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Is the SCO Lawsuit a Good Thing for Linux?
Jack William Bell writes "The National Post is running an essay by Wynn Quon entitled 'Linux's lucky lawsuit'. In it Quon claims that (A) SCO is going to lose (saying ". . . SCO is a toad about to face a steamroller.") and (B) the Linux community needs exactly this kind of 'inoculation' as the OS moves from a hobbyist platform to a real business tool. Good analysis or unwarranted optimism?"
Wynn Quon
National Post
Saturday, August 09, 2003
SCO's challenge of IBM's use of its software is not a threat to the open-source Linux operating system. If fact, SCO is a toad about to face a steamroller.
Alarm bells are ringing throughout the open-source software world. SCO Group has filed suit against IBM, accusing it of illegally incorporating SCO's Unix code into the Linux operating system. Some analysts are predicting an onslaught of legal attacks that will kill Linux.
The alarm is overdone. While no one relishes the prospect of going to court, this lawsuit is actually a good thing for Linux in the long run.
The story behind the lawsuit goes like this: In 1995, SCO Group purchased the code for the Unix System V operating system from Novell. IBM has a contract with SCO to use this code as part of its own operating system, known as AIX. (An outside observer would be forgiven if he thought this lawsuit is all about a bunch of acronyms suing each other). SCO charges that IBM violated the contract and stole SCO's trade secrets by incorporating SCO software into the hugely popular Linux operating system. SCO claims a whopping US$3-billion in damages. Linux defenders accuse SCO of being a gold-digger, a two-bit player trying to exploit Linux's success for money.
At the centre of the lawsuit, Linux has its own interesting tale. Linux doesn't belong to any one company. Instead it was created through a fascinating process known as open-source development. A team of talented volunteer programmers led by Linus Torvalds collaborated over the Internet and built a stable, spiffy and very cheap operating system. In less than a decade it has become Microsoft's most dangerous rival. The operating system is now deployed on 14% of servers and its market share is growing at a torrid pace of 60% a year.
Four years ago, IBM recognized Linux's strength. It put 250 of its own engineers to work on it and integrated Linux into its products. The bet has paid off handsomely: In the fourth quarter alone, IBM shipped US$160-million worth of Linux servers.
And there lies the rub. Linux is now big business. It powers products for Dell and HP. It is finding its way (albeit at a slower pace) on to desktops and consumer electronics gear. Linux was born out of a warm and fuzzy let's-work-together idealism that is typical of all open-source projects. Today it finds itself front and centre in a world where market share projections and $800-an-hour litigation lawyers count for as much as spiffy code.
Software analysts worry that SCO's lawsuit will put the big chill on Linux development. This would be a bad thing, not least because it would leave Microsoft in a stronger position than ever. But there's another, more stout-hearted way of looking at it: SCO's legal action is the first harbinger of the corporate makeover of Linux. Open-source advocates are outraged at the audacity of the lawsuit. They should instead be thankful. Linux must inoculate itself against the nasty legal toxins that are endemic in the corporate environment. And if we were to perversely pick a poison, the SCO suit has a lot going for it. SCO is strong enough to provoke a strengthening of Linux's defences but not so strong that it poses any real danger.
What makes the SCO action the ideal first-time lawsuit for Linux is this: First, it is directed at IBM rather than directly at Linux customers. This means there is no immediate threat against the deployment and continuing use of Linux.
Second, the substance of SCO's claims appears weak. Eric Raymond, who heads the Open Source Initiative (OSI) advocacy group, has been a vocal debunker of SCO's charges. According to Raymond, it is unlikely there were trade secret transfers from SCO code to Linux. The codebase owned by SCO is an old and creaky one, a jalopy compared to the Formula One technology found in Linux. Furthermore, SCO itself had made its codebase freely available for public downloading, making its trade secret
I posted this at the tail end of a very long SCO thread, but it definitely bears repeating. (Since No-one will ever read post #1765 of a 7 page thread....)
A bit of op-ed/interesting facts from Netcraft.com...
Two months ago SCO sent letters to 1500 of the largest companies globally warning them of risks involved in running Linux. Although SCO did not make the identities of these companies public, Chris Sontag described the list as "the Fortune 500 and effectively the global 2000. It ended up being about 1,500 top international companies". This makes it likely that the list of companies that received letters from SCO will be quite similar to the list of sites we use to study enterprises' web site technology choices.
At the time many analysts speculated that SCO's behaviour might deter enterprise companies from using Linux. However, this has not happened to date, at least in respect of their internet visible web sites. In the last two months Linux has made a net gain of over 100 enterprise sites; sites which have migrated to Linux including Royal Sun Alliance, Deutsche Bank, SunGard,T-online and most noteworthy, Schwab.
It may well be that although SCO has generated an enormous amount of attention from the media and the Linux evangelists, it does not presently have the attention of IT practitioners in large companies.
SCO Who?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
And even better, how fortunate is Linux that a heavyweight like IBM is taking up its side on the GPL? If, a few years ago, one had thought of the GPL being challenged in court, who would be expected to take up the fight? The EFF? Some OSS group? Hardly a thrilling prospect...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Although your comments seem authoritative and knowledgeable, your facts are fuzzy and wrong. Unix was derived from Multics, but Multics at the point was dead. AT&T had abandoned the project altogether. That's when Dennis Ritchie developed Unix. Since Ritchie helped to develop Multics for AT&T, how can anybody say that he ripped off Multics. Is like saying I'm stealing part of my car to use in my other car. If it's mine, it's not stealing.
The Berkeley Shareware Distribution (BSD) was sued by AT&T in the early 1990s, for openly distributing copyrighted code in its public-domain source releases. As if this wasn't enough, it turned out that AT&T had also broken the license on code they had taken from BSD, leaving both sides forced to essentially accept the other's illegal behavior in order to avoid stiffer penalties.
Again, a mispresentation of history. Actually, AT&T had sold the Unix copyrights to USL by then so it wasn't AT&T vs BSDI. It was USL vs BSDI. Get your history straight. In the preliminary ruling, the judge indicated he would rule in BSDI's favor since USL could not support most of their claims. Was code from both parties intertwined? Yes, but from all accounts BSD had very little code to worry about. USL had larger problems because not only did they borrow code from BSD, they also removed BSD's copyrights and sold the code to other parties.
Reputable software companies such as Microsoft, though initially interested in Unix, have learned to steer clear of the mess of standards, licenses, and conflicting intellectual property rights that Unix forms.
I get it, you're a Microserf! So how much is Billy paying you to troll? Microsoft is one of the few companies you should use with the term 'reputable' around here. To be honest, large companies sometimes do engage in unethical behavior. Microsoft is no exemption. They have been sued countless times for copyright and patent infringement. Stac, Goldtouch, Timeline, Softimage, etc. Stac, Timeline, and SoftImage have all won their suits by the way.
Microsoft Windows XP is the latest release of Microsoft's flagship version of Windows, built from the ground up in the early 1990s based on the most modern concepts in operating systems, without any legacy baggage from the 1970s.
Just because XP is newer doesn't mean it's better. Is XP the most stable version of Windows to date? Yes. Is it good enough for most PC users? Again yes. It is good to run enterprise systems? Maybe. Like any OS, you have to match the requirements with the capability.
From its inception, Unix systems have been designed from the ground up to provide stability, security, and power while handling multiple users and processes. Microsoft only started trying to incorporate those features with NT. So in other words, Windows is the new kid on the block but is trying to play catch up. Is like saying my Kia is so much better and safer than your Volvo because they started designing the Kia after the Volvo has been saving lives for decades.
And it is available essentially for free, preloaded on hardware from all major manufacturers.
I hate to tell you, but you are paying for Windows because its price is rolled into the PC price. If you don't believe, go shopping on Dell.com and try customizing a business server. One of the options is to change the OS. If you remove the Factory OS, it will subract $799 from the price. In my world $799 is not "essentially free". Also if you read /., a user posted how he got refunds on Windows
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You'll find that SCO Group still owes Novell a noticable sum ($1.7 million) for Unix rights. You'll find they've burned more than $200.000.000 of venture capital, with little hope of recovering any of that except by a miracle ('Sue IBM? Brilliant idea!').
Their forward-looking statements also makes for interesting reading:
The Company anticipates that participants in the Linux industry will seek to influence participants in the markets in which we sell our products to reduce or eliminate the amount of our products and services that they purchase.
IOW, they've already filed with the SEC that they might stop selling any actual products. There's a truckload of warnings of potential hazards, most of which are very familiar to what has been discussed here and in other press.
The latest quarterly filing can be found at SEC or on: TheStreet.com
'Supernova' probably best describes what they're doing.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
anyone who's familiar with IBM's litigation history could'v e told them how unlikely that was
Anyone familiar with IBM's litigation history could also have told them that a patent infringement counter complaint is standard procedure.
Today I finally got around to reading IBM's answer/complaint. When you get to the part about SCO infringing IBM's patents, IBM names which specific products infringe each patent. Now I admit ignorance of SCO's complete product line, but this sounds to me like IBM carefully selected a minimum number of patents, in this case four, that would be infringed by every one of SCO's current or likely products. This has the effect of, if IBM gets an immediate injunction to stop the patent infringement, then this immediately cuts off all revenue for SCO. Additionally, patent infringement suits can only be defended by (1) proving that you don't actually infringe, or (2) prooving that the patent is invalid. Either one is very expensive in terms of the sheer amount of research that has to be done. At this point, on old patents.
Although the patent infringement just sounds like an attempt to be a thorn in the side of SCO, this is likely to kill them. All revenue cut off, and expensive patent lawsuits.
A preliminary injunction on the patents wouldn't cut off the extortion licensing revenue, but IBM's counter complaint also asks for that.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
IBM's claim is that they have exclusive ownership of the code that SCO is contesting (RCU, NUMA, JFS, etc.), and that SCO is in violation of the GPL by:
SCO has not to my knowledge argued that they own this code. They have argued that it is inappropriate release of trade secrets, which is something else and probably between them and IBM. Unlike copyright, trade secret restrictions aren't transitive. IANAL, though.
So this is not the issue right now.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Because businesses are a great portion of the entire "market", whereas hobbists are a tiny portion.
The likelyhood of chip and board manufacturers releasing drives or technical specs needed to create drivers is directly proportional to their perception of how much of their "market" needs linux support.
For example, I just purchased a Via EPIA-M10000 motherboard with Via C3 processor (for an embedded application project which needs the small size and much lower power of this board). Via knows that linux is important because they perceive that a lot of the market uses it, or will use it soon. Having looked for drivers in the last few days, it's obvious Via took a windows style approach and released some binary only drivers some time ago (redhat 7, etc). They've come under a lot of pressure to improve their support for linux, and if you look at recent discussions on their viaarena discussion website, they've recently sent code to Alan Cox and they are in the processor of changing their source code release policies to better cater to the linux "market".
Without businesses using linux on a wide scale, Via would probably not consider linux important and we'd be stuck with little or no driver support for this uniquely special (very small and low power) motherboard. That means I'd have to choose a bigger, power-hungry board, or port my application to the only other OS that has good drivers for that motherboard.... Yuk.
That is why I care that businesses and in general a large market uses linux. And you should too.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
While SCO doesn't claim that they wrote those, they do claim that they own them. They claim that the original AT&T license to IBM said that derivative works became AT&T property. That is true, however, the amendments say that the source from the original belongs to AT&T but IBM owns code they wrote themselves.
The interesting thing about this lawsuit is how wildly dishonest SCO has been.