SCO Might Sue Linus for Patent Infringement?

An anonymous reader writes "[Darl McBride, SCO's chief executive stated] that unless more companies start licensing SCO's property, he may also sue Linus Torvalds, who is credited with inventing the Linux operating system, for patent infringement." It's right at the end of the story and it's quite a statement.

Comments

Re:Well, that just shows what this is

[Anonymous Coward]

The Shakespeare character who said "first, kill all the lawyers" was a tyrant. He wasn't interested in killing the lawyers to stop stupid lawsuits, he wanted them out of the way so he could do whatever the heck he wanted.

SCO has descended to the playground bully level

[Bruce Perens]

This is by far the most irrational thing I've seen from SCO. Go to www.uspto.gov and search the patent collection online. Look for "Santa Cruz Operation", "SCO", and "Caldera" as patent owner. They were granted one patent last month, and not a significant one. There isn't much else there.

A lot of patents owned by other people mention SCO as an example of a Unix system. That is by far the largest source of mentions of their company name in the patent database.

So, where's the ammo in Darl's gun? No patents. No copyrights for the stuff he said he owned. No trade secrets, as far as I can tell.

And then, to threaten Linus Torvalds as an individual sounds especially whiny. multi-Million-dollar corporation sues San Jose programmer who has made a life of giving his work away for free. SCO has descended to playground-bully level.

Karsten Self revealed this interesting tidbit from SCO's 10K report:

The Company has an arrangement with Novell, Inc. ("Novell") in which it acts as an administrative agent in the collection of royalties for customers who deploy SVRx technology. Under the agency agreement, the Company collects all customer payments and remits 95 percent of the collected funds to Novell and retains 5 percent as an administrative fee. The Company records the 5 percent administrative fee as revenue in its consolidated statements of operations. The accompanying October 31, 2002 and 2001 consolidated balance sheets reflect the amounts collected related to this agency agreement but not yet remitted to Novell of $1,428,000 and $1,894,000, respectively, as restricted cash and royalty payable to Novell. The October 31, 2001 balances were reclassified from cash and equivalents and other royalties payable to conform to the current year presentation.

This is SCO's admission that Novell owns Unix System V, all revisions - that's what they mean by "SVRx", and pays Novell 95% of the royalties. SCO gets to keep 5% as administrative agent.

That proves the Novell allegation.

SCO stock dropped from $9 to $6 today. I'm surprised it closed that high.

Bruce

Re:Should Linus be afraid?

[Bruce Perens]

SCO does not own 117 patents. Maybe they are mentioned in 117 patents, as an example of a Unix system. Mind your search parameters. They own only a handful of patents, and no significant ones.

Bruce

Re:Don't take this threat lightly!

[Kissing Crimson]

Since no one is out there auditing Linux code looking for stuff like this

Actually, there's a team of people at IBM (and I'm sure a few other companies) doing exactly that.

Re:WTF?

[AstroDrabb]

IBM, Linux, or the rest have nothing to worry about since Novell announced that SCO has no patents on Unix and Novell still owns the IP.
http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/05/p r03033.html

Re:WTF?

[JosefK]

"The bigger question is, why does SCO think it can sue IBM for putting stuff into the kernel that SCO doesn't even offer?"

http://linux.rice.edu/pipermail/rlug-discuss/200 0- August/000557.html

The SCO v. IBM case arises from Project Monterey, which was a joint venture between SCO and IBM to port Unix to IA-64 or some such thing. IBM eventually pulled the plug, and focused instead on Linux.

SCO's primary claims against IBM seem to be that IBM took code that had been either brought by SCO into the project, or (more likely) developed by/in conjunction with IBM as part of the project, and used it in its subsequent Linux development.

So, even though SCO's products didn't (don't?) have the enterprise features they are accusing IBM of "stealing" from SCO, it seems to be their contention that the Project Monterey work was intended to develop such features, thus the claims for breach of contract and unfair competition.

SCO claims of pre-existing IP violations in "every" Linux distro would have no bearing on the IBM case.

you mean the MAN who created Minix

[Anonymous Coward]

Andrew Tanenbaum, the guy who wrote the operating system for educational purposes; some people who have taken operating systems classes may remember him as the guy that wrote their textbook as well.

Actually, what's interesting is why Minix was written. AT&T had allowed the source code to UNIX to be freely distributed to universities, etc. Then someone realized that there was commerical potential in UNIX and they began restricting access to the source.

Because it's frequently useful to have a functioning model at which to look when studying a subject, Minix was born to fill the missing educational void created by the commercialization of UNIX. It was designed to be big enough to be a real operating system, but small enough for one person to pretty much keep in his head at one time. Linux was created because there were a number of people who wanted to pile stuff into Minix which Tanenbaum didn't want there.