RacerX
Old Rhapsody User
I have been following the SCO vs. _____ (fill in the blank) case for quite some time now worried about the implications of an IT company whose primary product is law suits. Initially I was also interested in seeing just what code they thought they found.
I have had a long history with both Macs and Unix based computing. While in school, the mainstays of my computing world were Macs, Suns, SGIs and NeXT systems. But, as a student, I could only afford to own a Mac. Why? In the early 90s Unix was expensive. Of my current systems my 1991 SGI IRIS Indigo Workstations were about $10,000 back then, my 1993 SGI Indy Workstation would have been $24,000, my low end 1992 Sun SPARCclassics were $4,500, and to outfit a Mac with Apple's A/UX operating system was about $800. Even when NeXT finally made a PC version of NEXTSTEP, the price was about the same as A/UX. Unix was expensive, very expensive.
In 1994, while working at the National Science Foundation's Geometry Center, I came across a little system that would change all that for me. The Geometry Center (like most high end computer based institutions of the time) was running with Macs, Suns, SGIs and NeXT systems... no PCs. This was not surprising, the general feeling was that PCs were the tools of secretaries and gamers and had no place in the real computing world. Still, part way through the summer I find in a little back room a PC. Back then I thought the only reason for it being there was to play DOOM, but it was running a new operating system called Linux. It didn't do much, but it was free and running on a cheep PC.
By the end of the 90s the seeds of Linux had made major changes in how Unix systems were being priced. In 1998 I bought a PC to put Linux on it... and never did. Sun had released a version of Solaris for Intel that was free! Early the next year I bought my first SGI and OPENSTEP (replacing Solaris on the PC).
I didn't happen into a small fortune, all these things started to come down in price. And to top it off, the amount of software for these platforms was increasing... with much of it being free. The advent of Linux, BSD and Open Source had tipped the balance of Unix-based systems to make them available and viable for the average user. The pricing of Mac OS X is a direct result of the events of the late 1990s.
I never did get around to using Linux much, but I was very aware of the part it was playing in my daily computing life. So when SCO sued IBM over Linux code they said was Unix code, I was interested to see the merits of the case.
At first, no one knew exactly what they (SCO) were talking about, so it was possible that it was true. But when SCO was unwilling/unable to show any code, and all infringing code known of today was discovered by the Linux community themselves, I started wondering where this was all going.
Then came the letters. SCO sent 1,500 letters to Linux users saying that they had to start paying license fees to SCO or they would be sued. The problem was that none of SCO's code had been shown to be in Linux yet. Usually that type of move waits for the proof of the final out come of a case like the SCO vs IBM matter in court right now.
As this appeared to be a campaign of FUD, it was not surprising for Red Hat to defend itself, they sued SCO for proof of the SCO claims.
So, this still all seems to be mainly a Linux issue with some of it spilling over into the Open Source arena.
The first lines of code were shown by SCO to a small group at an SCO convention. It wasn't long before those lines of code were on the internet and shown to be available for open use (with the exception of some SGI specific code that turned out to be redundant anyway). The code could be traced back to either BSD or 16-bit Unix code released by SCO (then Caldera) more than a year earlier.
So it would seem that SCO doesn't have a case. But if they don't have a case, they are dead in the water. In an interesting (and disturbing) turn of events, it now seems like SCO is going to contest a settlement between AT&T and BSD back in 1994 which made BSD open source (leading to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and now Darwin).
Consider this, SCO is wanting to charge Linux users a fee of about $700. It now looks like in order to get around the lack of evidence of System V code in Linux, they want to have the rights to BSD code too. What is to stop them from asking for $700 from every BSD user (including us) for every processor running that software (that would be $1400 for you dual processor people).
SCO saying they are considering contesting AT&T vs. BSD means we are about to become targets too. We, Mac users, really need to start following this with a little more active interest.
I would really hate to see Mac OS X start to cost as much as A/UX did. More important, as I don't see Apple getting users who already have Mac OS X to pay up an additional $700, SCO could (in theory) ask Apple to cough up $700 for every copy of Mac OS X sold and $1400 for every dual processor system sold running it.
SCO is gearing up to sue everyone, and our platform maybe next on the list of targets.
I have had a long history with both Macs and Unix based computing. While in school, the mainstays of my computing world were Macs, Suns, SGIs and NeXT systems. But, as a student, I could only afford to own a Mac. Why? In the early 90s Unix was expensive. Of my current systems my 1991 SGI IRIS Indigo Workstations were about $10,000 back then, my 1993 SGI Indy Workstation would have been $24,000, my low end 1992 Sun SPARCclassics were $4,500, and to outfit a Mac with Apple's A/UX operating system was about $800. Even when NeXT finally made a PC version of NEXTSTEP, the price was about the same as A/UX. Unix was expensive, very expensive.
In 1994, while working at the National Science Foundation's Geometry Center, I came across a little system that would change all that for me. The Geometry Center (like most high end computer based institutions of the time) was running with Macs, Suns, SGIs and NeXT systems... no PCs. This was not surprising, the general feeling was that PCs were the tools of secretaries and gamers and had no place in the real computing world. Still, part way through the summer I find in a little back room a PC. Back then I thought the only reason for it being there was to play DOOM, but it was running a new operating system called Linux. It didn't do much, but it was free and running on a cheep PC.
By the end of the 90s the seeds of Linux had made major changes in how Unix systems were being priced. In 1998 I bought a PC to put Linux on it... and never did. Sun had released a version of Solaris for Intel that was free! Early the next year I bought my first SGI and OPENSTEP (replacing Solaris on the PC).
I didn't happen into a small fortune, all these things started to come down in price. And to top it off, the amount of software for these platforms was increasing... with much of it being free. The advent of Linux, BSD and Open Source had tipped the balance of Unix-based systems to make them available and viable for the average user. The pricing of Mac OS X is a direct result of the events of the late 1990s.
I never did get around to using Linux much, but I was very aware of the part it was playing in my daily computing life. So when SCO sued IBM over Linux code they said was Unix code, I was interested to see the merits of the case.
At first, no one knew exactly what they (SCO) were talking about, so it was possible that it was true. But when SCO was unwilling/unable to show any code, and all infringing code known of today was discovered by the Linux community themselves, I started wondering where this was all going.
Then came the letters. SCO sent 1,500 letters to Linux users saying that they had to start paying license fees to SCO or they would be sued. The problem was that none of SCO's code had been shown to be in Linux yet. Usually that type of move waits for the proof of the final out come of a case like the SCO vs IBM matter in court right now.
As this appeared to be a campaign of FUD, it was not surprising for Red Hat to defend itself, they sued SCO for proof of the SCO claims.
So, this still all seems to be mainly a Linux issue with some of it spilling over into the Open Source arena.
The first lines of code were shown by SCO to a small group at an SCO convention. It wasn't long before those lines of code were on the internet and shown to be available for open use (with the exception of some SGI specific code that turned out to be redundant anyway). The code could be traced back to either BSD or 16-bit Unix code released by SCO (then Caldera) more than a year earlier.
So it would seem that SCO doesn't have a case. But if they don't have a case, they are dead in the water. In an interesting (and disturbing) turn of events, it now seems like SCO is going to contest a settlement between AT&T and BSD back in 1994 which made BSD open source (leading to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and now Darwin).
Consider this, SCO is wanting to charge Linux users a fee of about $700. It now looks like in order to get around the lack of evidence of System V code in Linux, they want to have the rights to BSD code too. What is to stop them from asking for $700 from every BSD user (including us) for every processor running that software (that would be $1400 for you dual processor people).
SCO saying they are considering contesting AT&T vs. BSD means we are about to become targets too. We, Mac users, really need to start following this with a little more active interest.
I would really hate to see Mac OS X start to cost as much as A/UX did. More important, as I don't see Apple getting users who already have Mac OS X to pay up an additional $700, SCO could (in theory) ask Apple to cough up $700 for every copy of Mac OS X sold and $1400 for every dual processor system sold running it.
SCO is gearing up to sue everyone, and our platform maybe next on the list of targets.
