IBM has told attendees at the LinuxWorld Conference
& Expo that there is no need for it to indemnify its growing
pool of 6,300 Linux customers.
"Our position hasn't changed," said Jim Stallings, IBM's general
manager for Linux. The claims that have been alleged by the SCO
Group against IBM have no basis, so indemnification is not
needed.
Even if customers still have concerns, both major Linux
distributions - SuSE Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux - have
customer protection programmes in place to help defend users
against legal actions from SCO, Stallings said.
In addition, the Open Source Development Labs, a non-profit
enterprise Linux advocacy group, has begun a defence fund that it
hopes will bring in $10m for users entangled in any related legal
fights.
Despite recent legal threats from SCO that it could soon begin
suing enterprise Linux users, use of the operating system among
businesses has continued to grow, Stallings said.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice-president of technology and
strategy for IBM said indemnification is unnecessary because no
court has yet to rule on SCO's claims.
"We believe the [SCO] suit has zero merit," Wladawsky-Berger
said. "In our legal system, you've got to go to court and get it
over with. That's what we're doing.
"I know there is a part of the US which believes that legal
issues should be tried in the media," he said. "But it's not won in
the media. We think the actions we're taking are the right actions
to get these issues behind us."
Matt Plociak, an analyst at Progressive Strategies, said IBM's
argument against offering indemnification to its customers makes
sense.
"To me, if you offer indemnification, you're saying there may be
a problem," he said. "IBM is saying there is no problem and [that
they're] going to prove that in court. I think that's a reasonable
strategy, and obviously their customers are confident with that
because they have not stopped buying and using Linux."
Al Gillen, an analyst at IDC, said that while IBM continues to
pass on indemnification, the company has donated money to the legal
defence fund created by the OSDL.
"I don't think there's any real need to provide any
indemnification until they have a customer who's in some form of
litigation," Gillen said. "Then the pressure would increase for
them to do something."
Red Hat announced this week the creation of a Open Source
Assurance programme that will protect all existing and future Red
Hat Enterprise Linux customers from legal challenges as long as
they are using the software.
Under the included intellectual property warranty, the company
would replace any software code that allegedly infringed on other
code, so users and developers could continue to work with the
products.
Money would be available from the Open Source Now legal defence
fund for customers that might be sued for infringement issues.
The Red Hat move comes on the heels of last week's decision by
Novell, which has acquired SuSE Linux, to indemnify SuSE Linux
customers against possible legal action from SCO.
When Unix supplier SCO filed its lawsuit against IBM, which
alleged that IBM had illegally contributed some of SCO's System V
Unix code to the open-source Linux project.
Additional suits and countersuits have been filed by Red Hat and
Novell since the case began.
Todd R Weiss writes for Computerworld