Specifications

MICHAEL J. MILLER
One thing is
clear: The
lawyers from
IBM and SCO
will be arguing
for some time
to come.
www.pcmag.com SEPTEMBER 16, 2003 PC MAGAZINE
7
Forward Thinking
MICROSOFT HAS A MONOPOLY on the desktop—a
court-certified one with Windows and a de facto
one with Microsoft Office—and I’m not seeing
much action against this. Although Apple has a
small but loyal following, it doesn’t seem to want to
take on Microsoft directly. And Linux remains a
niche player on the desktop.
Server software is a different story, with multiple
companies competing with various flavors of Unix,
Linux coming on strong, and middleware providers
entering the scene. Microsoft has made a significant
effort with Windows Server 2003 and its .
NET strat-
egy, but it’s just one of several players.
In the past couple of weeks, I had the opportunity
to sit down with senior executives from
SCO, IBM,
and Sun Microsystems and discuss the future of en-
terprise software. Here are the views from
SCO and
IBM. I’ll save Sun for the next issue.
FIGHTING THE OS WARS: THREE PERSPECTIVES
THE SHAPE OF COMPUTING over the next few years
may be heavily influenced by some legal contracts per-
taining to Unix that were written more than a decade
ago. The
SCO Group is claiming that IBM has violated
its Unix contract by contributing certain code to Linux.
SCO is also alleging that Linux users are illegally run-
ning some of the company’s copyrighted code.
I was initially quite skeptical about these claims,
but after talking with several of the principals in the
case, I’m not so sure anymore. The history of
SCO
and Unix is complex. Unix was created by AT&T,
which licensed versions to many organiza-
tions. One licensee, The Santa Cruz Orga-
nization (
SCO), sold a version of Unix for
Intel x86–based computers. Even-
tually,
AT&T sold Unix—including
the patents and copyrights—to
Novell, which tried to make
UnixWare a competitive operat-
ing system. The strategy wasn’t
particularly successful, so Novell
sold its Unix business to
SCO.
Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds
created and popularized Linux by using the
open-source general public license (
GPL). A number
of companies, including Caldera, Red Hat, and SuSe,
developed their own Linux distributions.
IBM and
others soon began promoting Linux as an enterprise
operating system for servers. As a result of these
efforts and the inroads Windows was making on
servers,
SCO’s Unix business on x86 systems
declined. In 2001, Caldera acquired
SCO’s server di-
vision, later changing its name to The
SCO Group.
That’s when the copyright controversy emerged.
Chris Sontag, a
VP at
SCO, recently visited
PC
Mag-
azine’s offices with a stack of documents he claims
proves
SCO’s case. Some of these documents are
compelling. Sontag explained that
SCO owns the
copyright to Unix System V. He said that through
kernel 2.2, Linux was progressing fine under the
GPL.
But in the transition to kernel 2.4, code was added
that violates
SCO’s copyrights.
Some of the evidence Sontag showed us is straight-
forward: Sections of the Linux kernel code relating to
the journaling file system and multi-
processor support are identical to the
Unix System V code. He offered to
show us specific sections of the
Unix code, but only under a
nondisclosure agreement, which we
refused. He said this code was not
added to Linux by
IBM but by some-
one else, and that it’s a violation of
SCO’s copyright. I’m not a lawyer, but his
argument seems convincing.
Sontag then explained that
IBM’s
Unix contract prohibits disclosure of
the source code for Unix or for “deriva-
tive” works based on Unix. He said that
IBM con-
tributed code to Linux, sections of which were de-
rivative of Unix, created originally for
IBM’s AIX.
This, according to Sontag, is in violation of
IBM’s con-
tract. One thing is clear: The lawyers from
IBM and
SCO will be arguing about this for some time.
I also recently spoke with Steve Mills, head of
IBM’s software group, who said that it’s mostly an
AIX contract issue and that
IBM has “perpetual, ir-
revocable rights” to Unix.
IBM lawyers are convinced
the company did not violate the contract, and
IBM
has countersued
SCO
. According to Mills, SCO was a
SCO’S LINUX CONUNDRUM
ILLUSTRATION BY MILAN TRENC