SCO License Fees Would Hurt Linux Market (ZDNet)

SCO License Fees Would Hurt Linux Market (ZDNet)

Posted Jul 25, 2003 1:19 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
Parent article: SCO License Fees Would Hurt Linux Market (ZDNet)

Consider who Gartner's customer's are: large risk-averse organisations. This advice is meant for them.

You've also got to consider what other advice Gartner could possibly give its customers. They can't say "it's unfounded litigation" because Gartner's reputation amoung its customers would be toast if SCO had even a minor win. So in many ways this is a "cover our arse" statement from Gartner.

You'll notice how the analysis relies solely on SCO's claims. This is very unusual; typically in Gartner analysis all points of view are evaluated. So this statement is very remarkable for not considering the views of the open source sotware advocates.

I can only think that this is done so that the analysis doesn't need to state Gartner's thoughts on the likelyhood of the SCO litigation succeeding. If the litigation is eventually unfounded Gartner can simply claim to have been hoodwinked too.

Coming from the market where Gartner aims its advice, I've got two objections:

(1) By not exploring the likelyhood of a SCO success they are doing their customers a disservice. Gartner should have learned that total risk aversion is not useful advice. Too many of their customers spent far too much on Y2K issues because of their lack of clear-eyed evaluation of risk.

(2) The alternatives to SCO's licensing are not considered, rather SCO's licensing scheme is taken at face value. For example, many large corporations already hold UNIX source licenses. Even a new license may be more economic than per-CPU based binary licenses, yet Gartner doesn't consider this alternative. Given Gartner's minute examination of Microsoft Licensing 6.0 the acceptance at face value of SCO's licensing scheme is remarkable.

The most obvious strategy, wait until the outcome of the permanent injunction litigation with IBM, is given remarkably little consideration. The analysis is adverse to this approach but gives far too little legal basis for that aversion.

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