SCO lost: What does that mean?
So I blogged that SCO lost – I didn't get a chance to explain what that meant. (We were expecting over 70 people to the house that afternoon and my significant other might have shot me if I'd sat down to blog!) So what does it mean that SCO lost? I'm not an attorney (I seem to say that a lot) but here's my quick recap:
Way back in 2003, SCO sued IBM for giving away SCO's trade secrets and SCO's Unix copyright in Linux. Along the way, lots of random things happened:
- In 2004 SCO also sued Novell – saying that Novell was falsely claiming to own the Unix copyrights that SCO said they owned. (If Novell held the Unix copyrights then SCO couldn't sue IBM for giving them away. You can't sue somebody for stealing somebody else's stuff.)
- Microsoft bought a license for Unix from SCO for a million dollars.
- Oh, and SCO continued to distribute Linux (along with, I suppose, the stuff that they are mad at IBM or Novell for contributing to Linux.)
Then on August 10th, 2007 the courts ruled that Novell, not IBM, owned the Unix copyrights in question. So SCO lost the SCO vs Novell case and although the SCO vs IBM case is still open, SCO doesn't have much of a leg to stand on.
The SCO cases cost millions and millions of dollars, caused lots of anguish in companies using or considering Linux, and caused many companies to start demanding indemnification for Linux. In response, companies like HP and Red Hat started indemnifying their Linux distributions. A whole new business was created and Open Source Risk Management – a company that offered insurance against Linux related law suits – was founded. (Plug: OpenLogic offers indemnification for all of the 300+ open source software products we ship. Companies using open source want to have that reassurance. It makes it much easier to explain to your bosses how much open source is going to save you if you don't have to keep responding to "what happens if we are sued?")
Would people have worried about legal risks without the SCO case? Probably.
Would they have worried as much? Probably not.
Would they have moved to Linux and other open source applications faster? Maybe.
You can see the full, detailed time lines of the SCO vs IBM case at Groklaw and of the SCO vs Novell case.
I have been following this story for an entirely different reason — how some companies (and business executives) wrongly believe that litigation-based business model is viable. I fully support IP rights but to build a business on litigation alone is not a viable strategy. The SCO saga should send a strong message to the entrepreneurs and business leaders that real value is created through selling great products to customers so that they are delighted.
I like how Steve Pavlina put it. There are two ways to make money:
1. Contribute.
2. Mooch.
You are either making something of value or you are mooching off of those that do. People whose business plan is to make money by suing others are mooching.
[...] For those that don’t know, SCO –can be described nothing short of a “stupid ogre” of a company that– claimed it’s code had been robbed but (afaik) never came up with this code to prove the point. They intimidated other companies into forking over millions of dollars to avoid being sued for (re)distributing GNU-Linux, despite that they themselves made their GNU-Linux based distro publicly available. This is the sort of logic — or lack thereof– for which SCO is known. This threat of litigation was not limited to companies but also consumers, as this is what caused Sun to contribute 10 million dollars into SCO. I can sum them up in one word, “idiots!”. [...]