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Futures for SCO

Really briefly:

If McBride is to be believed, he's aiming for a future in which people keep on using and adopting Linux, but they pay a certain licence fee to SCO for every host, much as people do with commercial Unix.

Not going to happen.

Putting proprietary licensing onto the Linux kernel puts every distributor into violation of the GNU GPL, and open to suits from every copyright holder. The GPL is pretty clear: if the kernel can't be distributed (and redistributed, modified, etc) freely, it can't be distributed at all.

Not only, but also: SCO are talking about giving people licences to binary Linux kernels. But who wants that? It would be just another Unix: people would have no freedom to debug, inspect, fix or adapt it. Why would you bother? Even users who never see a compiler would not enjoy the fruits of the open source process. Linux would shrivel.

Even assuming all SCO's outlandish claims are true, they are not going to make money the way they want. There are ways for them to make money. One is by pumping up their stock price and selling the executive's and Canopy Group's stock. Another is to be bought out and shut up by IBM or someone else, but it looks like they blew that chance. Another is to scare people with unsubstantiated lawsuit threats, but I think most people with enough money to be worth suing can know bluff when they see it.

Here are the outcomes I can see as possible:

1. Most likely: SCO are simply making it up. They make a lot of noise for a couple of years, then fizzle.
2. There is some kind of infringement because of a nit in the IBM contract. The offending code is removed and rewritten. We return to our regular programming.
3. Through some as-yet-unknown theory of code tainting, a court decides that it is impossible to excise SCO's copyrighted code from Linux. Everybody leaves. SCO is left with nothing.

There was a tight window for a lawsuit like this: it had to happen after there was enough money in Linux to attract sharks, but before people really got to understand the point of the GPL and when they could hear the idea of a binary licence fee without laughing. I think they missed it, but we shall see.

posted Thu 31 Jul 2003 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link

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