Comment Articles

Who stole SCO's lollipop?

Matt Loney ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 15 May 2003 13:44 BST

I hate to say it, but I can't help feeling that SCO is behaving rather like a belligerent child who has had its lollipop stolen. You could say that SCO is doing nothing more than protecting its intellectual property, and doing that in the most obvious way: by calling in the lawyers. Well, it's the lawyers who tend to lend that belligerent quality to any argument. It always ends in tears, and there's never, really, a good excuse.

In the meantime, a lot of companies who have bought SCO Linux from none other than the new SCO Group in the understandable belief that they were buying a legitimate operating system over the counter are getting worried, as are companies who bought Linux from IBM, Red Hat and others. We understand that SuSE customers are safe, but in an interview last year, SCO's then-incoming chief executive Darl McBride indicated to me that the company's intellectual property (from the Unix code base) was likely to be many more places. You can bet that right now over at HP teams of lawyers and engineers are scouring the source code of HP UX and Tru64 to check for liabilities, while up at IBM the same will be going on with AIX and Dynix. Even Sun and Apple are likely to be asking themselves -- even if only for a sanity check -- "Are we safe?" Indeed, is anybody?

There is a simple -- and naive -- solution to all this. SCO could do the grown-up thing and say, hey, we've got UnixWare and OpenServer, and people are still buying them (which they are), and if other people can make money from Linux then maybe we can too, after all (which they haven't been). I suspect that Doug Michels, who founded the original SCO and is now chief executive of that part that was not sold off to Caldera, might have taken that attitude. Michels has always been one of those people known for his love of Unix. Lawyers, on the other hand, have not -- unless it involves lawsuits and money.

So what's going on at SCO? Well, SCO's lollipop was something called Project Monterey, and the big bully who snatched it was IBM -- now the focus of SCO's $1bn lawsuit. Project Monterey was around at the time of Doug Michels' SCO; the old SCO. The new SCO Group, headed by Darl McBride, is a different animal altogether, and was created when Caldera bought the operating systems and professional services division of the old SCO. That is, the Linux company bought two Unix operating systems: UnixWare and OpenServer.

The two SCOs are separated by four years, the coming of age of Linux, and the theft of one giant lollipop.