[H-GEN] RFC: SCO

[David Jericho]

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On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 02:27:07PM +1000, Raymond Smith wrote:
>     Why? Doesn't this concern the Linux community here? Or is everyone
>     just not bothered enough to get up and do something?
> </blockquote>
> 
> To start things off: I am not concerned about it as I see it as the last
> desperate attempts of an irrelevant company to survive. Furthermore, Ihave confidence in IBM's ability to win this lawsuit.

I don't doubt IBMs ability, along with SGI, HP, and
Whoever-Else-With-Deep pockets to band together and smash a seemingly
childish SCO into the ground, either through winning the court case, or
simply suing them until they have no more money left.

I agree with Raymonds comment regarding SCO being irrelevant. SCO
installations are on the decline, and it's pretty much at the same rate
as the hardware is dying. I can name a few firms in Brisbane who
replaced their SCO machines with HP, Solaris or even Windows as their
SCO hardware died. It's harder to get software running on SCO, and when
you do find it, it's often so primative compared to what is available
elsewhere that it's not worth the time or money.

If SCO were to come forward, and name the offending sections, or at least 
give references to the files involved, I'm sure the problem could be solved
with minimal issue.

But SCO's story is inconsistent, and they're asking us to take their
otherwise outrageous claims at face value. It's gone from offending
sections of AIX, to including Linux, IRIX, and a long list of variants, 
being a few tens of lines of code to many thousands, to being simple 
blocks of code here and there, to being technologies SCO has no released 
working implementation of.  

And of course there's the flipside. How do we know SCO hasn't done the
dirty on the non-offending parts of the Linux kernel or GNU utilities,
and placed that code into their software? I'd be suspicious of a claim
that it has never happened.

> The second part of his question is, I think, a little odd. But in my
> case, I can't see what HUMBUG could do about it. Perhaps we could send
> letters of support to IBM or issue a press release like AUUG.
> What do other people think?

Well, we can do the support thing, we also have people capable of
replacing lines of code if needed. With the exception of possibly one or
two members, I highly doubt most of the club has seen the source to many
of the claimed Unix variants.

Of course, having said that, it'd be nice if SCO could tell us what was
the offending code, thereby allowing us to rectify the situation through
replacement.

I do realise that being Open Source, software can open itself to these
problems. By the very same token, by being Open Source, software can
easily fix this if the situation where to come to pass.

-- 
David Jericho

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