SCO … go!
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The Open Source community can barely contain its collective
glee now that a judge has ruled SCO does not own the copyrights to UNIX.
The community should take a deep breath, because the game has just gotten
interesting. Microsoft and Sun will make it so.
During their disingenuous term of copyright “ownership”, SCO
extracted money from Microsoft, Sun, and other companies wishing to avoid any
potential litigation vis-a-vis UNIX copyrights. Sun paid their tribute, as did Microsoft. Bill gates
upped the ante by channeling funds through intermediaries into SCO to help with
their litigation against IBM, and thus hamper Linux adoption through FUD.
These cross funding schemes have a number of implications. First, the
judge made it very clear that any licening monies SCO received for the
copyrights they did not own are now payable to Novell. Novell has the option of
forgoing that payment, but in the warfare of free markets, releasing prisoners
is bad policy. With a mere $8M in cash, SCO could not likely stay alive if
such bills came due, and Novell would enjoy life more if SCO simply
vanished. Given how their share price tanked on the first day of trading after the judge ruled, the end may well be neigh.
This win also changes the relationship Novell has with Microsoft. In
their deal earlier this year, they entered many covenants that kept one and the
other out of court over Microsoft patents and Novell IP (copyrights).
Novell may now have slightly more leverage in the wake of the SCO ruling, but likely won’t use it as their
newly minted pact with the devil has far larger benefits over the long term that the immediate harasment value.
But they do not have such a relationship with Sun, and given legal vagaries,
might well wish to enforce copyright restrictions against Solaris. True,
Solaris is not a profit ceneter any longer given its release into the Open
Source wilds. And if any of the copyrighted materials have already
entered the realm of GPL (as they may have with the passive consent of Novell
and their own Linux distribution), then there may be no leverage at all.
But the heads at Sun must be rifling through legal documents as I type to
assure themselves that they are in the clear.
Which brings us to the question of Novell’s intents. Will Novell Open Source these conflicted copyrights? They may have already. When they bought SuSE and started distributing Linux (with these copyrighted materials allegedly embedded and exposed), they may have Open Sourced the intellectual property. I have not dug through their distro, so I don’t know myself. Given the timing of the acquisition and the SCO suit, I doubt they foresaw this set of affairs, and thus may not have made the necessary edits in time. The entire, prolonged, expensive debate may all well be moot if someone, somewhere is holding onto an aging SuSE distro CD with a Novell label affixed and can find therein a GPL stamp.
Let the digging begin!
p.s. A personal note the SCO CEO and all around scuz Darl McBride. Thhhhpt!
