This seems to be the thinking at the SCO Group judging from proceedings at its partner and customer conference in Las Vegas on Monday.
SCO executives told delegates that "all the (legal) liabilities rested with the user and not Linux vendors."
The company is embroiled in a US$3 billion lawsuit against IBM, claiming Big Blue inserted unauthorised code from SCO's Unix into Linux. SCO has also moved to issue a licensing structure for the commercial use of Linux.
At the event, SCO officials fleetingly displayed the "illegal code" but refused to allow closer access before a nondisclosure agreement was signed.
For those who abhor the idea of submitting to SCO's demands, you'll be happy to hear that IT law expert Lawrence Rosen has given the green light for Linux users to continue using the operating system...even if the courts rule in favour of SCO.
In a Q&A document, the general counsel for the Open Source Initiative asserts that if IBM hasn't paid SCO a single cent, Linux users shouldn't reach for their chequebooks either.
Rosen's paper is designed to help users assess whether they need to purchase a licence to use Linux. He answers two of the most frequently asked questions in the IT circuit today:
1) Can SCO demand licence fees for Linux?
Sure. But just because someone demands money doesn't mean you should pay them.
SCO has sued only IBM, remember, not you, and is demanding at least US$1 billion in economic damages. IBM didn't reach for its chequebook yet. Why should you?
SCO already licensed Linux to you royalty-free when it distributed Linux under the GPL (General Public License ) licence. Although SCO purported to suspend its Linux distribution after the commencement of this lawsuit, SCO continued to make Linux code available for download from its Web site. By distributing Linux products under the GPL, SCO agreed, among other things, not to assert certain proprietary rights--such as the rights to collect licence fees--over any source code distributed under the terms of the GPL.
Some people complain about the absence of indemnity in open source licenses, including the GPL license used currently for Linux. The economic equation is simple: because the software is given away for free, no open source licensor can afford to offer indemnity.
I don't believe indemnity matters anyway in this case, because of the way SCO has structured its complaint. Assume, for example, that SCO wins its case against IBM and IBM pays US$1 billion in damages to compensate for the use of SCO's confidential code in Linux. (Again, this is a worst case scenario helpful only to assess risk to Linux users.) How then could SCO turn to Linux users and ask for the same damages all over again. That double-dipping isn't fair in law or in equity. Courts usually don't allow that.
Simply by being an interested and aggressive defendant with deep pockets, IBM is now effectively shielding Linux users from damages, even without an indemnity provision in the GPL.
2) Does SCO have a copyright on Linux?
Perhaps.
SCO can register a copyright in any software it wrote or modified or that it distributed as a collective work. So can Linus Torvalds, and Red Hat, and SuSE, and Debian, and so can anyone (including IBM) who contributed more than a trivial bit of code to Linux.
Any of those people or organisations in the US can send US$30, and a form, and 50 pages of their source code to the Library of Congress and get a certificate of copyright registration suitable for framing. The procedures are described at http://www.loc.gov/copyright. There are similar procedures in other countries.
Registering a copyright is only a ticket to get to court. Registration itself isn't proof of anything important.
Of course, registration doesn't give SCO ownership rights to the original versions of the software it modified or re-distributed. Nor does SCO have any copyright ownership in software that is independently written by others, even if that software is based on ideas learned from SCO.
Do you think Rosen's points are valid? Read the entire document at http://www.osdl.org/docs/qa_re_sco_vs_ibm.pdf and share your thoughts below.
-Yes.