[NTLUG:Discuss] SCO History article -- Non-Compete: "Linux sucked until IBM came along"

[Kelledin]

On Friday 25 June 2004 08:38 pm, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> > SCO's writings on the matter of Monterrey are more
> > reasonably explained via that "throw everything and
> > hope something sticks" theory of legal filing.
>
> As I have stated repeatedly, SCO had to show that IBM
> was supported Linux as a violation of the Project Monterey.
> That's what the previous items were regarding, how IBM
> has transferred IP from itself to Linux, how that has
> improved Linux, and how that now harms SCO, in violation
> of the Non-Compete clause of the Project Monterey contract.

I kept wondering where Monterey was going to come into play.  It 
was brought up in the original complaint, but it seems to have 
faded very much into the background since then.

I remember the hints of IBM becoming dissatisfied with where 
Monterey was going--IIRC IBM terminated the agreement right 
after the UNIX assets got sold to Caldera.  Your theory now 
brings a new theory to my mind:

IBM, being dissatisfied with Monterey's progress, wanted to dump 
it and get involved in Linux.  Of course, the non-compete clause 
probably prevented that.  But when the original SCO sold its 
UNIX assets to Caldera, I think IBM saw a loophole there.

Suddenly the act of strengthening Linux was "technically" no 
longer a non-compete violation, since strengthening Linux 
actually meant strengthening the competitive position of IBM's 
Monterey partner.  On top of that, IBM didn't (and still 
doesn't) develop or produce its own distro to compete with 
Caldera/RedHat/SuSE/Mandrake either--IBM is pretty 
distro-agnostic.  Caldera as a Linux distributor had zero room 
to beef about it.

Caldera as the new SCO, of course, felt different.  Enter the 
Caldera/SCO identity crisis, and we had a powder keg.

In hindsight, Caldera's purchase of the SCO UNIX assets was 
obviously a bad idea; Ransom Love ended up with a company that 
was competing with itself.  I remember tales of the internal 
rift between the Caldera Linux guys and the old-school SCO 
engineers/developers that got relocated to Caldera's payroll.

--
Kelledin
"If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does 
it still cost four figures to fix?"