The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
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SCO had a collaboration with IBM called Project Monterey, in which SCO and IBM were merging their operating systems in order to be better positioned for IA64 (which at that point people still thought would be good).
One minor detail of the Monterey deal was that SCO got the right to port IBM's superior networking stack into SCO's operating systems. One part of IBM's networking stack was their implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter, and that was one of the parts I ported over (I'm pretty sure the file still had a BSD copyright notice on it).
That was back in the days when SCO was a cool UNIX vendor that thought of itself as an extension of UC Santa Cruz. Back then employees couldn't really imagine it turning evil, and it made me wary of what my subsequent employers (Google and Facebook) could turn into.
It was (at that time) the best Unix on cheap x86 hardware, so it was deployed everywhere. In gas station pumps, in cash registers, in ATMs, in back office databases. I think SCO made up the majority of Oracle database instances.
Most people interacted with SCO code on a daily basis but didn’t know.
Of course they rapidly lost the x86 UNIX crown to Linux. At the time I was there SCO could still do a lot of stuff well that Linux couldn’t, but the advantages were rapidly going down and the writing was on the wall.
> SCO's Linux lawsuit made no sense and no one at the time gave it much of a chance of succeeding. Over time it was revealed that Microsoft had been using SCO as a sock puppet against Linux. Unfortunately for Microsoft and SCO, it soon became abundantly clear that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux and its allies.
In a way this was a proxy war of Microsoft vs Linux.
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[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sco-linux-fud-returns-from-the...
Small enough to not have a “big company” feel, yet profitable enough (at that time) to not have “startup panic”. Plus lots of cool hackers, including some of the original authors of UNIX, who had joined through the AT&T deal.
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!
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.
1. Debian always had more stability and predictability than Red Hat in practice. Too much so. The Dells and HPs of the world didn't recognize it because it was not a company.
2. My impression was again that Debian was technically better than RedHat in every way I might care about. We happily installed it at $work, and the experienced Unix sysadmins I knew could use RedHat but didn't like it so much.
IIRC Debian maintainers formed companies for that reason.
I was a Debian user because it suited me. It was obvious (to me at the time) that suits were going to choose RedHat, and we ran it a bit to have experience.
How wrong I was. Ubuntu made Debian every bit as much as a "choice of the suits" as Redhat.
There were plenty of people and small highly knowledgeable shops and academics that thought 6 hours fixing a bug after custom compiling a patch was fine and normal (and a RHEL subscription at least meant RedHat would have a team doing that part for you if absolutely necessary), but its not the way companies operated. RHEL at least meant whatever release was stable and an actual QA team put patches through their paces on various hardware and configurations (especially those enterprise high end server configs with special SCSI/RAID controllers, high end network cards, and other chipset other distros simply didn't have the means to test on). The QA/support team wasn't bug reports and guys on usenet going "it works for me, you should have gotten the exact same hardware I have, or be willing to go through the code and figure it out and patch it, and submit it to the source, like a good user should". Or tell you go back to Micro$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.
But I was a lot younger and didn't know a lot of what I do now, so was probably doing everything RPM wrong.
In some ways, RHEL is still like that, because popular packages are usually a major version or two behind if they're even there at all. You have to hunt down an EPEL that has whatever you need.
But I also realize my perspective was that of a hobbyist, not an enterprise sysadmin who was probably upgrading to well-known versions through known paths.
The first time I did a major version upgrade on Ubuntu, I was shocked it worked.
Computers of all stripes are more reliable now. In the late nineties I ran apache + mod-perl built from source.
We had a lot of problems, but I cannot recall ever having a problem with those two.
We tested every update, of course, but it was not a huge burden.
That's inbetween figuring out how to get things to compile and the dependencies of dependencies, etc.
I got Linux to work, but it was also a love hate relationship, when I got it working, it worked and worked for months, but I had almost a PTSD reaction when it was time to upgrade anything, I knew what was coming and I was afraid.
And the thing is I was being conservative about MS running half the planet. They had their grubby hooks in everything.
That half of the planet did not run....
I managed to compile Gaim before I managed to install it from RPM packages.
Using Debian was a moment of pure epiphany.
Good times.
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”.
RHEL was never supposed to be the latest, I think even a every new major release they'd be on a kernel and library version that was 2 years behind but had been through its paces. IOW, it was a feature not a bug, and its what companies were paying for (their customers were boring legacy Fortune 500s not startups). As a business model, it was solid, and the most successful in the commercial market by far because it catered to their customers needs, even if they're not our own, even Ubuntu Server took pages from their book.
https://peps.python.org/pep-0513/
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.
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).
Flash forward to a few weeks ago, I tried installing good ol' 7.3 again and it wouldn't even finish the installer...
I don't remember if there was a trick to it, or whether bit rot and architecture changes make it not installable anymore.
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.
I'm pretty sure the person you're replying to was taking about the distro as a whole, not the package file format
>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.
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.
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.
Then I switched to Debian Potato and never turned back. It was such a clean and sane experience.
Unfortunately, I could not scape rpm hell at work as Fermi Linux, and then CERN Linux, were both based on Red Hat.
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.
https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170602132852/https://fun.irq.d...
I’ll always have a soft spot for Slackware even if I’d never dream of running it any longer.
Not a trivial thing by the way, if you think about it.
The ever-looming “threat” might be laughable in hindsight had it not stifled innovation at such an early stage of growth.
IT Directors everywhere should atone.
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.
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.
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."
All of these code-based LLMs are willfully violating copyright already. It's doubtful this goes anywhere in the courts, however.
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.
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.
Per usual for these kinds of things what you're really paying for is the name and "trust" associated with it.
In the grand scheme of things when you're raising tens of millions - billions of dollars the cost of these tools in terms of total services across due diligence is nothing. Additionally, tools like this are selected by the investor and you don't really have much say in the matter.
Basically, you use "expensive" $SOLUTION the investor prefers, check the box, and move on to the hundreds/thousands of other due diligence items in the transaction.
Where it gets really interesting (to me) are cases with super aggressive investors like Tiger Global and anything in bubble (crypto) where close times are days and almost no due diligence is performed.
As one example I doubt anyone used these kinds of tools at FTX...
I don't mean to diminish the importance of Linux at all.
Miss groklaw... what a loss when that shut down.
> 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.
Edit: Found the log, not sure if "Aquired via Exchange" was a taxable event. If it is, there are a bunch https://web.archive.org/web/20000617155153/http://biz.yahoo....
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.
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.
[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.
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_init.html
And, mind telling us which expert witness report?
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.
I found a commentary (https://landley.net/writing/halloween9.html) that says something similar:
> UnixWare and OpenServer were always minor versions of Unix, the versions belonging to other vendors have always been more important and more lucrative: Sun's Solaris, HP's HP-UX, and IBM's AIX being three surviving profitable examples. All of these companies have purchased "irrevocable, perpetual" licenses to AT&T's old Unix codebase, and will never owe SCO another dime for it.
So, if SCO had managed to kill Linux, then Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX could have stepped in to compete with Windows NT.
One of the reasons Linux was eating commercial Unix's lunch was that x86 hardware was cheaper than RISC workstations and had finally hit a point where it performed as well (and eventually better). RISC systems were on their way out, and commercial Unix companies didn't seem to want to give up that fight.
So commercial Unix vendors would have needed to sell x86 ports of their Unix systems to compete with Windows NT, but as a technical matter, those x86 ports already existed (Solaris x86 certainly did).
TLDR: If Linux had been killed, there would be other Unix options to compete with Window NT.
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.
That said, it is reasonable to ask whether Solaris should have simply been placed under the GPL or a permissive license.
That didn't scream confidence in their ability to migrate to Open Source or their overall technical superiority, despite some very nice features.
Had they moved sooner to open source, and embraced it instead of trying to create a moat around their stuff, they probably could’ve stayed relevant.
That's so true.
But OmniOS and OpenIndiana still work excellent.
NT or Solaris were actually better and BSD variants had been around for a while.
Samba and Apache were the driving forces back then. In Germany, SUSE had great influence.
But Linux success is still amazing.
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).
That predates the SCO lawsuit by about 2 decades.
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.
I was going to write that the Internet remembers, but apparently that has its generational limitations. :(
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.
I disagree. It's a pretty detailed article (~1800 words) and Microsoft's role just gets a passing mention.
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.
Same for me, i switched about 6 years ago to FreeBSD.
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.
Edit: actually there was SCO, but it was costly. So above really I mean "no viable free Unix-like OS for...PCs".
Not all the bsd communities are equally friendly.
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...
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.With all due respect...the hell you aren't.
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.)
Some people are mystified by why so many long time free software people don't think microsoft is suddenly a good actor these days.
And that's without even MENTIONING his involvement with Weinstein and the use of Israeli private intel company Black Cube to dredge up dirt on both Harvey's victims and the reporters covering the case.
> 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.
> "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 :)
That name!!!
I followed the SCO lawsuit closely through Groklaw and /. back in the day.
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.
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.
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.
The Debian developers raised the obvious, predictable objection to the inclusion of this utility: the associated images were covered by a non-free license.
<https://lwn.net/Articles/113644/>
That was ... also very nearly 20 years ago. The story left its mark.
They were providing the financial ammo.
(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.
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.
XFCE is one of my own fallbacks (I usually prefer WindowMaker), though fvwm, twm(!), the boxes (open-, black-, flux-, hacked-, etc.), tiled WMs, etc., are all perfectly serviceable.
Some may look* vaguely dated, but tend to be rock stable and blazingly fast.
XWinMan is still live, I find: <http://www.xwinman.org/>
When I started college in 1993 our default environment was mwm but I quickly switched to vtwm and had a really cool setup. I switched to AfterStep because I loved the NeXTSTEP look and used that and WindowMaker for 10 years before moving to XFCE.
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".
It won't surprise me if one of these days Oracle decides that Canonical is a ripe lawsuit target over ZFS.
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.
Because there's a moderate change that it goes against them.
I hope btrfs becomes quite stable and usable.
That whole CDDL/GPL incompatibility is BS.
(speaking as the guy who wrote the scripts to change all the license text, though the actual relicensing was due to a lot of work on my boss's part.)
And canonical includes ZFS, and i think they have more lawyers then you and me.
Do you really think they would take that risk especially with oracle to include ZFS (that is not even their main fs)?
Have some commonsense.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Congress passed the Sonny Bono Disney Protection Act (being facetious here). Was that before the Convention was signed?
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.
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.
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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.
they're every 4 years, though.
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.