Egger is the founder of Open Source Risk Management, or OSRM, an innovative new firm that will soon begin offering insurance protection for Linux. At the cost of $30 per $1,000 of coverage, OSRM promises to defend Linux against all infringement claims, exactly the kind of suits that Chrysler and AutoZone are now facing. If SCO represents the biggest threat to Linux in its existence so far, then OSRM is a classic example of how the flexible open-source world reacts to every new threat -- by innovating a new, widely distributed, from-the-bottom-up solution.

Insurance is crucial for Linux, Egger says. Unlike proprietary software, the free operating system is vulnerable to third-party infringement claims. When large corporations buy applications from proprietary software firms such as Microsoft, they are usually sold rock-solid "indemnification" packages -- clauses that let the customer off the hook in the case of any legal question surrounding the software. But it's not the same for Linux, which was written by many developers all over the world and can't be guaranteed by a single firm. It wouldn't be fair to ask Red Hat, say, to indemnify you of any claims against Linux, Egger points out. "You would be asking them to guarantee something which they have no more knowledge of than you do," he says. "You're asking them to do something where they might be in the position of having to guarantee what their competitors wrote."

Egger believes that only a neutral firm can guarantee the legality of Linux, and only one that has strong ties to the developer community. In order to guarantee that Linux isn't infringing on anyone else's property, OSRM is inspecting the OS's code with the help of many developers. The firm is being advised by such open-source gurus as Bruce Perens, and it has hired Pamela Jones, a paralegal who runs the popular Groklaw discussion site, to help with legal strategies. Jones is the pioneer of what she terms "open legal research" -- complex legal research done in the open, on the Web, by groups of people with varied expertise in law and code. During the past year, Groklaw has been the center of such research aimed at thwarting the SCO case; Jones and others on Groklaw plan to do similar work for OSRM.

It's these ties to the open-source community that make OSRM most interesting. The firm, says Bruce Perens, gives open-source developers a chance to stand by their work. "What we are saying is, for a very small amount per year we will put our money where our mouth is," Perens says. IT managers "will not have to defend this use to their bosses again."

There's no evidence, yet, that SCO's efforts against Linux have been effective. For several months, SCO has been asking corporate users of Linux to pay it for the right to use the free operating system -- but in the first quarter of the fiscal year, the company only managed to sell $20,000 worth of licenses for Linux, which suggests that most firms don't believe SCO's claim that it owns Linux. (In order to sell these $20,000 worth of licenses, SCO spent about $3.4 million on litigation during the quarter.) Meanwhile, the Linux market seems as strong as ever. Don Marti, the editor of Linux Journal, points out, for example, that the Linux server business experienced double-digit growth during the past year.

But Marti also says that he knows of some companies that are at least delaying plans to migrate from Unix to Linux, which is understandable considering SCO's attacks. Both AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler were once celebrated for their adoption of Linux; now they're being sued for it. If you were a large corporation thinking about Linux, wouldn't you wait until the dust settled?

Well, if you were a lawyer at one of those Linux-leaning corporations, one thing you might consider doing first is reading Groklaw. Groklaw was founded about a year ago by Pamela Jones, a paralegal and a techie who became intrigued by SCO's $5 billion case against IBM. SCO claimed that IBM engineers had secretly stolen code from SCO's Unix software and stuffed the code into Linux, making Linux an illegal copy of SCO's property. Jones, who was skeptical of this claim, began blogging about it. "I thought maybe, in my wildest scenario, a hundred people would ever read what I was doing, and I was thinking exclusively of a blog, not a Web site," Jones told Salon in an e-mail interview. "Blogs are more casual and have more leeway editorially. So I was just breezing along with panache, without a care in the world. It felt like I was writing 'Dear Diary, today SCO did thus and so.'" But as the SCO case heated up, Jones saw her site catapulted into the spotlight -- i.e., it was getting frequent links from Slashdot -- and the content morphed into something more than breezy blogging. Soon, she says, groups of people with expertise in various areas of the law and software development began offering her tips, and in a short time these readers began working together on Groklaw projects aimed at undoing SCO's case.

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