And for good reason. The company sued IBM in March, saying it illegally contributed some of SCO's licensed Unix code to Linux. Since then, SCO has been making a major business out of intellectual property enforcement, which happens to be the company's fastest-growing revenue generator.
SCO's lawsuit has excited no small degree of controversy. Critics say the company is trying to shake down Linux users and that it does not have any legal basis for its claims. So in a bid to clarify its case both to customers and detractors, the company showed the disputed code to some attendees at the SCO Forum, its annual user conference that took place this week in Las Vegas.
But that step did anything but lower the temperature. Shortly after making the offer to let outsiders examine the code, members of the Linux community blasted SCO, saying the code was originally covered under a public licence that allows it to be shared.
CNET News.com sat down at SCO Forum earlier this week with attorney Mark Heise, a partner with Boies Schiller & Flexner, which is representing SCO, to talk about how the case is affecting the company, the open-source community, and public licences that require sharing such as the General Public License, or GPL.
Q: Why is this case important?
A: It's a case that has the possibility of defining in what direction the software industry is going. Are we going to have an open-source free-for-all? Are we going to have proprietary only? Or are we going to have some sort of combination?
This case has been characterised as an attack on the GPL.
We never raised the GPL in this litigation. We are somewhat surprised that IBM, which has this tremendous copyright and patent portfolio, is advocating the use of the GPL since it could have an impact on them. We don't think the GPL applies. We believe it is
pre-empted by the federal copyright law.
Talkback
What box of cracker jacks did the SCO attourney get his law licence from? The US copyright law places no restrictions on a copyright holder to licence others to produce their works and the single copy exclusion is for single copy licences only. If this were not the case then every book printer in the US would be in violation even though they have a licence from the copyright holder. In the case of SCO and the GPL/Linux there are two issues to consider. First, SCO has failed to show any SCO copyrighted code in Linux. Secondly, even if they found code they have already licenced the free use and distribution of the 2.4 kernel code( all of it) under the GPL. Let's take the kid gloves off the next time you interview one of these idiots and have some fun. At this point, if I was one of this guys law partners I would be looking at loosing him before the corporate name is soiled too badly. Cleraly he dosen't know copyright law or common sense. Oh yes, to his paranoid friends, IBM did not, I repeate, did not put me up to this!
Is this about thier contract issue with IBM as the court case seems to state it or is it about SCO's view that they own all UNIX and all UNIX source code.
They are not going to convince others of that belief. Its easy enough to see where UNIX code has been released under other licenses by previous copyright holders. SCO owning UNIX now doesn't change the those facts.
SCO is certainly not endearing UNIX users or Linux users to them. This doesn't seem a good course for a company planning to survive on their software skills.
What a softball interview. Did SCO pay you to place this ad for their thievery. If only they spent as much on developing software that works.
Whether SCO even has copyright over the _alleged_ _offending_ code has STILL to be determined.
Read the above line again PLEASE.
A point this article seems to have omitted for whatever reason... who knows??
It does unfortunately however perpetuate the FUD that SCO have been trying to spread. Sloppy journalism or the boys from Redmond exerting their influence. Who knows??
What I do know is the whole thing stinks. ;-(