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SCO Drops Linux, Says Current Vendors May Be Liable
Hank Scorpio writes "Well, SCO is at it again. I just received an email from their Developer Partner Program stating that not only are they suspending all future sales of their own Linux product (due to the alleged intellectual property violations), but they are also beginning to send out this letter to all existing commercial users of Linux, informing them that they may be liable for using Linux, a supposed infringing product. They mentioned that they will begin using tactics like those of the RIAA in taking action against end-users of Linux. This seems like it will be about as successful as the whole GIF ordeal a few years back. Where is UNISYS today? Is SCO litigating itself into irrelevance?"
This is just a last ditch effort by a company that will be talked about in the past tense a few years from now. They are obviously angling to have someone buy them or pay them to shut them up. They're hoping IBM will think "hell, we could buy them and their patents for less than all this legal crap will cost". Going after customers (and how much you want to bet that the customers they go after will coincidentially be customers of a certain large computer corp, is just a way to enlist the customers into pushing said computer corp into resolving the issue quickly.
Personally I think AT&T/Lucent/Avaya should form a company and bring the Unix rights back home.
The problemo that they have though is that 'SCO' is really Caldera inc which in turn used to sell Linux. There is a big problem with distributing linux if you intend to get heavy on the IP trip. As Bill Gates observed, Linux was released under a viral license which in effect strips away most of SCO's intellectual property rights.
The only things that Caldera can enforce its rights on at this point is code that is in the SCO code base AND a Linux distribution AND NOT in any Caldera distribution that shipped after the SCO acquisition.
The other tricky problem they have is detrimental reliance. Oh and don't discount the fact that getting into an IP pissing contest with IBM or Microsoft or any of the really big players is suicidal for any technology company, those guys have more patents to fire back in self defense its not funny.
The only reason SCO is doing this is that its their last gasp survival attempt - get bought by someone big.
A much cheaper way to do the same thing would be to put the company up for sale on EBay.
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"Has it been revealed to the world yet exactly which code is in question?"
No, and for two primary reasons:
1) SCO's bluffing until the bitter end. There is no copyright infringement, and everyone in high level positions at SCO knows it. SCO's market exit strategy (to be bought by IBM) backfired in a huge way, and there is no way to repair the damage. If SCO backs off now, it will be destroyed by the SEC for gross negligence towards the shareholders. Everyone at SCO knows that IBM is going to destroy SCO, and are merely trying to hold off the inevitable for as long as possible.
2) There is no copyright infringement. When the trial starts (and it's a given that this will get to trial considering #1 above), SCO will have to produce something (and I guarantee it will be manufactured ala Microsoft). At that point, the jig will be up. SCO doesn't actually want to go to trial, but now the company has painted itself into a corner and will -have- to go to trial. This is a great big "OOPS!" on SCO's part.
"And what, exactly, happened to their statement that they weren't going after Redhat or Joe Linuxuser, but instead just IBM?"
SCO realized that IBM wasn't biting, and panicked. This is SCO's flailing around for anything and everything to halt its inevitable destruction.
As SCO's own source is closed, how can we possibly verify that they didn't merge Linux code into their Unix source? If there is code that matches, there is a public verifiable trail of Linux and GNU software development, with archives of that old code for confirmation.
We aren't allowed to see any similar development history with SCO's code, not even the source snapshots that would have been purchased by IBM et. al.
Finally there is the wee issue that the vast majority of *nix kernel algorithms have been analyzed and discussed to death in dozens of textbooks for operating systems courses. By definition those algorithms are not patentable, because they have been published to the public domain as part of those textbooks. If Linux and SCO both happen to implement those algorithms, SCO cannot claim infringement because they don't own that IP.
I really can't think of any Linux features that aren't discussed in such texts. The kernel doesn't use SVR4 signal APIs or semantics. The network stacks are from BSD origins. Resource scheduling algorithms are a dime a dozen from the textbooks, as are approaches for process and application/user security. What does that leave for SCO to claim they "own"?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That may or may not be the case. However, SCO condoned all of this the moment they began distributing Linux themselves. While they could initially claim ignorance that this was going on, they could not claim so once the suit against IBM was filed.
It seems that they did not understand the full implications of the GPL when they filed their original suit against IBM.
However, the cat is now out of the bag. Any code that was in any kernel that SCO distributed after filing suit against IBM is now "in the public domain" and they can't take it back.
This just may end up being a test case for the GPL.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Exactly right. When AT&T/USL sued UC Berkley over BSD, they crippled BSD for a decade. Now they are trying to do the same thing to Linux. The AT&T vs BSD lawsuit introduced enough FUD and left a big enough cloud over BSD to drive commercial users away from BSD and make vendors license SysV "just to be safe". Even a strong BSD varient like the orginal SunOS has been supplanted by a SysV varient Solaris. I suspect that one of Sun's reasons in switching to SysV was to avoid legal issues, in addition to getting the "newer and improved" features of SysV. It is only very recently, with Mac OS-X, that BSD is finally coming out from under the cloud and starting to become mainstream again.
I find it interesting that the letter claims control over UNIX "methods". It sounds like they are contending that they have a lock over all "UNIX-Like" systems, even those with non-encumbered code because the ideas and methods are facsimilies of proprietery methods. I think they are actually saying that they have a monopoly on *nix-likeness. So regardless of the cut-and-paste issue with the code, they are still going to fight over the implementation itself. How they expect this to hold up in court is going to be interesting because the already "gave it up" when they cleared the BSD settlement.