IT shops unfazed by SCO's Unix offensive against IBM

Corporate users and developers remain the least concerned about The SCO Group's Unix offensive against IBM.

Despite SCO's decision to follow through with its threat to revoke IBM's AIX distribution licence, the legal fiasco has still not reached the priority radar in Australia's IT shops.

Even local embedded Linux engineers said the SCO/IBM lawsuit has not affected their Linux decisions, according to a poll conducted by Brisbane-based security solutions provider Snapgear.

In a poll of 85 visitors to the embedded Linux developer forum (www.ucdot.org), more than 90 per cent were unconcerned about the Unix offensive while 8 per cent were undecided.

While there are thousands of Australian users who may feel the impact of the lawsuit, Gartner's servers and storage research director Phil Sargeant said not a single client had shown concerns about the Unix battle.

He said corporate users are not troubled, in fact they are downright complacent, because they know that it will be ultimately resolved.

"Even if money changes hands as a result of the lawsuit, end users know it will resolved and they know it isn't the billion-dollar threat SCO is making it out to be," Sargeant said.

This isn't a good sign for Sun Microsystems which has launched an advertising compaign prodding corporate AIX users to start worrying about the ongoing legal battle. In the ads, Sun offers its own Solaris as an alternative Unix platform.

"Attention AIX Users: Sun is Here to Help. ... Unfortunately, our friends in Blue have a problem with licensing contracts that could make things very expensive for anyone running AIX," said the ads, which offer free, two-day assessments to customers looking to migrate from AIX to Solaris.

Nancy Weintraub, director of competitive intelligence at Sun, admitted legal officials inside companies are often more worried about the implications of the SCO action than IT staff.

In a separate statement, Sun reaffirmed to "its customers and partners that it has licensing rights to Unix code" and doesn't face the kinds of legal issues being pursued by SCO against IBM.

- with Todd Weiss