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SCO's legal gun takes aim at Linux

Lisa M Bowman CNET News.com

Published: 22 Aug 2003 09:25 BST

Instead of talking up new products, SCO Group executives devoted the bulk of their presentations at this week's SCO Forum to the fight against Linux.

And for good reason. The company sued IBM in March, saying it illegally contributed some of SCO's licensed Unix code to Linux. Since then, SCO has been making a major business out of intellectual property enforcement, which happens to be the company's fastest-growing revenue generator.

SCO's lawsuit has excited no small degree of controversy. Critics say the company is trying to shake down Linux users and that it does not have any legal basis for its claims. So in a bid to clarify its case both to customers and detractors, the company showed the disputed code to some attendees at the SCO Forum, its annual user conference that took place this week in Las Vegas.

But that step did anything but lower the temperature. Shortly after making the offer to let outsiders examine the code, members of the Linux community blasted SCO, saying the code was originally covered under a public licence that allows it to be shared.

CNET News.com sat down at SCO Forum earlier this week with attorney Mark Heise, a partner with Boies Schiller & Flexner, which is representing SCO, to talk about how the case is affecting the company, the open-source community, and public licences that require sharing such as the General Public License, or GPL.

Q: Why is this case important?
A: It's a case that has the possibility of defining in what direction the software industry is going. Are we going to have an open-source free-for-all? Are we going to have proprietary only? Or are we going to have some sort of combination?

This case has been characterised as an attack on the GPL.
We never raised the GPL in this litigation. We are somewhat surprised that IBM, which has this tremendous copyright and patent portfolio, is advocating the use of the GPL since it could have an impact on them. We don't think the GPL applies. We believe it is pre-empted by the federal copyright law.