Posted on 08/10/2004 7:45:05 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The threat of higher fees may now be the only way to prod more companies into buying SCO Group licenses because further lawsuits have been put on ice.
SCO is hinting that it may soon raise the cost of its intellectual property (IP) licenses, which it says companies running Linux need to buy in order to avoid being sued.
Many in the open-source community have been angered by SCO's ongoing claim that its proprietary Unix code has been illegally included within Linux. The company is currently involved in legal action against IBM, Novell and AutoZone.
Darl McBride, SCO's chief executive, revealed last week that his company isn't planning to bring more lawsuits anytime soon. This admission has led to speculation that there is now no incentive for companies to move quickly to protect themselves against SCO's lawyers.
SCO has a plan to try and counter such complacency.
Blake Stowell, SCO's public relations director, said companies that elect to sit tight and see if SCO wins could end up out of pocket.
He told ZDNet UK that SCO is "evaluating" its SCOsource program and could decide to make it much more expensive for companies to indemnify themselves against attack from SCO in the future.
"Companies that license now may be able to do so cheaper than if they do so later," Stowell said.
Two types of IP licenses are currently available from SCOsource: "paid up" licenses that give permanent indemnity, and annual licenses, which vary between one-fifth and two-fifths of the cost of a full version.
SCO may decide not to offer both options in the future and could, for example, decide to insist on an annual payment that would be more lucrative in the long term.
However, interest in the SCOsource program appears to be tailing off. Stowell said that the company expected to announce "six-figure" revenue for SCOsource for its most recent financial quarter. That's a far cry from the days when it gathered millions from licensees such as Microsoft.
This decline could suggest that most companies believe that SCO will lose its various court cases. If this happened, then the company's claim that Linux contains its IP would be in tatters and there would be no need for its SCOsource licenses.
IBM, which is fighting the claim that it violated its Unix contract with SCO by moving proprietary Unix technology to open-source Linux, declined to comment on the news that SCO may increase its SCOsource fees.
"SCO" =? "System Coordination Office" ????
SCO is a company attempting to keep operating long after the marketplace has decided they should no longer exist by trial lawyer litigation...
This is all this Linux suit has been about since day one. If you can't innovate and win in the marketplace... just go for extortion. Frankly I think a RICO lawsuit needs launched by the Feds against SCO ASAP.
LOL!!
This sounds mostly like they are trying to figure out how to get more immediate cash to pay off their lawyers.
.
Aren't they just daring the Feds to shut them down for running an extortion racket?
Their basic claim is that Linux is based on Unix and they own the rights to several distributions of Linux originally authored by IBM.
However Linux was not based on the IBM distributions. It was based on Minix, a non-IBM OS for Unix machines and the instruction set for Intel x86 machines.
SCO has no evidence that Linux copies the code they purchased.
In fact, all Linux code is publicly available and easily searchable - they could have demonstrated any plagiarism conclusively long ago, but they can't.
Even more ridiculously, SCO used to be named Caldera, and Caldera was a company that distributed the very same Linux code. They didn't seem to have IP problems with it then.
Since they have no factual leg to stand on, they hired Clinton's attorney David Boies to try and win them some court rulings.
It's not going well for them there either - they're just hoping that they can use the courts to intimidate their competitors and hurt their sales.
SCO's executives belong in jail as surely as Ken Lay or Scott Sullivan.
Unless all Freepers immediately send me my FastCoyote extortion tribute, I am going to double the fees! (cash, credit, it's all good!)
For those of you who, not being IT geeks, are mystified by the whole issue, it's like this. Suppose some homeless drunk guy in your town were to suddenly start proclaiming that he had inherited the whole state of California from some far-sighted ancestor. He's highly vociferous about this claim, making an ass of himself all over town. He barges through shopping malls screaming at people he picks at random. He shows up at civic meetings, thrreatening to charge people who enter "his" state. He becomes a regular at small claims court, filing wacky motions in accordance with his theory. He becomes a fixture in town, rattling his hatful of quarters, angrily demanding more tribute. At the moment the men in white cuff him and haul him away, he insists that he's the only sane person in town...
That won't be necessary. The stock market is doing the job just fine.
http://www.forbes.com/business/2004/08/04/cz_dl_0804sco.html?partner=yahoo&referrer=
SCO says the company's biggest investor, BayStar Capital, has been pushing SCO to drop its Unix business altogether and simply become a litigation machine, bringing intellectual property-related lawsuits. But SCO insists it remains committed to selling Unix software--when it's not busy fighting people in court.
In prehistoric times, I believe it was the "Santa Cruz Operation."
"In prehistoric times, I believe it was the "Santa Cruz Operation.""
The "new" sco has little to nothing to do with Santa Cruz Operation.
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