Posted on 09/20/2007 8:29:08 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Boston - In the print edition of Forbes there's a great (albeit sometimes painful) tradition of doing "follow-through" articles where a reporter either takes a victory lap for making a good call or falls on his sword for making a bad one. Online publications don't typically ask for follow-throughs. But I need to write one.
For four years, I've been covering a lawsuit for Forbes.com, and my early predictions on this case have turned out to be so profoundly wrong that I am writing this mea culpa. What can I say? I grew up Roman Catholic. The habit stays with you.
The case is SCO Group (nasdaq: SCOX - news - people) v. IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people). In March 2003, SCO sued IBM claiming that IBM took code from Unix--for which SCO claimed to own copyrights--and put that code into Linux, which is distributed free. Last month a judge ruled that SCO does not, in fact, own the Unix copyrights. That blows SCO's case against IBM out of the water. SCO, of Lindon, Utah, is seeking bankruptcy protection.
In June 2003, a few months after SCO Group sued IBM over the Linux operating system, I wrote an article that bore the headline: "What SCO Wants, SCO Gets." The article contained some critical stuff about SCO but also warned that SCO stood a chance of winning the lawsuit. "SCO may not be very good at making a profit by selling software. ... But it is very good at getting what it wants from other companies," I wrote.
I wrote that because in the 1990s SCO's predecessor company, Caldera, ran a similar shakedown on Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people), making claims about the old DOS operating system. I was briefed by Caldera's lawyers on that case, but I never took them seriously. Then they won a settlement. Whoops.
This time, I figured I should at least give SCO the benefit of the doubt. I flew to Utah and interviewed their managers. I attended a SCO conference in Las Vegas and did more interviews. They told me all sorts of things, like they'd found a "smoking gun" that proved IBM was guilty, and that they were preparing to sue big Hollywood companies that use Linux server farms to make movies.
I reported what they said. Turns out I was getting played. They never produced a smoking gun. They never sued any Hollywood company.
Over time my SCO articles began to carry headlines like, "Dumb and Dumber," "Bumbling Bully" and "SCO gets TKO'd."
But I still thought it would be foolish to predict how this lawsuit (or any lawsuit) would play out. I even wrote an article called "Revenge of the Nerds," which poked fun at the pack of amateur sleuths who were following the case on a Web site called Groklaw and who claimed to know for sure that SCO was going to lose.
Turns out those amateur sleuths were right. Now some of them are writing to me asking how I'd like my crow cooked, and where I'd like it delivered.
Others in that highly partisan crowd have suggested that I wanted SCO to win, and even that I was paid off by SCO or Microsoft. Of course that's not true. I've told these folks it's not true. Hasn't stopped them.
The truth, as is often the case, is far less exciting than the conspiracy theorists would like to believe. It is simply this: I got it wrong. The nerds got it right.
SCO is road kill. Its lawsuit long ago ceased to represent any threat to Linux. That operating system has become far too successful to be dislodged. Someday soon the SCO lawsuits will go away, and I will never have to write another article about SCO ever again. I can't wait.
I wish others could be so honest as to admit their error(s).
This was called as BS years ago, and his admission is late in coming, but he could have just moved on and dropped his predictions into the memory hole. He didn’t. Props to him.
If he is SO wrong so many times, shouldn’t he just hang it up?
I suspect that's because the earlier shakedown took place in the clinton years, and as we all remember, clinton took Bill Gates to the cleaners back then with his antitrust suit, because Gates didn't contribute enough to his re-election campaign. (Clinton was only concerned about anti-trust matters if he wasn't paid enough; he happily allowed Exxon and Mobil to merge, presumably because they paid up.)
Lots of people hated Bill Gates anyway, and the atmosphere during the time of the clinton attack on Microsoft was thoroughly poisoned. This latest case was presumably tried on the merits.
Maybe its because M$ was, in fact, responsible for the deeds it was charged with perpetrating and IBM/Novell/Linux were not? Nah, that would make too much sense.
I'm feeling mean today, Eagle :-)
SCO isn’t the only US UNIX company that’s declared bankruptcy since since the foreign Linux clone first showed up, but based on recent stats showing Linux growth stalling or almost stopped in the US it appears it will be the last. Apple was predicted by many to fall too but it’s blowing Linux away since they switched to Intel.
I’ll give the writer points for being willing to admit that he was wrong and had been played.
Ditto! It takes *alot* of character to put that into print..
So were back into foreign clone and not ripped off us tech mode? Well I guess with the SCO case melting down on *all fronts* its becoming obvious it did not 'need unix code' to reach the milestones of performance that it has.
Too bad about Caldera, err I mean SCO (originally a Linux company that tried to be a lawsuit company which went bankrupt).
Apple was predicted by many to fall too but it’s blowing Linux away since they switched to Intel.
The last time I wrongly predicted 'apple would go down' was 1997 and it had little to nothing to do with linux. The Apple Store and iPod saved apple and moving to an Open Source UNIX for the core underpinnings of their Operating system was brilliant!
Ill say this about Jobs, I dont agree with him on too much but the man is nothing short of a visionary
Since you’ve been PROVEN wrong about almost everything about SCO and Linux, I think I’ll pass of this bit of wisdom from you also!
But it did need some of IBM's UNIX engineers which it got. IBM's contributions weren't "clean room", they used the same exact programmers making those contributions "tainted" whether line by line copying happened or not.
Proven wrong by what, a single judge who ignored the testimony of the then CEO of Novell and refused to let a jury hear the case? Fine, Linux is still a foreign clone of Unix that came from a communist country, and a radical green party leftist owns more of the copyrights to a typical Linux distro than anyone which he uses for what he calls copy’left’, so I and many others won’t be supporting it over original American UNIX.
Need? Maybe... Help? certainly.
You dont know Linux or its history as much as I do so trust me in saying this. IBM maybe shaved some time off of the curve but Linux would have gotten there eventually on its own via Redhat and the like.
IBM's contributions to Linux are probably on par with the Open Source communities contributions to IBM (Apache, Samba, GNU Tools, ....)
IBM's contributions weren't "clean room",they used the same exact programmers making those contributions "tainted" whether line by line copying happened or not.
Huh? Im pretty sure we could say the same of folks working on BSD (The core of Apple) or even windows itself. Im sure MS has hired people away from other software companies who operate in a market the MS also occupies. Thats part of the business, You dont think when MS took folks from DEC they put that knowledge into NT? does this mean NT is nothing but a VMS Ripoff?
Ummm Finland is a representative democracy, not a communist nation. But the main two companies making money off of it are Red Hat and Novell *both* are American.
NT was a completely seperate commercial product put out by an American company, not a foreign duplicate down to the commands and file structure given away for free and backed by leftist radicals like Stallman.
Lets go back to your original though on the matter:
IBM's contributions weren't "clean room",they used the same exact programmers making those contributions "tainted" whether line by line copying happened or not.
You made a *very* valid point. So I pointed out to you that while this is true its also SOP for the industry. MS hired folks from DEC to help build windows NT *from a much earlier stage of developemnt* which means there is probably even a stronger VMS influence in NT than a Direct UNIX influence on Linux.
"Microsoft hired a group of developers from Digital Equipment Corporation led by Dave Cutler to build Windows NT, and many elements of the design reflect earlier DEC experience with Cutler's VMS and RSX-11. The operating system was designed to run on multiple instruction set architectures and multiple hardware platforms within each architecture. The platform dependencies are largely hidden from the rest of the system by a kernel mode module called the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer)." Wiki Source
While Finland in whole is maybe not communist but in many ways socialist, Torvalds own parents were in fact well known communists and his father even studied it for long periods in Moscow. He still gives his software code away for nothing, getting a small salary but nothing more. I believe more in the American software industry model which created billionaires of Larry Ellison and Bill Gates.
NT was “new technology”, not a duplicate of VMS. VMS software didn’t run on NT, the commands and file structure weren’t the same etc. It was a whole new and different O/S, put out by an American company, not a foreign clone given away for free like Linux was.
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