More on IBM's Project Monterey and SCO

karvind writes "Groklaw has posted another interesting article about AIX/Monterey/POWER research. The primary purpose of Project Monterey was to provide a stepping stone to Linux. IBM clearly stated this in promotional and technical materials, some of which SCO participated in publishing. It was always the plan that Project Monterey would be for POWER and SCO knew about IBM using SVR4 on POWER as far back as 2001. The article asks (and answers) some interesting questions: 'Where is the monetary damage to SCO? Where is there copyright infringement? Was SCO fully aware how quickly Linux would develop, that it would replace Unix, or did it take them by surprise?'"

Comments

For the clueless, here are some answers...

[mr_majestyk]

Where is the monetary damage to SCO?

IBM used the Monterey agreement to get access to SCO's source code so that it could be combined with AIX, resulting in an enterprise-grade environment for the Intel platform. But around the same time, IBM decided that Linux was the future, and allowed the Monterey project to die. Since SCO was counting on licensing revenue from Monterey, it was screwed by IBM's switch to Linux.

Where is there copyright infringement?

SCO is claiming that instead of using its code for the Monterey project, IBM siphoned the code over to its Linux development efforts. This violated the terms of their agreement.

Was SCO fully aware how quickly Linux would develop, that it would replace Unix, or did it take them by surprise?

What SCO was or was not "fully aware" of at the time is irrelevant...the dispute is about IBM's violation of its contract with SCO.

The issue is really quite simple. IBM was supposed to use SCO's code to develop Monterey, and instead, they apparently used it to enhance Linux. Everything else being said about this case is just rehashing of religious fervor and procedural issues.

since when did linux replace unix?

[chrismg2003]

about 80% of all major internet servers run on freebsd, and hopefully everyone knows that FreeBSD is unix :). just seems an unfair statement to me.