SCO Continues Its Confusion About Who Owns Unix
We
admit to rapt fascination with SCO’s continuing bombast about
its ownership of UNIX. It
actually only owns a corner of it.
A court case long ago decided that some parts of UNIX are
free and not under AT&T’s or SCO’s or anyone’s
control. In fact,
it doesn’t even own the name.
Of
course, it also sells Linux itself and has itself contributed to
the Linux distributions. Perhaps
it should sue itself?
The
best discussion of this you’ll ever see is contained in a
brilliant article by industry historian Eric Raymond.
He lays it all out for you, in fascinating detail,
complete with all the “i’s” dotted and the “t’s”
crossed. You may
find that at http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html
An
interesting aside is the commentary on the net by industry
insiders (developers and others) on the case.
Often knowledgeable, it is highly biased toward IBM and
against SCO. That
in itself is amazing, since IBM is not usually defended by
independent developers – big guys are usually considered able
to mount their own defense.
But in this case, everyone is so furious at SCO for their
desire to get money from IBM, no matter what damage it might do
to Open Source, Linux, or computing, that whoever is on the
other side is getting lots of support.
We
can’t wait to see what happens when this gets to court.
