[ale] History repeats itself

Tue Jul 7 17:29:59 EDT 2026

DEC was a big licensee of SCO and Novell, and as such I was shown the agreement between Novell (the purchaser of AT&T's IP) and SCO by my manager.

After careful reading of the document I looked at my manager and said "SCO did not receive anything.   The most they got was the ability to sell Unix licenses to other vendors."   My manager smiled and said "That is what I got out of it too....I just wanted you to confirm it."

Then, because it really did not affect DEC in any way, we just forgot about it.

Until, of course, Caldera bought SCO, changed the name of Caldera to SCO, and started to infer that there was SCO's code in the Linux kernel.

Anyone who really understood how Linus started the kernel and directed the kernel would know that this would be relatively hard or impossible to do even by accident on a copyright basis.   From a patent basis, the 17 year patent window is long closed.

>From a contract basis, any standing would have to be between IBM and "SCO", the signers of the contract.

In 1997 I was on the board of directors of UNIFORUM, an industry organization of Unix vendors.  Doug Michels, one of the co-founders (along with his father Larry Michels) of Santa Cruz Operations, was also on the board, and Doug insisted that UNIFORUM's Lifetime Achievement Award for that year be given to a 27 year old Linus for his work on the Linux kernel.   Once the board had agreed to give Linus the award, Dough INSISTED that he give the award to Linus himself (please see the attached photo).

Dough took Linus to breakfast that morning.   When I saw Linus after that I asked what Doug had said to him at breakfast.   Linus said "I was so embarrassed.   He asked me what SCO could do for Linux and I could not think of a single thing."   I told Linus "I would have said 'Doug give me your customer list.'"

A few months after that Doug and Larry sold SCO to Caldera and went off to form Tarantella.

Caldera, which as far as I could see only wanted a "cheap Unix", closed source or not, changed their name to SCO and started to sue people.

I sent an email to Doug asking him about SCO's relation to Linux and he said "SCO gives things to Linux and Linux gives things to SCO".   I took this to mean on a market share basis, not actually code.

Since much of what we call "Linux" today comes from the GNU project, BSD and MIT, and many others, the claim of SCO to an code in Linux (or even Unix) is crazy.   As is this (continued) suit.

Even if this company were to produce some type of "IP" that they could claim, all the Linux community would have to do is to re-write that IP out of the Linux kernel which is exactly what happened to free BSD from AT&T IP,  creating "BSDlite" in 1994.

I really do not know what they would expect to get from the continued pursuit of this case unless they had presented this case and IP to investors in order to get funding.   This last thought is pure conjecture.

maddog

> On 07/07/2026 1:34 PM EDT Chuck Payne via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>  
>  
>  
> 
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 1:20 PM Calvin Harrigan via Ale <ale at ale.org mailto:ale at ale.org> wrote:
> 
> > On 7/7/2026 1:18 PM, lollipopman691 via Ale wrote:
> > > First as tragedy, then as farce.
> > >
> > > https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/07/06/zombie-who-owns-unix-lawsuit-comes-alive-again/5266761
> > >
> > > -- CHS
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > Checks Calendar.  It's not April 1st, so...
> > 
> > --
> > Calvin Harrigan
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>  
> I thought Novell played there Ace, showed they own it.
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> Terror PUP a.k.a
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