Presidential Ramblings

 

Issue 1.5

October 2003

 

Elections Coming

Each December, half the seats on the DACS Board of Directors are up for election. This is your opportunity to come forward and volunteer for nomination to the Board, and to help build DACS into an ever better user group. If you are interested, please talk with me at the General Meetings or contact me by phone or e-mail.

This Thursday, I wasted a day going down to see PC Expo. This once great show is now called TechXNY. With a moniker like that, it’s no wonder the show has fallen apart. (See Marc Cohen’s commentary on page 11). Three of us rode the train from Danbury and enjoyed the conversation down and back. The small size of the show was made all the more apparent by the vast areas of floor space that were screened off. The rumor on the show floor was that Microsoft canceled “late” (whatever that means) with the implication that all the other large vendors canceled as well. It’s a shame that we have lost this resource. I enjoyed the annual pilgrimage to the city —a day of learning what was new in the personal computer industry. The best part of the show was the many small booths around the floor perimeter where emerging companies struggled to be noticed— companies like Danbury-based Relay Communications, Inc. who I first saw there sometime in the late 80’s. Or how about the year when Netscape released Navigator? Everyone had a product or package to access the Internet, except Microsoft who was talking about the Microsoft Network which was intended to compete with CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL. And then there was the year I listened to Bill Gates’s keynote address when he told us how OS/2 was the future of computing.

The congregation of industry people spawned other events. Back in the old days, many of the people who ran forums on CompuServe met each year for a “Sysop Gathering”. PC Expo brought these people to New York and it was fun to put a face to familiar names. PC Expo is dead—R.I.P.

SCO, UNIX and Intellectual Property

There is a very interesting take on the SCO vs. Linux issue on BYTE.com (remember BYTE Magazine?). Go to byte.com and search on SCO. The first article will be “SCO Owns Your Computer” by Trevor Marshall, an interview with Chris Sontag, SCO’s Senior Vice President, Operating Systems Division. The gist of the article is that SCO’s claims go far beyond Linux. There is an implication that both Apple and Microsoft could suffer as well if SCO is successful with the IBM suit. The original UNIX licenses were like the GPL in that ownership of all derivative works reverted back to AT&T. The key technologies where SCO claims their ownership rights have been infringed are:

  • JFS (Journalling File System).
  • NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access), a SGI/Stanford collaboration.
  • RCU (Read-Copy-Update).
  • SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processing).

Further, the original UNIX licenses covered all “methods” and “concepts” of operating systems and thus all operating system developed since UNIX System V are derivative works. The implications sort of suck the air right out of you, eh? My guess is that it will take at least five years for any of this to make any real headway in the U.S. court system. What about overseas? Well it only gets murkier. The UNIX licenses were, naturally, based on US federal and state laws. Several European companies have filed for injunctions to prevent SCO from spreading FUD in Europe until SCO’s case is proven in court. The author speculates that SCO will find things much more difficult overseas.

So why target Linux? Well because the source code is available, of course. Linux is the only operating system where SCO can actually look for snippets of code that closely resembles the code in UNIX System V. So they hired “experts” to do just that.

Read the article. It gives a perspective of this potentially very serious problem that is not presented by the general press.


BackHomeNext

© Copyright Danbury Area Computer Society, Inc. 1998-2003 All Rights Reserved
Web Site Terms & Conditions of Use