Why SCO won't show the code, Aug 19, 2003

So...SCO's code demonstration, the one that it put up to convince its resellers of its case, comes from a version of Unix which first came out in 1979. The code was publicly circulated in the 1980's, and explicitly released under the BSD license by [the company now known as] SCO at the beginning of 2002. SCO might well have a complaint that SGI did not properly give credit for the code it used. But there is no possible way the company can argue that this code's presence in Linux is an infringement of its copyrights.

The SCO Group's argument that the GNU General Public License is invalid would also mean Microsoft is breaking the law, according to the Free Software Foundation

Such an interpretation "would... eliminate Microsoft's method for the distribution of the Windows operating system, which is pre-loaded by hard drive manufacturers onto disk drives they deliver by the hundreds of thousands to PC manufacturers," he noted.

"We were one of the first digital video people to make the move to Linux because, at the time [we were] using [Windows] 95 and 98, we had something like a 20-25 percent call-out rate per month to the systems, because they would just hang and corrupt themselves," said Douglas, explaining that Opia Vision moved to the open source platform because they needed higher reliability

In the absence of windowsupdate.com the first stop of incoming requests was the Akamai caching service which Microsoft uses. This runs on Linux, hence Netcraft report a Linux host, but behind this the Microsoft servers were still operational, hence the report of Microsoft IIS running on Linux. So Microsoft isn't running Windows Update on Linux, and although it's using a service provider that runs on Linux, those services are still fielding back to Windows 2003 servers, clear?

In addition to commercial reasons for protecting local software, there are security concerns. China is placing official support behind the Red Flag Linux operating system, which they trust because the open-source code allows officials to see that there are no data spyholes installed by foreign powers.

"We challenge SCO to specify exactly what code it believes to be infringing….only with that disclosure can we begin the process of remedying any breach that may exist….if SCO is willing to take the honest, cooperative path forward, so are we. If it is not, let the record show that we tried before resorting to more confrontational means of defending our community against predation," the e-mail said.

At the SCO Forum here Monday, the company pulled out its latest weapon: lines and lines of disputed code that were allegedly copied from SCO's Unix into IBM's version of Linux. The company claims that IBM illegally copied Unix code into its version of Linux, and it's warning Linux customers that they may be violating copyright by using the operating system without paying SCO. It's also recently rolled out a new licensing plan that would require Linux customers to pay between $199 and $699 per computer.

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