Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA) yesterday posted a position paper on its Web site arguing that Australian companies who receive a request for licence payment from SCO should not reply in any way, should seek legal advice and should also submit any documentation from SCO to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
OSIA argues in the paper that Australian enterprises and individuals using Linux should continue to do so, and that SCO's threats are no barrier to the ongoing adoption of the operating system. The release of the paper comes a week after IBM asked the US court presiding over its dispute with SCO to issue a prompt ruling that Big Blue had not infringed on SCO's copyrights. SCO sued IBM last year, claiming the tech heavyweight included in its Linux software some source code from Unix, which SCO claims to control. The case has subsequently expanded into a far-ranging legal assault on Linux.
OSIA spokesperson Con Zymaris told ZDNet Australia that the paper, prepared during the past two months, would provide businesses and individuals with a platform to undertake a risk analysis before deploying Linux.
However, OSIA has included extensive disclaimers of legal responsibility for information contained in the paper and for interpretations thereof. Zymaris stressed OSIA was "not a legal outfit, we're an advocacy and industry development body".
OSIA's move, its first significant foray into community issues associated with free and open source software, comes as the ACCC continues to investigate a complaint by Open Source Victoria (OSV) -- of which Zymaris is a convenor -- that SCO's activities breach the Trade Practices Act.
ZDNet UK sister site ZDNet Australia understands that the competition regulator is continuing to assess the merits of the OSV complaint, with its last written communication with OSV being more than two months ago.
The ACCC has acknowledged the OSV complaint raises several complicated issues involving intellectual property rights and provisions of the Trade Practices Act that cover misleading and deceptive conduct.
The OSIA paper argues that the claims made by SCO are "akin to a complete stranger knocking on your door one day, demanding rent in arrears for a portion of your office.
"You have had no dealings with this stranger beforehand and he offers you no proof whatsoever that he owns what he says he owns. He does, however, threaten to sue you if you don't pay".
The paper argues that SCO's actions are illegal under the Trade Practices Act.
SCO's Australian and New Zealand boss, Kieran O'Shaughnessy, was not immediately available for comment.
For more coverage on ZDNet Australia, click here.
Talkback
SCO is just a front for MS to get rid of competition without being taken to court for monopolizing again.
Psychromoft at it again.....trying to supress the rising tide of open-source success. Pity the company that is intimidated by this nonsense. Opensource should be embraced and enjoyed!
An operating system is quite obviously a basis for agreement. In practice it would not matter that much which operating system a business used so long as anyone that company communicated with digitally, by for instance buying software or sending documents through the internet, used the same system. Windows will continue to hold its dominant market position merely because it already has a dominant market position.
My opinion is that the facts that everyone will have to face in this issue is that the value of a popular operating system is created mainly by the people who choose to use that system and only marginally by the people that created the system. For example if a business or individual was to make the decision to leave Windows and apopt Linux would they be more concerned at foregoing the inbuilt features of windows such as its GUI or multitasking abilities or would they be more concerned at foregoing the capacity to use Windows based software that in many cases would not have been produced by Microsoft. Further if a business or group was to leave Microsoft Excel to use Lotus 123 would they be more concerned about losing the Excel graphics and programming features or would they be more concerned about diffuculties porting the spreadsheet data which was actually the product of their own efforts.
It seems to me that if my reasoning here is valid then court decisions to support SCOs intellectual property claims would be, given that the main value of an OS is generated by those people who choose to use the OS above that created by those who made the OS, more an example of condoning extortion rather than of justly rewarding intellectually contributions. Hopefully intellectually property laws will be understood in spirit and in future true innovators such as Linus Torvalds will be rewarded for their efforts rather than being punished by the power of essentially souless legal trickery.
How can a company sue for infringment on a copyright it hasn't proven to have ownership of? And by all accounts doesn't appear to have any chance of obtaining.
I don't understand how simply chucking lots of money and lawyers at a case can keep it open and ongoing when it is already obvious SCO do not want the case to be resolved since they know they cannot win it.
SCO is just a Microsoft puppet...the detail of the case is academic. Its scare effect and duration are paramount to Microscoft, who sponsor this campaign against linux adoption.