[TUHS] Microsoft, SCO, and a certain License

Kurt Wall kwall at kurtwerks.com
Mon Mar 1 09:54:28 AEST 2004


In a 0.7K blaze of typing glory, Jon Snader wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 06:24:30PM +1030, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > 
> > The most important detail is whether it was, in fact, derived from
> > OpenBSD.  This sounds very unlikely to me.  If it were the case, why
> > would they pay anything to SCO?
> > 
> 
> I have no idea whether Microsoft based SFU on OpenBSD or not, but
> the conventional wisdom on Groklaw, the SCOX Yahoo Finance Board,
> and similar domains that are following the SCO issue is that Microsoft's
> purchase of the license was a backdoor way of financing an attack on
> Linux.  I don't whether that's true either, but it does provide an
> answer to your question.

That was my initial thought, too. I decided that the idea that Microsfot
would purchase a license as a business tactic was just too paranoid or 
perverse and lumped it in the same category as lining my hat with aluminum
foil to disrupt the government's mind control experiments. Lately, I'm not
so sure. If Ronald Reagan can call ketchup a vegetable, Bill Clinton can
debate the meaning of the word "is", then Microsoft could well have
purchased a license from SCO, insofar as the $10 or $20 million is pocket
change for them.

Kurt
-- 
Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else -- unless it
is an enemy.
		-- Albert Einstein


More information about the TUHS mailing list