SCO is losing their minds

I think SCO is has really gone over the edge here, or they are becoming a M$ wannabe.

Man, Billy G gives you some cash and suddenly you own the world. Someone in their public relations dept is really screwing up. They are really looking bad because of all this. I'd bet Gates is loving every minute of it. Ole Bill has been reading his Sun Tzu.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztec...reut/index.html

As the french saying say, SCO have their two feet in ****, deeply.

Don't forget that SCO is mostly owned by Microsoft so this move is not much of a surprise. If I were a SCO employe I'd start scanning the market again, I mean, IBM is a century old business.

I did learn something new out of this, FUD was initaly a term to describe IBM's tactics and now they are using it against SCO.

Bah all these million dollar companies, it's like waiting for the next 5 year old fight at the playground!

Doesn't suprise me either, MS is attmepting to kill Linux using any possible method. The fact that it *might* contain copyrighted material in it has caused our higher ups to order us not to install Linux on any further boxes until this things gets into the courts.

Meanwhile, two businesses in town have over 700 AS/400's a peice and their CTO's are practically crapping their pants right now. I think IBM will fend this attack off, but the uncertianity is going to hurt sales simply because end user companies such as us do not even want to risk the chance that we will have to pay IBM for AIX then pay SCO again.

Any new *iux boxes we install will be *BSD of sometype, proably Free since that is what I have expriance with. However, we were looking in replacing some of our older quad Alpha 500mhz rendering servers with new IBM stuff and now that has been put on hold and we are now looking at spending more money to purchase Sun systems.

Anyway...

From what I've read, I'd have to agree with you on most of the points, except that damage to IBM has already been done. There are several firms that I know that were looking into upgrading or switching to IBM systems, we were one of them, but this is going to cause them at least think twice: we did.

Most tech people know that SCO is dying and are most likely going to loose this fight with IBM, but the fact that there is uncertainty and the legality of IBM's flagship product in question is enough for businesses not to run the risk. Some will delay a bit, but we are at the point where we need to add more equipment, and with the new Bush tax write off, can afford to do so.

We even called our law firm to ask about it and they didn't seem to think we would have anything to worry about, but try convening your boss that there is 99.99% chance that nothing will be made of this, but if we have a 100% chance of nothing happening with Sun or worse MS...you can see the issue on the business end.

I work at a small architecture/graphics design firm with about 50 full time employees and there are three of us that are in the IT department. It took us almost a year to convence the owner to deploy Linux on file servers, after all some of our project files can reach 30 GB rather quickly, and our business in continuing to grow and we are adding more hardware all the time. But just having the uncertainty there will proably cause the next boxes we get to be MS 2003 server. I don't have to inform people of the cost per CPU of MS compare to the fact that our cost per CPU goes down with the more we add. (We purchased 1 copy of RH 7.1 and use it on all)

Why was it so hard, well for starters we use AutoCad and 3D studio MAX which work only on Win systems and there are only a few PowerMac boxes that our graphics and video production people use. They were, still are, using NT4 server for printers and file servers and when it came time to add more file storage we convenced the boss that we could save about $5000 by using Linux. Now we're getting read the riot act because, "You guys said this would save us money, but now its costing us $300 an hour any time we have to call our lawyers and just inquire how big a threat this is."

I can garuntee you now that we will be switching everything back to Windows systems. I would suggest *BSD, but the boss is going to say, "That's what you said about Linux, and I am not going to take the chance. Now go call up redmond and get another 25 user licences please!"

No amount of logic is going to convenice the owner/our boss and the sad part is there is not much I can do. Labor market here is tight and I was lucky to get this job in the first place. Think I am going to risk it to push Linux?

If SCO pushes this thing to RH or SuSE, it will become cannon fodder for M$ and will certainly hurt Linux in the business world. It has killed it for now at our firm.

SCO is a dying company looking to eat its "friends" alive to try and save itself. Let's look at it this way:

1. SCO needs to prove that the AIX/Unixware code was stolen, not stolen from Linux or, perhaps, BSD.
2. SCO's claims to intellectual property of System 7 are, at best, questionable to begin with.
3. SCO has, to this point, not made any moves to show that it's claims have any base.

I'm not too concerned about it. I highly doubt that SCO is going to be able to show evidence that anyone infringed on them, especially since they picked IBM's deep pockets to attack.

SCO's idiot quote of the day (from their complaint to the Third Judicial District of Salt Lake County):

"Prior to IBM's involvement, Linux was the software equivalent of a bicycle. Unix was the software equivalent of a luxury car ... It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code, methods or concepts..."

Translation: We're so dumb, we can't believe that a good product can be developed without status-hungry PHBs hounding hard-working developers all the time.

Of course, the other question that begs to be answered: since SCO is a Linux/Unix company... did they, perhaps, release their own proprietary code into the system and other people just picked it up?