The End of SCO

Posted Jan 6, 2005 7:38 UTC (Thu) by LinuxLobbyist (guest, #6541) [Link]

Oh, I'm sure that there's some Canopy company out there willing to be it's first victim^Wcustomer. Unless, of course Mr. Mustard puts a stop to that kind of nonsense. ;-)

Posted Jan 6, 2005 12:57 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

While some might bite, it'll be pretty limited to a subset of current
customers, I'll predict. As the legal side folds, there will simply be no
reason for uptake by anyone else, and all sorts of reasons /not/ to.

Consider for a moment the situation SCO is in. They've demonstrated that
they won't hesitate to cannibalize their own licensees, so for new
customers to touch what has become the third rail of Unix everybody knows
will be essentially begging SCO to sue them. At present, the question of
whether Novel actually turned over the Unix copyrights and etc is still up
in the air, but all the legal opinion I read says there's at least a 50/50
chance that Novel still owns it. That doesn't leave SCO in a good
position there relative to others (say SUN), altho to be fair, there's no
question that SCO /does/ have the right to use the Unix IP for its own
work.

The effect of the USL/BSD settlement becoming public shouldn't be ignored
either. Basically, what Novell bought and /might/ /have/ transferred to
SCO was certain legal rights as pertain to UNIX licensees. The terms of
the settlement make it /far/ more difficult for them to claim violation
from those who /have/ no such licenses, making anything related to a Unix
license even /more/ difficult to sell, now, particularly to those not
already caught in the net of current licenses. Any new customer buying a
Unix license at this point /has/ to have rocks in their collective head.
Anybody with an ounce of sense not already caught in the net, had best be
staying /far/ /far/ away from it. That and there's already precedent for
SCO foisting off licenses on customers doing unrelated business, such that
said customers claim they weren't even aware of purchasing them. Anyone
doing business with SCO therefore has to be worried about unwittingly
being caught in the UNIX licensing net and therefore becoming subject to
suit based on violations thereof, even when they /thought/ they were
buying something entirely unrelated. This is /not/ a good position to be
caught in, for either party.

SCO's Unix has always been an x86 play -- they don't have their own
hardware as does SUN -- and in all honesty, there's nothing left of the
x86 Unix market save for an ever smaller legacy installation set.
Everyone's turning to Linux or one of the other open source *ix players
(the BSDs, now SUN Solaris as well). Those who in times past might have
gone for SCO's offering will probably go for Solaris instead. Otherwise,
they'll either go for Sun or IBM "big iron" on the high end, or go Novell
or Red Hat for Enterprise Linux on x86. Of course, there are other
offerings available below that, from a number of other suppliers, but
while they might have been SCO customers in the late 80s and 90s, they
really aren't in the SCO market at all now.

That pretty much leaves... an ever shrinking current customer base as the
market for Legend or anything else SCO may come up with. As LWN has
predicted, SCO money will probably run out before it could really take
off. What that means is that currently, this product serves as a way for
SCO to continue to claim it hasn't put all its eggs in the litigation
basket, while in the future, it's likely to be the one asset with some
arguable value left, to pass on to whoever gets the SCO remnants when it
dies. Thus, what is Legend from SCO today will most likely be wrapped
into some other company's product in 2006. Who'd step up to by the
remnants as SCO folds? Maybe it'll pass to some other Canopy group. Or,
maybe SUN will buy it. Or... maybe some other independent lawyer group
might see some IP or other still there and worth litigating over, and will
buy it to expand their litigation only IP holdings.

My prediction, FWLIW...

Duncan