SCO vs IBM

June 17th, 2003 | jchaager | technology

One of the big stories in the tech news lately hs been the SCO vs IBM lawsuit. In it, SCO alleges that IBM took Unix code that was owened by SCO and released it into Linux, thereby violating their licensing agreement. They have recently amended their suit and are now seeking $3 billion in damages for the alleged wrongdoing.

But does SCO have a case? According to the Open Source Inititiave, SCO’s claims are, at best, misleading and, at worst, outright lies. Some of the code SCO claims that IBM stole and added into Linux is stuff that isn’t even in SCO’s version of Unix. So, how can IBM steal something which SCO doesn’t even have.

Further, SCO’s lawsuit make condescending statements that it would be impossible for the open source community to develop some of the aledgedly infringing features without IBM having stolen them and given them to Linux. This is an affront to all of the programmers who have worked hard to develop these features. And several of the features IBM is alleged to have stolen, such as SMP support in the Linux kernel, were actually written and developed before IBM became involved with Linux.

In a recent interview, one of SCOs executives even went so far as to accuse IBM of aiding terrorists by adding features to Linux which allow it to achieve supercomputing levels of processing power. This statement is worse than Jonny Cochran playing the race card in every one of his trials.

The latest confrontation between SCO and IBM came this weekend. On Friday, SCO issued a press release stating that they had terminated IBMs licenese of the AT&T Unix code because of their alleged actions. IBM issued there own terse press release rebutting SCO saying simply:

“IBM’s Unix license is irrevocable, perpetual and fully paid up. It cannot be terminated. This matter will eventually be resolved in the normal legal process.

I forsee the bigger trouble for SCO buried in the last paragraph, however. “IBM will continue to ship, support and develop AIX which represents years of IBM innovation, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and many patents.” (emphasis added). If IBM starts going through their vast patent library, it is conceivable that they could file a countersuit against SCO that would send them into oblivion.

Makes you wonder what kind of idiots are running SCO these days. Share your thoughts on this ordeal.