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Microsoft admits defeat, licenses Unix. :-)

Nice article from Bruce Perens on The Fear War against Linux.

It seems fairly clear that because SCO have given their customers an irrevocable licence to use and redistribute Linux under the GPL, they can't really sue people using it now. They might have a cause of action against anyone who copied their code, in the unlikely case that this actually occurred.

The more I think about that, the more unlikely it sounds. One of the strengths of the kernel development model is that everything that goes in is fairly extensively reviewed either by subsystem maintainers, people on mailing lists, or other developers looking at the area. Just look at the archives: anything gets in on the first try, some patches are revised over a period of months before being accepted, if at all.

If I hypothetically lifted some code from SCO and tried to put it in, surely it would be knocked back. Even if it was any good, which from my experience of SCO seems unlikely, then undoubtedly it would be written with different patterns and idioms than are common in the Linux kernel. If I submitted it, people would not only say that it was bad, but also wonder where I got it from. There'd have to be such a large rewrite that it's hard to imagine anyone would bother in the first place.

The only scenario where I *can* imagine access to proprietary Unix code being useful is in supporting an undocumented hardware interface that was known to SCO but not to the world at large. In that case, the developer would be using the code not for its own sake, but as a guide to the hardware, and you'd expect that any trade secrets being infringed would be those of the hardware manufacturer, and in any case unlikely to amount to a billion dollars. Anyhow, I doubt if SCO's hardware support is much better than Linux these days. The most interesting and most often proprietary hardware is probably graphics cards, which is hardly SCO's strong point.

It's interesting that this should come out just a little while after Microsoft admitted that their FUD strategy was not making much headway against Linux.

Everybody remember the Gandhi quote?

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Gentlemen and ladies, this newest leaked memo from Microsoft confirms that we are advancing through GandhiCon Three.

posted Tue 20 May 2003 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link

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