The company, which is at the heart of a controversial lawsuit over Linux code, said that it plans to offer licenses that will support run-time, binary use of Linux to all companies that use Linux kernel 2.4 versions and later.
"We have a solution that gets you clean, gets you square with the use of Linux without having to go to the courtroom," Chief Executive Darl McBride said in a conference call Monday.
SCO sparked a major controversy in the Linux world in March, when it sued IBM, saying the company had incorporated SCO's Unix code into Linux and seeking US$1 billion in damages. The company alleged, among other things, trade secret theft and breach of contract. SCO then updated its demands in June, saying IBM owed it US$3 billion. In the meantime, it sent out letters to about 1,500 Linux customers, warning them that their use of Linux could infringe on SCO's intellectual property.
The claim of copyrights on the Unix code in question may raise the stakes in the dispute. Some attorneys say a copyright claim, which was not included in the earlier allegations against IBM, could be easier for the company to prove.
SCO said prices for the licenses for its Unix System V source code would be announced in the coming weeks. Pricing will be based on the cost of UnixWare 7.13, the company's current Unix product.
The move bypasses companies such as Red Hat that develop, distribute and advocate Linux and goes straight to the users, who might be inclined just to pay up rather than get ensnared in an ideological and legal battle.
"It's a very smart strategy, if it works," said Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property attorney with Gray Cary. "If the price is low enough, better to buy a certainty than get tangled in a murky war."
But the move hinges on several complicated issues, some of them at the heart of SCO's suit against IBM. Specifically, SCO must be able to persuade courts or Linux users that IBM and other Unix licensees weren't permitted to transfer to Linux the programming code they'd created themselves for use in Unix.
And proving Unix copyrights isn't a simple matter. "Unix is now a patchwork of stuff that's in the public domain and stuff that isn't in the public domain," Radcliffe said.
If successful, SCO's move essentially would impose a tax on Linux, an operating system that has spread quickly across the computing industry in part because its open-source nature has sparked a broad, lively, unfettered development process. But a tax would undermine that movement, said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff.
"I'm not sure I really see the option where SCO in the long term succeeds in collecting a tax on every copy of Linux sold, because that really destroys what Linux is," said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. "It seems to me that either someone ends up buying SCO, or SCO basically succeeds in destroying Linux."
SCO previously hadn't been able to base any actions on Unix copyrights because the U.S. copyright office had them registered to Novell, an earlier owner of Unix intellectual property. A contract unearthed from a filing cabinet showed that SCO had some of the copyrights, and now SCO has registered copyrights for Unix System V and Unixware, McBride said.
"Since the year 2001 commercial Linux customers have been purchasing and receiving software that includes misappropriated Unix software owned by SCO," Chris Sontag, senior vice president and general manager of the company's SCOsource intellectual property division, said in a statement. "We intend to provide them with choices to help them run Linux in a legal and fully-paid for way."
SCO's claims have raised the ire of many Linux enthusiasts, who have said that the ailing company is engaging in a last-ditch effort to save itself by recouping licence fees when it has no rights to do so. The company further alienated itself from the Linux community in May, when it agreed to a licensing deal with Microsoft, which has roundly blasted Linux for years. Some Linux fans have suspected that Microsoft jumped into the fray in order to spread uncertainty about the rival operating system, which has displaced Microsoft's Windows in some markets.
Earlier this year, SCO hired high-profile attorney David Boies, who led the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft, to help it in its case against IBM.
This is simply extortion. If SCO wants to charge a licensing fee for IP violation then it needs to show proof.
The Linux community needs to get together and take SCO to court on this matter. The court action should involve issuing an injunction to SCO; requiring SCO to prove their claim before they can start demanding licensing fees.
It is simply wrong for SCO to collect licensing fees while it refuses to show the alleged infringing code to the Linux community.
Message to SCO: Show us the PROOF!!!