Competitive Intelligence

SCO Against the World, Microsoft Lends a Hand in Hopes of Squashing Linux

I've been watching the developing SCO vs. The World situation with interest lately - especially with LinuxWorld in full swing this past week and Microsoft's (rumored $50 million) license of SCO's UnixWare (purportedly to fund SCO's legal assault on the Linux community). But, I'm mostly left shaking my head as reading the latest on who's suing whom and why. If you haven't clued in to the story yet, here's a dozen background links on the subject - these should provide a good primer and I'll refer back here for future posts:

Fighting SCO Fear and Loathing at LinuxWorld

What SCO Wants, SCO Gets

The Battle Over UNIX

Linux Users Reject SCO Offer

New Tool Roots Out SCO Code

Red Hat files suit against SCO

SCO sets Linux licensing prices

Forbes Person Tearsheet - Darl McBride

Red Hat Chief Rallies Linux Troops

Analyst finds SCO's "proof" credible

SCO Returns IBM Fire over Unix Rights

Red Hat to SCO: "You talkin' to me?"

In the end, Linux and open source software more generally face a challenge that's more paper tiger than real threat. I think it's a shakedown and a scam by SCO to harvest some blackmail money from a cheap IP acquisition made a few years ago. SCO's puppetmasters (see links above from Forbes) have something of a history of this sort of thing.

What's more, if SCO would simply show the world the Linux kernal code they claim is theirs - something they've still refused to do except for a few in the analyst community, as mentioned in the links above - some say it would take all of two hours to get it rewritten... problem solved. But, then SCO doesn't get paid, right?

SCO's approach makes me think they took a page from the RIAA's playbook of public relations. Charging a few hundred bucks on average for every box running Linux worldwide would certainly raise some cash - but more importantly, from Microsoft's perspective, it would virtually eliminate the Linux price advantage over Windows.

However, I don't think, when the evidence of the infringing IP is finally revealed, that - as Red Hat is suing to have done ASAP - SCO will be able to prevent wholesale rewrites in avoidance of those recently announced licensing fees; and, only a fool would actually pay SCO anything at this point, without any guarantee of a refund when SCO's proven wrong.

- Arik