Fun with SCO [LWN.net]

This week's most amusing development in the SCO case is the announcement that Microsoft, that great purveyor of Unix products, has agreed to buy a Unix license from SCO. The amount of money involved has not been disclosed, but there are reports that Microsoft is paying between $10 and $20 million. It is surely coincidental that SCO predicted that licensing revenue would be $10 million this quarter. That is, incidentally, almost half the revenue that the company was expecting over the quarter.

There has been no end of speculation regarding Microsoft's motivation for funneling that much money into SCO. It all remains just that, however: speculation. We may find out what is really going on eventually, but it will take a while.

The community's attitude toward SCO and its lawsuit remains scornful (at least). It is a matter of faith that SCO's claims are without merit. That faith will probably prove to be justified, but one might wonder about what might happen if SCO turns out to have a point. LWN's standalone article on the topic (reprinted below) was criticized by some as obvious and/or naive, but the question, we believe, deserves a bit more thought than it is receiving. Even if SCO's case turns out to be no more than the hollow, baseless slander that it appears to be, the free software community remains vulnerable to injections of proprietary code.

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Fun with SCO

Posted May 22, 2003 2:41 UTC (Thu) by torsten (guest, #4137) [Link] (4 responses)

Can we separate SCO from the Canopy Group?

The Canopy Group bought Caldera. Caldera was once a player in the Linux distribution market, but they never kept up with features and development very well. Meanwhile, The Canopy Group used the Caldera DOS property to sue the socks off of Microsoft. There was an out-of-court settlement, and Microsoft took a one-time charge of $400 Million USD. This court resolution was a big hurrah for the anti-Microsoft crowd.

Has the Canopy Group Purchased SCO with similar intentions?

I don't get the feeling that The Canopy Group is really making a serious run at the UNIX market. I also wonder at what stage Microsoft entered the fray. A $10 million USD "license" of intellectual property is substantial, and a curious investment. There are several possibilities here.

1. Microsoft is purchasing insurance, since all versions of Windows contain code that is copyrighted by the "Regents of the University of California at Berkeley." i.e. SCO copyrighted sources.
2. Microsoft licensing purchase is an exchange for SCO's undermining of Linux.
3. Microsoft is turning their former enemy (Caldera/DOS/Canopy Group) into their friend, as in "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
4. Microsoft had their hand in all this nonsense from the beginning, and this license is just the kickback/payoff.
5. ...???

One of the big questions I have is, am I allowed to implement the ideas in my head?

When I read text books, source code, papers, specifications, and other things, am I free to implement those ideas? I have never signed a document that says I will not implement my ideas, share the proceeds, or credit anyone. Do I owe a debt (of money or recognition) to the professors who taught and inspired my ideas, do they own a part of my Intellectual Property? Does SCO own a part of their Intellectual Property?

It seems with the concept of "Intellectual Property" that companies, like SCO, are claiming ownership of the implementation of ideas that people have learned from reading the original UNIX source code.

When I read GPL code, am I allowed to reimplement the concepts and ideas (without direct copying) into BSD or proprietary code? Can I, conversely, implement ideas I learned from reading UNIX code into Linux (again without copying any source)?

It also seems that SCO is claiming copyright infringement. Why is it, that SCO, unlike all other GPL proponents, do not give the infringer the opportunity to remove the copied portions of code (as is the courtesy of the open source crowd)?

Fun with SCO

Posted May 22, 2003 15:49 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Caldera was once a player in the Linux distribution market, but they never kept up with features and development very well.

But they did. OpenLinux 1.3 was one of the first distros to ship KDE 1.0 (fond memories here: this is when I replaced Windows 95 with Linux as my primary OS) and OpenLinux 2.2 had one of the first graphical installers (Lizard I think). They always held back on using cutting-edge versions of glibc, gcc, etc. though.

They didn't do well in the retail channel because of their focus on VARs. But I doubt that they'll be missed much by anyone.

Fun with SCO

Posted May 22, 2003 16:24 UTC (Thu) by dmallery (guest, #635) [Link] (2 responses)

go take a look at www.canopy.com.

ray noorda controls this. nothing happens without his imprimatur. notice that canopy also controls trolltec. lest we forget, he also controls novell, which recently and loudly discovered linux.

this is the real source of all this... a company that vastly exceeds sco's resources and has been very successful with this tactic in the past. in a way, sco is just set up as the fall-guy to take the heat.

dave mallery

Fun with SCO

Posted May 22, 2003 19:03 UTC (Thu) by erat (guest, #21) [Link] (1 responses)

Ray Noorda doesn't control anything with any company unless he's on the board for that company. Yes, he owns lots of stock in companies to which Canopy has offered funding. No, he does not have the power to override the decisions of the board for these companies no matter how many shares he owns.

Canopy does not control Troll Tech (I think someone figured out that Canopy has a <10% stake in TT), nor does Ray control Novell (they have a board too).

Pushing all of this aside and merely viewing this from a "Canopy hates Linux" perspective, I'd like for you to answer one question for me: Why would Canopy, Ray Noorda, whoever, want to destroy Linux if in doing so they'll de-value the multi-millions they've invested in Linux software companies like LinuxNetworx, SnapGear, Troll Tech, Helius, etc.? Doesn't that strike you as a wee bit silly? (Okay, so there were two questions...)

Brewing up conspiracy theories can be fun, but try to make your conspiracies somewhat believable next time, 'kay? Thanks.

Fun with SCO

Posted May 23, 2003 16:42 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (guest, #1698) [Link]

Actually, major stockholders effectively do control corporations in most cases, because the board members know that if they piss off the major stockholders, they'll get voted out and replaced by someone who will do what the stockholders want.