SCO Must Die

I don't know how many of my readers have been following the recent kerfuffle over SCO (The Santa Cruz Organisation) suing IBM for more than $1 billion. SCO alleges that IBM took code that SCO owned and put it into Linux.

Yesterday SCO's share price rose on news that they had registered copyright on the Unix source - a completely meaningless step. Copyright registration merely says they you filed a copy of the work with the copyright office on a particular date. Unlike patent or trademark registration, it says nothing at all about whether you actually have any legal right to the work.

SCO's claim against IBM is nebulous - perhaps deliberately so. It is partly based on copyright, partly based on patents, partly based on trade secrets. So far SCO has not publically produced any evidence to support any part of their claim. Instead, they have moved directly to making not-at-all veiled threats towards Linux users: Pay us or we'll sue you too.

It's pretty clear why SCO has taken this route: The company is doomed. Back in the day, SCO had a good and competitive product. Take a high-end PC - say, a 386/33, or later a 486/50, add a Stallion board (a popular multi-port serial card) and a bunch of Wyse 60 terminals, install SCO, and you had a capable multi-user system for a lot less money than the proprietary Unix boxes of the day, and much less money than a traditional mini-computer.

A lot of small-to-medium businesses ran the company on SCO.

In recent years, though, SCO has been caught between Windows NT - a cow of an operating system, but reasonably stable and backed by Microsoft's marketing department - and Linux, which is not only a substantially better system than SCO, but is free.

There's no way out for SCO. There are no opportunities left. The only people still on SCO are legacy users - those who have always run on SCO, who have SCO-trained technical staff, and those who need an application that hasn't yet been ported to Linux.

So SCO went where the money is, and sued IBM. It's quite possible that they don't expect to win the lawsuit, but are looking instead to get bought out as part of a settlement. IBM don't appear to by playing according to SCO's script, however, and have told them to get knotted.

So now SCO have turned on Linux users, suggesting that they may be legally vulnerable if they continue to use Linux without paying SCO. This, without any case going to court, much less being proven. SCO have also issued warnings aimed at Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, saying that he too may be liable.

So in a short period of time, SCO have managed to make deadly enemies of every geek on the planet and IBM, which is not a good combination. On their side, they have Microsoft, who have listed Linux as their number two threat (after the sagging world economy). Microsoft recently - as in, after the lawsuit - paid SCO an undisclosed amount for a Unix license. Note that Microsoft do not sell Unix.

The remaining factor to this mess is that SCO is not a large company. Their market capitalisation is less than the likely tax they aim to extract from Linux users all over the world. In other words, to Linux users, it would be cheaper - and better in the long term - to buy SCO and close it down than to pay the tax.

It's just a pity that no-one thought to do this six months ago when their stock was in the toilet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 615 words, total size 3 kb.