SCO vs. IBM

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SCO vs. IBM

Abstract

On March 6, 2003, The SCO Group filed a $1 billion lawsuit [1] against IBM. The lawsuit alleges, among other things, that IBM has violated contractual obligations it has with SCO by incorporating parts of AIX (IBM’s UNIX derived operating system) into Linux – the open source version of UNIX. The lawsuit has not gone to court and, when it finally does, may take upwards of a year to settle. Nevertheless, a preliminary look is worthwhile. Since the time of the initial filing, the rhetoric has escalated and it has become clear that the ramifications of the suit are much broader than just IBM vs. SCO. SCO’s claims, should they be proven, would not only have a major impact on Linux, but could also claim other casualties – chief among them the Open Source movement. After some introductory material, this paper examines the potential effects and provides an ethical evaluation. If one assumes that SCO’s claims are valid, Linux is in serious trouble, and a black-eye will be placed on the face of the Open Source community that will not quickly heal. But, even if SCO prevails, it’s far from clear that they’ve “done the right thing”…

Introduction

On March 6, 2003, The SCO Group filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM. Central to the lawsuit is the claim that IBM has violated contractual obligations it has with SCO by releasing into the public domain AIX source code as part of enhancements the company has made to the Linux operating system. Why does SCO care? Because SCO claims to hold the copyright to the UNIX operating system [2]. AIX is a derivative of UNIX – not only is UNIX source code used as the basis for AIX but IBM (and a host of other UNIX vendors) readily admits this and pays licensing feeds to SCO. Linux, on the other hand, is open source. Its source code is freely available for usage, viewing and modification. SCO’s claim is simple – IBM is illegally distributing its intellectual property by placing it into Linux and thereby diluting the value of UNIX.

Over the last few months, there have been a number of key developments that are beyond SCO and IBM’s current spat. Of particular interest:

SCO stopped releasing its Linux distribution – asserting that the Linux is derived from code that is copyrighted by SCO [3].

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