Tuesday, December 09, 2003

SCO ordered to put up or shut up

The SCO Group, which owns the IP rights to UNIX, has been stirring up a cloud of uncertainty and doubt about the open source Linux operating system. Earlier this year SCO sued IBM for allegedly incorporating UNIX source code in the Linux kernal. Linux supporters have been frustrated that SCO, for the most part, has been unwilling to reveal the "millions of lines of code" in Linux that SCO claims came from its intellectual property. The problem for enterprise system users is that the confusion undermines any motivation to migrate to Linux.

But the cloud may be about to lift. A US federal court judge has given SCO 30 days to show what proof it has.

Quoted in an Internet Week article, Eben Moglen, professor at Columbia Law School says, "This is the big moment in the factual determination of what's in SCO's hand, if there are facts to support the claim that SCO has made concerning literal copying from Sys V Unix into the Linux operating system kernel -- this is the moment where we find out. Provided that IBM is not prevented by court order from sharing that information, it will be possible for everyone to know what SCO claims is theirs."

This ZDNet article has more details.

No comments: