MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-05-24 |
| FROM | Ruben I Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] SCO andGNU/Linux - News from Utah
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Posted 5/21/2004 2:02 PM Updated 5/21/2004 6:00 PM
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Suits over Linux tests muddy backwater of copyright law
By Paul Foy, Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY ? When Utah technology executive Darl McBride sniffs Linux, the free computer operating system, he picks up a scent of Unix, a long-established business system he maintains made Linux sturdy and reliable.
McBride is chief executive of The SCO Group, which acquired rights to Unix through a series of corporate acquisitions and mergers. SCO sued IBM for dumping allegedly confidential Unix code into Linux and sued DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone for deploying Linux systems without an SCO license.
The suits sent a shudder through the open-source movement and threaten to literally unravel Linux as it gains commercial acceptance and market share on Microsoft. It also exposed a gaping liability of Linux, a work of thousands of hackers whose contributions of software code may be original ? or not.
But others think SCO is bluffing. Show us the code, says Linux high priest Linus Torvalds, who dismisses SCO's claims as "just totally out to lunch." SCO has been hesitant to publicly reveal the stolen goods and fumbled early disclosures, pointing to the wrong code.
Torvalds, the Finnish college student who wrote the original Linux kernel and is the gatekeeper for contributions that have steadily improved the operating system, says Linux contains no Unix or Unix-derived code and doesn't need it ? and he doesn't appreciate the acccusation.
"It's as if Darl was going public calling my child a slut," Torvalds said in a series of lengthy e-mails to The Associated Press from his home in San Jose, Calif.
Linux does contain some IBM-written code, he acknowledged, turning at least part of the debate on slippery semantics.
SCO is claiming rights on the code IBM wrote for its version of Unix called AIX, which IBM will claim it owns outright, calling it "third-party code." A trial has been set for April 2005.
McBride claims more than 700,000 lines of Unix-derived code have seeped into Linux, whose kernel or brains contain about 5.7 million lines of code. It was code IBM and other Unix customers, who were supposed to keep it confidential under licensing pacts, just gave away, he says.
SCO disclosed under court seal code for 232 software products to IBM for study but won't let others see any unless they sign a confidentiality pact, a condition the AP refused.
McBride did produce a page of "header" files ? for example, "include/asm-alpha/errno.h" ? that perform utilitarian tasks and which experts doubt can be copyrighted. Those files basically express facts, like names in a telephone book, Torvalds said.
SCO's legal gambit has made McBride unpopular in corporate and hacker circles. At 44, he's been called the most hated guy in tech. Fortune magazine branded him "Corporate Enemy No. 1" in a cover story. He packs a gun because of death threats and uses bodyguards in public. He beefed up his home's security system.
In an interview, he answered critics by saying there's no free lunch, even with software.
"Microsoft with its billions of dollars in the bank still doesn't have a system that has five 9s of reliability, and it's not for lack of trying," said McBride, who said Linux has managed to gain that level ? 99.999% ? of reliability.
"So the question is, did a college programming student and some of his friends create that or did something else happen?"
That something is Unix, he said. It is a system developed in 1969 by AT&T Bell Labs. The Nasdaq Stock Market uses Unix to process as many as 5,000 stock transactions a second. McDonald's and other fast-food companies use it to track restaurant orders and sales.
Stripping Unix code from Linux would "cripple" that operating system, and hackers can't just replace a few characters of source code and claim to have purged Linux of Unix, he said.
SCO is making copyright claims not just on raw code but its sequence and organization and Unix variants developed by others, testing the limits of U.S. copyright law.
McBride says SCO owns the core Unix system and licensing rights to variants developed by a third of Fortune 500 companies. In all, SCO controls more than 30,000 licensing pacts "all over the place" with major colleges and universities, governments and others.
Critics pan McBride's company as mostly in the business of collecting royalties, producing more litigation than software. SCO also sued Utah's Novell Inc. for "slander of title" when Novell said its transfer of Unix technology didn't include copyrights.
With Linux becoming common on network servers of major corporations, SCO also sent letters to about 1,500 companies demanding they pay licensing fees of about $700 per server or face legal action.
"What I don't like is them threatening to sue customers of Linux," said Stuart Cohen, chief executive of the Open Source Development Lab, an organization funded by more than 40 technology companies that has created a $3 million legal defense fund for Linux users.
None of SCO's lawsuits has gone to trial.
Cohen says SCO won't reveal the offending code because it knows "we'll fix it," which he said shows the Utah company is more interested in shaking down Linux users than protecting copyrights. He said the case "is about business and money."
One copyright expert says SCO's claims amount to nothing more than fist-pounding. Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen says SCO has distributed Linux versions under a general public license that requires contributors to renounce their rights to any parts of the system.
But at least one outsider, Baystar Capital Management, is betting on SCO to prevail. The Larkspur, Calif., hedge fund has invested $40 million in SCO ? and for one reason only.
"We think their most valuable asset is the intellectual property that is the focus of the litigation next year," Baystar spokesman Bob McGrath said. "We see that as the best value for the shareholder."
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