SCO Group and Linux advocates offered differing
interpretations yesterday of the role that the GNU General Public
Licence would play in a legal dispute between SCO and
IBM.
In March, SCO launched what has become a $3bn lawsuit against
IBM, claiming the company had improperly added code to Linux. SCO,
which owns rights to the original System V Unix software. SCO has
since claimed that IBM may no longer distribute its own version of
Unix, called AIX, and has threatened Linux users with
lawsuits.
On Wednesday IBM filed a complaint in court, charging SCO with a
number of counterclaims, including patent violations, breach of
contract, and breach of the GPL.
SCO responded to the countersuit yesterday, calling IBM's
complaint an effort to distract attention from flaws in its own
business model and criticising the GPL. "It's a fairly nebulous
licence," said SCO spokesman Blake Stowell.
Whatever questions may surround Linux's licence, they are
compounded by the fact that SCO this week began offering to sell
Linux users new software licences that would bring their Linux
systems into compliance with SCO's intellectual property
claims.
Linux advocates argue that because it distributes Linux itself,
SCO is retroactively tacking a second conflicting licence onto
software it has already distributed.
"They need to realise that they have licensed the software under
the GPL and released it to the world and they have no rights to ask
for royalties," said Bradley Kuhn, the executive director of the
Free Software Foundation, the organisation that created the
GPL.
SCO stopped selling Linux in May. Stowell admitted that his
company was still providing Linux source code and security patches
on its website to fulfill support contracts with customers, but he
disputed Kuhn's claim.
"If our intellectual property is being found in Linux and
that's being done without our say, then I don't think that the GPL
can force us not to collect licence fees from someone who may be
using our intellectual property," he said.
IBM's complaint echoes Kuhn's criticism. SCO has included GPL
code in its Linux products and "by so doing, SCO accepted the terms
of the GPL. By seeking licensing fees, SCO is in breach of the
licence, the complaint says.
The Free Software Foundation's general counsel, Eben Moglen, is
consulting IBM in its countersuit.
IBM's claim of GPL violations is noteworthy because the GPL has
never been tested in court, and the IBM countersuit could,
ultimately, decide whether it is enforceable under US law.
Recently, a German legal expert called into question the
software licence's enforceability under European law.
The GPL has not gone to court in the past, Kuhn said, because
companies have always settled with the Free Software Foundation,
rather than risk a court case. "The GPL doesn't need to go to court
to be proven," he added. "The lawyers on the other side don't want
to go to court because they can't win."
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service