After 18 years, SCO's IBM litigation may be settled for $14.5M | Hacker News Reader

After 18 years, SCO's IBM litigation may be settled for $14.5M

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Who else misses groklaw, BTW? That was my favorite tech law site for many years.

[1] http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2003101616...

I miss it but it was never the same without PJ and I hope she's been able to move on and is doing well.

What happened?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-concerns-cause-pj-to-c...

Basically she had privacy concerns. As I recall, at least one journalist had tried to track her down in real life.

Real cloak and dagger stuff.

Well, without reopening ancient wounds, it actually wasn't unreasonable to ask who the person behind this popular and influential anti-SCO website was. Certainly the question would have come up with a pro-SCO website.

I personally know an analyst who was convinced it was a sock puppet site for one of the litigants. I don't think he was ever convinced otherwise even though a journalist friend of mine, who I absolutely trust, assured me it was a real person who was about as you would imagine.

So, yeah, I believe PJ was more or less who she appeared to be. I'd also expect people would be very skeptical about such a blogger's identity under different circumstances.

There were all kinds of questionable things going on. I read for long enough to be convinced that it really was a single person, but I think that they were skeptical because she got a lot of contributions from others who helped look into some of the legal matters, so in another sense she was the face of the Groklaw community. I don't know for sure if that was really her name, etc., because I never knew her other than online, but she had a distinct writing style that would not be easy to replicate, so she was always a single voice and she was relatively unknown, as far as I could tell, until she started getting posted to Slashdot regularly.

But yes, SCO really was moving against her in the background, so she had some reason to be paranoid there.

Totally agree. My default assumption is that even if she was a fellow traveler with the anti-SCO camp, she wasn't funded although that could be naive of me.

But, yes, in general there were fellow travelers with various camps behind the scenes and money flowed in deniable ways.

I suspect it was a pseudonym given her concern about privacy and that being a common name, although not obviously such.

It was reported by a few journalists that Pamela Jones was her real name, but yeah, I have no way to verify that and ultimately it didn't matter, because the information was being collected and presented in public.

The community could, and did, call her on it when they believed she was making motivated arguments during the TurboHeracles affair. This to my mind shows that it was really a community and not just an echo chamber.

> there were fellow travelers with various camps behind the scenes and money flowed in deniable ways.

The ones that stick in my mind were a guy called Florian Mueller who seemed unreasonably determined that Linux was ‘stolen’ and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution which put out papers claiming that Linux could not have been written by Linus as operating systems are just too complex, and must have been borrowed from Minix.

Both appear to have had significant Microsoft backing.

I actually knew the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution guy (Greg Fossedal) fairly well at the time and had a fairly long history with him. I don't think I ever got him to understand open source principles and he was always rather rooted in academic principles. In that vein, Linux definitely was bootstrapped from Minix but, at least arguably, there's never been a lot of formal acknowledgement of Minix' contribution to Linux. Even if everything was entirely legit from a license perspective.

ADDED: In other words, Greg always most objected to the lack of citation more than anything else--which is very important in an academic context.

Linux wasn’t bootstrapped from Minix in any meaningful way though, even if it was inspiration (and that would be quite a claim to make given Minix is a microkernel design and linux is a monolith), and Andrew Tannenbaum weighed in on that at the time. Further, it wasn’t just lack of attribution - specific allegations of copying were made as well as appeals to incredulity - one person could never write an OS! It must all be stolen!

He was flat out wrong and he put his efforts into spreading FUD about it while taking money from Microsoft, all while the SCO stuff was going on.

It’s very hard to see his efforts as anything other than paid-for propaganda.

Agreed. This seems especially apparent in light of the "Torvalds / Tannenbaum Debate"[1] that occurred back in the early days of Linux. It's not like Andrew Tannenbaum came out and said "Hey kid you stole my code." No, instead he came out and said "This OS of yours is obsolete and a step back into the 1970's" (paraphrased slightly).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...

> ...and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution

Institution --> Institute, IIRC?

That’s what I thought too, but Wikipedia tells me otherwise:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Instit...

I also could tell PJ's "voice" apart from others'. At the end of her hiatus, she wrote some articles without mentioning that it was her, and I could still tell.

Yeah, SCO was trying to depose her at one point so she ducked the subpoena (the "health break", IIRC... couldn't admit to being aware of it being served). They tried to track down her phone, etc. and there was an article of a woman with her name at one point, though I believe she disputed that it was actually her.

Then the TurboHercules thing started and her position on that didn't sit well with some in the open source community since they weren't exactly real threats to open source and the shadowbans started, etc.

Then she left the final goodbye note which is still up: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175

Essentially, it became a fade away or become a public figure and she chose the former. Which there's certainly nothing wrong with.

It's complicated and I can't do it justice in a comment here. This is a pretty good summary [0] of the atmosphere near the end and some thoughts from PJ on why it all had to end, at least her part in it.

[0] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175

I used to read groklaw on rotation with slashdot, freshmeat and a few other sites. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot about law from it.

But speaking as an outsider, something changed and it became a bit of a torches and pitchforks site. When there was a post that was basically saying “you’re either with us or you’re against us”, I had to quit.

I thought PJ did a huge service to the community in the earlier days of Groklaw, it is certainly a part of the lore of Linux and the internet as a whole. Sad that it took such a toll on her.

Never understood why somebody else couldn't take over the same sort of role. As I understood it, PJ wasn't particularly close to the case in any way, she was just interested and was collecting relevant documents and putting them on the web site. Can't we do the same sort of thing in a subreddit, or in various other locations?

I remember the IBM lawyers being anti Groklaw at the beginning, worrying about a third player muddying the waters.

But that attitude quickly changed as it became the go-to resource. As one internal lawyer said to me at the time "it's nice to be on the good side for a change!" (somewhat tongue in cheek, but the broad community support was, I would safely say, unlike anything they were used to!).

(I worked for the LTC at the time, but never had any direct involvement in the case).

I'm hearing about Groklaw just now and it looks like it was a very valuable website. I was curious because, There is a need-gap: 'Weekly review of high profile startup lawsuits'[1] posted on my problem validation platform and Groklaw didn't turn up in the discussions.

Judging from your comment it seems like there's a real need for tech law site.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/157-weekly-review-of-high-profi...

Xinuos, founded by former SCO leaders filed a lawsuit against IBM & Red Hat, back in April https://lwn.net/Articles/851315/ (no, it wasn't an april fool's day joke). https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/, alleging anti-competitive behaviour etc. Xinuous produces newer versions of *nix based OSs that the SCO Group used to produce, the OpenServer and UnixWare brands.

So even though SCO group is finally (finally?!) dying, everything is still pretty much business as usual.

I'm confused, if SCO sold off its rights to a new company the settlement should go to the new company?

If the price didn't reflect the potential of this settlement then that could have been an accounting crime against the now bankrupt SCO, but I don't see why SCO would be entitled to any duplicate claims.

SCO only sold the IP for Unixware and OpenServer to Xinuos, retaining whatever rights were needed to continue the lawsuits with IBM and others. I believe at that point, the leftovers of SCO were called TSG (short for “The SCO Group”). In their early days, Xinuos would make a point of stating that the old SCO lawsuits were nothing to do with them.

That would make sense but this is the quote on their own website:

“While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property,” said Sean Snyder, President and CEO of Xinuos. “It is also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community, and innovation itself.”

Edit- unless you are saying their claim is that someone would rip off new code at this late a point in their dead branch of UNIX? That would be possible I guess, but they would have to be delusional to a point that strains credulity.

How come i get the feeling of listening to a scumbag talking out of his behind? Does Xinuos have more than one employee?

No, it's not about Xinuos's code (if any). It's about rights to the property that they bought from SCO. That purchase lets Xinuos say "our", even though it's not theirs by authorship.

Things are confusing because Xinuos recently launched a brand new lawsuit against IBM and IBM owned RedHat. Xinuos' claims in that case are all about anti-competitive behavior and nothing about TSG's historical accusations of code theft and breach of contract.

I'd actually say the lawsuit is about Xinuos' failed business model:

* The infamous SCO vs Novell & IBM lawsuit soured everyone on SCO, so companies got their software off of OpenServer/UnixWare as quickly as they could.

* Those few who continue to use SCO products have existing OS & user licenses that will remain valid in perpetuity (or until the 2038 bug renders them unusable), and virtualization allows continued use of those old OSes on modern hardware without help from Xinuos.

* Their "V" (VMWare virtualization) releases amount to pre-installed disk drivers and small performance tweaks, and for that they switched to an annual subscription model that it seems nobody will buy-in to.

* Some of their releases like OpenServer 6 broke some backwards compatibility. Newer releases like OpenServer 10 are just rebadged FreeBSD with a bit of SCO legacy binary compatibility thrown-in.

* The ascendancy of Linux made SCO and Xinuos' expensive commercial OS products increasingly irrelevant before the IBM/Novell lawsuits, and only ever more so today.

The irony here is that the real, original SCO (or rather, the Santa Cruz Operation) sold their IP and Unix business to a company called Caldera -- who had already successfully sued Microsoft over the DR-DOS/Windows 95 lawsuit started back in the day by Digital Research, whose IP rights they'd purchased. Caldera were an also-ran Linux distributor who ran out of capital in the 1996-98 time frame (I forget precisely when) and pivoted into litigation. The Microsoft lawsuit victory gave them the money to buy the SCO IP and go after IBM, which turned out to be a Really Bad Idea because IBM's legal department back then made Microsoft's look like a teddy bear.

The original SCO changed their name (Tarantella? I think?) and were eventually absorbed by what was left of Borland.

Irony: I worked at (original, non-litigious, UNIX-developing) SCO circa 1991-95; if SCO's execs had their eye on the ball they could have rolled out their own Linux distro with a ton of valuable extras backported from Open Server and cleaned Red Hat's clock. But instead, despite half of the UNIX dev team moonlighting on open source projects, the official line was that Linux was an amateur-hour hobbyist project that nobody would ever pay for.

> But instead, despite half of the UNIX dev team moonlighting on open source projects, [...]

+1. The original SCO didn't have such a bad reputation. Quite a few Unix hackers worked here. It also had a big Unix conference, Linus Torvalds was an invited speaker.

The reputation damage caused by the rogue SCO to their former employees must be big.

Wasn't Unixware (under whatever name it was running in the given year) something of the go-to choice for proper Unix on x86 till Linux got more complete? I think ESR even maintained a how to on it.

I think so, I remember seeing the list of Unixware bugs (also maintained by ESR) while looking for historical files on the web.

Well, IBM certainly is no stranger to anti-competitive behavior. If SCO had focused on breach of contract from the beginning, their case actually would have had some merit, IMHO.

But then they went bananas and made fools of themselves with the whole Linux-copyright-violation bit, destroying their case more thoroughly than IBM's lawyers could have done.

they were paid to do that by microsoft as a fud war?

This case was never about merit.

As far as I know - which isn't very far! - Microsoft started to support SCO only after they had dragged IBM to court.

SCO had pretty much bet the future of the company on their and IBM's joint Itanium Unix, and when IBM pulled out of the project, SCO was rather screwed[0]. Suing IBM for breach of contract was a sensible decision, as far as I can tell.

[0] Considering what a phenomenal failure Itanium became, I suspect they were screwed either way.

Very different case and fact pattern of course, but HP won a $3B lawsuit against Oracle because of the latter dropping Itanium support.

Fun personal fact. Apparently HP actually used an analyst report I wrote as one of their exhibits in that case.

It seems Microsoft did funnel money to SCO by first agreeing to pay a $16m licensing fee to SCO for something that they fought against having to pay in the 80s and for which SUN only paid $9m. They also gave $50-60m to an investment firm which intern gave it to SCO.

Beyond financing the fight, there hasn't been any other evidence of their involvement. Anything else is just conspiracy theories.

Microsoft was certainly in full "Linux is a cancer" mode at the time, and even had an executive, Martin Taylor, who was essentially their Linux attack dog. That said, while they were certainly not opposed to what SCO was doing, there's not much evidence that they were the man behind the curtain either.

I worked at the IBM Linux Technology Center back when this whole clusterfsck was just taking off. Without going into details, it impacted how I was able to get my job done. The damage that the SCO Group inflicted on the world by making it a lot more difficult for companies like IBM to contribute toward Linux is immeasurable, and I can only laugh bitterly when I see a settlement amount measured in a measly 8 figures. The industry-wide FUD that SCO inflicted has been far, far more damaging.

But it paid for a lot of lawyers yachts in the mean time.

Not necessarily. TSG back in 2004 negotiated with their law firm to cap legal fees at $31 million.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040831183432157

That's still a lot of yachts, if they aren't all in the multimegabuck class.

Feels appropriate linking to Slashdot for this bit of news.

In soviet russia, a beowulf cluster of cowboy neals serves hot grits to you! :D

I remember seeing Cowboy Neal on IRC and feeling like it was a celebrity sighting.

The world needs a Cowboy Neal option.

As long as it isn't the goatse guy, it's all ok :D

This thread brought memories...

Have a frosty mug of natalie portman!

This is probably the best ending the Linux community could have hoped for; however, I'm dismayed that SCO burnt itself in flames, it was actually a very good operating system; not GNU/Linux-good, but very good back in the days. I understand they lost a lot of business to Linux (so did Microsoft etc.) and that's how the system works; but they were "stuck" because they couldn't open it as it held files with various copyrights (AT&T, Novel, etc.) whom wouldn't have agreed to this. What could/should have they done instead? Well, I can't think of anything as most of the commercial unix vendors are gone now (Irix, Solaris, Tru64, etc.).

> What could/should have they done instead?

Gone quietly into the night with their dignity intact.

Or, "if you can't beat 'em, join em." Adopt Linux-based systems and support both classic and Linux offerings. Adapt.

Change Linux to FreeBSD and that's what Xinuos is doing right now with Openserver 10.

That SCO isn't the one that launched the suit. It was Caldera/SCO that did it and already had a business selling support for their Linux distro.

The whole thing was/is a tangled web. I spent months on this case at one point and even I'd have to go back to my notes to reconstruct the whole messy timeline.

IIRC, the SCO that made SCO Unix was purchased by another company which renamed itself SCO and started filing lawsuits; the company you recall fondly is not actually the company that we are here to discuss.

Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) sold off their entire Unix business to Caldera, and renamed itself Tarantella (it was later acquired by Sun). Caldera renamed itself The SCO Group (TSG) and started lawsuits.

TIL from another comment: In 2004, Caldera/SCO even considered to rename itself as Unix System Laboratories (AT&T's former Unix business) to create more confusions! I didn't know it was that evil...

https://lwn.net/Articles/95854/

Maybe SCO could have spun their properties as advantages: stable driver ABI, ISV/IHV certification, Unix/Posix certification, support, etc. They could have had a free "CentSCO" version and charged for support like Red Hat.

Some version of SCO had already made a hash of a multi-vendor datacenter Unix. Before Linux became commercially popular there was a lot of interest in 2nd and 3rd tier vendors in an enterprise Unix that would have enough marketshare to interest ISVs. But the project pretty much flopped.

Linux didn't really have a big effect on SCO until they were already flailing. It was mostly Windows NT that was eating their lunch. SCO tried to claim that it was Linux that caused them to go downhill but the timeframes just don't line up. Source: I spent a lot of time studying this at the time.

> This is probably the best ending the Linux community could have hoped for

I would have hoped for an ending more like Prenda Law's.

Yeah, me too. For IBM to give them a dime feels wrong to me.

But after thinking about it, it's not so bad. Darl McBride won't get a dime of this. Neither will David Boies - except that Stuart Singer is still a counsel to the Trustee. The trustee might get some, which rankles a bit, but it's better than the other two getting anything.

> This is probably the best ending the Linux community could have hoped for

No, IBM's counter-suit being successful and those who launched the ridiculous lawsuit being fined, disbarred, and or thrown in jail would be the best ending. The fact that TSG will get a pittance out of it is not sufficient discouragement against future lawsuits.

This wouldn't have been possible with a judge that ignorant.

Slashdot is breaking the browsers back button now, seriously?

HN should not allow urls that do this to be posted.

Open links in new tabs to avoid this "problem" entirely.

Right click or long press the back button to go back more than one step at a time.

If you still have issues complain to your browser vendor, not HN or slashdot.

I can also restart my phone or buy a new one to avoid this problem entirely. I guess I’ll do that.

You know, if your browser is allowing for its back button to be hijacked, its right to blame browser rather than, people who use its API. What next block websites that track locations, send notifications? If your phone needs a restart, to close a website. I think you have bigger problems with that phone.

I recommend PinePhone.

I was able to click on the link, and click back to return to these comments, in both FF and Chrome. What behavior are you seeing that's different?

I’m guessing you’ve ublock origin or similar on those browsers thats mitigating it. It’s broken on safari (iOS).

I tried again with brand new, blank profiles in Chrome and Firefox (default settings, no extensions) and still can't make it hijack the back button.

On iPhone Safari, after clicking the article link, I cannot navigate back to HN using the back button.

It's using whatever library stuffs an extra page in your history, "More stories to check out before you go!" in a blue banner at the top of the page. (iOS chrome)

I dub this pattern the "chum blast"

I was unable to go back on mobile Firefox. Going back would instantly redirect me back forwards.

Edit: Tested on desktop firefox, and it works fine there.

Firefox Android, it fills the back history in a loop. With a long press on the back button though I can then jump over the looping page. Back to HN.

> With a long press...

TIL.

Sigh... Fucking un-discoverable phone UI shit.

From the official Hacker News Guidelines:

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting."

UPDATE: Right now 43% of the comments on this story are about the site's back-button behavior.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's a stupid rule. I'm glad for the warning, because now I know not to click it. Formatting is one thing, and I and see why griping about that is boring. "Caution Dark Patterns Ahead" is a useful warning.

Yeah, but this article is about SCO v IBM settling. The last quiet dying gasps of things that entertained and educated us 15-20 years ago and we barely realised still existed are kind of on-topic. Now I wonder what happened to kuro5hin.

> what happened to kuro5hin

Still around last I checked, a year or three ago.

It is a shame that after all the damage they did, they will still get millions from this.

If it makes you feel better, I’m guessing that every penny went to their attorneys (and then some!)

I'm old. I remember reading about this crap back in 2003 and thinking "I'm sure it will be thrown out of court in a year or two". The court system is nuts.

What will happen to the $699/CPU (minus discounts) licensing fee SCO demanded to companies using Linux back then? Apparently, a certain number of them paid to avoid litigation. Does it mean they can call back for a refund?

Ages ago, the Santa Cruz variant of SCO ran some key components of the State Department's sensitive communication system. The rigs were good, solid and did their job. It was sad when they morphed into the bad SCO.

When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I worked for Olivetti's R&D lab and we did a lot of work with SCO. In the early days if x386 "Xenix" and Unix, they were one of the coolest companies around. We loved going down from Cupertino to Santa Cruz and working with them.

Who will pay? Who will get the money?

The lawyers will get the money.

"The Estates" are the corpse of SCO, and "The Trustee" is the court-appointed trustee for The Estates. So, it would seem that IBM is going to pay $14 million to the corpse of SCO.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the corpse of SCO will pay all of it to their lawyers.

Though there is a slim chance there will be some left over, and will go to the shareholders.

> And I wouldn't be surprised if the corpse of SCO will pay all of it to their lawyers.

That's not how it's supposed to work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693487

And what are they paying for? Case was always described as meritless.

IANAL but I assume to close the books and be able to stop paying their own lawyers on anything related to the case, however relatively minor--and perhaps to mitigate any future risk, however minor.

Thanks, wonder why there was no final ruling yet.

Legal stuff takes a lot of time.

I assumed that this case had been resolved like a decade ago. Does anybody else remember when SCO vs Linux (as reported by Groklaw) was an obsession of tech news sites?

The case was essentially zombie-fied (no, that's not actually a legal term) over a decade ago but, in spite of a couple events since, the final stake never got driven.

Yup. It was a daily visit for me. Did a bit of time at the courthouse reporting. Fun times...

Did anybody else notice that Xinuos is So Unix backwards?

Xinunotihs Corp

Not a new idea - invented by Mt Xinu

I suspect the "-os" bit is supposed to be read the right way around, as "OS" (= Operating System). "Xinu OS".

Hmmm... In good old recursive-definition-hacker-backronym style, "Xinu Is Not Unix"?

I don't get it. Does this mean SCO had a valid legal point after all if IBM paid them $14.5M?

No, it means the lawyers responsible for handling SCO’s bankruptcy have stopped hoping for a bigger number and settled for being able to repay creditors something instead of nothing, while IBM’s lawyers have decided the number is small enough it’s not worth defending itself any longer.

Finally, it’s the year of Xenix on the desktop.

It is fitting that this is reported on Slashdot.

Why? Because Slashdot is a hideous zombie of its former self, sold off several times to different owners, and now all about politics and inaccurate / flamebait semi-tech stories with the credibility of a tabloid? I guess that's fitting.

I read and posted on Slashdot daily in the early 2000s. Back then then it was all about politics and inaccurate/flamebait semi-tech stories with the credibility of a tabloid. So, I don't think Slashdot has really changed.

Slashdot's audience, however, has largely moved on and the cultural significance of Slashdot has been taken over by other platforms.

It was much better in the 90s and very early 2000s.

The creation of the politics section, Sept 2004 was the beginning of the downfall, in hindsight. The site really kept changing for the worst from then on, and the latest change in ownership turned it into complete trash.

Huge waste of 18 years for $14.5 Million.

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