Hell No, We Won't SCO
While the protestors caused a minor ruckus around the company's main building, they did little to distract SCO officials from steadfastly pursuing their legal battle with IBM, and, by way of extension, the greater Linux community.
On Friday morning, this reporter visited SCO Group CEO Darl McBride and senior vice president Chris Sontag in their offices to see first hand what exactly is at the root of the company's legal claims with regards to IBM and other Linux companies. Here's what I found.
For those willing to accept SCO's invite and sojourn to Utah County, SCO officials will walk you through several issues pertaining to SCO's legal battle with IBM and the Linux community, including specific lines of code and files. In a corporate board room equipped with two Sony plasma displays, SCO's Sontag, for example, painstaking went through a litany of issues that have cropped up since SCO first accused IBM of violating a contract that governs how IBM can use Unix intellectual property. (As a subtle reminder of how many contracts that it has with third parties covering the use of Unix, SCO has lined its conference room floor to ceiling with thousands of contracts bound in white, gray and blue binders. The original contract with Compaq dating back to 1986 is right there under 'C', for example.)
Over the course of 90 minutes, Sontag drove home three key points, in addition to revealing specific lines of code and files within Linux software that SCO says were put into the software in violation of contracts. Some lines of code have been so blatantly misappropriated, SCO says, that even spelling errors from comments sections were copied into Linux software.
Overall, SCO makes a fairly compelling case that it owns the rights to Unix and UnixWare and much of the underlying source code, and that its rationale for taking on IBM is not without merit. Finally, the company can show several examples of lines of code in Linux software whose roots appear to be from derivatives of Unix code.
"A lot of people are asking why little SCO in Lindon, Utah, wound up in the position we are in today," says Sontag. "A little understanding of the history of Unix helps answer that."
Echoes McBride: "You may ask 'how did SCO lawyers get IBM by the balls?' Well, it wasn't us, but AT&T years ago."
At least for now, McBride has no plan to give up defending the work they did all those years ago.