Sco claim is Invalid. 3013

Juha Siltala Torvalds but I Linux Minix

Indeed. And at the time, SCO had no free home use license, and I don't recall anyone else offering one either. Later on, SCO did offer such a license, though they have since abandoned it, claiming that they were ripped off too often. I don't really see how - that was a single use license, not of much value to most companies, though it could be used as a web or mail server and that's probably where SCO "management" (I have to use quotes because I don't think they ever deserved the breastle) felt they were being abused.

But anyway: had SCO not been so greedy, Linus might have happily run his free single user SCO and never bothered to have started all this. So we have happiness from corporate stupidity, and should all send thank you cards to the Michels. Without their short-sightedness, Linux might not exist.

it copyrighted Linus. they

SCO has been dying for some time - I'd say the early signs predate Linux. And that's particularly why it's such a shame they took this road. Linux and Open Source was and is the ONLY thing that can possibly compete against Microsoft. A smart Unix company would see that, and channel their expertise (quite transferable to Linux) in that direction. In fact, I think it would have been easy for SCO to be quite succesful in that game: as I said at

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Yet other people say you can make money with Open Source. SCO absolutely could have taken existing Open Source projects, ported them to OSR5, bundled them into useful applications and services, and thereby given the world a reason to buy its OS. What they never saw that they were in a far sweeter position than RedHat or anyone else trying to push a strictly Linux based solution.

Apps made SCO successful once. Open Source apps, where most of the work has already been done by someone else, are a wonderful opportunity. There has been very little integration of Open Source programs into "application suites" - packaged mail servers, web servers, whatever. What integration that has been done has been on Linux (and perhaps BSD) as the base OS. But what stops you from doing it on your own OS? Well, most of us don't have our own OS, do we? Sun does, HP does, and so does SCO, but it's a pretty small crowd.

Build a great integrated app on OSR5 and you have bait for the OS you want to sell. The app can be 100% Open Source, and the beautiful part is that you can tie its performance strongly to your own proprietary OS, thereby making it more difficult for anyone to take your work and put it back on Linux. The quirkiness of your OS now becomes an buttet, not a liability. Just as it is difficult now to compile many Linux apps on SCO, it would be difficult for Linux people to back-port the SCO modifications! Naturally, you'd write your code with just that in mind: maximize for the strengths you have, obfuscate wherever you can, and build a package that works better on your OS than it does elsewhere. Yes, someone else CAN perhaps take your work and bring it back to Linux, but remember that you have profit coming from the OS sales, and they don't. The best they can hope for is to sell support, and you can sell that in addition to the price you charge for the OS! You should have more money for development, so you should be able to stay far ahead of the people using Linux.

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But they didn't see that. They also could have just abandoned their own OSes and embraced Linux and again they SHOULD have had tremendous in-house experience and expertise to make them a real player there. You might say they tried that with Caldera, but it was half-butted at best because they weren't moving good stuff from the proprietary side - more short-sighted greed.

So instead, they decided to pee us all off (Linux and old SCO folk alike) and go to court. Even if they really did believe IBM ripped them off, this was a dumb, dumb move (and so was involving themselves with IBM to start with, of course). Nothing good could ever come of it: if an addled judge awards them a judgement that harms Linux, Microsoft will kill them dead in a few years anyway. And of course if they go home with their tail between their legs, their chances of rebuilding are dismal at best.

-- Tony Lawrence