The anticipated SCO vs IBM courtroom tussle and the gaping kimono that reveals the telltale smudges of a long standing SCO II (the latter day SCO) and Microsoft heavy petting session seem to be one of those gold plated Douglas Adams-esque SEPs at first glance. As my fellow hitchhikers may remember, an SEP is something that is virtually invisible, as Someone Else’s Problems often are. No concern of yours. Clear as the air in the Slieve Bloom Mountains to you and me.
IT court cases and press releases sent from afar announcing strategic alliances are boring. Not even worth rubber necking as you pass the scene of the accident. ‘Nothing to do with me, mate, I’m trying to decide if Tablet PCs are worth the premium,’ I can hear you say.
A little bit of IT industry hugger mugger or the usual bed hopping/partner swapping/infidelity, ’tis all, you and I may smugly presume. We all readily attribute these shenanigans to the usual order of business on the Left Coast of the Land of the Free and home of the paranoid. Recall the recent embarrassing iLoo imbroglio… laughable. Insignificant.
Or is this a spectator sport for those who find other people’s marital tiffs fascinating? Are you just too busy deleting breast enlargement crème/debt relief/ink jet cartridge spam from your inbox to pay too much attention to industry gossip? (Try Spamnix if you are a Eudora user — it’s excellent! You’ll still be in debt, pay dearly for ink and stuck with what nature gave you, but at least you won’t receive so much junk email about it)
And perhaps, as with the tales of Sun being up for sale to Dell, HP or IBM (take your pick or just laugh!), it’s mere chit chat. Or as baseless as the rumour that Sun’s helmsman, Scott McNealy is for the chop. You’d rightfully be inclined to dismiss it as idle trivia with little bearing on your day-to-day IT dilemmas or resource allocation nightmares. But it’s not. And you shouldn’t.
Alarm bells
Being a long time Unix watcher, the events of the last few weeks have sounded the alarm. The open systems and open source corners of the world are far from tranquil bailiwicks where the technocracy determinably beaver away at ever more powerful and secure Windows alternatives in the post dotcom world of hard graft.
Typical spats over the number of C programmers it takes to make the head of a pin truly scalable, interoperable and compatible are just background noise. These SCO-centric ructions are of the four alarm, big red flashing light variety. The klaxon’s scream is calling out in your direction at impressive speed.
A brief summary of the madcap action so far is in order just in case you have turned other pages under the assumption that the whole Linux intellectual property thing was an SEP. A veritable chronicle of the Unix world could unfurl but I’ll try to spare you.
Linus Torvalds
AT&T created Unix in the 60’s and then the trouble started. Its corpus passed through various hands including Novell and SCO (SCO I — the original Santa Cruz, Ca. variety). There were some not too carefully worded license agreements with Sun, IBM and HP among others. Diversity flourished.
Along the way some folks that were altogether more hairy and libertine than the crass commercialists flogging heavy iron running (among other things) Unix created a very similar but distinctly different critter called Linux. A sandbox for student programmers went critical.
What was later to become the open source community was lead by a Finnish grad student named Linus Torvalds who modestly named his kernel research project after himself. He attracted a global following turbocharged by an end-of-techno days dotcom feeding frenzy.
Open source acolytes publish the source code of their creations openly so that others can improve on them and use them for free. Needless to say this is an anathema to the rest of the software world as typified by people that have paid a lot of money for programming talent, sales commissions, multi-storey car parks full of executive conveyances, etc. Not to mention investors looking for dividends and an ever increasing share price.
Linux didn’t and still doesn’t sit very well with the Unix community from which it sort of sprang. Is it jealousy or just a better sense of what makes the world go round? Doug Michels, originally CTO and then CEO of SCO (I), opined a few years ago that the intellectual property conundrums inherent in the open source developmental model were a time bomb. I’ve heard Ballmer and Gates say the same with a lot less ambiguity or tact.
Despite our long professional relationship and perhaps because we had been investigating California viticultural by-products that afternoon, I was inclined to dismiss Michel’s musings as partially FUD inspired. After all, here was the head of a company with a global network of customers (and developers and sales dudes), a real revenue stream and profits with a share capitalisation far less than the Linux upstarts who ostensibly gave their stuff away and not a whiff of profit in sight. Michels was just being prescient, a trait sometimes acquired if sufficient Bonny Doon Le Cigare Volant is consumed.
Some true believers in open source tried to make a go of creating for-profit businesses based on giving away software. The struggle goes on, rather like waging war to ensure peace. One of the companies that were at the leading edge of New Age business model engineering was Caldera, a Utah based company funded by Ray Noorda of Novell fame, who you might recall, owned Unix before flogging it to SCO (I).
After the sale of two thirds of SCO (I) to Caldera, SCO (I) changed its name to Tarantella and went its merry way with a secure applications and data access product portfolio. Sic Transit Gloria but also Sic Transit a lot of headaches.
In due course, Caldera changed its name to SCO Group which I will heretofore label SCO (II) as it is easier for all concerned to keep track of the damn thing than calling it SCO Group, or Son of SCO, or Devil Spawn of the Mormons, or whatever. The IP of Unix has become the property of a Linux company that is as desperate as the next to show its investors that it isn’t running a charity.
The time bomb predicted by Michels has started making rumbling noises. IBM, never a comfortable company to partner with (ask anybody) is being accused by SCO (II) for ripping off its intellectual property to the tune of $1bn dollars (Anybody else imagine Dr Evil saying this?)
The truth will out. In the meantime scribes are having a blast with the contradictions, back biting and name calling. Meaningless drivel?
The bottom line of this screed and the reason you have been ratcheting your eyeballs back and forth on this page for the past four minutes should be clear to even the meanest intellect. This ain’t no SEP. It affects the future price, availability and support overhead of software whether you are a ‘pure-as-the-driven-snow’ Linux user or an ‘in-the-mire-with-the-rest’ Windows victim.
If you buy or develop software for business use, it is ultimately not going to be cheaper or easier if you opt for a Linux-based system and your upgrade and technical support issues are not going to be made any simpler either. The mother of all FUD clouds is about to descend on the open-source community and whisk away the firm footing they presumably held on the moral high ground. Severe dents in the eggshell-like economic case for Linux will ensue.
Sure, the wheels of justice will grind slowly onwards in the US and a decision on SCO’s end game negotiating tactic with Big Blue will take years to reach a denouement despite the big name lawyers assembled by both sides (or perhaps because of it). I wouldn’t care to speculate when and who will ‘win’. But the effects of the law suit will be felt in the much nearer term, akin to the way the stock market behaves with the expectation of bad news.
Bedfellows
And if you thought that Linux was going to be a bulwark against the avarice of the Monopolists of Redmond, think again. Poking out from under the open source duvet is a pair of Linux-hack sandals right next to those cloven hooves. Capitalism makes strange bedfellows.
Speculation is rife that Microsoft is engaging in a bit of champerty, i.e. supporting litigation by another party in the hope of benefiting from the outcome. After a lot of very expensive association with legal eagles over the past few years, Microsoft may have learned a trick or two and found a way to acquire the hearts and minds of Unix and Linux by partnering and licensing where no other form of transaction could pass muster in even the Republican-dulled US Department of Justice. I never said Microsoft was stupid.
For all we know, Microsoft may be readying its own Linux distribution instead of merely using the IP to assure better interoperability as they say. We all know what a great job Microsoft does with freebie software. How could it be accused of operating a monopoly if it is better at giving it away than Red Hat or SUSE?
No rest for the wicked, I’m afraid. Eyes open for SEPs that are really your problems. When you select a business tool, make sure it fulfils your business needs today. Discount heavily promises of what will happen tomorrow. Or start drinking a lot of Le Cigare Volant.
26/06/2003
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