piblog

pibil's blog: <!-- meta's best friend -->

Fri, 07 Mar 2003

SCO Group sues IBM #
It's really sad to see the SCO Group fall to this level. When they were Caldera, their Linux distro was OK; mainly targeted for the server market but never made any real inroads although they had some innovative utilities. Then they bought SCO and tried to convert SCO Unix users over to Linux, but this failed. Soon after that, Linux fell out of favor internally, Ransom Love left the company and they disappeared from UnitedLinux.

So around the beginning of 2003, they refocused on Unix, not from a development standpoint, but from an IP perspective. When they acquired SCO, they bought all of the 20 to 30 year old patents from the Unix that spawned from the University of California's Berkeley campus. Some of this work ended up in projects such as *BSD which, in turn, ended up in source code everywhere (including Linux and Windows). So how does a company, with managers and stockholders desperate for revenues, capitalize on these patents? They sue, of course!

In January, the SCO Group hired David Boies, former US prosecutor of the Microsoft anti-trust trial. When this news came out, there was a lot of discussion on the net that if SCO actually tried to act on these supposed patent infringements, it would be fruitless in the courts as well as kill any hopes of industry support for the company.

Well, yesterday, it actually happened. The SCO Group sued IBM for 1 billion US dollars. Why IBM? They have the biggest pockets and have invested heavily in Linux development. They could try to sue Red Hat, SuSE et al., but there would be no money it for SCO. But in suing IBM, they are going to run into a sawmill. You see, IBM has a few lawyers of its own. And they didn't spend a billion dollars of their own on Linux on a whim.

From my sphere of influence, I will not have anything to do with SCO or any of its products from now on. |/open-source|