Free Republic

An open-source letter October 1, 2003, 4:00 AM PT By Joe Firmage The current flap between SCO Group and the Linux community brings back memories of summer 1995. It was an unforgettable time for me, in a bad way. As vice president of strategy for Novell's Network Systems Group, I had been working for more than a year to help plan the integration of NetWare and Unix into a next-generation network operating system. Our engineering teams were a year into a three-year development plan, targeting 1997 or 1998 for the release of a breakthrough converged platform to be called NetWare...

In a phone conversation today with Erik Monninkhof, CFO and co-founder of Dupaco, the sole distributor of SCO product in the Netherlands, I learned that it's not just competing Linux distributions that are suffering since SCO changed management. According to Monninkhof, Dupaco has had a relationship with SCO for 18 years. In 1986, they drove from COMDEX in Las Vegas to Santa Cruz and, for $5000, became distributors of SCO Xenix in the Netherlands. During the following years, they successfully sold SCO products, outlasting other Netherlands companies that also tried to sell SCO to eventually become the sole distributor. To...

Raving Luni, aka Ron of Linux-Universe has contributed this interesting analysis of the current battle raging against Open Source, and by extension, Freedom in general. Sun is behind it too, very much. The Unholy Trinity shares one common issue: "Open Source software is eating into their profits". So they all support this action in a desperate attempt to save their business model. Here are the patients: SCO is in critical condition, so they go first. Sun is in serious condition, they will come too, more forcefully if they don't find a successful business arround OSS first. So they play both...