Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray [at] despammed.com

Die, SCO, die. Excuse the schadenfreude, but a computer company called The SCO Group is going down in financial flames ... and it couldn't be more deserved.

Since 2002, SCO's entire business model has been to intimidate and sue users of the Linux operating system, claiming that the OS infringes on its purported ownership of patents on the UNIX operating system. Shunned by users and facing an angry open-source software community that banded together to disprove their claims, SCO decided to play chicken with IBM. They sued IBM for selling systems running Linux, expecting IBM to settle, and then everyone else would cough up too.

Except IBM didn't blink. They eagerly went to court to force SCO to prove their claims. SCO demanded outrageous amouts of evidence from IBM, but dragged their feet continually when ordered to produce their own evidence.

(An aside: SCO was on its deathbed a few years ago. And then Microsoft invested in them, an amount that was lunch money to one of the world's largest corporations but enough to keep SCO going. As usual, Microsoft was trying to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about a threatening competitor. Today they're huffing and puffing that Linux contains some of their copyrighted code -- which they won't reveal -- and encouraging companies to pay them a licensing fee. Yes, pay to license alleged infringing code without proof. But they're big and scary, so some companies have caved.)

And then last week the judge ruled that virtually all of the UNIX patents that SCO claimed to own actually belong to Novell. Cue the sound effect of air leaking from a tire as the stock, which had once traded at about $20 a share, plunged. As I write this, it closed at 44 cents.

Ironically, a previous incarnation of the same company (Caldera) was highly regarded by the Linux community. But new management in 2002 took them down what appears to be a dead-end.

Labels: lawsuits, Linux, patents, software

posted by Paul Murray at 12:31 AM | permanent link |