Linux users face uncertain future if SCO wins

If you should ever want to silence a chatty elevator after a hard day at a Linux conference, try uttering four simple words: “What if SCO wins?”

IBM may be marshalling an army of lawyers to litigate this very thought out of existence, but the fact remains that the technology industry is transfixed by The SCO Group’s case. This tiny company from Utah — with its struggling product line — is grabbing the spotlight because everyone wants to know how the issue will play out.

Many observers do not expect this dispute to end in a court verdict, in part because they think a complete SCO victory could have a catastrophic effect on the technology industry. The $19 billion Unix market could be thrown into chaos, and the life of the open source community itself could be cut short. And customers? They’d be left with the one commodity they could least use: uncertainty.

Since SCO filed suit against IBM in March, claiming the computer maker had violated its Unix contract by adding work derived from SCO’s System V Unix, the case has been further muddied by additional claims SCO has put forth.

SCO now maintains that Linux violates its Unix copyrights and that the GPL (GNU General Public License) software license that governs Linux is not valid. Add to this a countersuit from IBM and a lawsuit from Red Hat, and you end up with more possible outcomes than can be imagined.

Analysts agree, however, that SCO’s case boils down to determining whether the AT&T license that SCO acquired actually grants the company control over extensions to the Unix kernel, which SCO calls “derivative works” based on its intellectual property.

A SCO victory would clearly hurt IBM, and Linux users would suddenly find themselves running an illegal operating system. But because Linux has become an industrywide phenomenon, such a verdict could rock the entire IT industry. System V licensees such as SGI and Hewlett-Packard have made contributions to Linux that could easily fall under SCO’s expansive definition of derivative works, says Gordon Haff, an analyst at research company Illuminata.

Haff argues that it’s even possible for Unix products such as the Veritas file system, the Oracle database, or even Computer Associates’ Unicenter software to be considered Unix derivatives under this view. “If SCO were to win on the derivative-works claim, it would basically ratify an enormously broad … claim that would affect almost everything to ever touch Unix and would have implications for an enormous variety of products from an enormous variety of vendors,” Haff says.

Some enterprise IT leaders are soldiering on, hoping that the issue will simply go away. In the midst of converting a number of Web, file-and-print, and custom database applications to Linux, an IT manager at one major retailer insists he has no plans to change course.

“We are not going to turn back,” says the IT manager, who asked not to be identified. “We figure that because we have purchased a distribution from SuSE … we are licensed to use Linux,” he explains. “Until something happens in a court of law, we’re not going to do anything different from what we’re doing today. At that point, we will seek legal counsel.”

If the Unix industry would be rocked by a SCO victory, the open source world would be devastated, thanks to the other major question raised in the case: whether or not the GPL is a valid license.

Ironically, IBM — not SCO — was the one that really raised the GPL flag when it accused SCO of violating Linux’s license in its August countersuit. IBM’s argument is that the SCO Intellectual Property License for Linux, which SCO is offering Linux users to aid them in complying with its intellectual property claims, is in fact a violation of the GPL. IBM says the GPL does not allow Linux distributors to add this kind of encumbrance to software released under the open source license.

The GPL question is particularly interesting because the Linux software license — which also governs a number of other open source projects, including Samba and GNOME (GNU Object Model Environment), — has never been completely tested in a court of law.

Darl McBride, SCO’s CEO, portrays the lawsuit as a proxy battle for the future of the software industry, which increasingly views its products as commodities to be given away free. According to McBride, a SCO win would be a victory for companies seeking to be paid for their intellectual property. “Is software going to be free in the future or not?” McBride asks.

In contrast, Eric Raymond, president of Open Source Initiative, says an SCO victory would be tantamount to the end of open source. “It is SCO’s expressed intention to destroy the possibility of open-source licensing,” he says. “Therefore, if SCO wins, the hacker culture dies. It’s pretty much that stark.”

That leaves customers with a variety of unappealing options.

SCO has said it expects customers to stop using any Linux kernel released after the 2.2 series, unless they pay SCO licensing fees of $700 per server processor. Another option would be to simply replace the current Linux kernel with a variety of alternative open source kernels such as BSD or the GNU Hurd kernel.

But the first place most customers will look will be to their Linux vendor, IBM, which will give the computer giant a huge incentive to settle intellectual property claims with SCO, observers say.

“If SCO wins, two things are going to happen,” says Chris LeTocq, an analyst at Guernsey Research. “One, there will be a fairly massive rewriting effort; two, if there’s any indication that this rewriting effort is likely to take any length of time, SCO is suddenly going to find itself purchased.”