing was/is a tangled web. I spent months on this
| case at one point and even I'd have to go back to my notes to
| reconstruct the whole messy timeline.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| IIRC, the SCO that made SCO Unix was purchased by another
| company which renamed itself SCO and started filing lawsuits;
| the company you recall fondly is not actually the company that
| we are here to discuss.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| > This is probably the best ending the Linux community could
| have hoped for
|
| I would have hoped for an ending more like Prenda Law's.
| axiolite wrote:
| > This is probably the best ending the Linux community could
| have hoped for
|
| No, IBM's counter-suit being successful and those who launched
| the ridiculous lawsuit being fined, disbarred, and or thrown in
| jail would be the best ending. The fact that TSG will get a
| pittance out of it is not sufficient discouragement against
| future lawsuits.
| natas wrote:
| This wouldn't have been possible with a judge that ignorant.
| wmf wrote:
| Maybe SCO could have spun their properties as advantages:
| stable driver ABI, ISV/IHV certification, Unix/Posix
| certification, support, etc. They could have had a free
| "CentSCO" version and charged for support like Red Hat.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| > What could/should have they done instead?
|
| Gone quietly into the night with their dignity intact.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Or, "if you can't beat 'em, join em." Adopt Linux-based
| systems and support both classic and Linux offerings. Adapt.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Change Linux to FreeBSD and that's what Xinuos is doing
| right now with Openserver 10.
| ghaff wrote:
| Some version of SCO had already made a hash of a multi-vendor
| datacenter Unix. Before Linux became commercially popular there
| was a lot of interest in 2nd and 3rd tier vendors in an
| enterprise Unix that would have enough marketshare to interest
| ISVs. But the project pretty much flopped.
|
| Linux didn't really have a big effect on SCO until they were
| already flailing. It was mostly Windows NT that was eating
| their lunch. SCO tried to claim that it was Linux that caused
| them to go downhill but the timeframes just don't line up.
| Source: I spent a lot of time studying this at the time.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Did anybody else notice that Xinuos is So Unix backwards?
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Xinunotihs Corp
| steelframe wrote:
| I worked at the IBM Linux Technology Center back when this whole
| clusterfsck was just taking off. Without going into details, it
| impacted how I was able to get my job done. The damage that the
| SCO Group inflicted on the world by making it a lot more
| difficult for companies like IBM to contribute toward Linux is
| immeasurable, and I can only laugh bitterly when I see a
| settlement amount measured in a measly 8 figures. The industry-
| wide FUD that SCO inflicted has been far, far more damaging.
| Svperstar wrote:
| I'm old. I remember reading about this crap back in 2003 and
| thinking "I'm sure it will be thrown out of court in a year or
| two". The court system is nuts.
| Twirrim wrote:
| Xinuos, founded by former SCO leaders filed a lawsuit against IBM
| & Red Hat, back in April https://lwn.net/Articles/851315/ (no, it
| wasn't an april fool's day joke). https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-
| sues-ibm-and-red-hat/, alleging anti-competitive behaviour etc.
| Xinuous produces newer versions of *nix based OSs that the SCO
| Group used to produce, the OpenServer and UnixWare brands.
|
| So even though SCO group is finally (finally?!) dying, everything
| is still pretty much business as usual.
| krylon wrote:
| Well, IBM certainly is no stranger to anti-competitive
| behavior. If SCO had focused on breach of contract from the
| beginning, their case actually would have had some merit, IMHO.
|
| But then they went bananas and made fools of themselves with
| the whole Linux-copyright-violation bit, destroying their case
| more thoroughly than IBM's lawyers could have done.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| they were paid to do that by microsoft as a fud war?
|
| This case was never about merit.
| cptskippy wrote:
| It seems Microsoft did funnel money to SCO by first
| agreeing to pay a $16m licensing fee to SCO for something
| that they fought against having to pay in the 80s and for
| which SUN only paid $9m. They also gave $50-60m to an
| investment firm which intern gave it to SCO.
|
| Beyond financing the fight, there hasn't been any other
| evidence of their involvement. Anything else is just
| conspiracy theories.
| ghaff wrote:
| Microsoft was certainly in full "Linux is a cancer" mode
| at the time, and even had an executive, Martin Taylor,
| who was essentially their Linux attack dog. That said,
| while they were certainly not opposed to what SCO was
| doing, there's not much evidence that they were the man
| behind the curtain either.
| krylon wrote:
| As far as I know - which isn't very far! - Microsoft
| started to support SCO only after they had dragged IBM to
| court.
|
| SCO had pretty much bet the future of the company on their
| and IBM's joint Itanium Unix, and when IBM pulled out of
| the project, SCO was rather screwed[0]. Suing IBM for
| breach of contract was a sensible decision, as far as I can
| tell.
|
| [0] Considering what a phenomenal failure Itanium became, I
| suspect they were screwed either way.
| ghaff wrote:
| Very different case and fact pattern of course, but HP
| won a $3B lawsuit against Oracle because of the latter
| dropping Itanium support.
|
| Fun personal fact. Apparently HP actually used an analyst
| report I wrote as one of their exhibits in that case.
| smorgusofborg wrote:
| I'm confused, if SCO sold off its rights to a new company the
| settlement should go to the new company?
|
| If the price didn't reflect the potential of this settlement
| then that could have been an accounting crime against the now
| bankrupt SCO, but I don't see why SCO would be entitled to any
| duplicate claims.
| ch_123 wrote:
| SCO only sold the IP for Unixware and OpenServer to Xinuos,
| retaining whatever rights were needed to continue the
| lawsuits with IBM and others. I believe at that point, the
| leftovers of SCO were called TSG (short for "The SCO Group").
| In their early days, Xinuos would make a point of stating
| that the old SCO lawsuits were nothing to do with them.
| cstross wrote:
| The irony here is that the _real_ , original SCO (or
| rather, the Santa Cruz Operation) sold their IP and Unix
| business to a company called Caldera -- who had already
| successfully sued Microsoft over the DR-DOS/Windows 95
| lawsuit started back in the day by Digital Research, whose
| IP rights they'd purchased. Caldera were an also-ran Linux
| distributor who ran out of capital in the 1996-98 time
| frame (I forget precisely when) and pivoted into
| litigation. The Microsoft lawsuit victory gave them the
| money to buy the SCO IP and go after IBM, which turned out
| to be a Really Bad Idea because IBM's legal department back
| then made Microsoft's look like a teddy bear.
|
| The original SCO changed their name (Tarantella? I think?)
| and were eventually absorbed by what was left of Borland.
|
| Irony: I worked at (original, non-litigious, UNIX-
| developing) SCO circa 1991-95; if SCO's execs had their eye
| on the ball they could have rolled out their own Linux
| distro with a _ton_ of valuable extras backported from Open
| Server and cleaned Red Hat 's clock. But instead, despite
| half of the UNIX dev team moonlighting on open source
| projects, the official line was that Linux was an amateur-
| hour hobbyist project that nobody would ever pay for.
| smorgusofborg wrote:
| That would make sense but this is the quote on their own
| website:
|
| "While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our
| intellectual property," said Sean Snyder, President and CEO
| of Xinuos. "It is also about market manipulation that has
| harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community,
| and innovation itself."
|
| Edit- unless you are saying their claim is that someone
| would rip off new code at this late a point in their dead
| branch of UNIX? That would be possible I guess, but they
| would have to be delusional to a point that strains
| credulity.
| scns wrote:
| How come i get the feeling of listening to a scumbag
| talking out of his behind? Does Xinuos have more than one
| employee?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| No, it's not about Xinuos's code (if any). It's about
| rights to the property that they bought from SCO. That
| purchase lets Xinuos say "our", even though it's not
| theirs by authorship.
| [deleted]
| axiolite wrote:
| Things are confusing because Xinuos recently launched a
| brand new lawsuit against IBM and IBM owned RedHat.
| Xinuos' claims in that case are all about anti-
| competitive behavior and nothing about TSG's historical
| accusations of code theft and breach of contract.
|
| I'd actually say the lawsuit is about Xinuos' failed
| business model:
|
| * The infamous SCO vs Novell & IBM lawsuit soured
| everyone on SCO, so companies got their software off of
| OpenServer/UnixWare as quickly as they could.
|
| * Those few who continue to use SCO products have
| existing OS & user licenses that will remain valid in
| perpetuity (or until the 2038 bug renders them unusable),
| and virtualization allows continued use of those old OSes
| on modern hardware without help from Xinuos.
|
| * Their "V" (VMWare virtualization) releases amount to
| pre-installed disk drivers and small performance tweaks,
| and for that they switched to an annual subscription
| model that it seems nobody will buy-in to.
|
| * Some of their releases like OpenServer 6 broke some
| backwards compatibility. Newer releases like OpenServer
| 10 are just rebadged FreeBSD with a bit of SCO legacy
| binary compatibility thrown-in.
|
| * The ascendancy of Linux made SCO and Xinuos' expensive
| commercial OS products increasingly irrelevant before the
| IBM/Novell lawsuits, and only ever more so today.
| fortran77 wrote:
| When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I worked for Olivetti's R&D
| lab and we did a lot of work with SCO. In the early days if x386
| "Xenix" and Unix, they were one of the coolest companies around.
| We loved going down from Cupertino to Santa Cruz and working with
| them.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Feels appropriate linking to Slashdot for this bit of news.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| In soviet russia, a beowulf cluster of cowboy neals serves hot
| grits to you! :D
| dehrmann wrote:
| I remember seeing Cowboy Neal on IRC and feeling like it was
| a celebrity sighting.
|
| The world needs a Cowboy Neal option.
| marcodiego wrote:
| It is a shame that after all the damage they did, they will still
| get millions from this.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| If it makes you feel better, I'm guessing that every penny went
| to their attorneys (and then some!)
| cheese_van wrote:
| Ages ago, the Santa Cruz variant of SCO ran some key components
| of the State Department's sensitive communication system. The
| rigs were good, solid and did their job. It was sad when they
| morphed into the bad SCO.
| isatty wrote:
| Slashdot is breaking the browsers back button now, seriously?
|
| HN should not allow urls that do this to be posted.
| justinsaccount wrote:
| Open links in new tabs to avoid this "problem" entirely.
|
| Right click or long press the back button to go back more than
| one step at a time.
|
| If you still have issues complain to your browser vendor, not
| HN or slashdot.
| isatty wrote:
| I can also restart my phone or buy a new one to avoid this
| problem entirely. I guess I'll do that.
| anaganisk wrote:
| You know, if your browser is allowing for its back button
| to be hijacked, its right to blame browser rather than,
| people who use its API. What next block websites that track
| locations, send notifications? If your phone needs a
| restart, to close a website. I think you have bigger
| problems with that phone.
| binarybanana wrote:
| I recommend PinePhone.
| jffry wrote:
| I was able to click on the link, and click back to return to
| these comments, in both FF and Chrome. What behavior are you
| seeing that's different?
| iforgetti wrote:
| On iPhone Safari, after clicking the article link, I cannot
| navigate back to HN using the back button.
| oasisbob wrote:
| It's using whatever library stuffs an extra page in your
| history, "More stories to check out before you go!" in a blue
| banner at the top of the page. (iOS chrome)
| Igelau wrote:
| I dub this pattern the "chum blast"
| gpm wrote:
| I was unable to go back on mobile Firefox. Going back would
| instantly redirect me back forwards.
|
| Edit: Tested on desktop firefox, and it works fine there.
| isatty wrote:
| I'm guessing you've ublock origin or similar on those
| browsers thats mitigating it. It's broken on safari (iOS).
| jffry wrote:
| I tried again with brand new, blank profiles in Chrome and
| Firefox (default settings, no extensions) and still can't
| make it hijack the back button.
| bombela wrote:
| Firefox Android, it fills the back history in a loop. With a
| long press on the back button though I can then jump over the
| looping page. Back to HN.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| From the official Hacker News Guidelines:
|
| _" Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button
| breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be
| interesting."_
|
| UPDATE: Right now 43% of the comments on this story are about
| the site's back-button behavior.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Igelau wrote:
| That's a stupid rule. I'm glad for the warning, because now I
| know not to click it. Formatting is one thing, and I and see
| why griping about that is boring. "Caution Dark Patterns
| Ahead" is a useful warning.
| fergie wrote:
| I assumed that this case had been resolved like a decade ago.
| Does anybody else remember when SCO vs Linux (as reported by
| Groklaw) was an obsession of tech news sites?
| ghaff wrote:
| The case was essentially zombie-fied (no, that's not actually a
| legal term) over a decade ago but, in spite of a couple events
| since, the final stake never got driven.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yup. It was a daily visit for me. Did a bit of time at the
| courthouse reporting. Fun times...
| dzdt wrote:
| Who else misses groklaw, BTW? That was my favorite tech law site
| for many years.
|
| [1]
| http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2003101616...
| smhenderson wrote:
| I miss it but it was never the same without PJ and I hope she's
| been able to move on and is doing well.
| willvarfar wrote:
| What happened?
| smhenderson wrote:
| It's complicated and I can't do it justice in a comment
| here. This is a pretty good summary [0] of the atmosphere
| near the end and some thoughts from PJ on why it all had to
| end, at least her part in it.
|
| [0]
| http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
| ghaff wrote:
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-concerns-cause-pj-
| to-c...
|
| Basically she had privacy concerns. As I recall, at least
| one journalist had tried to track her down in real life.
| Sunspark wrote:
| Real cloak and dagger stuff.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, without reopening ancient wounds, it actually
| wasn't unreasonable to ask who the person behind this
| popular and influential anti-SCO website was. Certainly
| the question would have come up with a pro-SCO website.
|
| I personally know an analyst who was convinced it was a
| sock puppet site for one of the litigants. I don't think
| he was ever convinced otherwise even though a journalist
| friend of mine, who I absolutely trust, assured me it was
| a real person who was about as you would imagine.
|
| So, yeah, I believe PJ was more or less who she appeared
| to be. I'd also expect people would be very skeptical
| about such a blogger's identity under different
| circumstances.
| Natsu wrote:
| There were all kinds of questionable things going on. I
| read for long enough to be convinced that it really was a
| single person, but I think that they were skeptical
| because she got a lot of contributions from others who
| helped look into some of the legal matters, so in another
| sense she was the face of the Groklaw community. I don't
| know for sure if that was really her name, etc., because
| I never knew her other than online, but she had a
| distinct writing style that would not be easy to
| replicate, so she was always a single voice and she was
| relatively unknown, as far as I could tell, until she
| started getting posted to Slashdot regularly.
|
| But yes, SCO really was moving against her in the
| background, so she had some reason to be paranoid there.
| ghaff wrote:
| Totally agree. My default assumption is that even if she
| was a fellow traveler with the anti-SCO camp, she wasn't
| funded although that could be naive of me.
|
| But, yes, in general there were fellow travelers with
| various camps behind the scenes and money flowed in
| deniable ways.
|
| I suspect it was a pseudonym given her concern about
| privacy and that being a common name, although not
| obviously such.
| Natsu wrote:
| It was reported by a few journalists that Pamela Jones
| was her real name, but yeah, I have no way to verify that
| and ultimately it didn't matter, because the information
| was being collected and presented in public.
|
| The community could, and did, call her on it when they
| believed she was making motivated arguments during the
| TurboHeracles affair. This to my mind shows that it was
| really a community and not just an echo chamber.
| ghaff wrote:
| As someone who was somewhat on the inside, there were a
| lot of things about the SCO case that resolved to you're
| either with us, and ignore inconvenient facts, or you're
| against us. I was certainly on the other side from SCO
| but there were certain narrow and largely irrelevant
| things that you sort of weren't allowed to acknowledge.
|
| Basically, there were a few trivial copyright
| infringements.
| Natsu wrote:
| Yeah, SCO was trying to depose her at one point so she
| ducked the subpoena (the "health break", IIRC... couldn't
| admit to being aware of it being served). They tried to
| track down her phone, etc. and there was an article of a
| woman with her name at one point, though I believe she
| disputed that it was actually her.
|
| Then the TurboHercules thing started and her position on
| that didn't sit well with some in the open source
| community since they weren't exactly real threats to open
| source and the shadowbans started, etc.
|
| Then she left the final goodbye note which is still up: h
| ttp://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
| ghaff wrote:
| Essentially, it became a fade away or become a public
| figure and she chose the former. Which there's certainly
| nothing wrong with.
| bborud wrote:
| It is fitting that this is reported on Slashdot.
| axiolite wrote:
| Why? Because Slashdot is a hideous zombie of its former self,
| sold off several times to different owners, and now all about
| politics and inaccurate / flamebait semi-tech stories with the
| credibility of a tabloid? I guess that's fitting.
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