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Microsoft joins Linux fear campaign

Bruce Perens ZDNet US

Published: 20 May 2003 13:10 BST

Microsoft's connection to the anti-Linux campaign being waged by the SCO Group is becoming clear.

In the latest move, Microsoft has stepped up the battle with an announced agreement to license SCO's Unix patents and the source code, describing the deal as a reflection of its "ongoing commitment to respecting intellectual property and the IT community's healthy exchange of IP through licensing."

Nice rhetoric.

This comes after SCO just last week sent a letter to big IT customers, threatening legal action. And the reality is that Microsoft is tying SCO's allegations into its own anti-GPL campaign, a mostly unsuccessful effort to convince customers that the sharing and openness methods used in Linux development are unhealthy for the market. (SCO has gone so far as to publish "Quotations from Linux Leaders", a collection of inaccurate and out-of-context quotes of GNU Public License creator Richard Stallman and myself to paint Linux developers as nothing better than software pirates.)

Someone should tell SCO that IT customers don't like to be threatened by their vendors. In fact, the increasingly bellicose tone of SCO's communications and the refusal to show any evidence might well suggest that its claims are nothing more than grandiose ravings. To be sure, Microsoft will take advantage of those ravings while it can.

The real story here is the lack of substance to the SCO claims, and the increasingly remote chance that its lawyers will prevail. A similar case alleging plagiarism of Unix by an open-source operating system was litigated in the early '90s. AT&T sued the University of California, claiming that the BSD system infringed upon AT&T's copyrights. Eventually, the court narrowed AT&T's concerns down to only four source files, which the university simply replaced rather than argue about them. AT&T then settled the case by paying the university's court costs. SCO is not likely to do any better.