The escalating legal battle between SCO and IBM
probably will not be resolved in the near future, but SCO's
four-month-old allegations continue to churn lively controversy in
the open-source community.
The latest public review of the case came at the fifth annual
O'Reilly Open Source Convention, as several hundred Linux and other
open-source users gathered to listen to a panel of IT experts weigh
in on what has become a very public fight.
Panel members said the $1bn (£610m) lawsuit filed against IBM in
March by SCO is most likely a case of a former Unix market player
looking to go after the richest target it could find to try to win
a court award and fill its cash-starved coffers. The lawsuit has
since been amended by SCO to ask for more than $3bn (£1.8m) in
damages.
The problem, according to panelist Lawrence Rosen, a technology
attorney at Rosenlaw & Einschlag, is that the case is still far
from going to trial, meaning that much of what has so far been
discussed about its merits is "way premature".
"We need to wait until the evidence comes out" and then allow
the case to unfold through motions, briefs and an eventual ruling
from the court, Rosen said.
Even with that caveat, Rosen and the other panelists - Alan
Nugent, chief technology officer at Novell; Bradley Kuhn, executive
director of the Free Software Foundation and Chris DiBona,
vice-president of marketing at game software maker Damage X - took
turns talking about the SCO suit.
"We're committed to helping the open-source community get over
this," said Novell's Nugent. "We believe it is groundless."
For Novell, the case against IBM hits close to home. Novell,
which had previously acquired the Unix systems business of
AT&T, broke up and sold its Unix properties in 1994 and
1995.
One of those deals was with the former Operation, which was
bought by Caldera International and later became The SCO Group.
In May, Novell's chief executive officer and president, Jack
Messman, publicly called on SCO to lay out its alleged evidence
that IBM had illegally put protected SCO Unix code into Linux.
Because of the lawsuit and his company's past dealings with
Unix, Nugent said he couldn't discuss all of the details of the
complex transactions that had taken place between Novell and SCO
years ago. But, he added, "the things that are probably most
important are not necessarily things that will help SCO's
position".
Last month, SCO carried out its lawsuit-related threat to pull
IBM's Unix licence because IBM failed to comply with SCO's demands
to meet the alleged terms of its licensing agreement.
The Free Software Foundation's Kuhn said in May that SCO was
still offering copies of its own Linux distribution on its FTP
website, which he said negates SCO's claim that Linux has been
illegally offered with protected SCO Unix code.
"If it turns out that SCO has a claim [in the IBM case]... then
they have themselves released that very software under the GPL
[General Public License]," Kuhn said. "There's really no claim
whatsoever."
Also troubling, Kuhn said, was last month's announcement that
Microsoft paid an undisclosed amount of money to SCO for a Unix
licence, the result of Microsoft's stated desire to ensure that its
products comply with SCO's intellectual property claims regarding
Unix.
Microsoft in the past has "identified the GPL as their biggest
competitor and enemy", Kuhn said.
The licensing deal, he argued, was less about wanting to
suddenly assure compliance with SCO's Unix claims as much as an
attempt to "make things look bad for the GPL. We still think Linux
is pretty solid as it stands", Kuhn said.
Damage X's DiBona stressed that for SCO, the merits of the case
were unimportant from the start.
"This lawsuit came because of financial reasons," DiBona said.
"They sued IBM because IBM has the money."
Todd R
Weiss wrties for Computerworld