IBM vs. SCO Group
SCO Group is not making many friends in the market by the ways it is pursuing corporations working on Linux. The latest news in is that they have won a court battle against the tech giant IBM (International Business Machines) over the long running battle regarding intellectual property dispute over the Linux computer operating system. The courts have ordered IBM to make available around 2 Billion lines of code of internally developed applications to SCO.
This ruling is to let SCO Group prove that IBM indeed used proprietary code of SCO UNIX Operating System in the Open Source Linux developed by IBM. SCO sued IBM over this around two years ago. This has rather sparked a flame between the two groups working on software development – Open Source Community, which is working on Linux voluntarily developing code, and the old-fashioned corporations, which kept their applications closed.
IBM on their part has contributed a lot to the Linux movement. They have run TV ads and even released some of their patents to be used by the Open Source Developers to program their code. However, cases like these would be dampening their initiative and stop other corporations from starting contributing to the Linux development cycle.
This ruling would mean that IBM would have to give out code of their applications AIX and Dynix operating systems based on UNIX. The news also showed its effect on the share market as stock value of SCO’s share jumped around 20%!
|
TechWhack on Facebook
|
February 1st, 2005 at 2:09 am
I don’t think SCO has case here. If IBM will have used some SCO code and make it open for Linux, SCO should be able to tell from which like to which line the code had been used without authorization. SCO haven’t made that. It seems that this is just to try to scare Linux users away.