One Company's Response to SCO

Great_Jehovah writes "The CIO of Just Sports USA received an extortion letter from SCO, started a thread about it on the pgsql-general and then posted his response letter after weighing the various pieces of advice and info he received. Here's hoping that most of SCO's intended victims do the same." An anonymous reader submits a story in a Utah paper about SCO: "The Salt Lake City Weekly paper is running a front page article on the SCO shenanigans. The reporter interviewed Darl, Linus, Bruce Perens and others for the article with new choice quotes from them all." Also, IBM at Linuxworld claims it will win against SCO (miscellaneous plug: CmdrTaco will be speaking at Linuxworld later today).

Comments

Should of ended it with a:

[Anonymous Coward]

Now FUCK OFF!!!

Re:wasting your time? be professional!

[ahdeoz]

Hey! I have a Pentium 60 running an indistinguishable, heavily patched Redhat 5.1 for email, web, and general tinkering... and I've got heaps of money.

I contacted SCO, so should you

[jgoemat]

I got their phone number, 801-765-4999 from their web page. I use Linux at home and our company may be looking at it in the future. A woman answered the phone and I politely stated as much and she had to put me on hold to find someone to answer my questions.

Another woman (Cindy) came on the line and was helpful. I explained that I currently use Linux at home and that my company was looking at potentially using Linux. She asked how big the company was and I said it was we were a small consulting firm with about five people. I told her I was worried about potential liablity for using Linux and I was worried about getting sued. She said that I had nothing to worry about at home. She also said that my company really had nothing to worry about as they are just targetting larger companies right now. I explained that it didn't make me feel much better. Since my company currently doesn't use Linux and are looking at using it in the future, I was worried about potential liablity down the road. She said we really had nothing to worry about, but we should send a letter to Ryan Tibbits stating what I told her and how we were going to use Linux. They would then keep that letter "on file". I said that didn't make me feel much better that they would have my name and address should they decide to go after small businesses in the future. She made it sound like the letter would be some kind of indemnification, like if we contacted them requesting licenses and they didn't give them to us but had our letter on file that we would be ok in the future too. I thanked her and said I would do that.

After hanging up I realized that since we are a consulting firm and we provide services and install software for clients that they may be liable as well. I called her back and explained that we provide services for a larger company and are looking to expand into more companies in the near future as well and that I was worried about their potential liablity. She gave me the name and phone number of a sales rep to talk about licensing.

If we cannot use Linux without paying SCO a license, we will definitely not go that route. Our system currently runs on Windows and one of primary reasons to switch to Linux would be cost if we start distributing our application and providing services to many more companies, expecially small ones. I got the voicemail of the sales rep, when he calls back I will ask to get a letter saying it is ok to use Linux for free for our purposes. If he can't give me that I'll ask that he give me evidence that they have code in Linux. If there's affringing code there, I could probably replace it with something from BSD or Unix V32 that Caldera released under a free license. Failing that, I will ask if alternatives such as BSD would be ok to use by themselves. Failing that, I will contact my state attorney general.