SCO Extorting Unixware Licenses to Linux Users?

An anonymous user noted that SCO will sell you Unixware if you want to "Legitimize" your usage of Linux at your company. If you buy the license, you will be held blameless for your transgressions against SCO! Pricing has yet to be determined for the special licenses, but I suspect that for any value greater than zero, there are going to be a fair number of angry users.

Comments

Hrm

[Overly Critical Guy]

This couldn't have been edited onto the previous SCO story this morning?

It's getting to be a bit much, especially since attention is what they're after in the first place, Slashdot...

It's for "business"

[eXtro]

whatever that means. Even if I ran a business and I believed that SCO had a strong enough case to cause me worry I wouldn't buy into this. Say my business runs RedHat, I purchase a license and I'm held blameless. Fine, but RedHat itself isn't, so SCO goes and sues RedHat at a later date.

A few things can happen. 1) SCO loses, my license purchase was pointless then but I'm only out some money. 2) SCO wins and RedHat pays the licensing fees. My license purchase was pointless again because RedHat's aquisition of a license covers me. Not only that but RedHat will past the cost on to the consumers. 3) SCO wins and RedHat can't afford the licensing fee. RedHat goes out of business and I'm left with an orphaned product.

Basically unless I roll my own internal variant of linux I don't see any positive benefit to purchasing the license unless they intend to go after each business individually in court.

Re:It's for "business"

[nightsweat]

3) SCO wins and RedHat can't afford the licensing fee. RedHat goes out of business and I'm left with an orphaned product.

But that's the beauty of Open Source. You can't be truly orphaned.

Re:Uhm..

[bigjocker]

We have heard some of it, but mostly from user's comments. The article from this morning was focused on code and a way to track some contributions by Caldera employees to the kernel.

I for one welcome any news regarding this issue. Slashdot is known for it's huge Linux audience and is very handy to have a unified source of information and comments.

Why bother? A lot of us work on companies that use Linux (myself included), even some of us have helped our employers move from proprietary Unices to Linux (myself included), and in my case I also work as a independent consultant and have helped a lot of clients to make UN*X->Linux and WIN->Linux transitions (I make all the solutions using free software and license them under the GPL to my clients, if they want to redistribute the system or a modified version of it they must release the source, if not they are free to keep it secret) so this SCO issue is affecting (and has a lot of potential to affect really badly) my job and bussiness.

You never have too much information, and in any case, you can always not click on the link and let it pass. A lot of us even want to see more stories about this issue.

Re:Binary version of Linux?

[Troy Baer]

They are still claiming that the Linux kernel (or whatever part of SCO/Linux they are claiming today) contains their code, and that it is being used illegally, however if you give them money then they will ignore your violation. I'm not convinced that this is legal, since it sounds a lot like blackmail to me, but that doesn't seem to stop SCO.

I'm not sure if it's legal either, but it sure reeks of a protection racket to me. (It's especially galling given that they haven't even established in court that they do in fact own what they claim to.) I've complained to my state attourney general about it. I'd like to think they'll look into it, but my state AG is one of the ones who caved on the MS antitrust settlement...

--Troy