OT: Cutthroat Microsoft Tactic

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Dralasite:
Heres a rumor for you (of the best kind, I can't substantiate any of it ) -- SCO used to sell a unix called xenix? or maybe zenix. The rumor is that Bill Gates/MS orginally gave it to them, or at least provided heavy support. Many people consider SCO to be MS's proxy into the unix world.

The company that is called SCO today is not the company that partnered with MS to develop Xenix. The current SCO is actually Caldera Linux... Yes, a company that was founded as a Linux company. The original SCO that developed Xenix with MS sold off its Unix 'IP' to Caldera Linux and changed its name to Tarantella, going into some sort of networking/enterprise niche. Caldera-SCO then bought a bunch of licenses from Novell for various things related to Unix, because Novell had bought almost all the rights to Unix from AT&T some years ago, but the actual rights remained with Novell. All they had were licenses to develop their own stuff using Novell's code. Novell said as much in a press release on the day of SCO's Shareholders meeting. (That sure rained on the parade. Caldera-SCO lost 25 percent of it's stock value that day, while the shareholders were meeting and grilling the management! ) That's right, pseudo-SCO does not have the legal standing to make these claims and has publicly admitted it since Novell announced the real nature of the license agreement between them. Even funnier, Novell said that SCO obviously understood this because they had been pressing Novell to sell the actual copyights/patents. Novell refused, of course. And yet they still say they're gonna sue IBM (for breach of contract now rather than patent/copyright violation it seems) and have actually made noises about suing Linus personally for some sort of 'infringement' of the rights they don't own.

Meanwhile Novell is making noises about counter-suits, MS has publicy announced that it has 'licensed' SCO's 'Intellectual Property' and will be giving them lots of bucks (useful for paying the lawyers of course), and a German company is threatening to sue SCO in Germany based on German anti-trust law that bars using threats of lawsuits to get unfair competitive advantage. The exact claim that SCO thinks it has is still a secret, of course. If the programmers were told what SCO thinks it owns they could probably rip it out and rewrite a substitute in a matter of hours or days. But that's the point, and the reason for the lawsuit in Germany, this is about FUD, not business. If people are afraid that Linux might be sunk by lawsuits they won't want to use it, and MS might be able to recover the 1/3rd of server market-share that Linux has taken from them. Maybe the German lawsuit will be able to force Caldera-SCO to disclose what they think they own in the Linux source so it can be replaced. And maybe, just maybe, the legal process will uncover the slimy machinations of William H. Gates III before all is said and done.

Is your head spinning yet?

[ May 30, 2003, 00:25: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]