SCO
Continues To Scatter FUD
So
much has happened in the SCO lawsuit since the last time I wrote about
it that I feel like a soap opera fan who’s been on a long vacation
at a cottage with no electricity – desperate to catch up.
Catching
Up With The Action
Basically,
SCO has continued to insist that it owns much of the intellectual
property being distributed as part of Linux 2.4 and 2.5 and that companies
who are using these distributions must buy licenses from SCO or risk
being sued.
Red Hat, SuSE, and others in the Linux market have told customers
that they would be foolish to pay SCO anything before they have established
in court that they, in fact have a valid claim.
This
week, SCO upped the ante, finally announcing that they have a Run-Time
license available for infringing user companies and they will start
to make it available in a few weeks.
They claim that more than 900 companies have called them to
inquire about a license and that they consider about 300 of these
companies “serious.”
On
the other hand, as you can note by reading the excellent summary at
Internetnews.com, http://www.internetnews.com/index.php/13851,
lots more has happened:
- SCO offered a bit of what they claimed was infringing code
at SCO Forum.
- That code was photographed by a member of the SCO Forum audience
and posted to a web site where it was examined by many members of
the Open Source community, most notably Bruce Perens, and promptly
identified as “old” UNIX code, well documented and in the public domain
for perhaps 20 years or more.
- Various Linux/Open Source luminaries, including Eric Raymond
and Linus Torvalds addressed SCO on the web, taking them to task for
their behavior and pointing out that if they in fact wanted to have
the problem (infringing code) remedied, they had only to show it to
the Open Source community, who would remove it from Linux.
You can find a recent Linus Torvalds interview here http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1227128,00.asp
and Eric Raymond’s letter to Darl McBride here http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2003_08_17_armedndangerous_archive.html
- A number of Open Source community members have written about
the fact that the entire lawsuit may, in fact, be nothing more than
a financial scam, designed to raise the price of SCO stock so that
SCO executives could sell their stock at inflated prices (which they
have). You
can read my weblog on this subject and link to an article on the subject
here http://amywohl.weblogger.com/discuss/msgReader$170?mode=day
The Market And The SCO Lawsuit
It is a very interesting time in the Linux market.
On the one hand, customers are continuing to invest in Linux,
both in the U.S. corporate market and around the world.
A number of international stories have surfaced recently, showing
how appealing Open Source is to customers in both developed and developing
countries:
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A consortium has been
formed by Japan, Korea, and China to consider using
Open Source.
In this, they strongly favor Linux.
Japan is funding this with a
contribution of $85 million for
the next year.
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Brazil, has a continuing interest in Open Source at the government
level.
This is
particularly distressing to Microsoft, which, according
to the Wall Street Journal,
does about 7% of its business in Brazil
with the government.
Apparently, Brazil
has decided to redo a system currently on
proprietary software (Microsoft) on
Open Source.
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The decision by the city of Munich to move thousands of users to Linux
has been
reported here previously
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You can find a number of articles about Linux in our
archives.
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Customers
seem relatively unconcerned about the SCO lawsuit.
They seem to see this as a nuisance issue that IBM and the
courts will ultimately resolve.
Software and hardware vendors continue to roll out Linux-based
products.
Those that see a political advantage in saying that their product
is somehow protected against SCO by previous licensing agreements
do so (Sun, Microsoft); others simply ignore the issue or point to
the fact that the courts will sort this out -- and that will take
years.
A
New Information Age
We have discovered that sharing information in the Age of the
Internet is very different than in the past.
With web sites, weblogs, and lists, information is passed rapidly.
Thousands of interested parties, each with their own expertise
and resources, can choose to participate in the discussion.
The way in which the SCO “infringing code disclosure” at SCO
Forum unraveled is an excellent object lesson in how this works.
Hundreds of people with personal knowledge of what happened,
when it happened, who was involved, and what it meant, started sharing
their information.
What might never have been known – or could have been too costly
to ever untangle – in some earlier information process – took a day
or two to run through its entire cycle.
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