Floss Attacked: SCO case

IntroductionThe SCO case

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FLOSS under attack: the SCO caseMaster on Free Software

Juanjo Amor

[email protected]/Libresoft

22 December 2007

Juanjo Amor FLOSS under attack: the SCO case


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(cc) 2007 Juanjo Amor

Some rights reserved. This work licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy

of full license, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ or write to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan

Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.



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Origins of attacks

FLOSS is gaining traction in the IT marketplace.

Resistance mounted by some commercial vendors

Vicious attacks mounted by others

Enemies are using the well known “FUD” attacks (Fear,Uncertainty, Doubt).



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What is a FUD?

FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

Articles in press.

“Expert” talks.

Partial analysis.

. . .

Also, attacks through tribunals.



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The SCO case: the Legal Quandary of FLOSS

Probably, the most well known FUD until the date.

Created by SCO Group in 2003, as a lawsuit against IBM, andits aftermath.

Objective: to bully companies into avoiding FLOSS. Thisobjective has, mainly, failed (fortunately).



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The SCO case: origins

SCO was a small company, born after merging Santa CruzOperation, a small company what bought several Unix patentsto Novell, with Linux vendor Caldera.SCO was viewed as one of the companies which wanted toopen its market model to the FLOSS (through free operatingsystems).This changed in March 2003, when 2003 dropped the bomb.Thanks to original patents owned by Santa Cruz Operation,SCO claimed that they were the intellectual owners of Unixand their patents.They considered that IBM engineers infringed SCO rights, bycopying some copyrighted material from AIX to Linux.Results: SCO sued IBM for $1 billion.Two months later, SCO announced that they had discoveredmore code inside Linux.SCO sent also a letter to every Fortune 1000 company,claiming licenses for each Linux processor in use.



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Realistic claims or FUD?

Some companies were wondering whether SCO’s claims werereal.

For example: the Munich Council case.

What to learn? This could be a FUD or not, but we shouldassume some risks when using FLOSS solutions.

Copyright infringement, patents, etc. are ever possible.



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What should we know about SCO?

The story of this dispute begins at Novell, which initiallystarted to explore to FLOSS as business model.

This triggered a series o events that led to the currentsituation.



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Brief story of SCO

A secret project of Novell, in the early 1990s.

During that project, Novell bought Unix original patents andother rights to AT&T (1993).

After reorganization, Novell sold these goods to Santa CruzOperation.

Caldera bought the goods and the SCO Group arrived.

Changes in management team.

New CEO, Darl McBride, expert in businesses models relatedwith patents.

Results: the case against IBM. Creation of SCOSource to selllicenses.



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The lawsuit against IBM

Based in copies of chunks of Unix code from AIX to Linux, toadd new improvements that IBM wanted to Linux.

SCO considered license violation.

SCO rejected to publish the “copied” chunks.

War of words: the copied code is not public. So it does notexist.

However, Microsoft and Sun bought licenses to SCO.



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The lawsuit against IBM

Two months later: SCO announces that they have found morecode copied from Unix to Linux.

They sent the letter to 1000 Fortune and 500 Fortune Globalcompanies. They claimed a license of $699 for each Linuxprocessor.

Some companies bought the license. SCO announced thatthey earned $11,000 in second quarter 2004.

That is, only about 15 companies bought the license. Success?



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Novell enters the arena

May 2004: Novell enters the arena: SCO has not any legalfoundation on which to sue IBM.

Novell still owned the copyrights and patents that SCOneeded for this case.

That is, Novell didn’t sold all the patents, only a subset (andnot useful for the SCO claims).



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FLOSS activists enter the arena

Eric Raymond dissected many SCO arguments: seehttp://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html.

SCO assertion that Linux was not scalable, robust OS unableto compete with Unix until IBM dumped AIX code into it.SCO’s protests that IBM had infringed on proprietary code.Most code published by SCO as copied, was released as OpenSource by SCO in 2002, and didn’t come from IBM.


http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html


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The Microsoft connection

2004: SCO sues two Linux end users: DaimlerChrysler andAutoZone.

SCO can initiate a war agains these two companies since theyhad $25 million from Sun and Microsoft.

Investment of $50 million by BayStar Capital venture firm.

Microsoft had played matchmaker, and a BayStar principalopenly admitted this.

The Halloween Documents(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents,look for Document X.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents


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The Implications of the SCO crisis

SCO suits have exposed the myth that says that FLOSS isimmune from questions of authorship and ownership.

From a legal standpoint, copyright precedents for FLOSS arenot as clear at its advocates might like.

When RMS drafted the GPL in 1984, he tried to be verycareful in basing his Copyleft model on contemporarycopyright law. But GPL had not been tested in the courts,meaning there is little precedent for how the SCO suit mightplay out.

For FSF legal counsel, this has a simple explanation: there arenot precedents because the GPL works.

Aggressive interpretation of the SCO license for the SCO suitagainst IBM.



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The results

The case against IBM is tenuous and is not really relevant.

IBM engineers assumed they were in the right.

If SCO wins, IBM will have to pay the costs, but Linux andthe GPL should hardly fatally flawed.

The GPL never arrived to the courts because IP violations.

RMS anticipated the problem when he wrote GPL.

Linus Torvalds, however, never required to contributors to signas they owned the contributed code. This facilitated SCOclaims.

Possible solution: to rewrite all parts presumably copied fromoriginal Unix. Raymond says that this was done with all codeshowed by SCO as “copied”.

The patents infringed by Linux (283 patents, Steve Ballmersaid).



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More FUD?

Patents

OpenSolaris

. . .

Defending against FUD:

To buy the “licenses”

To get help from OSS big companies.

Open Source Risk Management.



Bibliography

Bibliography

D. Woods, G. Guliani: “Open Source for the Enterprise”.O’Reilly, July 2005.

Wikipedia entries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Grouphttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._IBMhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._Novell


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._IBM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._Novell

Floss Attacked: SCO case

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