"Although Gartner has reservations on the merits of (SCO's claims), don't take them lightly," Gartner analyst George Weiss advised in a May note. "Minimise Linux in complex, mission-critical systems until the merits of SCO's claims or any resulting judgments become clear."
Two weeks ago, SCO sent 1,500 letters to the world's largest companies, warning that they could face legal action for using Linux, which SCO says includes its own proprietary source code that was copied from Unix. The move grew out of a US$1 billion lawsuit against IBM that alleges Big Blue broke its contract with SCO by misappropriating trade secrets that it moved from Unix into Linux.
Novell, which bought Unix copyrights and patents from its original owner, AT&T, has disputed SCO's Unix intellectual property ownership.
Regardless of Gartner's advice, SCO's letters aren't having an effect, said Joe Eckert, a spokesman for Linux seller SuSE, whose business relationship with SCO is on the rocks.
"We've not seen a single hesitation from customers--just look at Munich," he said, referring to a decision by the German city government to install Linux on 14,000 desktop computers. SuSE's customers "simply do not believe that SCO, even if it has a case, will impact them--Linux is simply an inevitability."
In the advisory, Gartner's Weiss said he believes SCO's actions could be motivated in part by a desire to be acquired, which could let "SCO investors...exit with good returns," a motivation that SCO has denied.
SCO-IBM Vs Timeline Inc-Microsoft : Better off with Linux
If you are concerned over the threat of lawsuits over intellectual property then you are actually in a better legal position using GPL'ed Linux than using Microsoft's products.
While SCO has yet to provide any publicly available substantial evidence in their case against IBM and Linux, Timeline Inc has already won a US Washington Court of Appeal judgment against Microsoft in another contract dispute.
Unlike companies like Oracle Corporation and others, Microsoft chose a cheaper option when licensing Timeline Inc's Data base technology. That license puts developers and users of Microsoft SQL Server,Office and other Microsoft products at
risk of being sued by Timeline Inc for violation of Timeline Inc patents.
Microsoft's products do not provide users and developers an absolute safe haven from the threat from lawsuits based on violations of intellectual property. Microsoft's EULA provide the developer and end user with no protection against threat from current or future intellectual property lawsuits.
However, since the SCO Group has knowingly sold and distributed the GPL licensed Linux kernel and other components, it must by the terms of the GPL license, provide all those who receive the code from them an implicit license to use any intellectual property, patents or trade secrets which SCO owns and is used by the GPL'ed source code. That implicit license to that SCO intellectual property is also granted to anybody who subsequently receives the GPL source.
The GPL only grants the right, for reasons of intellectual property infringement or contractual obligations, to stop distributing the GPL'e binaries and source code if the conditions are imposed upon you by a third party. Since SCO claims ownership the intellectual property in question, it must grant all subsequent recipients of the GPL licensed source code SCO has distributed and any GPL'ed derivative, the same implicit licence and right to SCO's intellectual property the code imposes upon.
SCO has acknowledged deals with Suse and Lindows to distribute SCO's intellectual property in GPL'ed Linux, but the GPL license does not grant anyone or any organization the right to append extra terms and conditions upon the recipients of the GPL licensed source code.
It is very easy to effectively fold the current development branches of the Linux kernel and any other GPL'ed code back into SCO's distributed GPL'ed sources. This would grant the same implicit license for the infringed SCO intellectual property to the all the current development.
You are in a better legal position using the GPL'ed Linux platform and other GPL'ed software, than you are using Microsoft's or any other closed source software.