The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/924577/75ae0a1538029fcc/

by chmaynard • 3 years ago

332 251 3 years ago

AlbertCory8• 3 years ago

Here's a choice for you all:

(1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or --

(2) the current patent aystem, post CLS Bank, which has eliminated a lot of business method patents and some, but not all, software patents.

mikece2• 3 years ago

Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is unquestionably better than Linux? And if yes, are the Linux versions of the features or capabilities a significant enough constraint to warrant using Unix instead? It seems that certain networking and NAS applications are measurably better on Unix (Netflix is still a big using of FreeBSD caching servers iirc) but can't Linux close the gap?

AlbertCory8• 3 years ago

interesting but not what I asked

PeterWhittaker• 3 years ago

Well, that very much depends on the UNIX in question.

If one defines UNIX as POSIX, then, for the most part, or at least a pretty good part, Linux IS UNIX, because Linux implements much of POSIX, and in some cases does it better, e.g., certain functions for which POSIX is quiet or negative about thread safety are thread-safe on Linux, and there are almost always TS versions, e.g., strtok_r.

Outside of POSIX, one has to conside OS specific features, two of which come to mind as superior, though this is a judgement call: Solaris Zones and Mac OS.

I was a Linux desktop user for years, but I found that over time the desktop just started getting in my way (this was tennish years ago, so I am sure things have changed). I’d curse how gnome or KDE had once again broken my UX, then I’d help my wife or daughter with their Macs, enjoy the experience, the curse when I got back to my machine.

One day, after a particularly frustrating battle with whatever desktop I had then (I’d gone from Ubuntu to Mint to Debian to I cannot remember what, trying to find the sweet spot), I cursed, yelled that I would be back in 90 minutes, and bought my first Mac.

They’ve been a joy to use since. If Apple does something stupid, e.g., stopping at an old, brain dead bash, well, homebrew, et al, to the rescue.

Solaris Zones were wicked. One could get full MAC with labelled networking and restricted root with ease.

It’s finally possible to get close to Zones with a mix of capability management, namespace management, SELinux, et al, but not as easily.

So, yeah, there are individual UNIXisms that are better than Linux, but overall, at least on the server side, Linux is UNIX improved.

bombcar5• 3 years ago

Some Unices come with things that Linux can technically do, but they were built-in, not bolt-on.

ZFS is an example of one that's recognizable, you can bolt it onto linux and it (now) works quite well, but it was integrated much more into Solaris.

There are also Unix platforms that fully support hot-swappable just about everything, which you CAN do with Linux but it's not as simple.

Most of that stuff is gone by the wayside now, Linux is "good enough".

fsckboy• 3 years ago

Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is unquestionably better than Linux?

back when, unices were better at real multiuser, while linux was much faster at all sorts of I/O and CPU bound things in the personal-computer, single login context. Like massaging massive amounts text data (which everybody was doing to webify it), linux was blindingly fast, but don't trying to do much else at the same time, it would bring your machine to its knees.

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

with cleaned up laws

Which one I'd pick depends a whole lot on what those "cleaned up" laws consist of. But generally, this looks like an exercise in determining which is the lesser evil.

AlbertCory8• 3 years ago

"No IP protection for software at all" is your position, then?

nordsieck• 3 years ago

(1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or --

I'd go with this. But ideally with a 10-20 year limit on copyright[1].

I do think that there are some software patents (RSA, for example) that seem worthwhile. But the system as a whole seems like it does more harm than good.

---

1. My ideal proposal for copyright is exponentially increasing fees (after a short initial grace period) for a linearly increasing time period. But that seems like several bridges too far.

B1FF_PSUVM• 3 years ago

IP paying property taxes would be nice. Could even let owners set the value, if it were coupled to licensing fees etc.

AlbertCory8• 3 years ago

thanks.

please note that whatever a lawyer says about copyright law now is usually limited to what the courts have said plus the latest statutes and what judges are likely to rule.

The topic for today is harder: it's what should copyright law for software say? We're assuming that Congress does its job for once. The lawyers will never do it.

Don't like it that Disney had a forever copyright on Mickey Mouse? Me neither, but that's because copyright law is one-size-fits-all. The proposal is a carve-out where software law is different than literary.

So property taxes or shorter terms are definitely on point. "Which Unix is better" is not.

ok_dad• 3 years ago

Whatever choice "zero patents for software" is. Already, no one shares their code, which would be in the spirit of the patent system. The patent system is designed to keep the design details open and public, but gives a legal monopoly to the holder of the patent. Currently, companies can write software implementations that are completely closed and secret, but still hold a patent for whatever the "thing" that algorithm does. Clicking one button to check out? Patented, and I still don't know what the detailed code implementation looks like from Amazon. The patent itself only shows the most simple, rudimentary steps as block diagrams. The most open software we have is that which is unencumbered by patents!

AlbertCory8• 3 years ago

This is actually the topic of the first of (planned) four posts on software. For you lawyers, it's section 112.

mikece2• 3 years ago

How different would the history of Linux have been had FreeBSD (and its forks) not been encumbered by lawsuits in the 1990s? Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

What an interesting question!

I'm a bit glad that BSD didn't "win", because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me. I'm looking at switching to BSD (I haven't yet because that switch will be a lot of work -- I have a lot of machines) as a better alternative.

So BSD looks like an escape hatch to me and I'm glad that it's there.

nix235• 3 years ago

because as time has been passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me.

Same for me, i switched about 6 years ago to FreeBSD.

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would the BSDs have won?

From the horse's mouth:

Linus: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.

- https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html

dboreham• 3 years ago

That's what I was thinking too: when Linux was released there was no viable Unix-like OS for the current day PC machines.

Edit: actually there was SCO, but it was costly. So above really I mean "no viable free Unix-like OS for...PCs".

_skel• 3 years ago

I suspect that if Linus had tried to actively contribute to BSD he might have gotten fed up and done his own thing anyway.

Aloha• 3 years ago

IIRC, the BSD lawsuits were mostly about userspace stuff, ISTR the kernel was known clean. I wonder how big the license incompatibility was thought to be at that time to prevent releasing a BSD with a GNU userspace. I don't even know if the GNU stuff was complete enough.

ghaff13• 3 years ago

I've talked with a lot of people about this. The general opinion is that it was a combination of lingering concerns from the AT&T lawsuit and, perhaps more controversially, a somewhat difficult to engage with community. However, most of the same people also think that, had Linux not happened, BSD in some form would have occupied the space that Linux came to.

I did a series on this and related questions a few years back. (Podcast and transcript) http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/05/podcast-was-open-source...

justin66• 3 years ago

BSDI was legally in the clear in January 1994 and FreeBSD had an unencumbered version out by the end of 1994. Linux distros were still toys at that point. I think it's fair to say that the lawsuits didn't help BSD, but the lawsuits don't seem like they should have been a decisive reason for Linux overtaking them in mindshare and marketshare.

rwmj2• 3 years ago

FreeBSD didn't support shared libraries while Linux did, and that made a huge difference trying to run X11 on the 386 systems of the time, specifically because of hard disk space required.

kevin_thibedeau• 3 years ago

Linux distros were still toys at that point.

I had Slackware 1.1 running in 1Q94. It had X11 and you could run Mosaic on it plus all of the shell userland. It was pretty usable.

dekhn8• 3 years ago

Linux wasn't a toy in '94: I had a full X11 with emacs, g++, and all the other goodies and easily ported scientific software from the grown-up UNIX in the lab, using it to write my undergraduate thesis. This was using Slackware from 4 floppies. At the time I was offered two pills: Slackware or BSD. I picked linux since it sounded "newer and hotter".

It was a toy in '92-93 and they still didn't have good dynamic linking in '94, and I'd argue things were pretty dicey before glibc (I stopped using debian for years during the bo->hamm transition) but it was usable for production work at the time.

(none of this should be taken as a statement that BSD wasn't in great shape in '94; I had heard of the lawsuit but I don't think it affected my decision to go linux at that time)

giantrobot• 3 years ago

It's not really a matter of Linux or BSD "winning" in the 90s. It wasn't the kernel and base system that was super important but what you could run it on and what you could run on it. A Free Unix(like) was an important base component but went hand in hand with FOSS software running on top.

With the likes of Apache and Samba PCs running Linux (or a BSD) could replace many thousands of dollars in software licenses for server products for zero licensing dollars. It didn't really matter if the base OS was a BSD or Linux, as long as the services ran on top on relatively inexpensive hardware it was a massive win for a lot of organizations.

matrix12• 3 years ago

During project Monterey I had to setup all of the services that allowed SCO/IBM/Sequent on the IGS/IBM side. A few short years later I was tasked with pulling all of the IBM AIX design docs and source code for discovery going back to the beginning.

One has to recall that what sued IBM was the Ray Noorda Canopy Group. Aka Caldera. Which also levied lawsuits against Microsoft. Far from the ocean view of Santa Cruz.

gemstones• 3 years ago

I hadn't heard of Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) and I looked at his LinkedIn; this is his side of the story from his time at SCO, as he puts in in his work experience section. I found it super interesting.

  All of my work experience before and after SCO was of the startup/entrepreneurial variety. Fun stuff, new, exciting and positive. Then some former colleagues on the board of SCO (previously Caldera) convinced me to come in and try and turn around a company that had fallen from a billion dollar valuation down to a measly six million. They only had $8 million of cash and they were burning $4 million per quarter so I basically had 6 months to complete the turnaround. 

  What they didn't tell me was the company was in a dispute with IBM over disputed UNIX software code. This led to us filing a lawsuit against IBM, retaining David Boies to represent us, raising $76M to fight the battle, seeing our stock go from $0.66 per share to $22 per share, then falling back down to pennies per share after losing an important trial. 

  IBM teamed up with Linux programmers worldwide to go against me and I showed up on the cover of Fortune Magazine as "Corporate Enemy Number One". Hey, at least you can say that I was number one at something huh? I was as popular in the tech industry as Donald Trump hanging out at an Oscars after party with a bunch of Hollywooders.

  The legal battle is not actually over, 15 years later, the case is in review at the 10th circuit court of appeals in Denver.

  Silver Lining: While the courtroom battles were raging, we started a mobile apps business that I later bought out of SCO with some friends. That is where Shout came from. Back to the worlds I know and love - tech startup tied to sports and entertainment.

sjm• 3 years ago

And today he's a Marjorie Taylor Green-retweeting bankrupt conspiracy theorist. Funnily enough his personal website <title> is "Billionaire Cheat Codes"

morelisp6• 3 years ago

IDK, if I was put in charge of a company losing money like crazy and was genuinely trying to turn it around, my first thought would not be "oh, let's hire David Boies".

hristov• 3 years ago

I know! For HN readers not familiar with the legal industry, Boies was considered the superstar of the legal world at the time and was well known to demand $50 million retainers.

kjs32• 3 years ago

As I recall, Microsoft put up a ton of money to fund the SCO lawsuit. They didn't hire Boies out of Unix profits.

FloayYerBoat• 3 years ago

...and he's the (real) bad guy in the Theranos story. [Bad Blood, by John Carrerou]

ubermonkey• 3 years ago

It's weird. Boies got a great rep vs. Microsoft representing the Justice department, and obviously for working on the side of angels in Bush v. Gore, but he's also taken on some really ethically questionable clients -- among them, obviously, is SCO, but also tobacco companies. And, not for nothing, he both represented and served as a director for THERANOS.

And that's without even MENTIONING his involvement with Weinstein and the use of Israeli private intel company Black Cube to dredge up dirt on both Harvey's victims and the reporters covering the case.

quags3• 3 years ago

http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM-835-Exhibit_224.pdf follows a good explaination of sco's tactics at the time. During the lawsuit a dedicated server company rackshack (later ev1 servers) bought a license for all their users between. According to the owner Robert Marsh later in the trial, he felt in the end SCO was misleading and provided false information.

ianbicking• 3 years ago

If the stock went so low, couldn't IBM or whoever just buy SCO? Or were not there not a controlling number of shares available?

hoherd• 3 years ago

The LWN article discusses this point:

it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. ...
IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had invested heavily into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort.

chubot• 3 years ago

If you can win, why set that precedent? The negative result for SCO is very useful to the rest of society.

bitcharmer3• 3 years ago

His personal website contains gems like this one:

"Darl McBride will be remembered as one who fought for the rights of the individual against tyranny, for freedom against slavery, for intellectual liberty against herd mentality. In short, he is a Howard Roark (Ayn Rand's protagonist in 'The Fountainhead') for our age."
Francis Erdman, Blog Kinetic

And other heavily narcissistic quotes. Not surprising that he saw nothing wrong in appropriating other people's voluntary work and calling them long haired stinkies at the same time.

What a fellow :)

xtracto• 3 years ago

retaining David Boies to represent us,

That name!!!

I followed the SCO lawsuit closely through Groklaw and /. back in the day.

mrweasel• 3 years ago

It would have been more interesting to see SCO/Caldera being turned into a profitable Unix company, rather than going the lawsuit route. All development of SCOs products just stopped, there were never an attempt to turn the company around.

tpmx2• 3 years ago

This article doesn't give Microsoft enough credit for funding the whole thing.

I was going to write that the Internet remembers, but apparently that has its generational limitations. :(

sam_lowry_• 3 years ago

It's a friend now, remember?

hinkley3• 3 years ago

How's that Chrome download page hijacking thing goin'?

surfingdino• 3 years ago

Sure, we remember... https://www.junauza.com/2011/07/microsoft-fud-campaigns-agai...

Narishma• 3 years ago

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

bombcar5• 3 years ago

Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company.

They could go into more detail how SCO vs IBM ended up being a proxy war for larger corporations and interests, but it's a short article and it gets most of the high points.

tpmx2• 3 years ago

but it's a short article and it gets most of the high points.

I disagree. It's a pretty detailed article (~1800 words) and Microsoft's role just gets a passing mention.

kstrauser• 3 years ago

Huh, I'd forgotten about that but you're exactly right.

SirLJ• 3 years ago

Wow, thanks for the blast from the past, SCO were my first Unix servers along with IBM AIX ironically, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

jedberg4• 3 years ago

I had to deal with fallout from this. At the time I worked at eBay, and were not allowed to use any OS except Windows or RedHat Linux. The reason we had to use RedHat? Because we had a paid license from them that included them absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux.

But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time. So we were forced to use an inferior product because it came with IP indemnity. Thanks SCO!

cheekibreeki2• 3 years ago

Rh 4.2 ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?

jedberg4• 3 years ago

From my experience as a Linux sysadmin? RedHat ran half the planet because they had the best sales force and legal team (as exhibited by my example), but they did not have the best technology.

hinkley3• 3 years ago

Windows ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?

vondur• 3 years ago

This was pre DNF/YUM days. RedHat could be a pain installing stuff from RPM’s that had crazy dependencies back in the day.

MereInterest3• 3 years ago

My main experience with RedHat has been needing to bend over backwards to support its wildly outdated library versions. Because RedHat “supports” operating systems for about a decade, there’s always an argument that a library should be written to support whatever toolchain is provided by the oldest supported RHEL version.

RHEL’s “support” should be seen as “your software will continue to run unmodified when on this system”, but is frequently interpreted as “this is a sane platform for current development”.

nix235• 3 years ago

That was Debian and FreeBSD not RH.

dekhn8• 3 years ago

There were several good versions of Red Hat (IIRC 7.3 was pretty good) and then RH9 had NPTL but unfortunately was incompatible with the rest of the world (very custom kernel, userspace, compiler). IIRC the egcs included in that led to all sorts of interesting outcomes.

bitcharmer3• 3 years ago

I'm confused. RH9 is the latest release, how is it custom? What are you referring to exactly?

nubinetwork• 3 years ago

7.3 was my first Linux distro, I distro hopped for a few years and settled on Gentoo in 2004...

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, I tried installing good ol' 7.3 again and it wouldn't even finish the installer...

I don't remember if there was a trick to it, or whether bit rot and architecture changes make it not installable anymore.

ajross3• 3 years ago

But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time.

There's no better microcosm of the early Linux world than this. "Yeah, that giant market-driving lawsuit was bad, I was there too and suffered along with the rest of you. But that's not the important thing: let me tell you about how bad RPM is compared to DPKG! Did you know the underlying archive format was cpio? CPIO!"

That's not intended to be too much of a barb (I was a Debian nut too, FWIW), but really, all that stuff seems pretty silly in hindsight.

biorach2• 3 years ago

me tell you about how bad RPM is compared to DPKG!

I'm pretty sure the person you're replying to was taking about the distro as a whole, not the package file format

chungy• 3 years ago

Did you know the underlying archive format was cpio? CPIO!

And what's wrong with that? deb's underlying format is ar, which is basically the same class of simple archives that cpio is.

It solves the problem with two nice benefits:

1. You're not reinventing an archive format, the existing ones are perfectly adequate.

2. If your system is borked enough that you don't even have a working package manager, you can manually extract your package manager from a package file with nothing more than the cpio or ar programs.

dmitryminkovsky• 3 years ago

What were the best distros then?

dwater• 3 years ago

When I was a CS major in 1999-2003, the big names I remember people using were RedHat, SUSE, Debian, and Mandrake was gaining market share for desktop use. The installfests I went to were all RedHat. There seem to be a lot of complaints here about RedHat after that era, but my memory is that RedHat was the main linux distro circa 2003.

znpy4• 3 years ago

Because we had a paid license from them that included them absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux.

Not a trivial thing by the way, if you think about it.

jasoneckert3• 3 years ago

While I agree that the SCO FUD surrounding Linux was real at that time (we all felt it), Red Hat was one of the most respected, functional, and widely-implemented distributions for the entire time SCO was in the news headlines.

Kye• 3 years ago

It was also a huge pain if my experiences (early-mid 2000s) with Fedora are any indicator. Red Hat and co. were great because, given enough effort, they could be tuned into unshakable systems for any purpose. And you paid for that with your time and energy (or a support contract with Red Hat itself) and occasional frustration at things that didn't work like any other distribution.

ryukoposting• 3 years ago

Aaaaah, so that's why <company I interned at a few years ago> used RHEL!

itomato• 3 years ago

Ahh yes. We also kept our hands and feet inside the roller coaster with SLES and RHEL.

The ever-looming “threat” might be laughable in hindsight had it not stifled innovation at such an early stage of growth.

IT Directors everywhere should atone.

ChuckMcM• 3 years ago

Interesting side effect of this (to me :-)) is that when Blekko was acquired by IBM I got stuck doing what is called "Blue Washing" where IBM tracks down the licenses, origins, and usages of all the source code the acquired company is bringing to IBM. According to people I worked with when doing this, the entire process and toolset was an outgrowth of the work they did to disprove SCO's claims in the lawsuit.

I found it was both invasive and thorough, and generally engineers didn't like it when the answer was "You have to delete that, we can't verify we have rights to it."

politician3• 3 years ago

I wonder if it'll be much easier going forward. Take a suspect piece of code, run it through an LLM to explain it, pass the explanation to another LLM to generate code from the explanation. An automated pipeline for clean room reverse engineering.

jedberg4• 3 years ago

As long as you can prove that you had a license to all the code that was used to train the LLM! :)

hencq• 3 years ago

IANAL but it seems that if you rely on looking at the suspect piece of code to see what it's doing (even if done by an LLM), it's not exactly clean room.

kkielhofner3• 3 years ago

There’s an entire cottage industry around this. As one example:

https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/security-testing...

Frequently used for things like internal audits, compliance, due-diligence during financing, etc.

It’s remarkably thorough but not always completely accurate - it flagged an open source project I created that we were using as GPL. I had to correct them, which was entertaining.

bitcharmer3• 3 years ago

They are almost always inaccurate. What they always are is expensive

patwolf• 3 years ago

I was at IBM around the time of the SCO lawsuit and had to help out with blue washing a few projects. It was also around that time that there had been some high-profile cases of GPL code getting shipped accidentally. We had a tool that basically grepped through all the source for keywords like "Copyright", "License", or "GPL", and then we had to compile a report and get the lawyers to sign off on it. It didn't seem to me to be a very thorough way of proving provenance because it relied on proper attribution.

tiffanyh• 3 years ago

BSD

BSD's were the worst hurt from all of this. Too many companies scared to use it due to lawsuit.

Really unfortunate in hindsight, and Linux forever benefitted.

ajross3• 3 years ago

That causality seems backwards. Linux "benefitted" because it was the target of the lawsuit in the first place, which wouldn't have been aimed at Linux had Linux not already been the market winner. It was the USL v. BSDI lawsuit of a decade earlier (which to be clear absolutely did involve copied Unix code) that effectively killed BSD in the market by holding it back as Linux left the launchpad.

ghaff13• 3 years ago

The Linux and BSD cases actually turned out to be pretty similar. There were a handful of cases of literal copying but not to anything close to the degree claimed and pretty much trivial. (And SCO also made all sorts of claims around Linux taking knowledge, including negative know-how, and techniques from Unix that were completely ridiculous.)

heelix• 3 years ago

One of my greatest white elephant gifts were SCO stock certificates. Was a real challenge to figure out how to spend $20+ for a bit of paper as they were getting close to delisting. Really wish I had kept one for myself.

Miss groklaw... what a loss when that shut down.

ahelwer• 3 years ago

I was recently bitten by this ghost of the past in the present day! Since the TLA⁺ project is trying to join the Linux Foundation, they've recently started enforcing Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) signing on all of the repos under the github.com/tlaplus org. The CI workflow started insta-failing on my PRs since none of my commits included a DCO. Fixing this isn't terribly difficult, github gives you a rebase command to run so you re-apply every commit locally with DCO signoff, then force-push. Then in the future you have to remember to run git commit -s -am "commit msg" instead of git commit -am "commit msg". The -s flag adds a DCO message to the commit.

criddell• 3 years ago

I wonder if anybody here can correct my memory.

When Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO, I seem to recall that part of the deal was Microsoft agreeing to not compete in the Unix market. Today, Microsoft is embracing Linux with their WSL stuff and that certainly impacts the Unix market.

Maybe the 1997 agreement between the two companies ended Microsoft's exile from Unix-land or maybe when Caldera bought SCO's Unix business the Microsoft agreement didn't transfer?

And I realize that, unlike macOS, Linux isn't Unix but it does compete in that market.

quags3• 3 years ago

That sounds like Apple agreeing not to go into the music business with their settlement with apple music - and then just doing what they want any way. Microsoft being so large, could just do it and settle later.

bitwize3• 3 years ago

Back in 1999 Microsoft bought Interix, and marketed it as Windows Services for Unix under their own banner. So the agreement was probably non-binding as of 1999 at the latest.

Microsoft just didn't see Unix, and especially Linux, as competition because they felt what they built was better. Interix/SFU was a compatibility path to migrate Unix devs to Windows NT more than anything; it was more like Cygwin than like WSL.

They figured that Linux, and the dirty hippies that built it, would be easily swept away by Microsoft's mighty hand. Only when the Gates-Ballmer dynasty stepped down would the company be convinced otherwise.

ghaff13• 3 years ago

There was definitely a period in the 90s when a lot of people and companies expected/were resigned to Windows NT completely dominating both the desktop and the server. Even companies like IBM that were probably less convinced had backup plans like Monterey in IBM's case which factored into the SCO lawsuit.

mananaysiempre• 3 years ago

Interix/SFU/SUA was only the last pre-Linux iteration of Unix on top of Windows—a POSIX subsystem was included in NT from the beginning, even if it was practically useless to the point of having no network access (I believe early design documentation explicitly says it’s there to satisfy government contract requirements).

dekhn8• 3 years ago

Side note: I purchased Interix and used it to port a million-line C++/X11/Motif/OpenGL app to windows (successfully, although there wasn't really any demand for the result). Must have been '96 or '97. I didn't find it compelling, and the authors of the code decided to rewrite a new system from scratch, using Python and Tk (along with C++ and OpenGL) to be portable to all the commonly used platforms. That worked on Windows, Linux, IRIX, and later Mac OS X for at least 2 decades(!) with very little platform-specific code (except in the Tk dependency). They finally switched to Python/C++/Qt/OpenGL a few years back which I expect will work for another 20 years.

frandroid• 3 years ago

I recall the Halloween memos...

znpy4• 3 years ago

Linux is not unix, by the way.

Besides the obvious things (linux is just a kernel), the unix specification has many mandates in terms of API (for compatibility), in terms of behaviour and even in terms of commands and utilities (a specification of a vi editor is also in the unix specification iirc).

So yeah as long ad Microsoft doesn’t try and get anything certified as unix, they’re fine I guess (but I’m not a lawyer).

Worth noting: mac os is unix (every release gets certified iirc).

oblio4• 3 years ago

Amusingly, Microsoft used to sell Xenix, which was a certified Unix IIRC.

That predates the SCO lawsuit by about 2 decades.

ivzhh• 3 years ago

Providing legal protection for lawsuits can be a lucrative business. However, I'm not aware of any BSD-based companies that have capitalized on this opportunity. Are there any untold stories?

sangnoir• 3 years ago

Microsoft had the same approach to fighting Android: it threatened OEM with patent lawsuits, but never made the patents it was hanging public. Some of the settlements included agreements to manufacture Windows Mobile devices - an operating System that was clearly on its deathbed.

taftster4• 3 years ago

This is a hilarious quote, in the article, attributed to Linus, related to the concept of source code pedigree and the developer certification of origin for any contribution.

For example, in the case of "ctype.h", what made it so clear that it was original work was the horrible bugs it contained originally, and since we obviously don't do bugs any more (right?), we should probably plan on having other ways to document the origin of the code.

The concept that bugs would prove the origin makes me giggle. Because yes, if the code was stolen, it would have been stolen without the bugs included.

bobthepanda• 3 years ago

Well, mapmakers often sneak errors here and there to catch plagiarists. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement

manquer• 3 years ago

It works both ways, very similar bug patterns can be strong indication of copying does it not ?

ginko• 3 years ago

Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company.

I'm disappointed LWN would blindly rehash the "MS loves Linux" propaganda like this. Microsoft still doesn't love Linux. Their whole business model is still based on proprietary software.

ranger207• 3 years ago

I think that line is sarcasm. Corbet has a pretty dry sense of humor

dredmorbius2• 3 years ago

IMO the high-water mark was set in "Debian and the Hot Babe Problem":

The Debian developers raised the obvious, predictable objection to the inclusion of this utility: the associated images were covered by a non-free license.

<https://lwn.net/Articles/113644/>

That was ... also very nearly 20 years ago. The story left its mark.

CraigRo• 3 years ago

I would love to get a signed picture of Darl McBride for my bathroom. Because he paid for it. I heard about this lawsuit, called up a couple of IP lawyers, talked to a bunch of programmers, and read everything on groklaw. I called both analysts who covered the stock -- one had a price target of $5, while the other had a price target of $45 (stock was about 20 at the time). Then I shorted it with most of the money I had. It went down and I used the equity to short even more of it. In retrospect, the analysis was correct (i.e. don't sue a company that has more lawyers than you have employees without a good case), but the level of risk I took was insane, and it kept me up late at night for a long time.

dekhn8• 3 years ago

OK, that beats my "I made $25,000 on the VA Linux IPO simply because I was an early sourceforge user and got invited to the friends and family program".

jedberg4• 3 years ago

I had a buddy in college who made $25K on the VA Linux IPO for the same reason. He used it to pay for a used car and a couple year's tuition. Good times.

jboy55• 3 years ago

Eric Raymond (ESR) was a director of VA Linux. I remember seeing on Yahoo Finance in '00, but haven't been able to find again, that on Dec 30th or 31st, 1999 he exercised options for a 'gain' of around $2 million. He was locked from selling until around April. At that point all of his stock was worth around $6 million, which might have covered the AMT tax bill.

Edit: Found the log, not sure if "Aquired via Exchange" was a taxable event. If it is, there are a bunch https://web.archive.org/web/20000617155153/http://biz.yahoo....

jasoneckert3• 3 years ago

One thing that the author of this article left out is that SCO was not SCO during this dark period of litigation.

SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) was an x86 UNIX vendor that wasn't great, but enjoyed a lot of market share. I'd estimate they were #2 to SUN in installations because it ran on commodity x86 hardware. But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the pressure from Linux. When the company was sold to Caldera in Utah, very few original SCO people stayed, and those that did left quickly because Ransom Love (yes, that was his name) made it very clear the Caldera culture was not the old SCO culture, and that you'd have to relocate to Utah.

Following this, Caldera rebranded themselves back to SCO (The SCO Group) in an effort to convince people they were the same company. After all, they needed all the help they could get.

So, essentially, litigation SCO was not the original SCO. And in many ways, litigation SCO tarnished whatever respect the original SCO had.

AnimalMuppet4• 3 years ago

And litigation-SCO deliberately tried to confound the two, so that people assumed that litigation-SCO had all the IP rights that original-SCO once had. They didn't, though, as the court case showed.

ghaff13• 3 years ago

But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the pressure from Linux.

They were savaged by Windows NT before Linux became an appreciable factor. Which was one of the main arguments against Linux causing faux-SCO (as an industry colleague of mine liked to refer to them as) economic harm even if their claims were true--which they weren't.

But also, yeah, charting the corporate identities through that period was hard to keep straight. There was also a branch of Santa Cruz desktop products that ended up with Sun.

rascul2• 3 years ago

Caldera even had a Linux distro for a time, before the lawsuit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux

tomku• 3 years ago

Fond memories of OpenLinux because (iirc) the installer had off-brand Tetris you could play while it laboriously copied files from CD to HDD. Always thought that was a little funny given the antics they got up to later.

grahamm• 3 years ago

Yes the days of SCOC were great but the days of SCOX were dark. I left just before the Caldera take over.

kanzenryu2• 3 years ago

Anybody know anything about the part where SCO actually won? I'm referring to the final event years later where IBM made a settlement payment to them. I assume it didn't make up for the years of effort, but I'd love to know what it was based on.

AnimalMuppet4• 3 years ago

I think it was based on claims from the Project Monterrey contract. In fact, I think it kind of had to be - there weren't any other claims that were still active in the case, IIRC.

snowwrestler• 3 years ago

One of the weird side stories from the SCO saga was that of Dan Lyons, who at the time was a reporter with a little cottage industry in stories praising the work of SCO and predicting IBM’s imminent loss and comeuppance for all the Linux neck beards.

It later turned out he was also behind the briefly-popular “Fake Steve Jobs” blog, and on the strength of that reputation he left journalism to go into tech company marketing, with a brief side job writing for the show Silicon Valley.

burnte2• 3 years ago

He DID admit he was completely wrong with his predictions, so it's not like he was a blind cheerleader.

area51org3• 3 years ago

Only when forced to.

area51org3• 3 years ago

Lyons has also made a "career" out of hating on technology and SV in general. Besides writing for the TV show, he's also written several books about why technology and SV really, really suck and are to blame for practically everything wrong in the world (e.g. Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us). Oddly, he did actually try to work at a high-tech startup on the east coast, and when he was booted out for incompetence, he wrote a book about why startups are just such bullshit, man. I have personally spoken to him, by sheer coincidence and long before any of this came to pass, and he was very interested in working at a startup someday, although he was writing for Forbes at the time. In other words, if you want my take, dude has serious envy and has spent years trying to exorcise it by punishing everyone who has what he covets.

AnimalMuppet4• 3 years ago

I missed the SCO v. Novell verdict by 5 minutes. Got a heads-up phone call from a Groklaw contact and ran for my car, but didn't quite make it.

FoomFries• 3 years ago

The use of acronyms without definition is exhausting. A three letter one which has multiple uses all the more so.

jwmcq• 3 years ago

As someone who works building technology for commodity trading in the energy industry... you get used to it. Kinda.

KerrAvon• 3 years ago

SCO? It's the name of the company. Like IBM.

LBJsPNS• 3 years ago

Formerly Santa Cruz Operation...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation

talkingtab• 3 years ago

Personally, the most interesting thing about that event was groklaw. (http://www.groklaw.net/index.php) It is hard now to reconstruct the experience of having a website dedicated to something I cared passionately about. Groklaw is an example, in my opinion, of what the internet could be, should be and isn't. A website that provided a community for people with a common cause.

I don't mean to diminish the importance of Linux at all.

elkos• 3 years ago

I really miss Groklaw. Sometimes I wish they could come back, the insight of the author and the community around the site was really valuable and allowed me to have a more informed opinion.

29athrowaway• 3 years ago

SCO was just a sockpuppet of Microsoft.

They were providing the financial ammo.

hddqsb• 3 years ago

If you like Star Wars, check out the "bit of fun" that the author linked in the article's comments: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20120415121413.111a7461@lwn.net...

robotelvis• 3 years ago

I was actually the "author" of one of the pieces of code that SCO claimed had been stolen from them - SCO's implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter.

SCO had a collaboration with IBM called Project Monterey, in which SCO and IBM were merging their operating systems in order to be better positioned for IA64 (which at that point people still thought would be good).

One minor detail of the Monterey deal was that SCO got the right to port IBM's superior networking stack into SCO's operating systems. One part of IBM's networking stack was their implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter, and that was one of the parts I ported over (I'm pretty sure the file still had a BSD copyright notice on it).

That was back in the days when SCO was a cool UNIX vendor that thought of itself as an extension of UC Santa Cruz. Back then employees couldn't really imagine it turning evil, and it made me wary of what my subsequent employers (Google and Facebook) could turn into.

cjensen• 3 years ago

SCO the "cool UNIX vendor" was not the company that sued. In 2001, the cool UNIX vendor was struggling and sold its UNIX business to Caldera. Caldera renamed itself "the SCO Group" and filed the lawsuit. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation

noisy_boy2• 3 years ago

I remember seeing original SCO unix in our server room in 1998 - they were a legitimate player then but I also remember seeing all new orders going for SunOS (and later for Sun Solaris).

sgt3• 3 years ago

In my mind, I associate Caldera with that Linux distribution that was pretty OK, but nothing to write home about.

wsc981• 3 years ago

Let's not forget the following [0]:

SCO's Linux lawsuit made no sense and no one at the time gave it much of a chance of succeeding. Over time it was revealed that Microsoft had been using SCO as a sock puppet against Linux. Unfortunately for Microsoft and SCO, it soon became abundantly clear that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux and its allies.

In a way this was a proxy war of Microsoft vs Linux.

---

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/sco-linux-fud-returns-from-the...

Taniwha• 3 years ago

The original SCO wasn't particularly cool either, I worked for a competing company that got called in to help them when they couldn't get get the 286 MMU to work, the deal was that we would get a copy of the resulting code, we got it working but in the end got zilch

robennals2• 3 years ago

I can’t speak to what it was like to work with them from the outside, but (at least when I was there) they definitely had a fun internal culture.

Small enough to not have a “big company” feel, yet profitable enough (at that time) to not have “startup panic”. Plus lots of cool hackers, including some of the original authors of UNIX, who had joined through the AT&T deal.

rlt• 3 years ago

Thanks, now I feel old.

onphonenow• 3 years ago

Fwiw I think Darl may still be playing some games w his bankruptcy filings. Just an opinion but I’d be curious if he’s had multiple recent filings and if any have been dismissed (ie failure to disclose etc). I took a quick glance at a court docket - I’m no expert but it didn’t look good at first glance

browsertasker• 3 years ago

Amazing read.

The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

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