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Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective SCO falls flat on its face
Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective SCO falls flat on its face | SCO falls flat on its face |
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| Written by Sam Varghese | |
| Sunday, 12 August 2007 | |
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The claim by SCO was a central pillar in a case against IBM, filed in March 2003, claiming that IBM had transferred code belonging to SCO into the Linux operating system. When the SCO Group filed the case against IBM, shivers ran through the Linux community. There was a lot of scaremongering for about a year or thereabouts and even after that SCO continued to try and browbeat companies which were using Linux into buying licences for IP which it claimed to own. SCO also claimed that Linux was an unauthorised derivative of UNIX and warned commercial Linux users that they could be legally liable for violation of intellectual copyright. Letters were sent to many users in the US and New Zealand, among other countries. IBM then filed a counter-claim against SCO, claiming it had violated four of IBM's patents. Cited in IBM's counter-claim were letters from Jack Messman, then the president of Novell, in which Messman made it plain that Novell, not SCO, owned the UNIX IP. Novell sought summary judgement on the claim that SCO owned the UNIX IP and that judgement has now been delivered. Adding to the mix, Red Hat made a formal complaint against the SCO Group to stop the latter from making "unsubstantiated and untrue public statements attacking Red Hat Linux and the integrity of the Open Source software development process.". There has also been some action in Australia with Open Source Victoria and CyberKnights, a company in Perth, filing complaints with the consumer watchdog against SCO. In short, quite a mix of cases and complaints. The implications of the ruling are many and varied. For one, the ruling also said that some portion of licensing fees earned by SCO for this IP may now have to be transferred to Novell - this includes money paid by Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Both these companies may now have to approach Novell for using whatever they purchased. It also means that when Novell signed its patent deal with Microsoft back in November 2006, it may well have known that it would cut both ways. Sun has an additional problem - it has released the code for its OpenSolaris operating system which is likely to contain code from UNIX; Sun had purchased what it thought were rights to use this code from SCO back in 2003, but now that Novell has been ruled to own the code, Sun will have to go back and negotiate with Novell. It's an extremely tortuous scenario and it may well serve as an important lesson to Microsoft which for some time has been bandying around claims that its patents are being violated by Linux. SCO made lots of similar claims and it even had a number of so-called analysts, chief among them the well-known Lauro Didio of the Yankee Group, singing its tune. The choir has now been effectively silenced. One additional aspect of this case which is worth noting is that it has taken 4-1/2 years for the US court to decide one aspect of the case. However, when SCO tried to make commercial Linux customers in the EU pay up for what it claimed was use of its IP, a court promptly threw out its claim - which Daimler-Benz challenged - and SCO fell silent in the EU thereafter. In Australia too, after the complaints were made to the ACCC, SCO fell silent. Frivolous claims seem to be entertained much longer in the US than in other parts of the world. The same goes for patents. It is a point worth noting.
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