[NBLUG/talk] Implications of SCO for Linux in the corporate setting.

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 01:14:33PM -0700, Doug Palmer wrote:
> Questions:
>     Are you jealous yet? :)

Only a little -- too much microsoft where I work.  :)  Sounds good, though.

>     How much would you worry that the SCO suit could have a significant
> impact on the health ($$$) of your company?

Well, what are the possible outcomes:

Scenario 1) most likely (IMO): SCO loses or there's a settlement or
something like that and this all goes away.

2) (next most likely)  IBM loses and it's a definable portion of the kernel
that has legal problems (court decides it was taken from AIX); something has
to rewritten by somebody who hasn't seen the source code in question.  Given
some of the players involved and their financial investment, as well as the
giant amount of volunteers available, I estimate this could be done in under
a week for something reasonably small; a day to code it and several days to
test, debug, test everywhere, create distro patches, etc.

3) Something *big* like all of SMP support (as opposed to particular
portions of SMP).  This can be treated like #2 above or like #4, below.  Or
grab a copy of the version right before the "tainting" and start over from
there.

4) Everything's "tainted" except that which is provably clean.  Switch from
GNU/Linux to GNU/Hurd or GNU/FreeBSD or GNU/OpenBSD or another open source
based platform that supports the same toolset (or can readily do so) --
there'd be work porting or rewriting hardware drivers, of course, and some
things wouldn't work the same for a while.

If you're somehow convinced that scenario 3 or 4 is something you need to
worry about, the safest option is buying new hardware from a large vendor
that supports Linux, such as Dell or IBM or HP, and stick with a popular
distribution which you pay for support for.  (say, RedHat's various
enterprise versions or Debian with a support contract or something like
that)

However, I think that those really drastic scenarios and amazingly unlikely
-- if SCO had the kind of evidence to back that stuff up, they'd be trotting
it out.  Based on their behavior, I'd guess that the worst case is a few
hundred lines of code somewhere that they don't want to be specific about,
or various speculations that IBM couldn't possibly have helped out Linux
without peeking into the AIX or SCO codebases.
-- 
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