On Thursday, March 6, 2003, after months of FUD, the SCO Group has sued IBM for ... 1 Billion dollars! - no, $3B, no, $5 Billion, says SCO - alleging that IBM has contributed SCO-owned IP to Linux.

Later on, SCO has sent letters to Fortune 1000 companies requesting them to pay a "license fee" to avoid being sued later. Further improving on their borderline extortion plan, in August they devise a scheme to get $699 from all Linux users. What would you get for that hefty sum you ask ? Well, I can't quite say, and neither would SCO (they would not disclose what exactly you are licensing). Despite SCO's own arguments that the debacle is about multiprocessor enterprise scalability, all Linux users, including the embedded market (who use devices with the power of computers of five years ago) were asked to pay up.

It looks like SCO has taken a self-destructive business path, which probably does not matter to them as SCO's own products have been losing significant market share in the past few years. For any company, sueing your major clients on fairly uncertain grounds would not seem like such a smart move. Disputing an unclear second-hand inherited contract with IBM seems downright suicidal.

Then there are the conspiracy theories. Open-Source Software has taken off in the past years in the business world, eating well into the server market share. Microsoft is openly anti-Open-Source. They are also trying to grab more of the above-mentioned market share where Linux also competes directly and effectively. Microsoft is the only large company that has paid SCO a significant amount ($8M) for a Unix-related license this year (which incidentally was the only reason SCO were not in red at the 10K filing time). SCO has targeted IBM, SGI and the entire Open-Source development model. In doing so, they are spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about OSS' and Linux' feasibility as a business solution. Interestingly enough, this is exactly the way Microsoft planned to fight the OSS wars. It's also probably worth mentioning in passing that, with press release after press-release, SCO's stock has jumped from a few bucks to over $12 in the past months.

So in August SCO has attacked the GPL License which stands at the very heart of lots of Open-Source projects, including most Linux software. The GPL ensures that the works people have made public for everybody to use freely, remain that way and are not turned into a company's proprietary product that no one can alter. It also ensures that improvements to them stay the same way. This is a good way for software to evolve, as hundreds of thousands of people will contribute their ideas to make better tools.

What SCO is doing is essentially stealing all these people's work based on a "foreign object" that they claim they own in it, but would not tell others because removing it would solve matters too quickly and leave SCO dry.

Who are your friends ? IBM, HP and others have recognized this trend and adopted OSS for their own products. Sun on the other does not like Linux much and are trying to bank on the SCO uncertainty, since they are the only significant player in the now rarefied high-end Unix server market. I think they are doing with Solaris what 3DFX were doing few years ago with the Voodoo cards. Remember 3DFX ?