[NBLUG/talk] SCO Suit Now Seeks $3 Billion from IBM

Eric Eisenhart eric at nblug.org
Wed Jun 18 07:59:01 PDT 2003


On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 04:08:07AM -0700, Edward Mendoza wrote:
> http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2003061701526NWKNLL
> 
> What's going on here anyway?

I think SCO's upping the ante to make their bluff stronger.  They're playing
large-scale poker and they're down to their last chips.  Their cards are
close to the chest, so nobody really knows exactly what's going on.

Though, the latest tidbit hiding in the news indicates to me that there's a
vague possibility of a bit of validity.  Namely, they're claiming that the
UNIX license that IBM uses confers ownership to SCO of all derivatives of
the UNIX codebase.  AIX is based on the UNIX codebase, so anything in AIX
that went to Linux would be a violation of the UNIX license contract.

Now, it's my understanding that IBM was very careful about intellectual
property considerations when they put engineers to work on Linux, but maybe
they slipped up -- hard to know.

Still, worst case:
One or two files in the Linux kernel source have to be rewritten from
scratch by somebody that hasn't ever looked at that portion of the Linux
code, the original UNIX code or the AIX code.  That's probably a project of
a week or two.

> I hope that everyone in this forum has made a committed decision to
> completely boycott all SCO products.

No need.  Nobody's been buying their products since before all this,
anyways; hence the desperate legal ploys.  They haven't sold anything that
anybody has wanted to buy in a while now.  (unless you were already an
existing customer and wanted support or wanted more of the same working
thing you had already)  People have already worked at converting from SCO to
Linux (mmmm... iBCS...) because the SCO stuff was too outdated to run on
modern hardware.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & Vice-President Pro Tempore
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244



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