SCO Sends A Second Warning To Linux Users

by , 8:00 AM EST, December 23rd, 2003

SCO is stepping up its campaign to collect fees from users of Linux: According a New York Times report, SCO sent a second letter to companies that use Linux on Friday, December 19, 2003. The letter claimed that Linux users were illegally using SCO's intellectual property, and that SCO was willing to discuss options for remediation. From the New York Times article, SCO Sends Second Warning Letter to Linux Users:

The SCO Group plans to announce today that it is escalating its campaign to collect license fees from corporations using the Linux operating system, with warning letters to the companies. Supporters of Linux, including I.B.M. and other companies, say that SCO's interpretation of its claim over Linux is exaggerated.

The letters, dated Friday, are the second round that SCO has sent to corporate users of Linux. SCO sent letters to 1,500 companies in May, warning them that it contended that Linux had violated its intellectual property rights. SCO owns the rights to the Unix operating system. The company asserts that Linux, a variant of Unix that is distributed free, violates SCO's license and copyright.

The new letters, signed by Ryan E. Tibbitts, SCO's general counsel, name more than 65 programming files that "have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted Unix code base and contributed to Linux."

The letters focus on application binary interfaces, the programming hooks by which a software application gains access to the underlying operating system. "We believe these violations are serious, and we will take appropriate actions to protect our rights," the letters state.

Read the full account at the New York Times Web site. There, you can also view SCO's letter, which lists some of the claimed offending code.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Well, this is interesting; SCO has named 65 functions in Linux that it believes violates its intellectual property rights. By naming the code, does SCO believe the act adds validity to its claim? Perhaps, or maybe SCO is merely thumbing its nose at IBM for having won a small victory earlier this month, in which SCO has been ordered to reveal the supposed offending code. Or maybe SCO feels that it needs to scare as many companies as possible into paying before it is ordered to stop its thuggery.

No matter how any of the lawsuits come out, SCO's actions against users of Linux are closely akin to thuggery; it has made claims, but has consistently refused to back them up, it has spread confusion throughout the Open Source community with its allegations, and it has threatened legal action on those who have the least knowledge of what is real or not, and have the most to lose.

Speculation as to why SCO decided to trod such a path could fill volumes, or at least a pamphlet, but there can be no doubt about how SCO is looking to the rest of the industry; like thugs. Maybe that's why SCO has made several attempts to explain its actions. As the old saying goes: Actions speak louder than words.

At any rate; now that some of the code has been revealed, those knowledgeable about such things will have a chance to make a better judgment on whether SCO has a leg to stand on.

Not that it matters in the larger scheme of things, but we don't buy any of SCO's explanations. If SCO owns the right to UNIX and those rights have, indeed, been violated, it could have easily gone to court with it's claims, won, then proceeded to reap valid bounty. SCO decided to do things bass-ackwards, which wastes a lot of time and effort for a lot of people, and does exactly what SCO claims it is not trying to do; spread confusion and fear.

It's a shame the greed isn't a crime.

SCO Sends Second Warning Letter to Linux Users