Re: Research questions WRT SCO's complaint

On Saturday, Mar 8, 2003, at 13:26 America/Los_Angeles, Karsten M. Self 
wrote:

> I'm doing some factual research on the SCO issue.  In particular there
> appear to be numerous factual errors in the complaint.
>
> Anyone with answers to the following:
>
>   - Was RMS ever faculty at MIT?  My understanding was he had a 
> research
>     position at the AI lab, but never held a professorship.  His
>     biography (by Sam Williams) makes no mention.

RMS was never on the faculty.  He started hacking at the AI around 
1972, or maybe a little earlier whilst still an undergraduate at 
Harvard -- I didn't get there until later.  If I remember he quit in 
1984 but I didn't pay much attention since it didn't change much (he 
still had the same office, was still around writing code etc).

>   - Early GNU/Linux development -- I know Maddog (then with DEC) got
>     involved in 1991/92.  Any other Unix vendor types on the bandwagon
>     early?  Cygnus also had ties to Sun IIRC.

I don't know what you mean by "ties": John was the earliest Sun 
customer and our first machine was one of the very first production 
sparcstations.  Michael was consulting for Sun until the company got 
going.

>   - Unix marketshare.  Does anyone have values for breakdown of
>     marketshare through the 1990s of the major Unix flavors?  My
>     understanding is that SCO was never much more than a bit player in
>     the x86 market.  Possibly a fair number of deployments, but low
>     overall valuation.

Any of the usuals (Gartner, etc) can give you these numbers as well as 
the magazines (Unix Toady etc) since they were eagerly followed by the 
kinds of people who cared about these sort of things.  A corporate 
library may have a collection of the trade rags.