Remember SCO? They just don’t know when to quit, do they? “The Department of Justice’s Trustee program, which has finally had enough of SCO’s stalling tactics and failed reorganization attempts, has filed a motion to transition the company to Chapter 7. SCO CEO Darl McBride says that the company will oppose the motion and will present a new reorg plan to the court.”
Man, is that show still going? I lost interest a few seasons ago…
I hear Fox will axe it.
Moving it to rand(Weekday) at 7:30, are they?
I’ll say it’s a damn shame that a bonafide Unix Operating System has to disappear and go down because of Darl McBride. What a coward and a clown!
What I would love to see is for Oracle to purchase SCO for a song then merge any IP and code into what one could dub “UNIX Foundation” to which Novell, OpenSolaris and SCO assets (plus any other UNIX vendor who wishes to through their IP into the basket) to be all pooled together and operate as a non-profit organisation as to avoid any future rangling.
Maybe then the next phase will be IBM, HP, and Oracle all working together on a single UNIX from the ground up whose differentiators are the middleware, support and management tools/integration which make the difference between each one they sell. It would not only provide a unified face to scare off Linux encroachment into traditional UNIX markets but also show a unified face to the Windows world that there is one UNIX – all running on different architectures but all compatible with each other from the ground up.
SCO is the “troll” of the software world… never feed the trolls 🙂 what is the point in buying out SCO if they have no real case
(1) SCO don’t own the copyrights to UNIX, Novell does.
(2) What SCO does own is the lawsuits it started … and lost … and which now consist almost entirely of counter-claims against SCO.
That is, SCO owns massive liability, and its name is absolute mud.
Why would Oracle buy something as utterly fouled up and completely worthless as SCO?
SCO will own some intellectual property – hence the reason I clearly stated that Novell needed to get invoklved with this “UNIX Foundation”. I don’t know why you feel the need to ‘pick fights’ with anyone who *dares* make a comment on osnews.com.
As clearly stated, they could pick up parts of SCO for a song given the movement into Chapter 7 (liquidation). But like I said, you have a habit of picking fights over issues where there is no contention.
SCO has written some code, especially when they were Caldera. That IP was released by Caldera put in to the Linux source code under the GPL v 2.
SCOG has also written some proprietary code … and you can find it in Unixware. Not in Linux.
As clearly stated, SCO is all liability and negative goodwill, and has zero assets.
Why would anyone buy liabilities, even for a song?
For clarity … these statements above are just statements of facts. There is no intent to fight people. Facts are facts.
They are being switched from Chapter 11 (reorganization)to Chapter 7 (liquidation) because they have continued to lose significant volumes of cash and had no success with any of the plans they have attempted to promote. So it’s going to be an auction rather than a sale per se. Oracle may get things cheaper by having a proxy bid on the items they are interested in.
Still doesn’t answer the question of why anybody would buy something that is all massive liability and no assets.
Losing lawsuits anyone? Millions upon millions of debt owed to IBM, Novell, Autozone and RedHat? How much am I bid, ladies and gentlemen?
What I would love to see is for Oracle to purchase SCO for a song then merge any IP and code into what one could dub “UNIX Foundation” to which Novell, OpenSolaris and SCO assets (plus any other UNIX vendor who wishes to through their IP into the basket) to be all pooled together and operate as a non-profit organisation as to avoid any future rangling.
Don’t miss this parody with Larry Ellison and Dick Stallman at http://aristippus303.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/oracle-king-of-open-s… with Free Software song by Stallman. LOL!
Edited 2009-05-07 05:54 UTC
Does such a thing exist anymore, except for maybe very specialised areas? I don’t really see anywhere that Unix sits that Linux cannot.
Not saying you’re wrong, just wondering.
One of the issues is the sale of the UnixWare business by Novell to SCO in late 1995. An ammendment followed in 1996 that transferred certain Unix intellectual property to SCO.
A key fact that I think has been given little importance was a Joint Development Agreement between SCO and IBM signed in October of 1998.
If SCO didn’t obtain all the proper intellectual property from Novell in regard to Unix, why did IBM make an agreement with SCO?
I’m sure IBM’s army of lawyers made their homework in 1998 to decide to deal with SCO and not Novell.
In 1998, IBM’s version of Unix called AIX was at least 4 years behind in multiprocessing technology compared to UnixWare. Also, AIX didn’t run on Intel microprocessors.
The JDA between SCO and Novell may be obtained from http://tinyurl.com/cpxzdb
The other issue is the presence of Unix code and methods in Linux.
Linux lacked good scalability in the late 90s and early 2000s. In addition, Linux developers didn’t have the knowledge to fix the kernel to let it scale efficiently beyond 4 microprocessors.
Unix source code and methods could have been used to improve scalability in Linux.
See http://tinyurl.com/dm5on8 to learn about scalability problems in Linux and the availability of Unix source code.
Insider, huh? You wouldn’t possibly be inside SCO?
Show us some examples in the Linux source code. It’s right there on kernel.org.
He can’t and that is the problem with SCO and her apologists. When push comes to shove and they’re asked to provide evidence – Darl McBride see’s fit to do the dodge dance and dive manoeuvre by dripping any statement with legalese gobbly-goop and setting up straw men which have no relevance to the discussion at hand.
The only thing Darl McBride has proven is that he is a bullshit extraudinaire who would make even Karl Rove blush.
Edited 2009-05-07 03:58 UTC
Scalability improvements in Linux came largely from SMP code from IBM.
SMP is IBMs code. IBM bought it from Sequent who invented it, so IBM own patents on it, IBM has maintained and improved it, and IBM has released it under the GPL for use in Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with SCOG.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing#Operating_sy…
Edited 2009-05-07 04:52 UTC
“AIX 4.1 is the first completely new version of the AIX operating system to be announced since the original launch of AIX Version 3 in 1990… Among the new features introduced in this version are: A fully threaded kernel to support Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP)”
“The main issue to transform a UniProcessor (UP) Operating System like the AIX operating system Version 3 into an MP Operating System like AIX Version 4 is to protect the coherency of the data structures managed by the kernel…”Apart from becoming an MP OS, the AIX operating system was also turned from a process-based kernel to a thread-based kernel…”
http://tinyurl.com/d2b9cg
AFAIK early SMP stuff in AIX was done by Bull who has been a long time licensor of AIX.
The RCU code that plays a large role in making SMP efficient was invented at Sequent. Not IBM, not AT&T. IBM owns it now though and it is GPLd.
Now, stop trolling.
“Sequent’s dual-universe approach is especially bad. You can’t write a program
that uses both memset() and mkdir() although such a program runs on the Unix
systems from Sun, Dec, MtXinu, SGI, HP, NeXT, and Encore — and in either
universe of an Apollo.
“Sequent doesn’t even seem to understand. They’re so proud that they’re finally
moving to SVR3.2 while that the rest of the world is moving to SVR4 — which,
please note, is the one that merges in most of the BSD features people want.
“I have been passing on these complaints to everyone who asks how we like our
Sequent. Rock-solid hardware, pathetic software.”
http://tinyurl.com/cten4t
In addition, Linux developers didn’t have the knowledge to fix the kernel to let it scale efficiently beyond 4 microprocessors:
From: Linus Torvalds <torva…@transmeta.com>
Subject: Re: MM deadlock [was: Re: arca-vm-8…]
Date: 1999/01/11
Message-ID: <[email protected]>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 431087276
Original-Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1999 13:50:14 -0800 (PST)
Sender: owner-linux-ker…@vger.rutgers.edu
Original-Message-ID: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
To: Savochkin Andrey Vladimirovich <s…@msu.ru>
X-Authentication-Warning: penguin.transmeta.com: torvalds owned process doing -bs
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
X-Orcpt: rfc822;linux-kernel-outgoing-dig
Organization: Internet mailing list
MIME-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: fa.linux.kernel
X-Loop: majord…@vger.rutgers.edu
On Sat, 9 Jan 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> The cleanest solution I can think of is actually to allow semaphores to be
> recursive. I can do that with minimal overhead (just one extra instruction
> in the non-contention case), so it’s not too bad, and I’ve wanted to do it
> for certain other things, but it’s still a nasty piece of code to mess
> around with.
>
> Oh, well. I don’t think I have much choice.
Does anybody know semaphores by heart? I’ve got code that may well work,
but the race conditions for semaphores are nasty. As mentioned, this only
adds a single instruction to the common non-contended case, and I really
do believe it should be correct, but it is completely untested (so it
might not work at all), and it would be good to have somebody with some
theory go through this..
Basically, these simple changes should make it ok to do recursive
semaphore grabs, so
down(&sem);
down(&sem);
up(&sem);
up(&sem);
should work and leave the semaphore unlocked.
Anybody? Semaphore theory used to be really popular at Universities, so
there must be somebody who has some automated proving program somewhere..
Linus
I remember using SCO 5 at college back in 1996. The setup was one server and a dozen or so terminals. It was my first exposure to a multi-user system and I thought it was kinda cool. It seemed a real privellage at the time when the teacher logged you on as SU ‘Don’t look while I enter the password’. LOL
There are a few good reports on what happened in Denver on Wednesday. I’ve gathered the most important at http://anonymous-insider.blogspot.com/2009/05/sco-v-novell-appeals-…
Enjoy!