If you haven’‘t been following the
SCO (rhymes with go) and
IBM debacle, well, then you are probably
a normal person. However, if you’‘re like me, then you may feel a little
twinge of fear at the prospects that the
open-source community is
currently faced with. For those of you who haven’‘t been following the
situation, here is how I understand it:
A long time ago
AT&T created an operating system
named Unix – some of you may have heard of it. For many reasons, most of
which I can’‘t understand and/or find boring, they decided to sell the
rights to Unix to Novell who
essentially let it sit around like the relic that it is and rake in the
adoration like a kid with the newest
Yu-Gi-Oh card. Eventually,
the rights to Unix wound up in the hands of Caldera (who at one time had
the best Linux distro IMO). Caldera,
like Novell before it mainly
collected meager license fees from Unix users and enjoyed the adoration
of the industry for holding the rights to the software equivalent of a
Monet masterpiece (outdated, yet beautiful). At some point Caldera
bought a few products from a company named
SCO (Santa Cruz somethingorother);
namely
OpenServer
and UnixWare and
soon after changed their name to SCO
(because the bulk of their profits came from the
old-SCO products).
Fast-forward
to the year 2003 – SCO is now a
struggling company barely able to keep its head above water. Its stock
holders are freaking out because the stock is worth next to nothing and
the company is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy… all hope is
seemingly lost. However, there appears to be someone with a brain still
at the helm because he or she figures out that the company may have a
case (or at least the illusion of one) against
IBM for IP fraud. Let’‘s go back a
little bit and explain the reasoning behind this. For a long time
Linux was a bit player in the computer
industry. Even the most successful firms selling
Linux
(RedHat,
Mandrake, etc…) were barely blips
on the radar screen. However, one day a real big fish named
IBM decided to throw their hat into the
proverbial Linux ring in order to
compete with firms such as Sun and
Microsoft (some of you may have
heard of them) in the total-solution enterprise server arena. That is,
Microsoft had
OK. As we left off, SCO
was one CF of a company that needed to do something, and fast, to stay
afloat. Knowing that there was this big beach ball named
IBM out there, they took aim in a last
ditch effort for survival and pulled the IP infringement lawsuit card
and hit a homerun. To
elaborate, SCO claimed that
Linux (and therefore
IBM) contained code that originated as
Unix (which if you remember, they own the rights to) and therefore
breaks trade-secret laws. If you know anything about
Linux, then you may be asking
yourself, “how can this be so, wasn’‘t
Linux built from scratch” The answer
is, pretty-much. Linux is based very
loosely on Minix (mostly as a
what-not-to-do style of motivational force), which in turn was built
from scratch by Andrew S.
Tanenbaum. Therefore, it will be very difficult for
SCO to make their case if any trial
occurs.
So there we have it; a fairly accurate description of the
SCO /
IBM debacle. Amazingly, the waters of
this soap opera appear to be getting murkier by the day as the sewage of
a company on the brink of self-destruction washes up onto the pristine
beaches of the open-source
community. When news of the filing of the suit against
IBM, SCO
stock took a
sharp
rise making it (for once) worth more than pennies. Stock holders
must have been happy about this development because it meant that the
chances were very high that IBM, or
perhaps another Linux company would be
compelled to buy SCO, thus making the
stockholders a nice chunk of change when such a prospect seemed bleak
just a few weeks prior. Could this have been the motivation for this
entire debacle SCO likes to claim that
they are only standing up for their rights as IP holders, which taken in
a vacuum is admirable – especially when it’‘s looks like a classic David
vs. Goliath scenario. However, some recent developments have tarnished
there puritanical stance.. First, SCO
happens to sell a version of Linux. In
fact, as Caldera, Linux was the
foundation product that the company sold. My question naturally is this;
if SCO was worried about
Linux violating its IP, then why did
it develop its own version of it and release it under the
GPL
Wouldn’‘t this imply that they were in turn releasing their coveted
intellectual property under a license that claims that they have no
ownership under said property? Second,
SCO recently released a statement
claiming that not only would IBM and
other distributors be held accountable for misappropriation of trade
secrets, but the end-users of Linux
would also be swimming in dangerous waters. If this isn’‘t a shakedown
then I have no idea what is. This particular action reeks of
Kenneth
Lay/Dennis Kozlowski-esque tactics. By releasing such garbage
threatening the users of Linux with
legal ramifications, SCO is causing a
huge stink which may force the hand of someone like
Suse or
Redhat to buy them up quickly before
customers start dropping them in fear of being sued for using their
products. Third, Linux being
open-source has its
source code available free of charge
for all eyes to view. If the IP of SCO
was indeed present in the software, shouldn’t they have noticed before
now Caldera/SCO was founded in 1994 by
Ransom Love and Bryan Sparks… shouldn’t they have noticed that Unix code
was embedded within Linux by now – 9
years later Of course, SCO would like to
claim that the Unix portions of the code have intentionally been
obfuscated and therefore undetectable before now. I find that hard to
believe.
The
SCO/IBM
suit is an interesting chapter in the history of
Linux, and indeed one of the more
frightening, not because of the apparent shakedown that is going on, but
due to the possibility (remote as it seems presently) that SCO may just
be correct. The ideal situation where SCO looses its case in court is
surrounded by many horrible counter-possibilities. In fact the ideal
situation may be the ONLY outcome that benefits both Linux users and
sellers. I’’m going to keep an eye on it closely, and I hope that you
will too.
-m