Some of you may have missed this. I did as I thought this was just a rehash of the SCO wars of the early 2000's. Xinuos formerly known as the SCO Group is suing IBM/Red Hat for copyright infringement, intellectual property theft and anti-competitive practices. While this is similar its not the same. They seem to be focusing on the anti-competitive practices more than the copyright infringement and intellectual property claims. The copyright and intellectual property claims were pretty much scrubbed by Novell during the first court case and Novell is now Micro Focus so I dont know how thats going to work out in the wash but lets take a look at their other claims; Anti-Competitive practices.
Do IBM and Red Hat practice anti-competitive behavior? Sure. But so does every other technology company out there. Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and IBM have long been engaged in that behavior. Giving perks to potential customers, giving free hardware and software to potential customers to squeeze small tech companies out of the picture and making crappy software on other companies platforms so they can sell their solution as "optimized" . Is it shitty? yes. Is it underhanded? yes. Is it anti-competitive? absolutely. Does it fucking matter? NOPE. Look, their claims stem on that they are butt hurt because they haven't sold enough product and they are looking for the bad guy. What I hate is that they are dragging the Open Source community and FreeBSD into this shit like Preparation H to soothe the pain. Look, you want to sell product MAKE COMPELLING PRODUCTS!!!! If you make it, and its good, they will come. Red Hat is going to implode soon enough Im still saying within 5 years. But, you cannot blame IBM or Red Hat for your erectile dysfunction predicament because your products lack sex appeal. You inherited winners with SCO OpenServer and SCO UnixWare both GREAT products for their day. Where are the 64 bit versions? Where is your broadened hardware support? You expect your customers to buy your products, scrounge eBay or Craigslist to find spare parts because SCO UnixWare and SCO OpenServer dont run on any system manufactured after 2002. Oh wait they can purchase another operating system license so they can run it under VM? Give me a break. Now, OpenServer 10 is NOT a bad product. I actually downloaded it when it was released and still have a VM with it. Not bad at all. But its FreeBSD with XFCE. Where are your actual server packages? What is it optimized for? What are your server roles? You cannot just take FreeBSD remove as much as you can and make a couple of web tools and call that a server. You have to optimize performance, you have to give customers the ability to clone that setup so they can deploy it to other systems. Your data sheets and customer docs are almost non-existent and pretty much the worst I have seen. My 12 year old son could write a better documentation on his worst day. Oh and BTW customers would love to know what you are working on. Staying silent for 3 years and popping up to sue IBM and Red Hat one day out of the blue is not a recipe for success.
Im not saying Im the smartest bear in the forest. Im definitely not the dumbest. We do pretty decent business. We make enough to pay the bills, pay the employee's and live. I have no aspirations to be the next Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Google, Red Hat, SUSE or IBM but we have been pretty successful in what we do and we make a damn decent living.
Not a dig at Xinuos but I think its past time for SCO and the like minded to just die. The tech industry has evolved and the old ways of doing business are DONE. You either keep up with the times or you are gone. Personally I dont think this lawsuit will go anywhere. But it wouldn't surprise me if IBM just settled it. My hope is they just go ahead and take a sledgehammer to this case if for nothing more to drive home a point.
