Despite The SCO Group’s recent move to terminate IBM Corp.’s right to distribute its AIX Unix operating system, and its claims to a portion of IBM’s total Unix revenue, some Canadian Unix users say they’re not losing sleep over the whole ordeal.
In addition to the US$1 billion in damages SCO is seeking for revenue lost to Linux, the Lindon, Utah company is now also seeking compensation from IBM for AIX-related hardware, services and software that it ships.
“Starting Friday (June) the 13th and going forward, the IBM revenue stream that ties to AIX, we’re going to make a claim on that revenue stream, based on the fact that they don’t have an authorized version of AIX to ship,” said SCO CEO Darl McBride in an interview.
“We have the contract rights to terminate their use of the software in the marketplace, or their ability to distribute their software in the marketplace,” McBride said.
But Rainer Heilke, secretary and newsletter editor for Edmonton Unix Users Group (EUUG), said he is “politely incredulous” when it comes to SCO’s claims. At a recent EUUG meeting, members briefly discussed the latest developments in the lawsuit, which was launched in March. “Everyone seems to be taking it as a joke to be shrugged off,” he said.
Heilke said the EUUG has done a number of presentations that shed some light on SCO’s claims.
These included a tracking of Unix’s ancestral tree – or “trellis,” as he likes to call it – that “clearly indicates SCO’s claims are spurious at best.
“It seems pretty clear to me that the current SCO leadership knows nothing of even their own history,” said Heilke. “The SCO-Caldera merger had the joining of SCO’s Unix and Linux as a top priority.” That’s why there’s reasonable speculation that SCO itself introduced the contested code into Linux – “assuming it came from SCO’s IP (intellectual property) at all,” he said.
Gilbert Detillieux, systems analyst at the University of Manitoba’s department of Computer Science in
