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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
SCO claims IBM and Linux have ripped off its old program code. Linux advocates say that's bunk. Nothing will become clear until SCO shows its hand in court.
Aug 18, 2003 | "There is perhaps not the same level of interest in this case as in that of the O.J. Simpson trial," says Gordon Haff, a technology analyst who's been closely following the multibillion-dollar lawsuit that the SCO Group, a small Utah software firm, filed against IBM in March. Cable news networks are not clamoring to cover every development in the complex contract dispute. "I do not expect to see it on Court TV anytime soon," Haff says.
But in open-source software circles, SCO's suit has achieved trial-of-the-century status. SCO owns the copyrights to decades-old Unix code, and it has accused IBM of secretly stuffing this code into Linux, thereby making Linux "an unauthorized derivative of Unix." To fans of Linux, SCO's claims seem at once preposterous and dangerous, and the lawsuit has set the community buzzing: The press (embodied by the likes of Slashdot and Linux Journal) is all over it, the pundits are in high gear, everyone believes himself an expert on the issue, and, like the best celebrity trials, the whole thing keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.
On Aug. 5, SCO made its boldest claim yet: Because the company believes that everyone using Linux is illegally using SCO's technology, the company released a price list detailing how much money Linux users should pay SCO if they want to continue using their beloved open-source OS without facing any legal troubles. SCO wants $199 for every desktop computer running Linux and $699 for every server (though that price will rise to $1,399 in October).
According to SCO, these prices are reasonable -- Linux is, after all, a pretty good operating system. "We compared Linux to our Unixware product," says Blake Stowell, a company spokesman, referring to SCO's Unix-based server system. Since Unixware sells for $1,400, SCO determined that a Linux server at $700 would be a steal.
But wouldn't Linux users balk at paying hundreds of dollars to use an operating system they'd long believed was free? SCO is unmoved by this question. To the people who thought they could get a good operating system for nothing, "I guess all I can say is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," Stowell says.
According to SCO, many major corporations have expressed interest in buying its Linux licenses, and one firm, a Fortune 500 company that SCO says "recognizes the importance of paying for SCO's intellectual property," even purchased licenses for its Linux servers. Blake Stowell says that terms of the deal prevent SCO from naming the company or disclosing how much money it paid, but he notes that SCO considers the amount "significant -- it was not a small number." He adds that he's confident that the company will soon announce more sales, and "hopefully we'll be able to name some of those companies." On Thursday, SCO announced that during the third quarter of 2003, it made more than $7 million from its efforts to license its Unix code.
News that SCO has made some money selling rights to its code failed to convince many of its critics that the company has a valid case against Linux. "I think it's amusing that they were willing to put out a press release for one licensee, and on top of that it's a licensee who's ashamed of doing business with SCO," says Don Marti, the editor of Linux Journal.
Marti and other critics see the licensing announcement as just one more rhetorical escalation by the company -- just about every week, SCO puts out statements crowing about another apparently trivial "development" in its case, an effort designed, open-source advocates say, to garner ever more public attention for its claim that using Linux is illegal and somehow dangerous. This is particularly galling to Linux devotees since, in their view, SCO has not publicly provided any real evidence of infringing code in Linux.
In the first few months after SCO filed its case, many large firms selling open-source software seemed to be staying out of the imbroglio; even IBM was not very vocal in its defense of Linux. But on Aug. 6, IBM filed a forceful countersuit in the SCO case, charging SCO with violating IBM's own software patents and with causing unnecessary harm to IBM's Unix and Linux businesses.
In an argument that many others in the open-source community have long been making, IBM also noted that because SCO had itself once sold a version of Linux under the GPL (General Public License) for open-source software, it had explicitly disclaimed any rights to all code in Linux. (On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that SCO's lawyers plan to argue that the GPL violates copyright law and is therefore invalid.) On Aug. 4, Red Hat, the top Linux company, also filed suit against SCO. The company claimed that SCO's public comments had damaged Red Hat's business, and it asked a judge to issue a declaratory judgment stating that Red Hat's products do not infringe on any of SCO's copyrights.
The lawsuits -- both the SCO-IBM case and Red Hat's separate suit -- are destined to be long-term affairs, and to the extent that SCO is successful at creating actual uncertainty in the marketplace regarding the legality of Linux, the worries are going to linger. So far, according to almost every reliable expert on the matter, Linux users don't seem to be very nervous. But if SCO keeps up its rhetorical war -- and especially if a few more big firms decide to pay SCO off just to make it go away -- Linux could face some problems in the marketplace. Risk-averse corporations, especially, might think twice about using the system.
"It really wouldn't make sense for a company to rip out its Linux servers and put something else in right now," says Gordon Haff, the tech analyst who contrasted this case with the O.J. trial (Haff works at Illuminata, a research firm in New Hampshire). "But if they're thinking of a Linux rollout a year from now and they're also considering alternatives like Windows and maybe Solaris and others, then they might consider this small risk associated with Linux."
Can IBM, Red Hat and other Linux firms successfully combat SCO's claims in the media? Foes of open-source software -- with Microsoft taking the lead -- have long been saying essentially what SCO says now: If Linux seems too good to be true, maybe it is. Maybe there's a catch to it. Maybe using it could land you in trouble. And maybe paying for your operating system is not such a bad idea after all.
