limeyx wrote: ↑Wed Jan 24, 2018 12:23 am
saltycaper wrote: ↑Sun Dec 31, 2017 10:49 am
^VA Linux was a lot of fun. Really enjoyed watching that one. I think the
IBM Linux commercials came out around this time too.
What about SCO systems (final resting place Caldera ?) Who decided to make money by suing their customers and for some (unfathomable) reason picked IBM and lost ... very very badly
And it made legal history.
The story was that SCO argued it had prior rights to what Linus Torvald had used in creating LInux. I.e. that linux was not true open source code.
SCO's (Santa Cruz Online's) core business went away. But it pursued litigation against major Linux (& UNIX?) providers, IBM being the biggest.
It was really an effort to put deep freeze on the only open source OS. Remember Android too is a linux descendant. It was another Microsoft strategy to kill all opposition to Windows. At that point, Apple was an almost irrelevancy (and Microsoft made money from selling Office for Mac).
What happened is M
icrosoft took a stake in SCO and was effectively funding the litigation. The idea was it would put a chill over any IBM client agreeing to a Linux-based Solution. IBM & HP had to give their customers blanket guarantees to assume losses if litigation successful.
Remember the internal motto at Microsoft in Balmer's heyday "Windows everywhere".
The CEO of SCO received death threats. And an open source file was built up of documents, and interested parties (basically the whole Linux community) could make additions to that, and review the documents. They did a vast amount of "free work" on behalf of the defence.
That was apparently new in legal circles?
Eventually the suit lapsed-- can't recall whether the judge threw it out or what happened.
It was a precursor to what has become a common tech industry strategy. Acquire Intellectual Property and threaten to sue the heck out of any startup or new entrant that could possibly be a competitor some day.
Litigation funding is now a thing-- there are hedge funds that raise money to to it (uncorrelated asset, right?).
The whole question of IP, particularly in the USA, is a mess, and has, I understand, become a significant barrier to innovation. All the big tech companies have been buying portfolios of patents from defunct companies like Nortel, and then sitting on them with the threat of litigation against all comers.