Re: Troll Tech [was RE: Sco vs. IBM]

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003, Jesse Pollard wrote:

> On Thursday 19 June 2003 14:08, Thorsten Körner wrote:
> > Hi Jesse
> >
> > Am Donnerstag, 19. Juni 2003 20:58 schrieb Jesse Pollard:
> > > On Thursday 19 June 2003 12:37, Downing, Thomas wrote:
> > > > I'm no authority, but IMHO
> > > >
> > > > > In article <[e-mail]>,
> > > > >
> > > > > Adrian Bunk  <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > >
> > > [snip]
> > >
> > > > > Which makes no sense. You're not at the mercy of Linus or the
> > > > > kernel developers, neither at that of the KDE developers, but
> > > > > TrollTech controls the KDE desktop wrt commercial apps.
> > > >
> > > > No, they don't.  KDE uses the GPL for QT.  If I build a commercial
> > > > app using KDE, it is GPL.  If I build a commercial app not using
> > > > KDE, but using commercial QT, that has no effect on the KDE desktop.
> > >
> > > Lets see...
> > >
> > > SCO releases Linux code under GPL...
> >
> > Did they ?!? No they didn't
> > They are talking about old Unix-Licenses, not about Linux. And SCO also has
> > not licensed Unix to IBM themselves.
>
> It was my understanding that you could download SCO Linux up until about a
> month after they started the lawsuit. By that time, all/most of the contested
> code had to already be in the kernel. Since SCO was supplying it, it was
> released (my opinion).
>
> IMHO IBM AIX doesn't owe anything to SCO. Sure in the early days, IBM did
> consider using System V... but it had so many problems being ported that they
> completely dropped it, and continued with AIX development instead.
>
> I've used both.. and believe me, AIX doesn't work ANYTHING like System V. no
> virtualization (disks), no partitioning (systems), no distributed operations,
> minimal networking, no Power support... (this was a 202e prototype at the
> time I believe...
>
> All of that belonged to AIX. which even had SMP beginnings (some platforms).
> Even shared memory was not exactly working well on System V (semaphores were
> very slow).

If something is so well known that somebody skilled in
the art could reconstruct it. That, having been abandoned
by many over 20 years, if I have a license to use it,
having paid for this license before it became obsolete
many years ago, do I have the privilege of suing those
who acquired knowledge of how to build it from public
information? I think not. And, the first line of defense
against such frivolous lawsuits was supposed to have been
the lawyers. I hope that IBM does not settle out-of-court
and takes the challenge. Once it gets into court there
are going to be some Lawyers who lose their licenses to
practice law.

This is how you stop this kind of abuse. Typically large
companies will decide to settle some claim against them
when the accountants total up how much money it will cost
to defend against the suit. They make some "deal" in
which they admit no wrongdoing, but simply pay off the
extortionists. This is how many of these instances are
"resolved". Unfortunately, this resolution leaves the
door open for other extortionists and the situation
continues.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.20 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
Why is the government concerned about the lunatic fringe? Think about it.