[ale] non-technical Linux question

Mon Feb 17 17:01:34 EST 2014

Yeah - I think it was actually the same guy that had bought DR DOS (the erstwhile CP/M  from Digital Research) just so he could sue M$ because it was generally believed that MS-DOS started from QDOS (quick and dirty operating system) which was a somewhat obvious knock off of CP/M.  When he changed jobs either from Novell to SCO or vice-versa he bought it again so he could start the lawsuit from his new company.  From what I could see that probably did have some merit (from original DR owners anyway) but buying products just so you can sue someone seems like a bad business model to me.   I don't know what ever became of that litigation but it was before the SCO/IBM/Linux litigation.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Payne
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 4:45 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] non-technical Linux question

It sad that Caldera did that, because they did do some good. I remember they bought Word Perfect to Linux, the first commercial Word Processor Linux. I actually bought a copy of it, and book that came with CD as well. I was excited that Linux was getting Professional Software. Don't get me wrong Adword was good.

I think that also bought Art Software as well.  Coredel. I was hoping it was going to come to Linux as well.

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 4:27 PM, Greg Clifton <gccfof5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> IIRC, at some point prior to the flurry of lawsuits and the licensing "deal"
> that SCO was offering, Caldera bought SCO and changed their name from 
> Caldera to SCO. It was actually the Caldera crowd that "sank the ship" 
> with all their unsuccessful lawsuits, trying to profit from extortion 
> rather than product sales.
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Lightner, Jeff <JLightner at water.com> wrote:
>>
>> There's some debate about whether Novell "sold" or "licensed" and 
>> therein was a major focus of the litigation that ultimately resulted in SCO's
>> demise.   Essentially SCO was claiming it "owned" "UNIX" and that everyone
>> else had "licensed" "UNIX" from AT&T who in turn sold it to Novell.  
>> There is no doubt there was a point at which Novell essentially 
>> contracted with SCO to deal with the UnixWare offerings as well as SCO's own UNIX offerings.
>> The question was did Novell "sell" it or "license it".   SCO claimed that
>> IBM who was embracing Linux in a big way had improperly included 
>> proprietary UNIX code (from AIX or OS/390 licensing) in OpenSource 
>> Linux so that meant SCO owned Linux.
>>
>> You could check out Groklaw (or copies of stuff from there since it
>> stopped posting for separate reasons) for the whole sordid story.   Not
>> being a lawyer and doing this from memory my (possibly faulty) 
>> recollection of it all summarized was:
>> 1)  The courts decided that Novell never "sold" UNIX - it licensed it 
>> to SCO.
>> 2)  Not only did SCO not have rights to UNIX as used by anyone else 
>> it actually owed unpaid license fees to Novell for what it had been 
>> doing with UNIX itself.
>> 3)  Not only did they NOT find proprietary UNIX code in Linux, the 
>> code that SCO challenged was actually Linux code improperly used in 
>> their UNIX which meant SCO was in violation of the GPL.
>>
>> In the middle of all that SCO was offering a "license" to distro 
>> makers that would exonerate them of any fallout if the courts did 
>> decide they owned Linux but as I recall only Suse (a once-related 
>> company) was ever dumb enough to sign a contract for that.
>>
>> The last I'd heard the "board" (a bunch of lawyers) of SCO fired the 
>> CEO who'd started all the litigation.  It seems it had long since 
>> gone bankrupt and its only "business" appeared to be the lawsuits.  
>> That CEO either did or said he would start an action against that 
>> "board" after his firing to protect the interest of the shareholders 
>> (whose stock was now worthless anyway so one wonders what he would be protecting).
>>
>> It was really a sad state of affairs.  In its day SCO UNIX was a good 
>> product and unlike most other UNIX variants was designed to run on 
>> any intel platform rather than proprietary hardware.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of 
>> Paul Cartwright
>> Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 3:45 PM
>> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
>> Subject: Re: [ale] non-technical Linux question
>>
>> On 02/17/2014 08:44 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
>> > SCO "Linux"?   I've never heard of that one.  I did work on SCO Xenix
>> > and SCO UNIX back in the early 90s.
>> >
>> > I had been working with various UNIX systems starting in the mid 
>> > 80s (I'd been doing DOS before that and did Novell Netware) but 
>> > they were all adjuncts to my full time job in accounting (early on 
>> > computers were the responsibility of accounting departments mainly because they were first
>> > adopters of PCs for spreadsheets).   In 91 I got my first full time IT job
>> > doing various UNIX (anyone here ever heard of Astrix from NEC [NOT the PBX
>> > FOSS of today]?) flavors.    About 95-96 I changed jobs and although the
>> > main job was HP-UX many of us got Caldera Linux desktops.   That was pretty
>> > cool as it contained WABI from Sun so could run the Windows 3.1.1 crud the
>> > corporation used, rather seamlessly.   WINE was not a good alternative in
>> > those days.   Most of what I've done since then has been with various
>> > RedHat/CentOS/Fedora versions though I have also played with Debian on
>> > PA-RISC just to see it work.   I've also worked with other FOSS stuff like
>> > FreeBSD.
>> >
>> > HP-UX
>> > SunOS/Solaris
>> > Dynix
>> > AT&T UNIX
>> > NCR UNIX
>> > SCO Xenix
>> > SCO UNIX (and later Open Desktop - originally TCP/IP and X-Windows 
>> > were separate add-ons that most installs didn't bother to buy) 
>> > Novell UnixWare
>> Novell also sold Unixware to SCO:
>> http://www.xinuos.com/index.php/products/virtualization/unixware7plus
>>
>> I worked on AT&T Unix and we also had Unixware platforms for our IVR 
>> group..
>>
>> --
>> Paul Cartwright
>> Registered Linux User #367800 and new counter #561587
>>
>>
>>
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