Stories about: SCO

Open Invention Network, which buys patents related to the Linux operating system and licenses them royalty-free, Tuesday launched a program aimed at encouraging open-source developers to document information about their work so that it can be easily read and used by patent offices and lawyers.

The obvious thought came to me while writing last week's column, that about the only folk (other than the deluded and amoral management of the SCO Group) that want the SCO Group effort attacking Linux and other open source initiatives to succeed is Microsoft. So I decided to explore that side in this follow-up column, but a bit of reading led me to the conclusion that things are not as simple as they appear.

At the beginning of its massive legal fight against Linux in 2003, The SCO Group imagined a day when companies like IBM, Novell and others would pay it large amounts of cash for alleged infringements on SCO-owned Unix code.

A few weeks ago, the OpenSUSE Project announced the release of OpenSUSE 11.0, the "community" edition of SUSE Linux, Novell's commercial Linux distribution. Like most recent distributions, OpenSUSE is made up of the usual suspects, including GNOME and KDE-based desktops, Live CD and full DVD installation options, and an online repository of software that can be installed using a GUI tool.

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, Zemlin also has served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, providing products and services for the Apache Web server. Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference and Linux World.

Earlier this year, it looked like The SCO Group was going down for the count. It had lost a key decision in its suit against Novell, declared bankruptcy and was quickly running out of money.

The private equity firm that has offered to pump up to US$100 million into SCO thinks court rulings against the vendor in its highly publicized Unix copyright lawsuits "don't make any sense" and it believes those rulings can be reversed on appeal to a higher court.

The embattled SCO Group has reached an agreement with a private equity firm that plans to provide the vendor as much as US$100 million and take SCO private.

Novell will head to court this April to find out what it is owed, if anything, by SCO, which had been trying to earn royalties from Unix code it did not own.

The SCO Group has been removed from the Nasdaq Stock Market because the company declared bankruptcy in September.

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, or FUD, is an old sword with a new blade in today's competitive IT world. If you cannot beat 'em, create controversy. But the old tactic is starting to lose its effectiveness.