No wonder McBride’s face is on the dartboard of a thousand geeks, and his Web site the target of endless hacks.
The intricacies of SCO’s four (and counting) lawsuits are positively Borgesian, but I’ve managed to peel back the onion to its stinky core. Take a deep breath and read slowly. It begins with a popular operating system called UNIX, which started at AT&T. The ownership of UNIX was sold and resold, winding up with a Utah firm named Caldera. (This was later renamed SCO.) Some years ago IBM licensed AT&T’s version of UNIX, and improved it. Then IBM decided to join up with the growing open-source movement and put resources into supporting its flagship, the operating system built around Linux. As part of that effort, it took some software its engineers had written for UNIX and replicated it to go into Linux. As is the practice in open source, that code was treated as property of the general community, and was widely distributed.
But SCO charges that its contract with Big Blue prevents IBM from moving those improvements to Linux. Furthermore, it insists that those improvements should be considered SCO property, even though SCO had nothing to do with creating them. Ultimately, McBride feels that anyone using Linux, whether a corporate customer of Linux or even end users with Linux PCs or TiVo video recorders (which use Linux), are stealing his property and should pay him. In fact, they should pay him big bucks, $149 for a desktop license (that’s more than Windows). He’s widely threatened to sue those who don’t pay up.
Many observers think that McBride’s chances of winning his claims are remote. “The facts aren’t good for them and the law is worse,” says Eben Moglen, a Columbia Law professor working with the Free Software Foundation. A more disinterested observer, Gartner researcher George Weiss, concluded in a recent report that “considerable doubt remains about the legal legitimacy about the claims.”
Yet the lawsuit is already reaping benefits–for Microsoft. SCO’s strategy introduces the idea that Linux users might get caught in the fallout. In addition to its $3 billion case against IBM, SCO has sued two Linux customers, AutoMall and DaimlerChrysler. While Gartner’s Weiss is advising companies not to pay unless SCO’s claims are backed up in court, he’s also warning them that they should pay for lawyers to protect themselves in the meantime. All this hurts Linux. Meanwhile, SCO’s biggest licensee by far is Microsoft, which paid more than $10 million. (The second is Sun, which recently decided to join forces with Microsoft in the software wars.) And when SCO needed more money to keep paying its legal bill, Microsoft indirectly hooked it up with an investment firm which put $50 million more into the struggling firm. In effect, Microsoft is funding a third party to foment fear and doubt on its prime competitor.
Speaking of strange bedfellows, SCO’s lead litigator is David Boies. You may remember him as the underdog who represented the United States in its antitrust action against Microsoft. Boies was relentless in proving that Gates’s bullies perpetuated a monopoly that stifled innovation and made life tougher for consumers. Now Boies and his firm could be helping Microsoft maintain that same monopoly by destroying its competitor. After all, if SCO succeeds in collecting a fee for Linux, the whole “free software” appeal is gone.
McBride contends that an SCO loss will send a “dangerous signal” that the software industry is falling prey to open source’s “socialist-communist model” of distribution. But there’s another way to look at it. If SCO’s claims are firmly rejected, other companies may think twice before threatening millions of innocent users with expensive litigation unless they pay huge license fees for unproven claims. You know what? I can live with that.
