Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Linux Was Almost Destroyed By This Lawsuit" video.

  1. 10:47 “Dismissal without prejudice” means “you can bring the case again”. “Dismissal with prejudice” means “judge says, piss off and never come back”.
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  2. Anybody remember the London Stock Exchange brouhaha? Microsoft made a big deal about the LSE choosing Windows NT to run its real-time trading system -- even put out a fake newspaper ad titled “The Highly Reliable Times” with that as its headline. And then there was this massive outage. I think the system was down for several days. Microsoft tried to blame it on “network issues”, not Windows NT itself. But not long after that, the LSE ripped out that Windows NT system and replaced it with Linux.
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  3. Groklaw did reveal their true pro-IBM colours later, in the TurboHercules case.
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  4. Remember that macOS is a “Unix” system primarily in legal, not technical terms. They have licensed the “Unix” trademark, but that doesn’t mean that they work quite the way that people expect of a traditional “Unix” system. If you want that, you go to Linux or the BSDs.
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  5.  @BrodieRobertson  Yes, there is some aspect of technical terms, yes. But it doesn’t really cover all the things that are traditionally thought of as “Unix”.
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  6. Also, we normally pronounce SCO as though it were a word: “sco”.
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  7. This “Pamela Jones” described herself as a “paralegal”. There is some doubt as to whether such a person actually existed. Certainly Groklaw appeared very knowledgeable and well-researched, so there could have been an entire legal team behind that name. Funded by IBM, of course.
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  8. You could say that Groklaw was on the side of the Good Guys in the SCO lawsuit. In the TurboHercules one, on the other hand, they were pretty firmly on the side of IBM.
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  9. Netware may have been a complex and fiddly product to set up, but I think its performance and reliability (and the third-party ecosystem that developed around it) made all that worthwhile. Which is why it took Microsoft several attempts to dethrone it from market dominance. Interesting to see people point to WSL and remind us of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”. My response is to look back at the Ballmer days and say that Microsoft already tried “Extinguish”, with every resource at its disposal, and failed miserably.
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  10.  @BrodieRobertson  Just looking at the main build script for Blender, for example, I count 11 occurrences of “if(UNIX AND NOT APPLE)”. Obvious things that are omitted on the MacOS build include: FreeType, portable build, the man page and X11. Also I’m not sure if FFmpeg is supported.
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  11.  @BrodieRobertson  That’s what I mean about “traditional” Unix. You wouldn’t imagine running a system without X11 (even Wayland is going to need XWayland for some time yet). Yet that is what Apple offers.
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  12. The irony is that there is a single section marked “if(UNIX AND NOT (APPLE OR HAIKU))”, to do with X11. So even Haiku manages to include itself in the other “if(UNIX...)” sections, Apple does not.
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  13. The “Unix Wars” was really the story of how the entire proprietary Unix market self-destructed, its fragmentation leaving it open to a takeover by Microsoft’s Windows NT.
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  14.  @Kneedragon1962  Think of WSL as an admission of defeat. The camel has been allowed into the tent, it’s only a matter of time before it pushes the Arab out.
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  15. Microsoft made patent claims against Linux. Or rather, they made vague patent threats, claiming at one point that Linux was infringing something like 200 of their patents. But they would never publicly say which patents those were. Instead, they strong-armed a few Linux-using companies into making deals to hand over some amount of money -- while keeping all terms, including those all-important patent citations, secret.
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