31 Mar
2018
31 Mar
'18
7:53 a.m.
Also one of the bigger mistakes the anti-Linux groups made. Among
other things it brought a whole lot of Unix history into the light.
And that was a Good Thing (TM).
I doubt IBM ever did anything more than send an occasional hint
Pamela's way. She did not seem the sort to follow a boss's orders that
way. I did start to worry she'd bought into the Google "Do no evil"
hype at the end, but then she folded it up and stopped posting
articles, so that's moot.
(For what it's worth, I can give an example of her depth of experience
in the software development process: I found in a relatively ancient
MS Windows 3.1 CDROM archive a small Microsoft Windows text editor
project, with a README stating it was in the public domain. It had
obviously been released to help nervous software developers kickstart
their own projects by offering a free windowing framework and text
editing source code. I email her and told her about it, and she
replied it would not be a good idea to let Microsoft know about it or
they would lock it up again. She was a legal assistant, and understood
well tracking cases through the courts, not the software development
process.)
Wesley Parish
On 3/31/18, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 30, 2018 at 07:22:57PM -0400, Nemo wrote:
The idiots were at SCO. In terms of Microsoft, if that theory is
true, it makes sense if you think in a fairly amoral way ("fiduciary
responsibility to shareholders excuses all business tactics" aka the
sociopathic theory of corporations) and consider it a fairly cheap PR
campaign to spread FUD about Linux. So it you could actually consider
it a fairly cunning tactics; it was probably cheaper than, say, the
national TV advertising spots IBM had been running to support Linux.
Of course, whether SCO was actually colluding with Microsoft, or just
a "useful idiot" that was manipulated into taking on IBM, who knows?
And short of having a special prosecutor look into it, I doubt we'll
ever know for sure.
Speaking of PR exercises, there were rumors that Pamela at Groklaw was
secretly being funded by IBM as a counter PR campaign. Even as an IBM
employee, I never saw any hard evidence of this, and everything Pamela
posted was backed by hard legal analysis and the actual court filings,
but I know people who were quite familiar with the players (including
those who knew, or at least claimed, that Pamela lived in Westchester
County in upstate NY) who were quite certain of this theory.
Certainly if it were not true, the person or people running Groklaw
must have donated huge amounts of their free time to keep the site
running and post the very rich amount of content available at Groklaw.
- Ted
As an
aside, this was the first and only time that I was on IBM's side,
and I still wonder whether M$ was bankrolling SCO in an effort to wipe
Linux off the map; what sort of an idiot would take on IBM?
Methinks a mention of the wonderful record at Groklaw
(http://www.groklaw.net) is in order.