Ransom Love’s Linuxworld 2000 Keynote Speech

NZheretic writes “The SCO Group is currently suing IBM for breach of contract for apparently putting Unixware/Monterey “technology” in Linux. SCO/Caldera’s complaint depends critically on certain historical and technical assertions which are materially false and (apparently quite intentionally) misleading.

SCO/Caldera and Old SCO, directly acknowledged and assisted IBM with the scalablity of Linux.

In August 2000, just days after Caldera purchased the Old SCO server division, the then CEO of Caldera, Ransom Love, made a keynote speech at LinuxWorld 2000. A RealPlayer video stream of the event can be found at t DrDobbs Journal’s Technetcast.

In the question and answer session at the end of the keynote, 44 minutes into the recording,Love was asked about the possible conflict over Monterey and Linux IA-64. (A MP3 of the following transcribed portion is available here )

Q: What happens about Project Monterey, because that conflicts with the IA-64 Linux, 64-bit Linux?

Love: OK. I don’t — if we do our job right in making Linux scale over like UnixWare to the degree that everybody, that we know we can… May I ask, some people have said, “Well, people have tried this in the past, but they haven’t been that successful,” may I suggest: we don’t have any ulterior motives for not making it successful. Technologically has not been the reason why it hasn’t done it before. There’s always some other motive, right? And so to talk about Monterey, clearly we want to make sure we have the same level of Linux integration on Monterey that we would have in our Unixware product. Now, we don’t control, I mean, we have a great
relationship… it’s a joint development relationship with IBM which we intend to preserve… but they have similar interests and so this is really a very synergistic, uh, this transaction is great for all of the major partners as they have already wanted to embrace Linux moving forward.

Now, let me address one other aspect of your question, which is that the Monterey Project is in conflict with the IA-64 Linux Project. I don’t believe it’s in conflict at all. Now, clearly, we have tremendous vested interest in the IA-64 Linux Project and with the acquisition of SCO, they’ve been doing a lot, so you combine those, and we’ve got one of the more comprehensive offerings, I believe, on the IA-64 Linux. So that’s clearly an area that we’re very committed to. But like Unixware, there’s elements of the Monterey kernel that are more scalable, OK? Now, on the IA-64 platform, I don’t know how long of window that is, but today, it’s a little bit more robust and more scalable than the IA-64 Linux
is today. Now, I’m not saying that over time that won’t change.

But, and let me address one other thing. Sorry, (laughs) you’re getting all of it through one question. But clearly we are going to add components back to the Linux kernel on both IA-32 and IA-64 platforms. We’ll work with Linus and everyone in order to make that available. That will take some time. And as I mentioned earlier, I don’t know that over time you can have a single kernel — in fact I know you can’t — that will scale, you know, the breadth of IT technology needs. So I think we’re looking, in the Linux community, at having multiple kernels, so…

Q: Multiple Linux kernels? Or multiple UNIX kernels?

Love: Multiple Linux kernels as well, over time.

Q: Thank you.

Love: You bet.

I am not a lawyer, but even I can see that The SCO Group has put itself into an intractable situation, any judge will listen to evidence from the above and laugh the SCO group out of court.

It’s about time to
reexamine the recent claims of The SCO group and call in the lawyers and maybe the authorities.”