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SCO: The party never ends

Like the bad actor in a Victorian melodrama, SCO refuses to lie down, and keeps coming back for more.

By Richard Hillesley, 18 Sep 2009 at 18:00

Meanwhile, Linux was making deep inroads into SCO's market for UNIX on the PC, which coincidently was built on Xenix, developed by Microsoft (in partnership with the Santa Cruz Operation), during a brief flirtation with UNIX back in the eighties.

Litigation doesn't pay

The casual observer could be excused for believing that litigation and teams of lawyers were the largest part of technical innovation in the computing industries, such has been the part played by litigation and threats of litigation around patents, copyrights and trademarks during recent years.

Big money can be made for a relatively small outlay, and litigation that is predicated around the "ownership" of ideas, patents and copyrights requires minimal investment in staff, research, manufacture or the trading of hard goods.

If The SCO Group had pursued its primary business, of producing Linux and UNIX based software, distributed through SCO's existing channels, it may have continued to thrive. As it has transpired, SCO has drained its resources, and has fallen badly at the first hurdle of the litigation process, having failed to prove that it has sole ownership of copyrights to UNIX. Technically, this conclusion can be overturned by jury trial. But SCO has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and any future case depends on the discretion of the Chapter 11 Trustee whose job it is to make the best of SCO's assets for distribution among its shareholders.

The second major issue of the SCO lawsuits has been rendered null and void. SCO has failed to demonstrate that there is copied code in the Linux kernel. Although IBM donated code to Linux this code is derivative work, not UNIX System V code, and IBM has proved that its earlier agreements with Novell give it ownership over "derivative works" and the right to donate any such code.

The Linux kernel is not under threat from any continuation of the case by a reinvigorated SCO or the Chapter 11 Trustee. The slow demise of SCO has been proof, if proof were needed, that litigation doesn't pay.

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2 comments

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Lotus 123 again...

Good article, well written. One of the funniest similar stories concerns Lotus 123 which was the market leading spreadsheet program and responsible mainly for the IBM PC appearing inside businesses throughout the world. If you wanted to break into this market, your product would have to be able to read and adopt 123 spreadsheets, no accounts department would re-write their past work just to buy your product. MS Excel was compatible and another product from Borland was too. The management of Lotus decided to sue Borland with a spurious claim and keep their product out of the market.

Although this tactic almost broke Borland, the daft management of Lotus had taken their eye off the ball, by the time they realised what was happening, largely through bundled Office suites, Microsoft had stolen their market. In the end, IBM bought Lotus mainly it is said for Lotus Notes and Lotus as an independent company disappeared, in going to Court they had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory !

By popskihaynes on Tuesday Sep 22

Sun and SCO

The transaction between Sun and SCO related to a Unix licence Sun already had before SCO bought the Unix business from Novell. Among other things, it released Sun from the source code confidentiality clause in the existing agreement; this allowed Sun to release Open Solaris. The Utah court held that Novell's agreement was required to any variation of (inter alia) Sun's existng licence. It will be interesting to see the result of the appeal court en banc rehearing and subsequent developments (including the actions of the recently appointed Chapter 11 trustee).

By MauriceS on Tuesday Sep 22