Users and suppliers at LinuxWorld have voiced
their support of Red Hat's move this week to fight The SCO Group's
legal assault on Linux, but admitted they were not too worried
about SCO's escalating legal campaign anyway.
"I think it's good what Red Hat's doing," said Jeffrey Baum, a
systems administrator at San Francisco-based Banc of America
Securities. "IBM and everyone else should join forces. They need to
fight these guys tooth and nail ... to stop SCO's illegitimate
attempt to hold people hostage."
Banc of America Securities runs Linux for firewalls, mail
servers, logging and file transfer protocol servers, along with
some MySQL database uses.
An IT architect at a US construction equipment manufacturing
company, who asked not to be named, said Red Hat's effort to try
and stop SCO's public attacks on Linux is "not going to add any
comfort" for users. His company continues to use Linux, he said,
and is not in any kind of holding pattern while the IBM-SCO case
proceeds.
Even if SCO were to prevail in its legal claims, he said, using
Linux is still the right choice. "If we end up having to pay,
depending on what it is, we're still saving money. Whether or not
Red Hat does anything, it doesn't matter."
Another Linux user, a systems administrator at a financial
services company who also asked not to be named, said his company
uses Linux in almost every part of its business but is unmoved by
the legal fight. "It doesn't affect me at all," he said. "It's a
desperate action by desperate men."
Several key Linux suppliers applauded Red Hat's stance.
SuSE Linux chief executive officer Richard Seibt his company
"fully supports this action" by Red Hat.
The company backed a similar effort in Germany earlier this year
when a German Linux association successfully went to court to stop
SCO from making unsubstantiated claims about Linux and any alleged
code theft, Seibt said. SuSE is now looking at whether it will
officially join Red Hat's battle against SCO's claims in the
US.
Because SuSE and SCO are two of the four partners in the
UnitedLinux effort to create a standardised Linux operating system
for enterprise computing, Seibt said his customers are protected by
a cross-licensing agreement with SCO.
"By buying our products, they are already indemnified because we
have this cross-licensing in place," he said.
Samuel Greenblatt, chief architect of the Linux Technology Group
at Computer Associates International, said his company is
continuing "full steam ahead" in offering its Linux products to
customers.
"We do not believe that the SCO lawsuit has any significance to
us or our users," Greenblatt said. "It's an issue between IBM and
SCO."
Customers are not slowing their deployments of Linux any more
than Microsoft users when 14 states sued Microsoft for monopolistic
practices in recent years, Greenblatt added. "It's not going to be
a showstopper, but it is getting to be an irritant," he said of the
SCO attacks.
Mike Balma, a Linux business strategist at Hewlett-Packard, said
his company is evaluating Red Hat's actions this week. "We're
clearly continuing to sell and support Linux. We're going
ahead."
Analyst Bill Claybrook at Aberdeen Group said Red Hat's actions
may make users feel better, but were unlikely to change the overall
legal landscape for now.
"It gives users the impression that companies are going to fight
back instead of letting SCO beat them over the head with all these
phony-baloney charges," he said. "They're trying to destroy the
Linux business even before it's been proven that they have a
case."
On Monday, Red Hat fired back at SCO's claims that some of its
Unix intellectual property was provided illegally to the
open-source Linux community by IBM. Red Hat filed a formal
complaint in an effort to show that it has not infringed on SCO's
intellectual property.
Red Hat said it hoped to hold SCO accountable for "unfair and
deceptive" actions, and is creating a $1m Open Source Now Fund to
pay for legal expenses associated with any infringement claims
brought by SCO against companies using Linux.
SCO threatened corporate Linux users with copyright infringement
lawsuits unless they license SCO's UnixWare technology - at $699
per server CPU. That price will rise in October to $1,399 per
CPU.
The legal back-and-forth began in March, when SCO filed a $1bn
lawsuit against IBM. That suit was later amended into a legal claim
of at least $3bn.
Todd R Weiss writes for Computerworld