Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> What is the truth about Sun and SCO?
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Does that mean Sun has a legal issue with Novell resulting from SCO's
> | actions? I don't know - does Sun?
> |
> | In the meantime, when it comes to "smears" Vaughan Nichols could have
> | learned a bit from Sun's former CEO, Scott McNealy:
> |
> | "You're all on notice - the whole industry knows now that there may be
> | some intellectual property issues around [Linux]," he said in August
> | 2003.
> `----
>
>
http://www.businessreviewonline.com/os/archives/2007/08/what_is_the_tru.html
>
I do keep wondering about Sun's possition in this. Declaring that Novell
owns UNIX, although a kick in the teeth for SCO, the ruling doesn't ring
true really does it. In real terms, Sun must own UNIX too, IBM must also
own UNIX as does HP and others that have fallen by the wayside. The trouble
is that the various UNIX distros all come under the same banner and are
reffered to by the same name.
There isn't only one UNIX, there never was. There was a huge amount of
common ground, but that only happened because we (by 'we' I mean those of
us who actually looked after them) started with a common base and then
passed our code and ideas around to each other. Just as in Linux, the good
ideas came to the top, the less good dropped to the bottom. So it narrowed
to the UNIX utilities and libs that we have now, but also grew as new ideas
were added. Sun, IBM and the others adopted into the main unit the good
ideas that came from that. No one was worried about IP, it was nice to see
something you added a line or two to ending up in the main distributions.
But in reality the UNIX distros were very different, in the same way that
Redhat and Suse are different, and Debian and PCLinuxOS are different.
Common ground yes, but the differences are significant.
Everyone knew Sun, they were the bee's knees of the UNIX world, the top
bods. If your site was graphic orientated then Sun was the one for you. Did
you know for example that Sun had in their workstations the 5/6/7 layer
graphics while PCs were still on flat bit mapped memory? Sun were always
expensive, but also, always the most advanced.
HP were always effectively the Redhat of the UNIX world, robust, not really
thrilling in many ways, but you could be certain that it would never let
you down.
and so it goes on through the UNIX distros. It is really hard to pick out a
single name where if your million pound question was 'Which UNIX vendor
would you point at as the main contributor to UNIX' :-
Sun
HP
Novell
IBM
I would have discounted Novell straight away. I don't mean any insult to
Novell, but they just didn't exist at that time. Then when you did turn up
your server OS was entirely new, it wasn't related to UNIX or any other
server OS of the day. It was sort of the OS2 of the server world.
I think I would have two taken away and would probably be left with Sun or
HP. Would I take the risk and point at Sun? Probably not, I'm not a
gambler, but I would tend towards Sun being the one to advance UNIX, Sun
were less afraid than the others to take chances, pretty much as Suse in
the Linux world, risks don't always come out right, but when they do they
advance you several steps.
But, Unixarians, can you really accept that Novell is the owner of All UNIX?
I can't, and I suspect that Sun would be making more fuss about the ruling
if it wasn't for Solaris and Linux and the new directions that make UNIX
ownership less relevant.
It's a bit like being told you have inherited the Titanic, nice, but you
can't actually do anything with it, it isn't going to float again.
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