SCO is dead!
Finally is one of the more annoying FUD companies in the world dead. As reported on slashdot , SCO has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy (here is their shares development ). update: also reported in Computer Sweden and IDG (in Swedish). It is a pity that such a company got the responsibility to manage the Unixware code. Hopefully some more responsible company can take it over, like IBM or Novell, who actually owns the copyright (even though SCO believed they did... :-). However, my own very personal, hard to prove hypothesis, is that SCO, who were not evil before 2003, they even had their own Linux distro, were utilized by Microsoft, whose agenda was to create FUD about Linux and possibly destroy Unixware at the same time.
In 2003 I wrote to SCOs PR manager Blake Stowell and asked
Why are you going to kill Unixware?
Of course the answer I got was that they were not going to kill Unixware, but this was for me the only reason I could see for SCOs Microsoft funded fight against Linux (Aug 2003). At that time I didn't know for sure that Microsoft were actually funding SCO but this was later proved "Microsoft behind $50M SCO investment", "Proof emerges of SCO's Microsoft link", "Microsoft wins latest Halloween PR bout without really trying" , Microsoft and SCO: FUD Brothers (March 2004).
Soon it is time for the most wellknown FUD company and probably also most currently hated company in the world, Microsoft, to get their judgement on Monday the 17th of Sept as Computer Sweden and Dagens Nyheter reported about, but in this case it has nothing to do with how they may have utilized SCO to spread FUD about Linux, this is a 9 year old anti-trust trial process, where the EU-court will judge Microsoft for having held computer innovation back, and thus been an obstacle for development and free competition by abusing their monopolistic business situation.
On reddit it was a discussion about time travel yesterday. One person expressed the typical selfish idea that if you could go back in time you could buy certain shares, domain names and such and become rich, then another person aim2free replied:
With risk for my own life I would try with all my effort to cancel that meeting between IBM and Bill Gates. To stop the DOS deal. Then I had done something good for this world.
I'm inclined to agree with this person. That would be an heroic act. Microsoft has probably slowed down the world's software development significantly and the harm they have caused may last for several decades. If it wouldn't be for Microsoft we probably wouldn't have the problem with closed hardware specs which is a serious problem today. We would probably have several popular operative systems, all supported, and most likely we would be using platform independent standardized formats for information exchange since long time ago. Programmers would have been encouraged to code their applications in a platform independent way. We wouldn't have the insane Microsoft tax which makes it hard to buy a computer without an operative system one doesn't want. Microsoft actually gets paid for software I won't use, but which I have to buy involuntary.
By the way, how many know that the .doc format (MS Word) which has become so popular is not even documented. The reason it works in so many applications is that people are good at reverse engineering. Now we risk to get the similar problem with the low quality OOXML (e.g. .docx) format. Hopefully people are insightful enough to go for ODF instead, even though there are still things missing in the spec, but better a somewhat incomplete spec than a spec which is full of flaws and bugs.
1980 in our fourth year MSc studies we had a project to implement a pre-emptive (one type of multitasking) operative system with multi user shell commands on an Intel 8080 machine (we named it MHOS:80). This system was quite reliable. One day when a class of kids entered the lab and started banging on the active terminals it didn't affect the performance of the system at all. The next year they used our system as a basis for the computer communication class, as it was also quite well documented. The Win32 API as such is also well documented but a software like the Wine Windows emulator would have been easier to implement if Microsoft hadn't often used undocumented features and side effects within their (sometimes buggy) API.
When I started at ASEA (later ABB) in 1981 we had advanced systems like Multics and soon also the Apple Lisa computer, which was impressive. It also had a multitasking operative system (non pre-emptive though) and Apple had really made a lot of research before implementing the GUI. The later Mac OS was simpler and not multitasking, but finally with the introduction of OS X a few years ago, also Mac got an advanced Unix style; as e.g. GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Unixware, GNU/Hurd; operative system as well. Even better than the Amiga computer which was introduced 1987, which had an advanced pre-emptive OS but the machine unfortunately lacked MMU and thus memory protection so one task failing could cause the whole system to crash, like in the old MacOS (the bomb) and Windows95/98 (blue screen of death). Anyway, when we got PC with DOS to our company around 1982 we were just laughing at it, but who could know that Microsoft being responsible for the simple DOS system would become such a dangerous threat to the computing world.
In the later 80-ies I was dreaming about a portable Amiga but the one I got 1988 at my workplace was a Toshiba with DOS...Now I'm dreaming about a Microsoft free world, and am looking forward to see something like:
Microsoft is dead!
in the news soon, but... unfortunately it is rarely dreams come true...
Roland Orre, IT-researcher and research consultant
Very interesting posting. I heartily agree with you - it's good to see that SCO has gone the way of the dodo. I just wish it would've happened sooner. I also agree with whoever said that about Bill Gates and IBM, I would also have tried everything to stop that meeting from taking place - the history of computing would've turned out vastly different, and hopefully to the better. And returning to SCO, one has to remember that the SCO that we've all hated for the last four years wasn't really the same SCO as before. The SCO Group was the FUDders, Santa Cruz Operation was venerable vendor of UNIX. It's very complicated, but none the less I'm making a toast to Darl McBrides continued torment in the nine levels of hell.
I agree with you about MS slowing down software in general, but you're missing a key point. If it weren't for MS, Apple would have been the prominent PC manufacturer. Apple today has really turned their ship around and are doing great things, but Apple back then was very much a proponent of the closed-system, 'trust-us-we-know-what's-best' ecology. No, MS kicked Apple's ass, and that's a good thing. I'm a fan of Apple now, but I'm glad they've had their head handed to them by Microsoft in the 90's. It makes them humbler. I wouldn't have tried to stop the meeting between MS and IBM, but I would have tried to modify the terms. Software isn't licensed, it's owned, standards are important and having the source code is the key to community involvement and creating an economy around your products.
Three years ago I made a prediction that it would take ten years for Microsoft to die. According to my predicition we still have to wait seven years. As the time goes by it's seems as if my prediction is comming to life.