[HN Gopher] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
___________________________________________________________________
The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
Author : chmaynard
Score : 188 points
Date : 2023-03-03 17:10 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I missed the SCO v. Novell verdict by 5 minutes. Got a heads-up
| phone call from a Groklaw contact and ran for my car, but didn't
| quite make it.
| taftster wrote:
| This is a hilarious quote, in the article, attributed to Linus,
| related to the concept of source code pedigree and the developer
| certification of origin for any contribution.
|
| _> For example, in the case of "ctype.h", what made it so clear
| that it was original work was the horrible bugs it contained
| originally, and since we obviously don't do bugs any more
| (right?), we should probably plan on having other ways to
| document the origin of the code._
|
| The concept that bugs would prove the origin makes me giggle.
| Because yes, if the code was stolen, it would have been stolen
| without the bugs included.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Well, mapmakers often sneak errors here and there to catch
| plagiarists. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement
| snowwrestler wrote:
| One of the weird side stories from the SCO saga was that of Dan
| Lyons, who at the time was a reporter with a little cottage
| industry in stories praising the work of SCO and predicting IBM's
| imminent loss and comeuppance for all the Linux neck beards.
|
| It later turned out he was also behind the briefly-popular "Fake
| Steve Jobs" blog, and on the strength of that reputation he left
| journalism to go into tech company marketing, with a brief side
| job writing for the show _Silicon Valley_.
| burnte wrote:
| He DID admit he was completely wrong with his predictions, so
| it's not like he was a blind cheerleader.
| ivzhh wrote:
| Providing legal protection for lawsuits can be a lucrative
| business. However, I'm not aware of any BSD-based companies that
| have capitalized on this opportunity. Are there any untold
| stories?
| matrix12 wrote:
| During project Monterey I had to setup all of the services that
| allowed SCO/IBM/Sequent on the IGS/IBM side. A few short years
| later I was tasked with pulling all of the IBM AIX design docs
| and source code for discovery going back to the beginning.
|
| One has to recall that what sued IBM was the Ray Noorda Canopy
| Group. Aka Caldera. Which also levied lawsuits against Microsoft.
| Far from the ocean view of Santa Cruz.
| ginko wrote:
| >Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO
| and loudly bought licenses from the company.
|
| I'm disappointed LWN would blindly rehash the "MS loves Linux"
| propaganda like this. Microsoft still doesn't love Linux. Their
| whole business model is still based on proprietary software.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| One thing that the author of this article left out is that SCO
| was not SCO during this dark period of litigation.
|
| SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) was an x86 UNIX vendor that wasn't
| great, but enjoyed a lot of market share. I'd estimate they were
| #2 to SUN in installations because it ran on commodity x86
| hardware. But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up
| given the pressure from Linux. When the company was sold to
| Caldera in Utah, very few original SCO people stayed, and those
| that did left quickly because Ransom Love (yes, that was his
| name) made it very clear the Caldera culture was not the old SCO
| culture, and that you'd have to relocate to Utah.
|
| Following this, Caldera rebranded themselves back to SCO (The SCO
| Group) in an effort to convince people they were the same
| company. After all, they needed all the help they could get.
|
| So, essentially, litigation SCO was not the original SCO. And in
| many ways, litigation SCO tarnished whatever respect the original
| SCO had.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| And litigation-SCO deliberately tried to confound the two, so
| that people assumed that litigation-SCO had all the IP rights
| that original-SCO once had. They didn't, though, as the court
| case showed.
| grahamm wrote:
| Yes the days of SCOC were great but the days of SCOX were dark.
| I left just before the Caldera take over.
| ghaff wrote:
| >But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the
| pressure from Linux.
|
| They were savaged by Windows NT before Linux became an
| appreciable factor. Which was one of the main arguments against
| Linux causing faux-SCO (as an industry colleague of mine liked
| to refer to them as) economic harm even if their claims were
| true--which they weren't.
|
| But also, yeah, charting the corporate identities through that
| period was hard to keep straight. There was also a branch of
| Santa Cruz desktop products that ended up with Sun.
| rascul wrote:
| Caldera even had a Linux distro for a time, before the lawsuit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux
| gemstones wrote:
| I hadn't heard of Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) and I looked at his
| LinkedIn; this is his side of the story from his time at SCO, as
| he puts in in his work experience section. I found it super
| interesting. All of my work experience before and
| after SCO was of the startup/entrepreneurial variety. Fun stuff,
| new, exciting and positive. Then some former colleagues on the
| board of SCO (previously Caldera) convinced me to come in and try
| and turn around a company that had fallen from a billion dollar
| valuation down to a measly six million. They only had $8 million
| of cash and they were burning $4 million per quarter so I
| basically had 6 months to complete the turnaround.
| What they didn't tell me was the company was in a dispute with
| IBM over disputed UNIX software code. This led to us filing a
| lawsuit against IBM, retaining David Boies to represent us,
| raising $76M to fight the battle, seeing our stock go from $0.66
| per share to $22 per share, then falling back down to pennies per
| share after losing an important trial. IBM teamed up
| with Linux programmers worldwide to go against me and I showed up
| on the cover of Fortune Magazine as "Corporate Enemy Number One".
| Hey, at least you can say that I was number one at something huh?
| I was as popular in the tech industry as Donald Trump hanging out
| at an Oscars after party with a bunch of Hollywooders.
| The legal battle is not actually over, 15 years later, the case
| is in review at the 10th circuit court of appeals in Denver.
| Silver Lining: While the courtroom battles were raging, we
| started a mobile apps business that I later bought out of SCO
| with some friends. That is where Shout came from. Back to the
| worlds I know and love - tech startup tied to sports and
| entertainment.
| quags wrote:
| http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM-835-Exhibit_224.pdf follows a
| good explaination of sco's tactics at the time. During the
| lawsuit a dedicated server company rackshack (later ev1
| servers) bought a license for all their users between.
| According to the owner Robert Marsh later in the trial, he felt
| in the end SCO was misleading and provided false information.
| ianbicking wrote:
| If the stock went so low, couldn't IBM or whoever just buy SCO?
| Or were not there not a controlling number of shares available?
| hoherd wrote:
| The LWN article discusses this point:
|
| > it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective
| was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have
| solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather
| less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an
| annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership
| of Unix -- and, thus, Linux. ...
|
| > IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had
| invested heavily into Linux in its early days and was
| uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property
| taint to attach to that effort.
| snapetom wrote:
| I shit on a lot that IBM does, but at the end of the day, I
| will always give them respect for what they did against
| SCO. If they rolled over, that would have given validity to
| SCO's claims and who knows where Linux would be today.
| chubot wrote:
| If you can win, why set that precedent? The negative result
| for SCO is very useful to the rest of society.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| His personal website contains gems like this one:
|
| > "Darl McBride will be remembered as one who fought for the
| rights of the individual against tyranny, for freedom against
| slavery, for intellectual liberty against herd mentality. In
| short, he is a Howard Roark (Ayn Rand's protagonist in 'The
| Fountainhead') for our age."
|
| > Francis Erdman, Blog Kinetic
|
| And other heavily narcissistic quotes. Not surprising that he
| saw nothing wrong in appropriating other people's voluntary
| work and calling them long haired stinkies at the same time.
|
| What a fellow :)
| sjm wrote:
| And today he's a Marjorie Taylor Green-retweeting bankrupt
| conspiracy theorist. Funnily enough his personal website
| <title> is "Billionaire Cheat Codes"
| morelisp wrote:
| IDK, if I was put in charge of a company losing money like
| crazy and was genuinely trying to turn it around, my first
| thought would not be "oh, let's hire David Boies".
| hristov wrote:
| I know! For HN readers not familiar with the legal industry,
| Boies was considered the superstar of the legal world at the
| time and was well known to demand $50 million retainers.
| FloayYerBoat wrote:
| ...and he's the (real) bad guy in the Theranos story. [Bad
| Blood, by John Carrerou]
| kjs3 wrote:
| As I recall, Microsoft put up a ton of money to fund the SCO
| lawsuit. They didn't hire Boies out of Unix profits.
| morelisp wrote:
| My point isn't that McBride was doing something financially
| irresponsible, my point is that _he's obviously lying_.
| Linosaurus wrote:
| He's technically only claiming that turning the company
| around was his job description when recruited. Is that
| this was a lie told to him.
| morelisp wrote:
| Even if he's getting fed nothing but lies by someone else
| about how IBM really did steal their source code and
| winning this is in the bag and will totally turn the
| company around, and somehow has no ability to discern the
| truth himself, you still don't hire David Boies to deal
| with that.
| kjs3 wrote:
| You've decided to throw down with IBM with a lawsuit that
| could result in _billions_ in damages. You 've convinced
| yourself you're going to win, lies or no. Microsoft is
| shoveling money at you to do it. And......you _aren 't_
| going to go hire a gold-plated superstar litigator, the
| guy whose already spanked Microsoft in court, "to deal
| with that"?
|
| With all due respect...the hell you aren't.
| morelisp wrote:
| > gold-plated
|
| In 2003? Boies was probably best known for losing one of
| the most watched court cases in American history.
|
| He's a great choice... if you want an savvy operator with
| a weak moral compass to pump your stock. Not so much if
| you want to win because you believe the company is in the
| right and has a promising future. (He might do that too,
| but no better than dozens of other effective lawyers.)
| kanzenryu2 wrote:
| Anybody know anything about the part where SCO actually won? I'm
| referring to the final event years later where IBM made a
| settlement payment to them. I assume it didn't make up for the
| years of effort, but I'd love to know what it was based on.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I _think_ it was based on claims from the Project Monterrey
| contract. In fact, I think it kind of had to be - there weren
| 't any other claims that were still active in the case, IIRC.
| CraigRo wrote:
| I would love to get a signed picture of Darl McBride for my
| bathroom. Because he paid for it. I heard about this lawsuit,
| called up a couple of IP lawyers, talked to a bunch of
| programmers, and read everything on groklaw. I called both
| analysts who covered the stock -- one had a price target of $5,
| while the other had a price target of $45 (stock was about 20 at
| the time). Then I shorted it with most of the money I had. It
| went down and I used the equity to short even more of it. In
| retrospect, the analysis was correct (i.e. don't sue a company
| that has more lawyers than you have employees without a good
| case), but the level of risk I took was insane, and it kept me up
| late at night for a long time.
| dekhn wrote:
| OK, that beats my "I made $25,000 on the VA Linux IPO simply
| because I was an early sourceforge user and got invited to the
| friends and family program".
| jedberg wrote:
| I had a buddy in college who made $25K on the VA Linux IPO
| for the same reason. He used it to pay for a used car and a
| couple year's tuition. Good times.
| criddell wrote:
| I wonder if anybody here can correct my memory.
|
| When Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO, I seem to recall that part of
| the deal was Microsoft agreeing to not compete in the Unix
| market. Today, Microsoft is embracing Linux with their WSL stuff
| and that certainly impacts the Unix market.
|
| Maybe the 1997 agreement between the two companies ended
| Microsoft's exile from Unix-land or maybe when Caldera bought
| SCO's Unix business the Microsoft agreement didn't transfer?
|
| And I realize that, unlike macOS, Linux isn't Unix but it does
| compete in that market.
| bitwize wrote:
| Back in 1999 Microsoft bought Interix, and marketed it as
| Windows Services for Unix under their own banner. So the
| agreement was probably non-binding as of 1999 at the latest.
|
| Microsoft just didn't see Unix, and especially Linux, as
| competition because they felt what they built was better.
| Interix/SFU was a compatibility path to migrate Unix devs to
| Windows NT more than anything; it was more like Cygwin than
| like WSL.
|
| They figured that Linux, and the dirty hippies that built it,
| would be easily swept away by Microsoft's mighty hand. Only
| when the Gates-Ballmer dynasty stepped down would the company
| be convinced otherwise.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Interix/SFU/SUA was only the last pre-Linux iteration of Unix
| on top of Windows--a POSIX subsystem was included in NT from
| the beginning, even if it was practically useless to the
| point of having no network access (I believe early design
| documentation explicitly says it's there to satisfy
| government contract requirements).
| ghaff wrote:
| There was definitely a period in the 90s when a lot of people
| and companies expected/were resigned to Windows NT completely
| dominating both the desktop and the server. Even companies
| like IBM that were probably less convinced had backup plans
| like Monterey in IBM's case which factored into the SCO
| lawsuit.
| taftster wrote:
| And what's interesting, if the SCO lawsuit had gone any
| other way, Windows NT _would_ probably have ended up
| completely dominating. Linux wouldn 't be here and probably
| neither would SCO Linux either. What a dire state that
| would be.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that even if SCO had all the rights to
| Unix that it thought it did [0], IBM would have found
| some way to make the problem go away even if involved
| buying SCO or effectively paying it protection money.
| Though from what I've seen of SCO's claims (I co-wrote
| one of the expert witness reports), it's hard for me to
| imagine they had much of a chance, Boies or no Boies.
|
| [0] Which remains one of the most inexplicable aspects of
| the whole case to this day whether Novell pulled a fast
| one and/or SCO's lawyering was just incompetent.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| No, Novell didn't pull a fast one. SCO didn't have the
| money to buy everything they wanted to buy, so the deal
| was deliberately structured so that they bought less. At
| the time, both sides knew it. And then most everybody who
| knew it left Caldera...
|
| And, mind telling us which expert witness report?
| ghaff wrote:
| I know that the deal was structured in the way it was
| because SCO didn't have enough money but I still find it
| bizarre that they entered a high-profile lawsuit with a
| fundamental misunderstanding of the cards they held. Did
| they really think that Cravath Swaine wouldn't notice?
|
| They don't have titles as far as I can see. But basically
| around Unix history, whether it was reasonable that Linux
| caused SCO's distress (relative to Windows NT), supposed
| economic damages, credibility of various claims that
| weren't thrown out because of actual Unix ownership,
| Project Monterey, etc. My boss's name is on it so don't
| want to say more than that.
| taftster wrote:
| Yes, but honest question, do you really think that if IBM
| had purchased SCO (and maybe throw Novell in there too)
| that Linux would have still had any chance? I don't know
| what the outcome, but I just think there's too many
| possibilities at that point for Linux to just stay
| hobbyist without corporate adoption (fearing now IBM
| licensing/lawyering at that point).
| ghaff wrote:
| At the time of the SCO lawsuit, IBM had already made a
| huge bet on Linux. [1] Basically, that's why SCO sued
| them. And they had their own Unix (AIX) which they could
| have ported to x86 if they had wanted to--but they
| didn't.
|
| Here's what the person who headed IBM's Linux initiative
| told me a couple of years back:
|
| And I still remember very well in December of '99, I
| called Sam Palmisano, the head of IBM Systems Group. And
| I said, Sam, the task force recommends that we should
| embrace Linux. And Sam said, okay, Irving, we will do
| that. But you have to now come over and run an IBM Linux
| initiative. And I said to Sam, okay, we were pretty much
| done with our internet strategy. So I was no longer
| needed to run the Internet division And I said to Sam,
| when do you want to announce it? And Sam said, how about
| now? And I said Sam. It's the Christmas holidays. Maybe
| we should wait until the new year. And in the second week
| of January of 2000, we made a major announcement saying
| that IBM would embrace Linux across all of these
| offerings. And in fact, later that month in January of
| 2000, I gave a keynote at LinuxWorld, which was taking
| place in the Javits Center in New York City, about IBM's
| Linux initiative.
|
| [1] https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2006/01/ibms_linux_ini
| t.html
| t344344 wrote:
| To be fair around WinNT 4.0 and Win2k, Microsoft had much
| better operating system compared to Linux. FreeBSD and
| Solaris were much better competitors.
| int0x2e wrote:
| Having worked in a Solaris shop for a while, I still
| wonder what could have been if Solaris made the decision
| to open-source about 5-10 years earlier than they did. I
| think Solaris would have been such a better base for the
| Linux ecosystem than Linux ever was. Though the licensing
| issues had to have been resolved for this to work out,
| and knowing Sun/Oracle - that would never have really
| worked out...
| oblio wrote:
| What's-his-name, the Sun CEO, hated both Microsoft and
| Open Source.
|
| Even when they open sourced Solaris, after he left, they
| did it as a half-measure with an anti-GPL license and
| then I think Oracle pulled the plug and doomed Solaris to
| the dustbin of history.
| ghaff wrote:
| McNealy was "just" chairman of the board when OpenSolaris
| was released. Also, I'm not sure it's fair to describe
| CDDL as anti-GPL unless you think the Mozilla Public
| License is as well.
|
| That said, it is reasonable to ask whether Solaris should
| have simply been placed under the GPL or a permissive
| license.
| dekhn wrote:
| Side note: I purchased Interix and used it to port a million-
| line C++/X11/Motif/OpenGL app to windows (successfully,
| although there wasn't really any demand for the result). Must
| have been '96 or '97. I didn't find it compelling, and the
| authors of the code decided to rewrite a new system from
| scratch, using Python and Tk (along with C++ and OpenGL) to
| be portable to all the commonly used platforms. That worked
| on Windows, Linux, IRIX, and later Mac OS X for at least 2
| decades(!) with very little platform-specific code (except in
| the Tk dependency). They finally switched to
| Python/C++/Qt/OpenGL a few years back which I expect will
| work for another 20 years.
| frandroid wrote:
| I recall the Halloween memos...
| znpy wrote:
| Linux is not unix, by the way.
|
| Besides the obvious things (linux is just a kernel), the unix
| specification has many mandates in terms of API (for
| compatibility), in terms of behaviour and even in terms of
| commands and utilities (a specification of a vi editor is also
| in the unix specification iirc).
|
| So yeah as long ad Microsoft doesn't try and get anything
| certified as unix, they're fine I guess (but I'm not a lawyer).
|
| Worth noting: mac os is unix (every release gets certified
| iirc).
| oblio wrote:
| Amusingly, Microsoft used to sell Xenix, which was a
| certified Unix IIRC.
|
| That predates the SCO lawsuit by about 2 decades.
| quags wrote:
| That sounds like Apple agreeing not to go into the music
| business with their settlement with apple music - and then just
| doing what they want any way. Microsoft being so large, could
| just do it and settle later.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| BSD
|
| BSD's were the worst hurt from all of this. Too many companies
| scared to use it due to lawsuit.
|
| Really unfortunate in hindsight, and Linux forever benefitted.
| ajross wrote:
| That causality seems backwards. Linux "benefitted" because it
| was the target of the lawsuit in the first place, which
| wouldn't have been aimed at Linux had Linux not already been
| the market winner. It was the USL v. BSDI lawsuit of a decade
| earlier (which to be clear absolutely did involve copied Unix
| code) that effectively killed BSD in the market by holding it
| back as Linux left the launchpad.
| ghaff wrote:
| The Linux and BSD cases actually turned out to be pretty
| similar. There were a handful of cases of literal copying but
| not to anything close to the degree claimed and pretty much
| trivial. (And SCO also made all sorts of claims around Linux
| taking knowledge, including negative know-how, and techniques
| from Unix that were completely ridiculous.)
| vincent-manis wrote:
| And, as I recall, there were allegations that some of the
| AT&T code was actually Berkeley code originally.
| tpmx wrote:
| This article doesn't give Microsoft enough credit for funding the
| whole thing.
|
| I was going to write that the Internet remembers, but apparently
| that has its generational limitations. :(
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| It's a friend now, remember?
| [deleted]
| Narishma wrote:
| With friends like that, who needs enemies?
| hinkley wrote:
| How's that Chrome download page hijacking thing goin'?
| surfingdino wrote:
| Sure, we remember...
| https://www.junauza.com/2011/07/microsoft-fud-campaigns-
| agai...
| bitwize wrote:
| Interesting choice of Ballmer as Dr. Evil... I always felt
| that Bill Gates's speaking voice resembled that of Evil.
| rascul wrote:
| Ballmer did crusade against Linux for a number of years.
| bombcar wrote:
| > Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded
| SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company.
|
| They could go into more detail how SCO vs IBM ended up being a
| proxy war for larger corporations and interests, but it's a
| short article and it gets most of the high points.
| tpmx wrote:
| > but it's a short article and it gets most of the high
| points.
|
| I disagree. It's a pretty detailed article (~1800 words) and
| Microsoft's role just gets a passing mention.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Huh, I'd forgotten about that but you're exactly right.
| heelix wrote:
| One of my greatest white elephant gifts were SCO stock
| certificates. Was a real challenge to figure out how to spend
| $20+ for a bit of paper as they were getting close to delisting.
| Really wish I had kept one for myself.
|
| Miss groklaw... what a loss when that shut down.
| SirLJ wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the blast from the past, SCO were my first Unix
| servers along with IBM AIX ironically, a long time ago in a
| galaxy far, far away...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Here's a choice for you all:
|
| (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up
| laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative
| works" -- or --
|
| (2) the current patent aystem, post _CLS Bank_ , which has
| eliminated a lot of business method patents and some, but not
| all, software patents.
| mikece wrote:
| Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is
| unquestionably better than Linux? And if yes, are the Linux
| versions of the features or capabilities a significant enough
| constraint to warrant using Unix instead? It seems that certain
| networking and NAS applications are measurably better on Unix
| (Netflix is still a big using of FreeBSD caching servers iirc)
| but can't Linux close the gap?
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| Well, that very much depends on the UNIX in question.
|
| If one defines UNIX as POSIX, then, for the most part, or at
| least a pretty good part, Linux IS UNIX, because Linux
| implements much of POSIX, and in some cases does it better,
| e.g., certain functions for which POSIX is quiet or negative
| about thread safety are thread-safe on Linux, and there are
| almost always TS versions, e.g., strtok_r.
|
| Outside of POSIX, one has to conside OS specific features,
| two of which come to mind as superior, though this is a
| judgement call: Solaris Zones and Mac OS.
|
| I was a Linux desktop user for years, but I found that over
| time the desktop just started getting in my way (this was
| tennish years ago, so I am sure things have changed). I'd
| curse how gnome or KDE had once again broken my UX, then I'd
| help my wife or daughter with their Macs, enjoy the
| experience, the curse when I got back to my machine.
|
| One day, after a particularly frustrating battle with
| whatever desktop I had then (I'd gone from Ubuntu to Mint to
| Debian to I cannot remember what, trying to find the sweet
| spot), I cursed, yelled that I would be back in 90 minutes,
| and bought my first Mac.
|
| They've been a joy to use since. If Apple does something
| stupid, e.g., stopping at an old, brain dead bash, well,
| homebrew, et al, to the rescue.
|
| Solaris Zones were wicked. One could get full MAC with
| labelled networking and restricted root with ease.
|
| It's finally possible to get close to Zones with a mix of
| capability management, namespace management, SELinux, et al,
| but not as easily.
|
| So, yeah, there are individual UNIXisms that are better than
| Linux, but overall, at least on the server side, Linux is
| UNIX improved.
| lizknope wrote:
| I've been using XFCE for about 15 years. It feels like
| nothing has changed during that time and I think that is
| one of its best features.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Is there anything about Unix -- then or now -- which is
| unquestionably better than Linux?_
|
| back when, unices were better at real multiuser, while linux
| was much faster at all sorts of I/O and CPU bound things in
| the personal-computer, single login context. Like massaging
| massive amounts text data (which everybody was doing to
| webify it), linux was blindingly fast, but don't trying to do
| much else at the same time, it would bring your machine to
| its knees.
| bombcar wrote:
| Some Unices come with things that Linux can _technically_ do,
| but they were built-in, not bolt-on.
|
| ZFS is an example of one that's recognizable, you can bolt it
| onto linux and it (now) works quite well, but it was
| integrated much more into Solaris.
|
| There are also Unix platforms that fully support hot-
| swappable just about everything, which you CAN do with Linux
| but it's not as simple.
|
| Most of that stuff is gone by the wayside now, Linux is "good
| enough".
| lonelygirl15a wrote:
| I seem to recall that Sun put ZFS under a license that has
| been deemed incompatible with the GPL by pretty much
| everyone except Canonical, and so that it can't be
| integrated with the kernel but must remain a "bolt-on" for
| legal reasons.
|
| It won't surprise me if one of these days Oracle decides
| that Canonical is a ripe lawsuit target over ZFS.
| ghaff wrote:
| Why would they if they haven't already? It's not like
| Canonical has a lot of money. But, yes, anyone else who
| Oracle might actually elect to sue won't go anywhere near
| ZFS.
| bombcar wrote:
| Likely because they want to keep that powder dry until
| someone with deep pockets gets involved, Microsoft, or
| IBM or someone.
|
| Because there's a moderate change that it goes against
| them.
| ghaff wrote:
| Btrfs has also been improving. Certainly not for all use
| cases but it's the default for desktop Fedora now and
| some Synology NASs use it, among others.
| bombcar wrote:
| On one hand ZFS has held down btrfs because "why bother"
| when you already have something that does much of what
| you want, but on the other hand it shows what can be
| done.
|
| I hope btrfs becomes quite stable and usable.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, but even if bolt it on (which Ubuntu does for you,
| any other distro it's easy to do) it's still a "bolt-on"
| that doesn't integrate as fully as it could if it were
| _the_ native filesystem, allowing full system rollback,
| snapshotting, boot management, etc.
|
| It's similar to the "polish" available on macOS or
| Windows, Linux has all the pieces but you have to
| assemble them yourselves, even today.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| interesting but not what I asked
| simonh wrote:
| It's a heady picture because there were many Unixes. Most
| were me-to and fairly generic for the most part, but some
| had novel capabilities in specific areas. IRIX for
| graphics, Solaris for Zones and ZFS, but none of them had
| everything. Often what was special was down to proprietary
| hardware.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Whatever choice "zero patents for software" is. Already, no one
| shares their code, which would be in the spirit of the patent
| system. The patent system is designed to keep the design
| details open and public, but gives a legal monopoly to the
| holder of the patent. Currently, companies can write software
| implementations that are completely closed and secret, but
| still hold a patent for whatever the "thing" that algorithm
| does. Clicking one button to check out? Patented, and I still
| don't know what the detailed code implementation looks like
| from Amazon. The patent itself only shows the most simple,
| rudimentary steps as block diagrams. The most open software we
| have is that which is unencumbered by patents!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This is actually the topic of the first of (planned) four
| posts on software. For you lawyers, it's section 112.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > with cleaned up laws
|
| Which one I'd pick depends a whole lot on what those "cleaned
| up" laws consist of. But generally, this looks like an exercise
| in determining which is the lesser evil.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "No IP protection for software at all" is your position,
| then?
| JohnFen wrote:
| No, that's not my position.
|
| Given the legal frameworks we have available, copyright is
| the right direction, IMO. Patents seem entirely
| inappropriate.
|
| But US copyright law is a royal mess and is not really a
| great tool. It needs to be reformed -- but as the last
| copyright reform demonstrated, not all reform is an
| improvement, so my position is that ultimately where I'd
| fall between those two choices depends on what, exactly,
| copyright laws look like.
| ghaff wrote:
| For proprietary software you could have licenses. In fact,
| the reason that IBM first licensed some of its software for
| the IBM/360 was that it was unclear at the time whether
| software could be copyrighted.
|
| However, absent copyright, it would probably be impossible
| (IANAL but have talked to lawyers about these topics) to
| enforce any usage provisions on open source software where
| you haven't explicitly agreed to a license. (Open source
| licenses basically give you rights that you wouldn't
| otherwise have under copyright law.)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| See above comment: the question is not "what does
| copyright law say _now_? " but "is some variation of that
| appropriate as a replacement for patents?"
|
| In other words, all options are on the table. We're
| assuming that Congress does its job, for once, and being
| that they're politicians, they do sometimes respond to
| public pressure.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, it's not just Congress. There's the Berne
| Convention which, with minor variances, governs copyright
| in most of the world. The US can do whatever it wants I
| suppose but it's not as simple as Congress saying: We're
| going to do our own thing. Who cares about Europe etc.?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'm not familiar with that.
|
| Congress passed the Sonny Bono Disney Protection Act
| (being facetious here). Was that before the Convention
| was signed?
| ghaff wrote:
| I am not a copyright law expert. But the Berne Convention
| originally dates to 1886.
|
| There is apparently some flexibility within the Berne
| Convention on copyright terms. There are also limitations
| on public domain works in continental Europe that differ
| from common law countries like the US. However, it does
| govern copyright in broad strokes. For example, the US
| used to require that a creator explicitly assert
| copyright while most of the rest of the world did not.
|
| In any case, the US is generally aligned with copyright
| in most of the rest of the world. So any broad change in
| copyright law (other than perhaps somewhat shortening
| terms) would make it an outlier.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Information deserves to be free.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > (1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned
| up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and
| "derivative works" -- or --
|
| I'd go with this. But ideally with a 10-20 year limit on
| copyright[1].
|
| I do think that there are some software patents (RSA, for
| example) that seem worthwhile. But the system as a whole seems
| like it does more harm than good.
|
| ---
|
| 1. My ideal proposal for copyright is exponentially increasing
| fees (after a short initial grace period) for a linearly
| increasing time period. But that seems like several bridges too
| far.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| IP paying property taxes would be nice. Could even let owners
| set the value, if it were coupled to licensing fees etc.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Note that there _are_ maintenance fees for patents, which
| are non-trivial.
|
| they're every 4 years, though.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| thanks.
|
| please note that whatever a lawyer says about copyright law
| _now_ is usually limited to what the courts have said plus
| the latest statutes and what judges are likely to rule.
|
| The topic for today is harder: it's what _should_ copyright
| law for software say? We 're assuming that Congress does its
| job for once. The lawyers will never do it.
|
| Don't like it that Disney had a forever copyright on Mickey
| Mouse? Me neither, but that's because copyright law is one-
| size-fits-all. The proposal is a carve-out where software law
| is different than literary.
|
| So property taxes or shorter terms are definitely on point.
| "Which Unix is better" is not.
| jedberg wrote:
| I had to deal with fallout from this. At the time I worked at
| eBay, and were not allowed to use any OS except Windows or RedHat
| Linux. The reason we had to use RedHat? Because we had a paid
| license from them that included them absorbing all liability from
| IP claims regarding Linux.
|
| But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that
| RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time. So we
| were forced to use an inferior product because it came with IP
| indemnity. Thanks SCO!
| ajross wrote:
| > But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that
| RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time.
|
| There's no better microcosm of the early Linux world than this.
| "Yeah, that giant market-driving lawsuit was bad, I was there
| too and suffered along with the rest of you. But that's not the
| important thing: let me tell you about how bad RPM is compared
| to DPKG! Did you know the underlying archive format was cpio?
| CPIO!"
|
| That's not intended to be too much of a barb (I was a Debian
| nut too, FWIW), but really, all that stuff seems pretty silly
| in hindsight.
| chungy wrote:
| > Did you know the underlying archive format was cpio? CPIO!
|
| And what's wrong with that? deb's underlying format is ar,
| which is basically the same class of simple archives that
| cpio is.
|
| It solves the problem with two nice benefits:
|
| 1. You're not reinventing an archive format, the existing
| ones are perfectly adequate.
|
| 2. If your system is borked enough that you don't even have a
| working package manager, you can manually extract your
| package manager from a package file with nothing more than
| the cpio or ar programs.
| biorach wrote:
| > me tell you about how bad RPM is compared to DPKG!
|
| I'm pretty sure the person you're replying to was taking
| about the distro as a whole, not the package file format
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Yes, but the arguments of that era always seemed to revolve
| around minutiae like the package manager, or default
| filesysem, or choice of default desktop.
| realitychex wrote:
| You're being dismissive of issues that were far bigger
| than you make them look.
|
| >like the package manager
|
| It wasn't about, for example, dpkg vs rpm, but apt-get
| versus.. nothing, because Red Hat had nothing to solve
| dependencies. Installing software on Red Hat was a truly
| hellish experience.
|
| >default filesysem
|
| I have never in my life seen people dismiss a distro
| because of a default filesystem. I question whether
| you've truly experienced the early days of Red Hat.
|
| They shipped broken development snapshots of GCC that led
| to serious compatibility issues :
|
| https://linux.slashdot.org/story/00/10/07/0027218/gccs-
| respo...
|
| They employed one of the most abrasive and divisive
| personality to helm the development of the libc :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2380062
|
| They were one of the most barebones distro in terms of
| tooling to configure and manage them. Debian was more
| fully featured on the terminal tooling front, while
| Mandrake and SUSE had a lot of GUI wizards for people
| more used to the Windows ways.
|
| Even much later in the Fedora days, when Kernel developer
| Alanx Cox questions the sanity of releasing a completely
| broken distro (version 18 of Fedora) this is what they
| had to answer :
|
| >So yeah: in case you didn't get the memo, F18 has a new
| installer and a new upgrade tool. They are both v1.0s. As
| in the case of all v1.0s, you may want to exercise some
| frickin' caution. If you want a Fedora release whose
| installer and upgrade tools were stabilized over a period
| of several years and 20+ releases, Fedora 17 is right in
| the torrent list
|
| Uh, like.. okay? but maybe don't release it, until, you
| know, it's not garbage?
|
| And then there's the whole thing with what Red Had did to
| take over the whole userland desktop stack with systemd,
| logind, dbus, pulseaudio, wayland.. all of which caused
| more issues than they ever solved. You still can't make
| software like autohotkey on wayland. All those pieces of
| software are heavily interconnected with each other
| making it less and less tenable to maintain a distro that
| doesn't package them.
|
| There are many, many reasons to be soured with what Red
| Hat contributed to linux.
| ajross wrote:
| > You're being dismissive of issues that were far bigger
| than you make them look.
|
| You whooshed on the humor above, so I should spell it
| out. The point is exactly the opposite. This focus on
| tribal distro warfare obscures the objectively much more
| important threat posed by this lawsuit to the entire
| ecosystem.
|
| I mean, no, you're simply wrong. SCO was a far, far, far
| larger threat to the Linux world than the fact that Red
| Hat inexplicably dragged their feet shipping yum on their
| enterprise distro.
|
| And it's important, as a matter of history, to remember
| that period and the players and the resulting and
| continuing effects on our culture. While on the flip
| side, no one cares (or rather: no one should care) about
| the lessons of apt vs. yum, all of which have been
| recapitulated a thousand times since. Let it go.
| morelisp wrote:
| > It wasn't about, for example, dpkg vs rpm
|
| No, it totally was. APT vs. nothing was a big deal, but
| RPM per se had a lot of mistakes. Debian also had
| massively better standard tooling around conffiles,
| diversions, alternatives, etc. They also had publicly-
| published packaging standards so even out-of-distro debs
| were often pretty good, while third-party RPMs were a
| garbage fire.
| biorach wrote:
| Nah, RH was very much it's own little world. Many of us
| were forced to use it because they offered a package
| (indemnification, support) that appealed to the bean
| counters and lawyers. For a few years they patched
| _everything_ that mattered (compilers, kernel, core
| libraries) to a massive extent in an attempt to
| differentiate and to give the appearence of adding value.
| I don't have fond memories.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| While I agree that the SCO FUD surrounding Linux was real at
| that time (we all felt it), Red Hat was one of the most
| respected, functional, and widely-implemented distributions for
| the entire time SCO was in the news headlines.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| What were the best distros then?
| dwater wrote:
| When I was a CS major in 1999-2003, the big names I remember
| people using were RedHat, SUSE, Debian, and Mandrake was
| gaining market share for desktop use. The installfests I went
| to were all RedHat. There seem to be a lot of complaints here
| about RedHat after that era, but my memory is that RedHat was
| the main linux distro circa 2003.
| cheekibreeki2 wrote:
| Rh 4.2 ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?
| MereInterest wrote:
| My main experience with RedHat has been needing to bend over
| backwards to support its wildly outdated library versions.
| Because RedHat "supports" operating systems for about a
| decade, there's always an argument that a library should be
| written to support whatever toolchain is provided by the
| oldest supported RHEL version.
|
| RHEL's "support" should be seen as "your software will
| continue to run unmodified when on this system", but is
| frequently interpreted as "this is a sane platform for
| current development".
| surge wrote:
| Current development was better done on Fedora, the upstream
| of RHEL, I think they were pretty clear that's what it was
| for. RHEL was for when you needed everything to work no
| matter what. Fedora was for new development and latest and
| greatest.
| MereInterest wrote:
| The problem with needing "everything to work no matter
| what" is that it just doesn't exist. The type of
| stability that RHEL provides is conditional on never
| using third-party libraries. RHEL backpoets security
| fixes to packages that it provides, but you're on your
| own for anything else. For example, RHEL 7 was released
| in 2014, has production support for another year, and
| extended support until 2026. As libraries are requiring
| C++17 support today, maintaining compatibility with stock
| RHEL 7 requires running older versions of a library.
| oblio wrote:
| They're talking about stuff that predates RHEL by half a
| decade.
| MereInterest wrote:
| True, more adding it as agreement on RedHat being
| consistently and intentionally behind the curve.
| jedberg wrote:
| From my experience as a Linux sysadmin? RedHat ran half the
| planet because they had the best sales force and legal team
| (as exhibited by my example), but they did not have the best
| technology.
| Postosuchus wrote:
| Wrong. Two reasons actually:
|
| 1. RHEL was the first distro directed at enterprise
| deployment (meaning, strong preference of rock solid
| stability and predictability over constant churn). Which
| made it the only distro Dells and HPs of the world
| recognized and agreed to support.
|
| 2. RHEL was created on legacy of RedHat Linux, which was
| the best distro for non-hobbyist environments (from
| reproducible deployments to the breadth of packages
| available) - since 3.0.3 onwards. RedHat JUST. WORKED.
| hackmiester wrote:
| I don't think "Wrong" is a very interesting, helpful, or
| productive response to someone's lived experience.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| I don't think we should criticize someone's word choice
| without knowing their culture and understanding their
| intersectional identity.
| flextheruler wrote:
| Are you stating that someone's identity is an excuse for
| them being disagreeable
| bartchamdo wrote:
| It looks like RHEL zealots never die from the other
| people's comments. RHEL had plenty of problems just like
| all the other OSes and distros.
| [deleted]
| surge wrote:
| I think you're romanticizing it. Until RHEL and LTS
| releases for Debian/Ubuntu, most distros you never knew
| if running and update was going to break something
| because there simply wasn't effective quality control
| testing in the hobbyist distros. Best you could do was
| run a version behind, but that hurt if you needed
| security updates.
|
| There were plenty of people and small highly
| knowledgeable shops and academics that thought 6 hours
| fixing a bug after custom compiling a patch was fine and
| normal (and a RHEL subscription at least meant RedHat
| would have a team doing that part for you if absolutely
| necessary), but its not the way companies operated. RHEL
| at least meant whatever release was stable and an actual
| QA team put patches through their paces on various
| hardware and configurations (especially those enterprise
| high end server configs with special SCSI/RAID
| controllers, high end network cards, and other chipset
| other distros simply didn't have the means to test on).
| The QA/support team wasn't bug reports and guys on usenet
| going "it works for me, you should have gotten the exact
| same hardware I have, or be willing to go through the
| code and figure it out and patch it, and submit it to the
| source, like a good user should". Or tell you go back to
| Micro$oft if you want support for your storage controller
| that the kernel module for worked fine in the last
| version. Those were the zealots, the rest were sys admins
| with too much other things on their hands to do than deal
| with Slackware or whatever the hot distro was on
| distrowatch.
| hinkley wrote:
| Windows ran half the planet, where are you getting this from?
| elromulous wrote:
| These statements are not mutually exclusive. Math checks
| out :)
| hinkley wrote:
| Only if MS and RH were the only thing that existed 20
| years ago, which we know is false. Sun Microsystems, for
| one. Debian for another.
|
| And the thing is I was being conservative about MS
| running half the planet. They had their grubby hooks in
| everything.
| elromulous wrote:
| For sure. My comment was in jest.
| vondur wrote:
| This was pre DNF/YUM days. RedHat could be a pain installing
| stuff from RPM's that had crazy dependencies back in the day.
| ape4 wrote:
| up2date was before then
| emilsedgh wrote:
| First time I installed Linux, I was trying to Gaim on it.
|
| I managed to compile Gaim before I managed to install it
| from RPM packages.
|
| Using Debian was a moment of pure epiphany.
|
| Good times.
| quags wrote:
| Dependency hell was a thing for sure. I had at the time
| made a script to easily install rpm's at with a shell
| script that was searching the mirrors. It didn't handle
| dependencies but would show what was missing. But so many
| years later now looking back, a big issue was really just a
| lack of understanding of rpms with all the other os's with
| rpms, different arcs and versions. yum was a welcome
| changed especially since apt had for so long solved
| dependency issues.
| nix23 wrote:
| That was Debian and FreeBSD not RH.
| dekhn wrote:
| There were several good versions of Red Hat (IIRC 7.3 was
| pretty good) and then RH9 had NPTL but unfortunately was
| incompatible with the rest of the world (very custom kernel,
| userspace, compiler). IIRC the egcs included in that led to all
| sorts of interesting outcomes.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I'm confused. RH9 is the latest release, how is it custom?
| What are you referring to exactly?
| dekhn wrote:
| Red Hat 9- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux was
| in 2003. I may be misremembering some details since I
| thought RH9 brought in egcs but it was 7.3 that did that.
| surge wrote:
| RH 9 is different than RHEL 9.
|
| Just like Windows 11 is different from Windows 98 (98
| doesn't mean it's newer).
|
| They went through a rebranding from RedHat Linux to RedHat
| Enterprise Linux over a decade ago but after or during the
| SCO nonsense. Early versions of RedHat's Linux were just
| called RedHat Linux because at the time it was just like
| any other Linux distro or starting from those early
| hobbyist roots. RHEL was meant to be stable and have
| commercial add ons for big companies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux (at
| the top it notes, not to be confused with Red Hat Linux)
|
| What could be thought of as Red Hat Linux today is the
| Fedora distro (which it was spun off into), which is
| upstream, more frequently released or up to date (and thus
| less stable), and targeted at the hobbyist or enthusiast
| user, which I'm one of the weird people that still uses it.
| Once something useful goes through its paces on Fedora,
| it'll eventually get integrated into RHEL where reliability
| is of higher value than the latest features.
|
| I started on RH 5.2 myself, in '99, and literally got it on
| disc for $40 at BestBuy. I also lived near RedHat's offices
| (in Durham, NC) at the time and got to visit them once with
| coworker friends. Exciting time, I was very young, and wish
| I knew enough to buy stock during its IPO at the time.
| znpy wrote:
| No, the latest release is rhel9, not rh9.
|
| At the time it was just "red hat linux" while today it is
| "red hat enterprise linux".
|
| The split (and the counter reset) was made to mark the
| split between a regular distro (fedora core, at the time)
| and an enterprise-oriented distro (red hat enterprise
| linux).
| znpy wrote:
| > Because we had a paid license from them that included them
| absorbing all liability from IP claims regarding Linux.
|
| Not a trivial thing by the way, if you think about it.
| mikece wrote:
| How different would the history of Linux have been had FreeBSD
| (and its forks) not been encumbered by lawsuits in the 1990s?
| Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or would
| the BSDs have won?
| JohnFen wrote:
| What an interesting question!
|
| I'm a bit glad that BSD didn't "win", because as time has been
| passing, Linux is getting to be an increasingly bad fit for me.
| I'm looking at switching to BSD (I haven't yet because that
| switch will be a lot of work -- I have a lot of machines) as a
| better alternative.
|
| So BSD looks like an escape hatch to me and I'm glad that it's
| there.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Would Linux have gained the mind and market share it did or
| would the BSDs have won?
|
| From the horse's mouth:
|
| > Linus: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I
| started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series
| on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting),
| and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state
| where it was so usable that I never really thought about
| switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on
| Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.
|
| - https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html
| dboreham wrote:
| That's what I was thinking too: when Linux was released there
| was no viable Unix-like OS for the current day PC machines.
|
| Edit: actually there was SCO, but it was costly. So above
| really I mean "no viable free Unix-like OS for...PCs".
| twblalock wrote:
| I suspect that if Linus had tried to actively contribute to
| BSD he might have gotten fed up and done his own thing
| anyway.
| lizknope wrote:
| I think Linus would have forked it and made LinBSD and more
| people would have joined his effort. The Linux community
| was a lot more friendly and helpful to me than the BSD
| crowd in the mid 90's
| znpy wrote:
| The bsd community is still ups and downs today.
|
| Not all the bsd communities are equally friendly.
| giantrobot wrote:
| It's not really a matter of Linux or BSD "winning" in the 90s.
| It wasn't the kernel and base system that was super important
| but what you could run it on and what you could run _on_ it. A
| Free Unix(like) was an important base component but went hand
| in hand with FOSS software running on top.
|
| With the likes of Apache and Samba PCs running Linux (or a BSD)
| could replace many thousands of dollars in software licenses
| for server products for zero licensing dollars. It didn't
| really matter if the base OS was a BSD or Linux, as long as the
| services ran on top on relatively inexpensive hardware it was a
| massive win for a lot of organizations.
| justin66 wrote:
| BSDI was legally in the clear in January 1994 and FreeBSD had
| an unencumbered version out by the end of 1994. Linux distros
| were still toys at that point. I think it's fair to say that
| the lawsuits didn't help BSD, but the lawsuits don't seem like
| they should have been a decisive reason for Linux overtaking
| them in mindshare and marketshare.
| dekhn wrote:
| Linux wasn't a toy in '94: I had a full X11 with emacs, g++,
| and all the other goodies and easily ported scientific
| software from the grown-up UNIX in the lab, using it to write
| my undergraduate thesis. This was using Slackware from 4
| floppies. At the time I was offered two pills: Slackware or
| BSD. I picked linux since it sounded "newer and hotter".
|
| It was a toy in '92-93 and they still didn't have good
| dynamic linking in '94, and I'd argue things were pretty
| dicey before glibc (I stopped using debian for years during
| the bo->hamm transition) but it was usable for production
| work at the time.
|
| (none of this should be taken as a statement that BSD wasn't
| in great shape in '94; I had heard of the lawsuit but I don't
| think it affected my decision to go linux at that time)
| rwmj wrote:
| FreeBSD didn't support shared libraries while Linux did, and
| that made a huge difference trying to run X11 on the 386
| systems of the time, specifically because of hard disk space
| required.
| dekhn wrote:
| linux's shared libraries were pretty limited in '94- I
| forget the technical reason but it had to do with runtime
| linker not being able to compute unique addresses for each
| .so, and so they sort of had to be assigned "ranges" that a
| particular .so owned (https://www.linux.co.cr/free-unix-
| os/review/1994/0914-a.html). Probably a.out vs. ELF.
| rwmj wrote:
| Yup, that was the limitation of the old a.out format. ELF
| was a breath of fresh air, but it didn't arrive until
| after Linux 1.2.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > Linux distros were still toys at that point.
|
| I had Slackware 1.1 running in 1Q94. It had X11 and you could
| run Mosaic on it plus all of the shell userland. It was
| pretty usable.
| lizknope wrote:
| I installed Slackware 2.1 in the fall of 1994. I had
| everything working. X11, networking, sound, Mosaic. I
| compiled Spice 3f4 and used it for my EE circuit sims.
|
| The next year I asked some questions on a FreeBSD usenet
| forum and was told to buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, and
| new network card. No thanks. I just stayed with Linux
| because the hardware support was much bigger.
| dekhn wrote:
| I wasted so much money on SCSI back in those days. This
| was the thing that finally killed it for me:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaz_drive
| lizknope wrote:
| I ended up buying a SCSI card in fall 1995 so I could use
| this. The drive was about $500 but each 650MB cartridge
| was only $30. I could format it with a ext2 and use it as
| a regular filesystem. No need to make an ISO image to
| burn. CD burners weren't cheap yet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_Dual
|
| This technology was later turned into DVD-RAM which was
| never as popular as DVD+/-R(W)
| Aloha wrote:
| IIRC, the BSD lawsuits were mostly about userspace stuff, ISTR
| the kernel was known clean. I wonder how big the license
| incompatibility was thought to be at that time to prevent
| releasing a BSD with a GNU userspace. I don't even know if the
| GNU stuff was complete enough.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've talked with a lot of people about this. The general
| opinion is that it was a combination of lingering concerns from
| the AT&T lawsuit and, perhaps more controversially, a somewhat
| difficult to engage with community. However, most of the same
| people also think that, had Linux not happened, BSD in some
| form would have occupied the space that Linux came to.
|
| I did a series on this and related questions a few years back.
| (Podcast and transcript)
| http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/05/podcast-was-open-source...
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Interesting side effect of this (to me :-)) is that when Blekko
| was acquired by IBM I got stuck doing what is called "Blue
| Washing" where IBM tracks down the licenses, origins, and usages
| of all the source code the acquired company is bringing to IBM.
| According to people I worked with when doing this, the entire
| process and toolset was an outgrowth of the work they did to
| disprove SCO's claims in the lawsuit.
|
| I found it was both invasive and thorough, and generally
| engineers didn't like it when the answer was "You have to delete
| that, we can't verify we have rights to it."
| kkielhofner wrote:
| There's an entire cottage industry around this. As one example:
|
| https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/security-testing...
|
| Frequently used for things like internal audits, compliance,
| due-diligence during financing, etc.
|
| It's remarkably thorough but not always completely accurate -
| it flagged an open source project I created that we were using
| as GPL. I had to correct them, which was entertaining.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| They are almost always inaccurate. What they always are is
| expensive
| kkielhofner wrote:
| As CTO I generally tracked software and applicable use
| license(s) across the entire codebase.
|
| My internal sheet more or less lined up with their results
| - with the notable exception being my project I referenced.
| FWIR it was something like 400 entries and I'd put it at
| roughly 95% accurate on this anecdotal rough estimate.
| sgc wrote:
| That is surprisingly bad. I would expect it to be some
| sigma level of accuracy for the money they charge.
| Perhaps I misunderstand the problem.
| politician wrote:
| I wonder if it'll be much easier going forward. Take a suspect
| piece of code, run it through an LLM to explain it, pass the
| explanation to another LLM to generate code from the
| explanation. An automated pipeline for clean room reverse
| engineering.
| hencq wrote:
| IANAL but it seems that if you rely on looking at the suspect
| piece of code to see what it's doing (even if done by an
| LLM), it's not exactly clean room.
| politician wrote:
| It's a two-step process.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
| jedberg wrote:
| As long as you can prove that you had a license to all the
| code that was used to train the LLM! :)
| akiselev wrote:
| Someone would first have to prove you used an LLM, no?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| That's what discovery and depositions are for
| politician wrote:
| Hah! It appears that no one training these models is doing
| that. GPT doesn't generate the correct GPL/MIT/BSD/Apache
| license information and attribution for the source code it
| generates from its training set.
|
| All of these code-based LLMs are willfully violating
| copyright already. It's doubtful this goes anywhere in the
| courts, however.
| patwolf wrote:
| I was at IBM around the time of the SCO lawsuit and had to help
| out with blue washing a few projects. It was also around that
| time that there had been some high-profile cases of GPL code
| getting shipped accidentally. We had a tool that basically
| grepped through all the source for keywords like "Copyright",
| "License", or "GPL", and then we had to compile a report and
| get the lawyers to sign off on it. It didn't seem to me to be a
| very thorough way of proving provenance because it relied on
| proper attribution.
| ahelwer wrote:
| I was recently bitten by this ghost of the past in the present
| day! Since the TLA+ project is trying to join the Linux
| Foundation, they've recently started enforcing Developer
| Certificate of Origin (DCO) signing on all of the repos under the
| github.com/tlaplus org. The CI workflow started insta-failing on
| my PRs since none of my commits included a DCO. Fixing this isn't
| terribly difficult, github gives you a rebase command to run so
| you re-apply every commit locally with DCO signoff, then force-
| push. Then in the future you have to remember to run git commit
| -s -am "commit msg" instead of git commit -am "commit msg". The
| -s flag adds a DCO message to the commit.
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