What SCO Wants, SCO Gets (Forbes)

Posted Jun 19, 2003 10:30 UTC (Thu) by mem (subscriber, #517) [Link]

Run around screaming in fear of losing what's sacred to them? That's the impression I get from the article. The author basically outlines SCO's/Canopy's/Caldera's past legal record (suing Microsoft, Computer Associates, something else I don't remember) and having it their way. The author seems to imply that we should be afraid of SCO getting it their way this time, too. Well, step back and think, what'd happen if SCO is right? IBM ends up paying a billion to SCO. The questionable code gets pulled from the kernel and written from scratch. But now people are tainted: you can't just rewrite it because you'd have to show you haven't seen the poisoned code before. It's not like I care if NUMA gets pulled from the kernel. I still have single processor machines. But I think it's nice if Linus has an employer who can pay him to work on Linux. And OSDL happens to care about NUMA. That's one of the things that puts money on their bowls.

Do I think SCO will have it their way? Not really. Should we be worrying now? Perhaps, but not much. There's no reason for that yet.

Regarding that billion... at first that ammount struck me as odd: as someone else already said, there's no way for SCO to have made that much money out of a product that they have "owned" for what, a whole three years? Remember, this is not Santa Cruz Operation, this is Caldera renamed to The SCO Group. Caldera bought the code from the real SCO a couple of years ago. Out of this transaction Santa Cruz Operation has gotten something like US$50 million, give or take a couple, and that's it. Should SCO win, Santa Cruz Operation gets nothing. Back on track: why one billion? I had forgotten IBM's "1 billion invested in Linux" babble from 2001. SCO is suing IBM for the perceived value that Linux has for IBM. I can see these people one night drinking scotch and smoking cigars "hey, those guys at IBM are pouring a billion into Linux" "yeah, heard about it. Lucky hippy bastards... Wouldn't it be nice if IBM poured that into Unixware instead?" "you know, I was thinking, remember that Monterrey deal? IBM's got a contract with us. I wonder if we could press a few IP-millions out of IBM just to leave them alone with their new toy... it's worth a billion to them afterall" "nah, the hippies have screwed up the bussiness, they publish all their code, it's not like they are idiots who'd go and copy our code and put it on a public server for everyone to see" pling! pling! pling!