Counter Suits

SCO has not yet put its cards on the table, and revealed publically what their suit is about. The FUD factor may be starting to bite into the Linux market, and market leader Red Hat has put up a fighting funds of $1M to help Linux developers fend off actions by SCO that seek to prevent Linux use.

Big Blue are also counter suing SCO, but include violation of 4 IBM patents and violation of the GNU Licence. IBM has accused SCO of misusing its interest in Unix "to threaten destruction of the competing operating systems known as AIX and Linux, and to extract windfall profits for its unjust enrichment".

Linux developers around the globe, Red Hat, IBM and SuSe Linux appear united in the effort to counter SCO's claims. Somehow, Linux deployments will feel much safer with this knowledge.

Worried about Linux? Read this!

A lawyer dissects SCO's claims against Linux users. Note, Adobe Acrobat is required for the above link.

SCO FUD

without prejudice (personal opinion only)

SCO's claim to some of the code in the Unix Kernal makes little sense. By licencing their own Linux serving in Caldera Linux their claim is invalidated, indeed a counter claim could be launched as a class action by the Open Source community.

What makes it okay for SCO to violate the terms of the GNU (a vastly larger and more modern library of Open Source generated code that was donated by Open Source programmers and organizations) to the detriment of the more significant Open Source contribution to Linux?

The SCO suit is based on a strict misinterpretation of what the "original work" is. The Unix kernel they seek to protect consists of routines long in the public domain, published in books. It is simply a set of functions. It is no secret.

If someone could purchase the copyright to reproduce an ancient manual say for a Model T Ford, that would not give them title to any and all car manuals published since. The Unix license do not invalidate Linus Torvald's work, and it certainly does not cover the huge GNU contributions to Linux, many of which have found their way into Unix.

It is broadly understood and accepted that the Linux Kernel was created from scratch and the similarity to Unix is a functional similarty. I would bet that SCO threw out their own C compiler and used the superior GNU C compiler to make their Linux programs. Has the GNU C compiler (or other tools) been ported to Unix?

Copyright is violated when a published work is copied. SCO did this. If IBM also did this, they were simply doing as SCO did when they published Caldera Linux.

That SCO (as Caldera Linux) published the works they seek to protect and published it in the public domain does affect their claim. That they did this in competition with IBM and others and then failed to market it adequately does not then give them a right to attack the entire Open Source community. They did compete on a level playing field. IBM invested heavily in Linux marketing and that has augmented the market, and increased the Unix market. Legions of programmers use Open Source Linux and then get jobs supporting mainframe corporate Unix, a previously poorly documented shambles with inadequate technical documentation. This opinion was formed supporting an AT&T Unix in the 80s. The User Manual and online help were primative when compared to the documentation standard reached with Linux.

SCO appears to be attempting to hijack IBM's marketing material, and thus violating IBM's copyright.