Posted on 07/28/2003 6:43:33 PM PDT by Salo
update IBM has launched a counterstrike against SCO Group's attack on Linux users, arguing that SCO's demands for Unix license payments are undermined by its earlier shipment of an open-source Linux product.
IBM's assertion came in a message to its sales force last Thursday evening, four days after SCO said Linux users must pay the company for a Unix license or face possible legal action. SCO Group, owner of the Unix intellectual property, contends that Unix code was illegally copied line by line into Linux and that companies such as IBM illegally transferred improvements made to Unix into Linux.
SCO's latest actions broadened its case against Linux beyond the US$3 billion lawsuit it has filed against IBM. Likewise, IBM's new message to its sales force--the chief way it communicates with customers--is a significant expansion of its defense over the narrower memos it sent earlier. Those memos said that IBM will stand by its customers and defend itself vigorously.
"SCO itself has distributed Linux under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which grants a free copyright license and requires that users be granted the right to freely redistribute the code free of claims," Bob Samson, vice president of IBM's systems sales, said in the message, which was seen by CNET News.com. IBM confirmed the authenticity of the memo. "SCO has not explained how it can now make a claim in the face of its distribution of Linux under these terms," Samson said.
SCO sold a version of Linux but stopped selling it in May. Several earlier versions of SCO's Linux products still are available on the company's FTP site, though.
However, SCO has in fact addressed the issue, in response to claims by Linux seller and former business partner SuSE and by the Free Software Foundation, which wrote the GPL. On Friday, SCO spokesman Blake Stowell reiterated the company's earlier position that the GPL provisions don't apply because SCO is the Unix copyright holder and it never placed the copyrighted code under the GPL.
"Distributing a product is not the same as contributing to a product," Stowell said Friday. In other words, the mere act of distributing GPL-covered code isn't sufficient; the copyright holder also has to deliberately release the code as open-source, he said. "The copyright holder has to knowingly contribute this code."
Section 0 of the GPL states, "This license applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License." However, Section 6 states, "Each time you redistribute the program (or any work based on the program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the program."
Legal experts said it's not clear which side is in the right, and that it may take a legal challenge in court to produce a ruling.
In the message from IBM, Samson also disparaged SCO's efforts to extract Unix license revenue from Linux users.
"This appears to be another desperate, unfair and unsupported attack on Linux in an attempt to wring money from customers without providing any factual basis as to why they should pay," Samson said. "SCO's statements consist of bare allegations without supporting facts. SCO has yet to identify the code which it claims is infringing in Linux, nor has it offered to openly disclose the code to the Linux community."
SCO hasn't identified publicly what code was allegedly copied line by line from Unix, though it has shown it to more than four dozen people who signed nondisclosure agreements, Stowell said.
SCO has, however, given some examples of software it said was derived from Unix and moved to Linux in violation of its contracts with Unix licensees such as IBM. In its lawsuit against IBM, SCO points to read-copy update (RCU), the Journal File System (JFS) and extensions to support non-uniform memory access (NUMA). These software packages are used to bring various higher-end features to Linux.
IBM contends it has done nothing wrong and hasn't violated its license terms.
It was comments by IBM exactly like that which got SCO's attention to begin with...
Interesting things turning up in searches of old newsgroups. Here's SCO developer Jun Nakajima talking about the SMP kernels he's working on. This is two years ago, and SCO is clearly participating in this effort:
From: Jun Nakajima (jun@sco.com) Subject: Re: high performance smp Newsgroups: mlist.linux.smp Date: 2001-02-09 09:22:41 PST I think SGI's compiler is doing a better job in that respect. Today 2.4.0 SMP kernels run on SMP IA-64 platforms (e.g. 4-way) reliably. I'm using such systems for heavy-duty software developement. We had a demo using an 8-way IA-64 machine last Summer.
This would fit with Caldera CEO Ransom Love's speech at the Linux World 2000 conference:
clearly we are going to add components back to the Linux kernel on both IA-32 and IA-64 platforms. We'll work with Linus and everyone in order to make that available. SCO now claims that they did not know any of this was happening? There are contemporaneous documents showing that they were working on it, alongside HP, Intel, VA/Linux, IBM, SGI, and others. There must be dozens of people who can testify that SCO developers were in the middle of this effort. I think they're going to have a tough time getting a judge to buy the idea that somebody slipped this by them.
IBM actually has nine affirmative defenses (the GPL issue is in #7).
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