[ale] non-technical Linux question

[Lightner, Jeff]

There's some debate about whether Novell "sold" or "licensed" and therein was a major focus of the litigation that ultimately resulted in SCO's demise.   Essentially SCO was claiming it "owned" "UNIX" and that everyone else had "licensed" "UNIX" from AT&T who in turn sold it to Novell.  There is no doubt there was a point at which Novell essentially contracted with SCO to deal with the UnixWare offerings as well as SCO's own UNIX offerings.  The question was did Novell "sell" it or "license it".   SCO claimed that IBM who was embracing Linux in a big way had improperly included proprietary UNIX code (from AIX or OS/390 licensing) in OpenSource Linux so that meant SCO owned Linux.

You could check out Groklaw (or copies of stuff from there since it stopped posting for separate reasons) for the whole sordid story.   Not being a lawyer and doing this from memory my (possibly faulty) recollection of it all summarized was:
1)  The courts decided that Novell never "sold" UNIX - it licensed it to SCO.
2)  Not only did SCO not have rights to UNIX as used by anyone else it actually owed unpaid license fees to Novell for what it had been doing with UNIX itself.
3)  Not only did they NOT find proprietary UNIX code in Linux, the code that SCO challenged was actually Linux code improperly used in their UNIX which meant SCO was in violation of the GPL.

In the middle of all that SCO was offering a "license" to distro makers that would exonerate them of any fallout if the courts did decide they owned Linux but as I recall only Suse (a once-related company) was ever dumb enough to sign a contract for that.

The last I'd heard the "board" (a bunch of lawyers) of SCO fired the CEO who'd started all the litigation.  It seems it had long since gone bankrupt and its only "business" appeared to be the lawsuits.  That CEO either did or said he would start an action against that "board" after his firing to protect the interest of the shareholders (whose stock was now worthless anyway so one wonders what he would be protecting).

It was really a sad state of affairs.  In its day SCO UNIX was a good product and unlike most other UNIX variants was designed to run on any intel platform rather than proprietary hardware.





-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Paul Cartwright
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 3:45 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] non-technical Linux question

On 02/17/2014 08:44 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> SCO "Linux"?   I've never heard of that one.  I did work on SCO Xenix and SCO UNIX back in the early 90s.
>
> I had been working with various UNIX systems starting in the mid 80s (I'd been doing DOS before that and did Novell Netware) but they were all adjuncts to my full time job in accounting (early on computers were the responsibility of accounting departments mainly because they were first adopters of PCs for spreadsheets).   In 91 I got my first full time IT job doing various UNIX (anyone here ever heard of Astrix from NEC [NOT the PBX FOSS of today]?) flavors.    About 95-96 I changed jobs and although the main job was HP-UX many of us got Caldera Linux desktops.   That was pretty cool as it contained WABI from Sun so could run the Windows 3.1.1 crud the corporation used, rather seamlessly.   WINE was not a good alternative in those days.   Most of what I've done since then has been with various RedHat/CentOS/Fedora versions though I have also played with Debian on PA-RISC just to see it work.   I've also worked with other FOSS stuff like FreeBSD.
>
> HP-UX
> SunOS/Solaris
> Dynix
> AT&T UNIX
> NCR UNIX
> SCO Xenix
> SCO UNIX (and later Open Desktop - originally TCP/IP and X-Windows
> were separate add-ons that most installs didn't bother to buy) Novell
> UnixWare
Novell also sold Unixware to SCO:
http://www.xinuos.com/index.php/products/virtualization/unixware7plus

I worked on AT&T Unix and we also had Unixware platforms for our IVR group..

--
Paul Cartwright
Registered Linux User #367800 and new counter #561587



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