Re: [TUHS] SCO sues IBM?

I'm sure I'm not the only person who sees SCO's recent legal activities with dismay. For those of you still looking for facts, take a look at the links off http://www.sco.com/scosource/, and particularly the complaint at http://www.sco.com/scosource/complaint3.06.03.html. There are a number of things there which concern me, but particularly: 85. For example, Linux is currently capable of coordinating the simultaneous performance of 4 computer processors. UNIX, on the other hand, commonly links 16 processors and can successfully link up to 32 processors for simultaneous operation. This difference in memory management performance is very significant to enterprise customers who need extremely high computing capabilities for complex tasks. The ability to accomplish this task successfully has taken AT&T, Novell and SCO at least 20 years, with access to expensive equipment for design and testing, well-trained UNIX engineers and a wealth of experience in UNIX methods and concepts. Apart from the fact that I can't see any factual evidence that System V as licensed from SCO or its predecessors had any competitive SMP scalability, the "20 years" concerns me. That could go back to the days of the Seventh Edition. Which brings me to the real point: a little over a year ago, we received a message from Dion Johnson releasing Ancient UNIX under a BSD licence. For those of you who have misplaced it, I'm attaching it again. While none of us doubt that it is genuine, SCO has no record of it on their web site, nor (as far as I know) do any of us have this in signed form. In view of SCO's aggression, I think we should contact them and ask them to at least put the statement somewhere on their web site. Comments? Greg -- Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: Liberal license for ancient UNIX sources Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 15:03:37 -0800 From: Dion Johnson <dionj(a)caldera.com> To: wht(a)minnie.tuhs.org CC: dmr(a)bell-labs.com, ken(a)plan9.bell-labs.com, grog(a)lemis.com, John Terpstra <jht(a)caldera.com>, drew(a)caldera.com, maddog(a)li.org, evan(a)starnix.com, phatch(a)caldera.com, ransom(a)caldera.com Dear Warren, and friends, I'm happy to let you know that Caldera International has placed the ancient UNIX releases (V1-7 and 32V) under a "BSD-style" license. I've attached a PDF of the license letter hereto. Feel free to propogate it as you see fit. I apologize that this has taken so long. We do not have a well regulated archive of these ancient releases, so we must depend upon you UNIX enthusiasts, historians, and original authors to help the community of interested parties figure out exactly what is available, where, and how. Many thanks to Warren Toomey, of PUPS, and to Caldera's Bill Broderick, director of licensing services here. Both of these gentlemen were instrumental in making this happen. And thanks to our CEO, Ransom Love, whose vision for Caldera International prescribes cooperation and mutual respect for the open source communities. Of course, there are thousands of other people who should be acknowledged. I regret I do not have time or wisdom to make a list of them all, but maybe someone does, or has. Anyway, here it is. Feel free to write to us if you want to understand more about how/why Caldera International has released this code, or you have any other comments that we should hear. Sincerely, Dion L. Johnson II - dionj(a)caldera.com Product Manager and one of many open source enthusiasts in Caldera Intl. Paul Hatch - phatch(a)caldera.com Public Relations Manager at Caldera International ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Name: ancient-source-all.pdf ancient-source-all.pdf Type: Plain Text (text/plain) Encoding: quoted-printable ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Part 1.2Type: application/pgp-signature