SCO Source Vs Open Source

The biggest ‘tech’ happening in recent times is obviously the SCO Group filing suit alleging that IBM helped copy Unix code into the Linux kernel.

SCO claims that the code from Unix (it owns the intellectual-property rights to the code) has made its way into the Linux kernel as is, or with modifications, and that IBM is responsible for this. They have sued IBM for a billion dollars, and have also threatened to revoke IBM’s license for Unix .

First, a bit of history. AT&T Bell Labs had the original Unix IPR (intellectual-property rights). The SCO Group of today has its origins in Caldera, which was started by a group of people who came out of Novell. The original SCO (Santa Cruz

Operations) got the IPR for the Unix code from Novell, which had bought it from AT&T. The term Unix is now a trademark of the Open Group. Caldera purchased the original SCO whose flagship product was Unix for the Intel platform (a part of SCO spun off as Tarentella). This Unix was, in turn, derived from Xenix, which SCO had licensed from Microsoft. Caldera did not have a terrific market run, and the company was renamed SCO Group to re-emphasize that the original SCO Unix was still the core business. Conspiracy theorists can read a lot into this convoluted history, and the fact that Microsoft has just licensed the Unix source from SCO Group.

While the claim has been made, no proof has been presented yet. Three possibilities emerge. Possibility one: Someone (possibly IBM itself) buys SCO and that is the end of it. Microsoft could have been a suitor, adding a further twist to the tale, but antitrust considerations rule that out. Possibility two: SCO is wrong, and will not prevail, in which case life goes back to what it used to be like.

Possibility three: If SCO is proven to be substantially right, then complex situations emerge. The simplest of them is that the copied code is replaced with fresh stuff. Unix is fairly well documented and discussed, so the copyright violation may be moot. SCO itself has distributed Linux and, by extension, the kernel code. So, being right may not be enough for them to win the case. The case could get extended beyond SCO and IBM to other companies supporting Linux, and in an extremely unlikely scenario, maybe even to Linux itself (IBM does not own the copyright to the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds does), and the many packages that go into a Linux distribution. That would be a right royal mess, with everybody busy filing and fighting law suites, when they should all be writing better software.

Whether SCO wins or not, there would be a lot of soul searching (and code searching) amongst open-source coders. And, that can only be for the better.

Meanwhile, as users we will have to wait and watch for the final outcome, which may even take a couple of years. And, barring the last of the possible outcomes, we may not even be directly affected by it.

Krishna Kumar