More
Comments On SCO vs. IBM
It’s
been another busy week for SCO and SCO watchers, commenting on their
lawsuit against IBM and their widening comments on Linux users.
A number of events have occurred.
-
Microsoft
has purchased a UNIX license from SCO.
Speculation is running wild as to what this might mean.
I would suspect that it’s nothing more exciting than
Microsoft making a small investment in protecting itself against
a future legal action. But
others, more Machiavellian than I, have suggested that it might
be Microsoft trying to throw a monkey wrench into the Linux
market.
-
SCO
has removed its own Linux product from the market, on the
grounds that it can’t sell Linux if Linux is tainted with UNIX
code. (Of course,
if SCO is the one that did the tainting, we wonder if they could
be suing themselves, but that’s another story.)
They promised to continue to support their own users and
to indemnify them from any action.
-
A
German Linux association (to which SCO belonged) demanded to
know the basis for SCO’s accusations and threatened to expel
it. SCO resigned.
-
Eric
Raymond updated
the OSI paper that responds to the original SCO filing,
saying that SCO was attempting to ruin the open source movement
after having spent eight years profiting from its work.
-
I
am continuing to hear from colleagues in the UNIX and Open
Source community with suggestions of who to talk to for the
history of what happened when, who did what, and why the SCO
charges are incredible. For
example:
Subject: Good technique vs.
Methods and Concepts
Hi again, Amy,
Where this may become interesting is in a
discussion of where techniques that are common
today were originally conceived,
and why. If diagramming
were first developed for Latin, and
only later applied to other languages after
folks saw how useful it was for Latin, would a licensee
of Latin be able to say "Naw, that's just common practice?"
If all the design and test data for heat ablative
tiles was developed by NASA and included
in information conveyed under
license to someone, would later industry uses of heat
ablative tiles for other uses discount the demands of the
license? The licensee
after all continues to have access
to the technical data originally supplied.
I know absolutely nothing about this case, but
simply as a thought experiment it might be
argued that IBM has gained a large
amount of experiential and
contextual information on the
licensed technologies that include not only 'how',
but 'why', 'when' and 'when not' kinds of
information that other practitioners in the field don't have,
precisely through the UNIX
experience with these techniques.
As you say, it will be interesting to watch.
Opinions
Subscriber
Dear Opinions Subscriber:
I also want to add that, in this case, it's
messier.
Not all of UNIX is licensed from AT&T (or, at
this point, SCO). What
if the IBMers got some of their skills from working on BSD Unix?
On CM UNIX?
These UNIXes have already been legally determined, as I
understand it, not to be covered by the AT&T/SCO license, so I
would guess that methods and concepts learned in practicing them
couldn't be covered either.
As you said, the court is going to be
interesting.
Amy
Amy,
Skills are, I think, covered by employment law. If it were
only skills, I don't think there would be a hope for this case,
since the courts have already decided (at least in employment
context) that a company can't get relief from an employee moving to
a competitor and reusing things he's learned.
I think the more relevant measures may be published internal
practices and design notes
The other interesting angle on this is that shows signs of
moving towards the same sorts of arguments made re software patents.
In fact (exposing my ignorance of this case) is the material that
SCO licensed to IBM covered under patent?
If so, this case could finally fully explore the patent vs.
skill argument we've been having ever since the XOR cursor. I think
you and I may have corresponded on this point previously, but the
patent concept assumes that inventions are difficult.
In computing, this simply isn't true. For us, what's hard is
in limiting inventions to those that are really useful and that gain
traction in people's imaginations.
Opinions Subscriber
I’m sure there will be more to follow.
Amy Wohl
(back to top)
