Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 09:34:36 +0200 From: Willie Viljoen <will@highveldcs.com> To: mikel king <mikel.king@ocsny.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: trouble brewing over the UNIX thing again... (was on freebsd-questions, moved to freebsd-chat) Message-ID: <200301240934.36578.will@highveldcs.com> In-Reply-To: <3E309AA0.3020705@ocsny.com> References: <3E309AA0.3020705@ocsny.com>
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> Here's a thought what about the intellectual property that the've enjoy > at the expense of all of the BSD's? What would happen if the BSD world > recinded the rights to TCP/IP and demanded compensation for it's use > from say everyone? Mike, the rights to IP itself are with DARPA, so we couldn't recind it, but, UCB designed the origional UNIX IP stack (which could be installed as a supliment to AT&T UNIX as part of the patch set then known as BSD). If we recinded that, even MS would have to pay up for including the code in Windows 2000. Ofcourse, nice thought as it may be, we are far too nice to do that. The BSD community has always taken pride in beating out the compettition with overwhelmingly superior technology. Sueing all your compettitors is a kindergarten business tactic only employed by companies who rely on old, proprietary technology that nobody wants anymore, and are making huge losses still trying to sell that old technology. IMHO, the money SCO would be spending on trying to sue every UNIX-like OS developer in the world would be better spent on developing a product we actually want. Developing products we want has not been their strong point in the past. SCO Unixware (the origional SCO, The Santa Cruz Operation) was rather handy, this is ofcourse not the SCO we are dealing with today, ie, what used to be Caldera. I don't think I know one person who ever willingly used Caldera Linux, or anybody who actually bothered to buy their proprietary CDE desktop environment. Why would we want to? We could download a free ISO with the same thing, and having the same level of sickening userfriendlyness, from Red Hat I wouldn't be caught dead using RH, still, it's handy for making a point. Still, from the new SCO's point of view, that's probably a bad business plan, ie, making money the honest way. Why eat into McBride's salary to spend lots of money, and lots of time, researching new technology, when they can just spend their shareholders' money quickly and sue everyone into paying them "royaltees" for what might be their intilectual property, but most certainly is not their work. From a BMW-driver's perspective, it's a brilliant business model, apart from a legal team, you need no employees at all. That works just wonderfully for management. They don't like engineers remember, most engineers are smarter than most management, management don't like employees that don't think their manager is an all knowing all seeing entity of universal power which has the final authority on everything. If managers had their way, they'd be regulating when we are allowed to relieve ourselves. Just think about seeing this on your office wall: "Employees will not use company sanitation facilities more than once a day. Failure to comply will result in manegarial centure of the employee, and complete revocation of sanitation facility privilages." Back to the point, I can't see how this will go very far. Simply looking at Boies' track record, in the words of a slashdot poster who's name has slipped my mind, but credit where it's due: "Boies is living proof that high profile failures will do more for your career than low profile successes." The only thing that could possibly be acumplished by SCO is a new line of Microsoft anti-UNIX (and specifically anti-Linux) propaganda. Just when they stopped calling it a cancer, and started to rather attempt to bring out the advantages to Windows (if there are truly such things). Now, I'm just waiting for TV adds saying: "Microsoft's software is 100% origional, we guarantee no problems with copyright liability." This doesn't cover the thousands of lines of code, which rumours say, were procured by less than honerable means, or the practice of seeing a good product, buying out the creator for a huge ammount, and then marketing the product as their own. Ofcourse, I wouldn't want to be caught spreading rumours about them, they might sue me, oh heck, I've used some of their privately owned words in my e-mail, oh my, they might sue me.... Let's just all remember where the only good product they ever sold, MS-DOS, really came from. Yet again, I deviate from the topic. To get back to the issue at hand, I want to alude briefly to a sugestion that's popped up in a few strange places. That being, the open source community setting up a consortium (if we get thousands of people to donate, it's not that expensive is it?) and simply putting SCO/Caldera out of its misery by a hostile takeover. It's a nasty tactic generally employed by evil MonopoliStic types, but in this case, it would let duped shareholders get back some of their money, and give the new board, elected by the new shareholders, us, the right to wave all their intilectual property rights, and maybe use the company's employees and resources for something nice, like say, research. Anyone for SCO stock? Now, as all management think we should be doing, I'll add a standard disclaimer to my e-mail. Almost all of this is just my own personal rantings. If you take this letter seriously, your are stupid. The content of this message is not neciserally the view of all engineers, most of us just love management, really. This message is posted in the hope of promoting histerical laughter with all readers, if you did not find it funny, or feel offended by anything I have posted, I would like to express my sincerest apologies that the terrible genetic imbalance responsible for your inability to process humor has so profoundly affected you and would like to advise you that medication is available for this condition. There we go, I've gotten everybody's two cents worth, that'll do for the day. If you would like more nonsensical ranting and random abuse hurled at large corporations, please contact will@highveldcs.com, I am always available for unfriendly comments. Will -- Willie Viljoen IT Solutions Consultant Highveld Computing Solutions 214 Paul Kruger Avenue, Universitas Bloemfontein 9321 South Africa +27 51 522 15 60 +27 51 522 44 36 (after hours) +27 82 404 03 27 (mobile) will@highveldcs.com Be ahead of the pack, visit http://www.highveldcs.com/ and find out how our next generation IT solutions will propel your business into the 21st century. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the messagehelp
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