Novell vs SCO is over

[Roger Oberholtzer]

On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 18:44 -0500, Michael Hipp wrote:

> And may turkey buzzards pluck the eyeballs and entrails from the rotting corpse 
> of SCO.

So Novell really own the rights to SVR4.2 code. I wonder what they do
with it. They licensed it to SCO, who then licensed it to Sun and maybe
SCO. No matter who licensed to whom. My point is that some people have
paid to use it. Are they using it in any products? Other than the very
dormant UnixWare 7.1.4. I cannot believe that the code 'sits on a shelf
somewhere' at Novell. Perhaps Novell have some SVR4.2 related business
beyond being sued?

I am just curious because I did like the SVR4.2 kernel. The folks at
Bell Labs were not idiots. They did some good things. It would be
surprising if the code base has just died. Of course, there is the
excellent "The Magic Garden" that explained SVR4.2 rather well. I wonder
if any ideas from that are interesting to Linux. If no one tries to sue
'Linux' for using them...

I wonder if Novell will say that they will not sue someone using SVR4.2
ideas in Linux. Like SCO did in their lawsuit. I do not think the court
decision was that Linux did not contain the supposed offending code. It
was that SCO did not own the code upon which they based their claims.
Meaning that whoever owns the code could, legally, still make the same
claim. That 'whoever' would have to be pretty stupid...

As to Caldera, I fully agree. It was a good thing - at the time. I think
modern Linux distros owe lots to Caldera for the ideas on installation
and system management. I am overall happy with the direction Linux has
taken since the Caldera times. Software by committee is usually the
stuff of jokes. But, with the exception of Ubuntu (which is not software
by committee), Linux groups make complicated things happen. The success
to failure rate is quite impressive.

I know that many people feel that newer distros just do not have the
same quality. I am not sure I agree. Due to the popularity of Linux,
much more hardware, and newer hardware, is supported. That alone has
gotten more complicated. I sometimes fear I will become hardware
illiterate because mode Linux distros simply deal with the hardware the
right way. The funny thing is that I now hear more Windows users looking
for drivers that I ever hear Linux folk doing the same. Also, the
massive work in things like the Novell OBS to make the zillion packages
all play nice together is simply fantastic. The fact that you can add
your own things to it, make things for other distros, or even set up
your own in the basement is going to move open source to new levels of
availability. There is much more to the newer distros that should be
applauded. But I think everone gets the idea.

Caldera was great. Long live openSUSE/Fedora/Ubuntu/_your_favorite_


-- 
Roger Oberholtzer

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