The SCO Fiasco Continues
In an amazing turnaround, a US Appeals court reversed a lower court decision from 2007 that awarded ownership of the UNIX operating system to Novell. Here we all thought this nonsense had been settled, and that UNIX could move on to bigger and better things. Instead, the owners of SCO are now reviving their dormant lawsuit against IBM and others. It’s sad, really.
There are two major issues involved in this long-running soap opera. The first is the claim that Linux contains code that was taken directly from the UNIX source listings — an assertion that has so far proven baseless. Huge amounts of otherwise productive development time have been consumed poring over source listings in an effort to weed out fact from fiction. To my knowledge, not a single line has been found. Last I read (several years ago) the courts had effectively thrown SCO’s assertions back in the company’s collective face due to their lack of substantive proof.
The other issue is “who owns UNIX.” This one is far more complex. Novell claims it owns the patents, having acquired them long ago during acquisition of another company that once owned this work. SCO claims ownership as well — and it was thought the 2007 case ended this battle. Now it’s reared its ugly head yet again, and SCO’s chairman is loudly claiming the company has been wronged all these years.
Probably the richest assertions made so far was Darl McBride’s assertion that “there are 20 million versions of Linux running around the world,” and that “Linux at the end of the day is a knock off of our Unix.” I seriously think he’s under-estimating the former. And, at best, Unix is potentially “their” product only in the strictest legal sense…the company hasn’t contributed a thing to the product in probably a decade.
And in the distance, I can hear Microsoft laughing hysterically. The company has always feared Linux, and upper management in Redmond is probably praying for this legal battle to continue for as long as possible. Alas, if past experience is any indication their prayers will not be answered. SCO is already in bankruptcy, and hopefully will stop troubling the I.T. world very soon. Good riddance.