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SCO Threatens to Press IP Claims on Linux -$99/cpu
Tangential writes "New story on LinuxBusiness week says SCO is about to mount an effort to get all Linux sites to pay a per cpu license for so-called patent violations."SCO has been proposing to charge users $96 per CPU for a so-called one-time System 5 for Linux software license to protect their systems from SCO-enforced patent issues if they ante up as soon as demand is made." They've retained David Boies (DOJ prosecutor of Microsoft) to handle the legal issues." Note: I've been unable to substantiate this - which are fairly incendiary claims. Further updates as more is heard.
GNU is not Unix.
Linux is a "Unix-like" operating system. Anyone who has ever done system programming for a Linux system could tell you that although it is close to the SVR4 conventions (such as in the acclaimed O'Reilly 'lion' book) it disobeys many of them because it's not quite System 5 compliant.
Is this really happening or is it early in the morning and I'm a sucker to a hoax?
The site's chugging a bit, so here's the full text. And kids, if you're going to post the full text, post it as a/c for crying out loud. Whores.
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Informed sources, who would only talk on the guarantee of anonymity, say SCO has been proposing to charge users $96 per CPU for a so-called one-time System 5 for Linux software license to protect their systems from SCO-enforced patent issues if they ante up as soon as demand is made. The fee would go up to $149 per CPU if SCO had to wait through a so-called 99-day "amnesty period" for its money. Users of SCO Linux would get a free System 5 license. They would also have the free right to run SCO Unix apps on Linux.
Sources say the scheme, which pretty much sounds like a protection racket - we won't sue if you pay - isn't engraved in stone but an undated weeks-old draft SCO press release that details the plan and was read to us has been quietly making the rounds. At press time, we got word that a major player, believed to be IBM, thought it had dissuaded SCO from going through with the idea.
A usually reliable source swears a SCO executive told him that SCO has hired the redoubtable David Boies, who prosecuted the Microsoft antitrust case for the Justice Department, to press infringement claims not against users but against the other Linux distributions. Presumably this means Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and maybe even SCO's United Linux partners SuSE, TurboLinux, and Conectiva.
It is unclear whether SCO envisioned the free System 5 license it's been proposing to bundle with SCO Linux extending to its United Linux partners or simply saw it as a SCO differentiator.
SCO would base any claims it makes on the Unix patents and copyrights that it acquired when it took over the Santa Cruz Operation. Its press release claims it "owns much of the core Unix IP" and that it has the right to enforce it.
The Santa Cruz Operation of course bought Unix from Novell, which in turn got it from AT&T. Unix was written at Bell Labs when Bell Labs was still part of the phone company. It is unclear whether the alleged IP is unassailable and that valid patents or copyrights actually exist or that the Unix libraries are actually in Linux. Reportedly there has been a lot of patent research going on in the Linux community lately and there are supposedly serious doubts SCO has much of anything.
SCO CEO Darl McBride was in England or en route home and did not return calls. Other SCO execs declined to comment; neither would Red Hat, SuSE nor major ISVs also familiar with the situation.
SCO's director of marketing communications Blake Stowell finally found a phone and confirmed that SCO was talking to Boies, described in the press release as SCO's "IP advisor," about how best to monetize its IP, but denied that it had retained him yet or that its plans were fixed.
Stowell also denied that SCO would target other Linux distributions, basically suggesting that it would be suicide for SCO to do such a thing. "Microsoft would love to see that happen," he said. Instead Stowell suggested that SCO would take out after other unidentified operating systems that drive something from Unix and hinted that that might mean Microsoft itself since Boies was involved.
Potential SCO targets said patent demands and encumbrances are explicitly outlawed by the GPL, the touchstone of the open source/Linux movement, and any move by SCO against the Linux distributions would make SCO a pariah. They claim the protection scheme itself would be the end of SCO. The open source community regards patents with haughty distain. Naturally there are fears that accounts on the Linux threshold will be spooked if SCO, which is playing on known IP concerns, starts making demands.
The situation is fraught with irony considering that open source people have figured it would be cash-rich Microsoft that took out after them brandishing its patent portfolio, not one of their own.
Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik publicly fretted about his worries that Microsoft will eventually take Linux to court for patent infringement at a Linux gathering only a month ago (CSN No 479).
Red Hat says it is so concerned - despite the fact that it's against patents and signed a petition to the European Union urging the EU not to adopt software patents - that it has "reluctantly" taken the "defensive position" of assembling its own patent portfolio. To mitigate its intellectual inconsistency, it says its patents can be used for free for any GPL work. Licenses, however, would be required for any closed, proprietary use.
SCO, on the other hand, needs the money. Its tiny Linux business is a disaster and there's little doubt that the company, founded by ex-Novell CEO Ray Noorda, would be out on the street by now if it weren't for the Unix operating systems it got from Santa Cruz.
Meanwhile, Boies' track record since the Microsoft case hasn't been anything to write home about. He wasn't able to save either Al Gore or Napster and actually a lot of the tar he managed to dip Microsoft in rubbed off with Microsoft's subsequent appeal and settlement with the DOJ.
From scratch, clean room development will protect you from copyright, but it is no protection from patents.
... is that it doesn't matter that it was written from scratch. Even if that Torvalds guy had been living in a cave, never having seen any kind of Unix ever and just happened to come up with Linux anyway, it would still be a patent infringement if SCO was the first to come up with the patented technology.
I read this section to mean that if SCO has patents that Linux implements, and 'the community' doesn't already have an unlimited eternal royaltay-free license to use these patents, then the Linux people are right now, regardless of whether SCO tries to pay up or not, legally obligated to remove the implementations of these patents from the Linux code. As far as i'm aware, there have been in the past concentrated efforts to find and remove submarined patents that accidentally wound up in GPLed software, no? What patents of this sort could SCO have?
At any rate one would imagine that SCO would not be so stupid as to demand individual $97 patent licenses from a group of people that (1) is at the moment their core target market (2) has a long-standing tendency to boycott people who do things like demand money for submarine patents (3) would probably not even pay the $97 fees, as they also have a long-standing tendency to not mind stealing from anyone they believe to be screwing them over. (I call (3) "civil disobedience", personally, but that's probably just spin on my part.)
And SCO would have to demand this money from individual users-- it would be impossible for SCO to demand it from vendors, becuase were SCO to start demanding licensing fees from anyone at all regarding patents of theirs inside the Linux kernel (which i assume is where these patent violations would have taken place), all existing linux vendors, including SCO, would be under GPL section 7 immediately legally unable to distribute Linux to anyone at all! (Not permanently, of course, as i find it highly unlikely any defendable SCO patent, once discovered in the linux kernel, would remain there any longer than a span of hours.)
Either way, assuming that SCO is in fact this stupid, and assuming that SCO actually does own patents that the linux kernel violates but that no one in the free software community has ever noticed, i think i'll wait until i read this on SCO.COM to pay any attention to it whatsoever.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
He says it himself that he knows it would be suicide, and hints that it might actually be Microsoft who is the target.
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
AT&T assigned the setuid patent to the public domain. I can see a reference to it here among other places.