SCO vs. The World

Ok, I a getting a bit bored reading about the various SCO related legal action, so i have decided it is time to add my own 2c worth...

For those of you who have been living on another planet for the past few months, SCO is suing IBM for alegedly submitting some code (and therefore intellectual property) from commercial UNIX code (that is now owned by SCO) into the open source Linux kernel project. Apart from IBM breaching their license to use the alleged code, the other implication is that every linux user is running software that requires license fees to be paid to SCO.

Now I'm no lawyer, and i don't know what the implications are for the period of time that we have been running SCO code (if the allegations are true), but the press reports of a massive problem for the future of Linux are surely overstated because the pieces of code are supposedly not large, and so replacing them with freshly developed code will be simple - even if it is maybe not quite as efficient - thus turning the latest kernel releases back into fully legal GPL code.

So that said, the evolving arguments are actually quite interesting. SCO has finally shown their code chinks they alledge were stolen by IBM, albeit to people signing a non disclosure agreement. Various commentators who have seen the code have commented that at least some fo it is previously published code covered by public use licenses (the BSD license in one case) and also that some of the code has already been superceded by new code in current kernel versions.

An excellent analysis of the pieces of code is witten by Bruce Perens in this article: external link.

As you would expect from IBM, they have counter sued with various suits, including claims that SCO has violated the GPL opensource license in a number of cases as well as violating four IBM patents. A discussion of these issues can be found in this news.com article: external link.

Initially this looks like a corporate IT and geek advocate saga - but the mainsteram media is weighing in with articles in major dailys on a regular basis. Not since the Microsoft antitrust trials has an IT story prompted such strong and sustained media debate. And it's a passionate debate, with phrases such as Of course, Heise's statement is nothing but moonshine that's based on an intentional misreading of the U.S. Copyright Act that would fail on any law school copyright examination. and for SCO to continue to use Open Source/Free Software while attacking others for using it is the epitome of hypocrisy.

In the end, I suspect the whole thing will fizzle into an expensive bad idea hatched by some genius inside SCO who just didn't think the whole thing through very carefully. As Fran Foo of ZDNet Australia says in this article, perhaps it is time to just ignore SCO...