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Sunday, July 20, 2003
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Gadzooks! Look What I Just Found
Talk about your laches and waiver, with a dollop of estoppel thrown in, not to mention a deepening plot.
Here, ladies and gentlemen, are, first, relevant snips from a SCO web page dating back to just after Project Monterey days, the IBM-Santa Cruz-Sequent project IBM killed in 2000. The SCO page has a copyright of 2001 and it's talking about AIX-5L, which was the successor to AIX, Project Monterey, from what I can gather from the two documents I just found. The second document is a news article from 2000 announcing the death of Project Monterey. Put the two together and a lot of things get clearer. I have made the most significant parts bold text, including references to IA-64, NUMA, Linux, and incorporatiing SCO Unixware and System V into AIX:
"AIX 5L - The Next Generation of AIX
"The next generation of AIX--AIX 5L--takes AIX to the next level with advanced technology, a strong Linux affinity and added support for IBM's Power and Intel's future IA-64 processor-based platforms, making it the most open UNIX operating system in the industry. AIX 5L demonstrates the success of the Project Monterey initiative, incorporating technology from the world's leading software and hardware providers, giving customers the business flexibility and performance they need for e-business. . . .
"AIX technology will help contribute to the success of the future systems running AIX 5L on Power and IA-64. . . .
"IBM has worked with a number of companies to provide best of breed technology for AIX 5L. Industry contributions include key technologies from IBM DYNIX/ptx, multi-path I/O and NUMA, and from SCO UnixWare and UNIX System 5 standard technologies. Bull continues to contribute development expertise in areas such as scalability and workload management.
"All of these efforts are paying off. Soon customers will be able to take advantage of the added benefits of AIX 5L. AIX 5L In addition to CPU and memory, AIX 5L Version 5.0 will offer an improved Workload Manager (WLM) with the ability to manage disk I/O, a capability not offered in Sun Solaris. This will help enable IT managers to give priority to Web-serving applications and resources, while making unused capacity available for other Web-serving tasks. AIX 5L will also offer Java 2 Version 1.3 support with expected availability ahead of Solaris. TCP/IP enhancements, offering improved network performance and reliability, will also be included. Among the UNIX System 5 technologies to be incorporated in this release is the SVR4 printing subsystem providing industry-standard print administration and drivers.
"Customers Will Benefit from Linux Affinity
"IBM is working to provide strong Linux affinity with AIX 5L. This will enable faster and less costly deployment of multi-platform, integrated solutions across AIX and Linux platforms. Many applications developed on and for Linux can run on AIX 5L with a simple recompilation of the source code, allowing customers to combine Linux applications with the advanced scalability and availability features of AIX. This Linux affinity in AIX enhances the customer's ability to adapt to changes in their business and technology.
"Linux affinity on AIX includes Linux application source compatibility, compliance with emerging Linux standards, and a GNU/Linux build-time environment with tools and utilities that combine to facilitate the development and deployment of Linux applications on AIX 5L. Linux affininty also includes AIX/Linux interoperability verification and will benefit customers looking to use Linux for fron-end Web serving and AIX 5L for transaction and data management.
"Software, Hardware Providers Working with AIX 5L Beta Code
"Software providers are building applications with the current beta release of AIX 5L for the future Intel IA-64 platform. Tool and middleware providers, including Cygnus Solutions, EPC, Geodesic, IBM, Merant, Parasoft and Roguewave, are working with preproduction systems to create tools and middleware to build applications. Other software providers are using these tools to build solutions that range from e-business and supply chain management to enterprise resource planning and business intelligence. Hardware providers, including Unisys and Bull, are working with AIX 5L beta code on IA-64 to ensure that the operating system runs properly on their systems. Bull recently announced it has successfully run AIX 5L on IA-64 on an eight-way Intel Itanium processor-based server, achieving an industry first.
"AIX 5L, the next generation of AIX, will continue to offer customers an industrial strength operating environment, with Linux affinity, providing choice and flexibility for customers' needs while leveraging current investments."
No wonder they took it down. The question is: what happened to all the commingled code when Project Monterey was killed? I'd surely like to see that contract. But even after it was killed, this document from SCO's own web site, says they were donating code to AIX 5L. This SCO page is currently available here.It used to be here. But SCO has removed the page. I found a link to it (now a dead link) in a comment someone posted back in August of 2000 on a ZDNet story (which is itself only available as Google cache) about IBM killing Project Monterey, dated August 28, 2000, so at least on that date, SCO had this page up. Here are some snips from the ZDNet page:
"IBM is killing off Project Monterey, a joint venture with The Santa Cruz Operation, while giving birth to a new OS. AIX 5L, a future Unix OS able to run on both Intel IA-64 and IBM's own Power chip, will integrate Linux alongside some of the technologies from Monterey.
"'At the same time, though, we're also focusing Linux on a brand new market of people who might not know anything about AIX,' said Scott Handy, IBM's director for Linux solutions marketing, during a technical session at this week's Solutions 2000 developers' conference in Las Vegas.
"IBM's multifaceted moves to Linux go a long way toward opening up the company's commercial code base. . . . Now, under the upcoming AIX 5L, IBM will integrate AIX with Linux to create a common operating environment with shared systems management, along with high-end technologies that were supposed to be included in Project Monterey.
"In 5L, IBM is building 'strong affinity with Linux' combining Linux source-code compatibility, a Linux build-time, and an AIX enterprise environment for running Linux applications, said Miles Barel, IBM's program director for Unix marketing, also at the conference in Las Vegas."
So... after this August of 2000 story announcing IBM was killing Project Monterey and giving us the name of its AIX successor, 5L, SCO had on its web site a page extolling the virtues of AIX 5L and its openness, and its "Linux affinity", as late as 2001. So they knew. They didn't have to hire any outsiders to look for any common code. They would have known exactly where to start looking. And they knew IBM was doing this back when it happened, because they all did it together as Project Monterey, and then from this web page, it appears SCO approved of and supported Project Monterey's successor AIX 5L also. They even donated code from UnixWare and System V. I'm not a UNIX expert, so if anyone sees anything here that I'm not seeing, speak up. But if SCO donated code to AIX 5L and IBM put in some Linux code and Sequent donated some, how can anybody sue anybody in this picture, when the evidence indicates everyone involved was deliberately trying to create an "open environment"? It even mentions the GPL.
And what about IBM? You think they might have a clue where any "identical" code might be? Wouldn't it have been nice to let the Linux community in on the secret, so it could be fixed? (Of course, that could be happening behind the scenes. I hope.)
And if there is identical code, does it look like it went from System V to Linux? or the other way around? or that it all found each other in AIX 5L and then to Linux, having been donated by all with the goal of opening the code back when everyone was on the same bandwagon? If that is the route, can SCO now ask Linux users to pay them a fee because the code got in there? This is dark and cynical on a Dickensian scale.
Read it while you can, because neither Wayback nor Google cache is necessarily permanent.
9:25:44 AM 
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