by , 4:30 PM EDT, August 29th, 2003
The situation with SCO and Linux keeps getting stranger and stranger. This time, however, the news seems to be good for the Linux crowd.
The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, posted an article which claims that SCO says it never intended to sue any Linux companies or go after any of the commercial customers of Linux companies, with the notable exception of IBM. SCO still plans to continue its lawsuit against Big Blue. From the article, No plans to sue Linux companies, says SCO:
The SCO Group said today it had never planned to sue any Linux companies, had no concrete plans to sue anyone and also no current plans to take a commercial Linux customer to court.
The company was responding to questions routed through its PR people in Sydney.
As the Canopy Group, which has a stake in SCO, also has interests in several other Linux companies, SCO was asked whether it planned to sue all these companies. The answer was "No. SCO has never planned to sue Linux companies."
In June, SCO senior vice-president Chris Sontag was quoted as saying the company would either will file a new suit or amend its lawsuit against IBM to target other companies which SCO alleges are illegally appropriating its Unix source code.
Today SCO also said it had no current plans to take a commercial Linux customer to court.
Read the full, but brief article, which gives a short history of SCO's actions and statements concerning Linux, at The Age.
It seems that SCO has either come to its senses, or was made to see the error of its ways somehow. Whatever the reason, if this report is true, then the Linux community can breathe easier. Not that the Linux folks had much to worry about, but a protracted court battle could have done some damage to the credibility of Linux in the eyes of corporate customers.
Doing a quick search, we found that SCO has, indeed, never specifically said it would sue other Linux vendors; however, Mr. Mark Heise, the lead attorney for SCO, and Darl McBride, CEO of SCO, have both strongly implied that lawsuits against vendors and customers alike would be coming. We whipped up some "for instances" for your convenience.
Mark Heise in a recent C|Net News interview with Lisa Bowman:
The question a lot of people have is how do you put the cat back in the bag? The code is out there. SCO has carefully thought out that a business resolution is the licensing agreement because SCO is no different than any other company in the United States. Business solutions are always better than litigation solutions. They want to resolve this on terms that are fair to the company, as well as the industry in general. If they can't do that, then they are going to court and they are entitled to receive substantial damages that are owed to them for material that was improperly used in the 2.4 version of the (Linux) kernel. Whether they are paid by IBM or by hundreds of other people, they are committed to making sure they are compensated for their valuable knowledge and copyrights.
We've also found this bit of news from Computer Business Review in an article titled, SCO Preparing Legal Action Against Customer:
Speaking at SCO's Forum event in Las Vegas, president and CEO Darl McBride said SCO preparing to speed-up the legal process and convince the skeptics. "We are prepared to have this heard on a quicker basis in a customer environment if that's what it takes to quicken it up," he said.
Talking to ComputerWire, McBride added SCO is identifying Linux users for possible litigation. He said SCO had for the last month gathered information on Linux users, and identified about 10% of the total Linux servers sold last year. McBride added that he expected that figure to rise to 40% over the coming weeks before SCO would take action.
SCO has three groups working on identifying and approaching Linux users. The first is drawing up the list, the second will send out letters offering the chance to license the code SCO says has been copied into Linux, and the third will take legal action against those who refuse.
McBride said SCO was likely to be selective about who it targets, probably choosing a company using IBM Corp's AIX and Dynix operating systems as well as Linux, so it can settle several legal arguments in one go. "Instead of doing mass-mailings we're now taking a very targeted approach," he said.
We've also found these statements reported in another article from The Age titled, Legal threat to commercial Linux users :
Chris Sontag, senior vice-president and general manager of SCOsource, which is trying to derive more income from the company's intellectual property, said today: "SCO is taking this important step because there are intellectual property issues with Linux. "When SCO's own UNIX software code is being illegally copied into Linux, we believe we have an obligation to educate commercial users of the potential liability that could rest with them for using such software to run their business. We feel so strongly about this issue that we are suspending sales and distribution of SCO Linux until these issues are resolved."
Finally, there's the Boston Globe piece on the SCO licensing scheme in which SCO demands that companies using Linux must pay the fee or risk litigation. From the article, SCO seeks Linux user fees:
The SCO Group Inc., a small Utah software company that claims it owns the rights to key elements of Linux, yesterday demanded that users of the freely distributed operating system pay US$699 for each server running Linux or face lawsuits. SCO chief executive Darl McBride likened his company's plans to sue Linux users to the litigious tactics of the recording industry, which recently said it would sue people who illegally swap copyrighted music files over the Internet. The new licensing plan, revealed one day after the Linux company Red Hat Inc. asked a federal judge to force SCO to reveal the substance of its claims to Linux, raised the stakes in the growing battle over who owns Linux, the open-source operating system created and improved by a far-flung community of computer programmers.
If SCO never intended to sue, why make all of the noise? Clearly the company wanted to represent the idea that it was, in fact, planning on suing other vendors as well as customers. What changed?
We don't know the answer to that, but perhaps SCO simply wanted to scare Linux customers. Much of what SCO claims could have been ironed out by the parties involved without making a media circus out of it. With words that put the Linux community on the defensive, and letters to Linux customers which put into question the very validity of Linux.
SCO stirred up the pot and now it wants to let it settle. The problem is that, if no legal decision about SCO's claims on Linux is ever reached, then SCO could very easily stir the pot again and again; which is why we hope the RedHat continues with its suit against SCO, whatever the outcome.