Fri, 23 Jan 2009

The Setting SUN.

Back in 2003, when the SCO Group launched their crazy ass lawsuit against companies using Linux, I was working at Sun Microsystems. About a after the lawsuit was announced, the SUN CEO at the time, Scott McNealy was quoted [Note] in this article:

"Don't touch open source software unless you have a team of intellectual property lawyers prepared to scour every single piece [of the open source code]. We offer indemnification, but many suppliers do not. A lot of companies are going to get very disappointed as we move forward. It will become a very challenging intellectual property issue."

I also clearly remember the reaction of Alan, one of my SUN co-workers when he read this. Alan jumped up out of his seat and said quite loudly "Go Scott!". In fact, it was so loud that I'm sure most of the people working on the same floor heard it. I also remember saying to Alan that SCO had started a lawsuit, that they still had to win it and that until they do win, Scott McNealy "should shut the f#@k up".

I bring all this up now, some 6 years later, because SCO Group is on life support and has been reduced to a litigation only company while Redhat, one of the many companies SCO Group had in its sights is on the verge of surpassing the market capitalisation of Sun Microsystems.

Note: This quote was extremely hard to track down. I did a bunch of searches that finally resulted in a blog post with a dead link to a page on Infoconomy. Fortunately, the very wonderful Wayback Machine had a copy of that one single Infoconomy article that contained the damning quote.

Posted at: 19:14 | Category: | Permalink