What SCO Lacks In Sophistication, It Makes Up For In Moxie
Not so, Linus notes. No one ever contacted him. Incredulous, I go back to SCO. Turns out that SCO did try to reach Linus, though not directly and not in any sophisticated way. SCO says it sent an inquiry through a third party, hoping it would get to Linus himself.
And these are the guys who might well control the future of the open-source community? Well....
To be sure, the above doesn't make SCO Group look anything other than a bunch of bumpkins, something they've been portrayed as in the press of late. But before you buy into that notion, consider this: Utah companies have not walked away empty-handed when battling powerful opponents on their home turf. What SCO lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in moxie, which goes a long in the Beehive State, which I have called home for more than a dozen years.
Some background: Unless you have been touring Utah's Arches National Park, where mobile-phone coverage is notoriously awful, you no doubt know that SCO Group of Lindon, Utah, now asserts that IBM and others may have misappropriated its intellectual property. It has launched a $1 billion-plus lawsuit against IBM and notified others of potential problems via letters to their legal departments.
One of the more unsettling aspects of the SCO Group's efforts to protect itself from what it believes is unlawful use of its intellectual property is the notion, expressed on more than one occasion, that no Linux software is legit, at least none distributed after very early versions of the software. The reasoning behind this thinking: The amount of SCO Unix code in Linux today constitutes a misuse of intellectual property. The question on everyone's mind now is this: Could there possibly be so much SCO Unix code embedded inside various Linux distributions that the entire movement could grind to a sudden and immediate halt until some sort of remedy is found? SCO believes so and is putting its reputation, if not its financial future, on the line to prove its point.
Lunacy, right? Perhaps, but that's for a court and a bunch of lawyers to decide. In the interim, remember that axiom: What SCO lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in moxie. Don't believe me? Just ask Microsoft and its famed legal department.
Several years ago, Caldera, the forerunner to SCO Group, challenged Microsoft in a Utah court and wound up with a fistful of cash in a settlement, reportedly $250 million. That's right: a quarter of a billion dollars. Caldera's claim in that suit: Microsoft illegally used its power and dominance in desktop operating systems to blunt widespread adoption of DR-DOS, a once-promising desktop operating system that Caldera acquired from a third party.
In addition to beating a Goliath that few people ever thought would topple in Utah, there are other interesting similarities between then and now that should make Linux fans sweat. For starters, Caldera (now, of course, SCO Group) has already demonstrated that it can successfully defend a product it had little hand in bringing to market. If you recall, DR-DOS was developed and taken to market by Digital Research before being sold to Novell. So as before, SCO Group is taking a stand over a product it did not invent. Frankly, that's a moot point from a legal point of view: If SCO Group's claims to Unix source code are as iron-clad as it says they are, and it can prove that its code was wrongly put into open-source Linux software, then it's got a case worth pursuing.
There are a lot of ifs to that statement, I know, but before dissecting them, consider something else that bodes well for SCO Group: the $1 billion case against IBM is now in the hands of the 3rd U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City. That's the very setting where Microsoft's attorneys in the late 1990s, armed with their vast resources, ran into some challenges. This time around, SCO says a different judge is overseeing the company's legal proceedings. But don't think for a moment that SCO Group's home-court advantage isn't intact. It is.
That's not to say that not all has gone the way SCO Group has wanted. Novell's open letter surprised the hell out of SCO Group executives, who, ironically, were waiting for someone from the company to come visit them on the day that Novell publicly challenged some of SCO Group's claims. That's generally not how things are done in Utah, and, frankly, not at all how it would have been handled if Novell's current management team were based in Utah as previous teams were. (If ever there were an indication that Novell is a different company than before, CEO Jack Messman's letter to SCO management, which was made available to the public, is it.)
For its part, SCO Group seems unfazed by the criticism and the scorn it has received and is expected again on Friday, June 6, to reiterate its claims to UNIX and UnixWare copyrights. Of neighboring Novell, McBride says, "They ditched NetWare and said their future is in Linux. But that puts them in a precarious spot because they show up four years late to the Linux party and music is not playing like it was and now they are trying to figure out how to get the machine playing."
PR battles aside, it's worth noting that SCO Group's business is rebounding, though its stock is getting hammered. In the fiscal quarter ended April 30, the company posted a $4.5 million profit on sales of $21.4 million. In that same period the year earlier, the company posted a net loss of $6.6 million on sales of $15.5 million.
As milestones go, it is modest as far as the industry is concerned, but significant considering all that's going on in SCO Group's world. The bottom line: thinking SCO Group's bold claims are nuts is no guarantee that they won't cause you significant grief.
One last thing: In case you're wondering if Torvalds and McBride have hooked up, the answer is yes. I put them together and they have exchanged everything but gunfire. Tell me from what Woody Allen movie that line is lifted and I'll send you a VARBusiness hat: [email protected].