groklaw.net — Seems SCO, the company suing IBM and alleging that they put masses of SCO code into linux illegally, was sponsored by Microsoft after all. Larry Goldfarb, head of Baystar investment says in a court filing that Microsoft pushed the $20 million investment ahead, even going so far as guaranteeing to back up the investment for the company.
Oct 8, 2006 View in Crawl 4
zetsurinOct 8, 2006
I guess it's back to the good old fashioned Microsoft-funded 'independent' FUD studies on Linux now.And to think that I still get crazy stares from (non games players BTW) guys at work when I tell them I use OSX at home.
akinderOct 9, 2006
Ah yes! Of course Eric "Open Source rules man!" Raymond is a true unbiased source!
ribald_jesterOct 9, 2006
Did MS break any laws here? Would IBM, Diamler, Redhat have legal options to persue against MS? Or is this one of those, "highly unethical" but perfectly "legal" business practices? Just curious...
sixdaysOct 9, 2006
@StonekeeperNIce to see I'm not the only one doing that :D
peter303Oct 9, 2006
SCO marketed products since 1980s.MicroSoft offload their version of UNIX (Xenix) to them.
dragOct 10, 2006
Keep in mind one thing though...This IBM vs SCO bulls**t originally it didn't have anything to do with Linux. It had to do with IBM just royalling screwing over SCO in a different matter entirely.Witness 'Project Monterey'.This project was a big effort between SCO and IBM especially.IBM was going to get the 'high end' Unix market based around Intel Itanium and POWER proccessors andSCO was going to get the 'mid' to 'low' end Unix market by supporting x86 and x86-64 proccessors.They were going to do this by standardizing Unix. So that applications programmed on one Unix would work on another. Both companies put a lot of work into it and SCO delayed releasing operating systems as part of the effort.Then along came Linux... Linux is currently doing what Project Montery was aiming to do, which is to create a standard unix system that scales accross all common architectures. So what was the point to Project Montery then?! Everybody figured propriatory unix operating systems had no long term future and that Linux systems will eventually surplant it.So IBM dropped project Montery to concentrate on 'Project Trillian', which they were working on in parrellel. This was a port of Linux to the Intel Itanium architecture... ie making Linux suitable for high-end unix tasks.As IBM and other traditional Unix companies continue to work on Linux it eventually materialized in the Linux 2.6 release. With this Linux now has more effecient ways to manage memory. A flexible scedualing system that can be custom tailored to specific tasks. Linux 2.6 showed a 600% improvement in performance in machines with 8 or more CPUs over Linux 2.4. Full support for adaptable NUMA architectures (ie Numa systems with hotplug memory and cpus). And a proven scalability of up to and over 64 cpus with stock kernel sources.So what is the point of Unix? The Linux kernel now outstrips everything that SCO's propriatory Unix can do and it does it faster, is easier to use, has higher compatability with software, AND is much much cheaper.THAT was originally what SCO was suing IBM over. Pulling out of Project Montery and putting efforts into Linux not only broke the contracts, completely screwed SCO over as the software they were developing on is now fairly irrelevent. All of this is due to IBM. IBM basicly killed any hope of long term survival in one big swoop and they probably did it on purpose. (hint: IBM can be evil mother f-ers if push comes to shove.)Then it morphed into this horrible 'Our IP in Linux' fiasco. I haven't looked it up, but it happened probably right around the time that Baystar invested in SCO AND Microsoft bought several million dollars worth of 'IP' openly from them.Not saying that SCO is guitless. I mean seriously; They are realy f-ng stupid to try to pull something like that. WTF were they thinking trying to drag Linux IP into this? If it wasn't for this last part then they might of had all the Linux folk on their side.After all they were Caldera before buying SCO. They gave a lot of the code for Linux that made SMP support possible in the first place!
Closed AccountOct 10, 2006
i440's just defending his paycheck.
Closed AccountOct 11, 2006
Yea some people like to stick the head in the sand when the facts aren't as they like it. But no matter what spin you put on it M$ using vile tactics to crush competition is wrong. Most people that are talking FUD wouldn't understand that monopolies adversely affect them in the end anyway.