Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

Posted May 29, 2003 20:42 UTC (Thu) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943)
Parent article: Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

The discussion of per-seat licensing in Caldera OpenLinux 3.1 and above glosses over a question I considered important at the time, and that Caldera Systems pointedly ignored: What property does the per-seat licence apply to?

Just before Caldera adopted the SCO Group d/b/a, I had an encounter with Caldera's "open source architect" and Linux community liaison, Ronald Joe Record, on a LUG mailing list. A guy named Calvin Chu had had some configuration problems with Caldera 3.1. A few Caldera-haters (not me!) advised him (paraphrasing) that Caldera sucks, and get a real distribution that doesn't try to rip off the community with per-seat licensing, etc.

Ronald attempted to help Calvin, as did I. In addition, Ronald attempted with some sense of long-suffering exasperation to defend Caldera Systems, Inc.'s policies and product to the assembled critics. Among these things, he defended the per-seat licensing.

This got my interest, because I was curious about what specific property the licensing covered. I'm a student of such things, and try to learn about them so I can explain them to others, e.g., at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/suse-product-strategy . I was _not_ out to get Caldera.

So, I got out my Caldera Workstation 3.1 CD, examined it, and reported to the LUG mailing list (and to Joe) what I'd found: http://lists.svlug.org/archives/smaug/2001q3/000122.html In short, I couldn't find anything on the CD that was both owned by Caldera Systems, Inc. and not under freely-redistributable licence terms. So, in the post cited above, I asked Ronald what property the per-seat licensing _does_ applied to. (Note that that couldn't really be a compilation copyright, as such terms would create licence conflict with the GPL terms of some of the constituent codebases.)

I was polite, and stipulated that neither of us was an attorney (in all likelihood), let alone was he probably authorised to address corporate legal matters. But I figured he could at least say "I don't know" or "I'll have to ask the corporate counsel". After all, Ronald did say it was his _job_ to represent the company to the Linux community. I figured it was a logical question for him to receive and pass on, if not answer.

But Ronald did something I didn't expect: He immediately unsubscribed from the entire mailing list and vanished -- and I've never heard an answer from anyone else, either. (Their later making an ISO available gratis for non-commercial usage wasn't an answer.)

I strongly suspect that no answer would have ever come, even without the present legal entanglement -- as my surmise is that Caldera's demand for per-seat licensing fees never had even the tiniest legal foundation. One strains to find a charitible interpretation under which they didn't eventually realise this.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com