[Linux-aus] SCO position, rationale and AUUG

[Chris Samuel]

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/*
 * Sorry about the rampant cross-post, just felt it was important to clear up
 * some points in Greg's post.
 */

On Thursday 22 May 2003 4:37 pm, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> > [Assorted organisations] are coming under increasing membership
> > pressure to respond to accusations of code plagiarism from the Santa
> > Cruz Operation (SCO).
>
> I don't think that SCO is the Santa Cruz Operation any more.

SCO who were the Santa Cruz Operation are now Tarantella, they sold their OS 
division to Caldera in 2001 and then changed the name.

	http://www.tarantella.com/about/history.html

Caldera became The SCO Group in 2002, and there doesn't appear to be any 
mention of "Santa Cruz Operation" any more. They've actually just changed 
name again, on the 16th May the shareholders approved renaming the company 
"The SCO Group, Inc." instead of just "The SCO Group".

	http://www.sco.com/company/history.html

> I think we need to look at where, if at all, SCO UNIX runs on
> significant numbers of CPUs.

You also need to be very clear about whether you are talking about SCO Unix or 
Unixware. The former is SCO's, the latter is the renamed System V Release 4 
from USG that Novell had before they sold it to Caldera (and AT&T had before 
them).

This case is about Unixware, not SCO Unix.

Bear in mind that one of the reasons that (I was told) Sun went System V for 
Solaris was because of the fact that the SunOS BSD kernel didn't MP anywhere 
near as well as System V (although Sun rewrote a lot the the SVR4 kernel).

> Sure, various versions of AIX, IRIX and
> Solaris do, but you can be pretty sure that that has nothing to do
> with the SCO code base.

Don't get into the trap of confusing Unixware and SCO Unix!

> This purchase of a UNIX license is really confusing.  By all accounts
> Microsoft has various UNIX source code, so they must have had a
> license.  After all, when SCO was effectively a part of Microsoft,
> they wrote or at least maintained XENIX.

Microsoft has had copyright messages in System V since around 1987, because of 
the original SCO's work on Xenix which MS released in 1980 (remember that SCO 
did the work under subcontract for MS, and the fall out from this is why SCO 
took MS to the European Commission in the late 1990's. See the webpage at:

	http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/tale.shtml

for more).

> > We also note that Microsoft have dropped support for some of their
> > software on SCO UNIX, but support those programs on Linux.
>
> The point?  That even Microsoft doesn't believe in SCO's viability?

Warning - SCO Unix is irrelevant at this point, Unixware is the issue.  It 
needs clarification about whether MS dropped support for SCO Unix, Unixware 
or both.

> Look at the effect on BSD of the AT&T vs. BSDI lawsuit 10 years ago. 
> FreeBSD and NetBSD weren't even involved in that lawsuit.

FreeBSD and NetBSD didn't even exist at that time. There's a nice piece on the 
BSD history and the lawsuit in Kirk McKusick's BSD chapter of the O'Reilly 
OpenSources book at:

	http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html

Chris
- -- 
 Chris Samuel  :  http://csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC

 Need someone with 10 years of Linux, Unix, Networking
   & IT Security skills in Melbourne, VIC ? Email me.

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