SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp.

On March 7, 2003, the SCO Group (formerly Caldera) filed a $1 billion suit against IBM for allegedly "devaluing" its version of the UNIX operating system. SCO claimed that IBM had, without authorization, contributed SCO's intellectual property to the codebase of the open source, Unix-like Linux operating system. SCO Group were also reported to have sent letters to many large companies, warning them of the possiblity of liability.

The lawsuit has caused outrage among the free software and open source communities. Open source advocates have argued (among other arguments):

that the Linux operating system was unlikely to contain UNIX code, as it had been written from scratch by hundreds of collaborators, with a well-documented provenance and revision history that was entirely in the public view;

that it made no technical sense to incorporate SCO UNIX code in Linux, as Linux had the technical features that are claimed to have been appropriated already implemented before SCO UNIX had them;

that even if Linux and SCO UNIX had some code in common, that this did not necessarily mean that the code was copied from SCO UNIX to Linux, rather than vice versa, or that both pieces of code were legitimately copied from some other source such as one of the open source BSD-derived operating systems;

that even if Linux did contain copied SCO UNIX code, that the UNIX source code had already been made widely available without a non-disclosure agreement, and so had no trade secret status;

they also argue that, even if Linux did contain some UNIX code, the SCO Group had lost any right to sue IBM for trade secret or other intellectual property infringement by distributing Linux itself under the GNU General Public License.

The GPL issue

According to Eben Moglen, the Free Software Foundation's legal counsel, SCO's suit should not concern other Linux users other than IBM. In an interview with internetnews.com, he is reported as saying:

"There is absolute difficulty with this line of argument which ought to make everybody in the world aware that the letters that SCO has put out can be safely put in the wastebasket," ...

"From the moment that SCO distributed that code under the GNU General Public License, they would have given everybody in the world the right to copy, modify and distribute that code freely," ... "From the moment SCO distributed the Linux kernel under GPL, they licensed the use. Always. That's what our license says."

Apparently noticing the incongruity of their selling a Linux distribution while suing IBM for stealing their intellectual property and giving it to the developers of that operating system, the SCO Group then announced on May 14 that they would no longer distribute Linux. According to their press release, "SCO will continue to support existing SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux customers and hold them harmless from any SCO intellectual property issues regarding SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux products."

Novell enters the controversy

Novell entered the controversy by publishing on May 28 a press release concerning the SCO Group's ownership of UNIX. "To Novell's knowledge, the 1995 agreement governing SCO's purchase of UNIX from Novell does not convey to SCO the associated copyrights," a letter to the SCO Group's CEO Darl McBride said in part. "We believe it unlikely that SCO can demonstrate that it has any ownership interest whatsoever in those copyrights. Apparently you share this view, since over the last few months you have repeatedly asked Novell to transfer the copyrights to SCO, requests that Novell has rejected."

SCO also recently announced thatit had "discovered" an ammendment to their contract with Novel transfering partial ownership to SCO, although Novel can't find that file.

What SCO claims

It has been reported that SCO has variously threatened to sue Linux users and even Linus Torvalds himself. Computerworld reported that SCO's Chris Sontag, regarding the alleged infringements, said:

"It's very extensive. It is many different sections of code ranging from five to 10 to 15 lines of code in multiple places that are of issue, up to large blocks of code that have been inappropriately copied into Linux in violation of our source-code licensing contract. That's in the kernel itself, so it is significant. It is not a line or two here or there. It was quite a surprise for us."

On May 30, Darl McBride was quoted as saying that the Linux kernel contained "hundreds of lines" of code from SCO's version of UNIX, and that SCO would reveal the code to other companies under NDA in July. [1] To put this into context, David Wheeler's SLOCCount estimates the size of the Linux 2.4.2 kernel as 2,440,919 source lines of code out of over 30 million physical source lines of code for a typical GNU/Linux distribution. [2]

Fear, uncertainty and doubt

A number of Linux supporters have characterized SCO's actions as an attempt to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about Linux. Many believe that SCO's aim is to be bought out by IBM. Others have have pointed to Microsoft's subsequent licensing of the SCO source code as a possible quid pro quo for SCO's action.

Univention Gmbh, a Linux integrator, reports it was granted an injunction by a Bremen court under German competition law that prohibits the SCO Group's German division from saying that Linux contains illegally obtained SCO intellectual property. If the SCO Group continues to express this position, they would have to pay a fine of 250,000 Euros.

Allegations of reverse copying

EWeek has reported allegations that SCO may have copied parts of the Linux kernel into SCO UNIX as part of its Linux Kernel Personality feature (see the EWeek report below). SCO has denied these allegations. Some open-source advocates have suggested that, if true, this may effectively have obligated SCO to release SCO UNIX under the terms of the GPL.

The GPL issue

Novell enters the controversy

What SCO claims

Fear, uncertainty and doubt

Allegations of reverse copying

External links