Welcome!

Open Source Authors: Bob Gourley, Maureen O'Gara, Adrian Bridgwater, John Cowan, Hovhannes Avoyan

Related Topics: Linux

Linux: Article

Embarrassing Dispatches From the SCO Front

Embarrassing Dispatches From the SCO Front
By Dee-Ann LeBlanc
Article Rating:
August 25, 2003 12:00 AM EDT
Reads:
 23,589

SCO has truly done it again.

Truly, it keeps getting better. SCO (back when it was Caldera) has violated the BSD license with the very code it accuses Linux of
stealing!

Dennis Ritchie himself (one of the original authors of Unix) is saying that either he or Ken Thompson (his co-worker at Bell Labs at the time) wrote that code early on, before there ever was a Caldera or SCO.

Published August 25, 2003 – Reads 23,589
Copyright © 2003 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Dee-Ann LeBlanc

Dee-Ann LeBlanc has been involved with Linux since 1994. She is the author of 12 books, 130 articles, and has more of both coming. She is a trainer, a course developer - including the official Red Hat online courseware at DigitalThink - a founding member of the AnswerSquad, and a consultant.

Comments (6) View Comments

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.

Most Recent Comments
women big 02/23/04 10:52:17 PM EST

Activists in Montreal Monday the federal Liberal election platform will include a women big five-year plan to fund affordable housing.
Lyrics 02/23/04 10:50:48 PM EST

Activists in Montreal Monday the federal Liberal election platform will include a women big five-year plan to fund affordable housing.
Franz 09/05/03 03:49:30 PM EDT

Are you saying there was insider trading?
Dean Kutryk 09/04/03 03:16:55 PM EDT

Send them (SCO executives) to prison and throw away the key.
walterbyrd 09/03/03 09:01:10 PM EDT

>>If these violations truely occurred, why has it taken so long for the owner of UNIX to bring suit?<<

Because scox was financially desperate. Scox never had a profitable quarter. Scox had a book value under $5 million, and was losing at least $25 million a year (once about $125 million in a year). Scox's stock price was well under $1 a share. So scox execs decided to give themselves a boatload of options for $0.001 each, and pump the price by filing a law suit against IBM.

Today (Sept 3) Scox share price shot up over $16/share. Insiders are selling like mad. And msft is giving scox boat-loads of fud money (about $6 million per quarter).

So everything is working out fine for scox execs.

>>Could it be that they now see that Linux has evolved to the stage that it could pose competition the proprietary software that for so long has dominated the market.<<

No. Scox could never compete against linux.
Gerald Cox 09/03/03 03:42:14 PM EDT

Why do the U.S. courts allow this fiaSCO to continue? How can a company attempt to extort licensing fees from Linux users with out proof that their intelectual property rights have been violated or without even producing evidence of such violation? Caldera Linux was relesed under a GPL. Wasn't SCO Linux released under a GPL? If so, then they released their own code for anyone to use or modify. Are they going to sue themselves?

If these violations truely occurred, why has it taken so long for the owner of UNIX to bring suit? Could it be that they now see that Linux has evolved to the stage that it could pose competition the proprietary software that for so long has dominated the market.

It just seems to me that SCO has taken its licensing and seemingly underhanded marketing lessons from Microsoft and Haley Davidson.

Just my opinion.