Some lessons from the SCO debacle

Sam Varghese
Monday, 17 September 2007 22:25

Opinion and Analysis

Software companies which conveniently chose to inject funds into SCO after the lawsuit against IBM was filed should also indulge in some introspection. One does not expect a company like Microsoft to do so - throwing money into the bowels of SCO was just one of those many failed attempts to try and nobble FOSS, a concept which scares the hell out of its executives, a concept which these worthies will never understand.

But Sun Microsystems also threw money at SCO and tried to hide its actions. In fact, Sun queued up to pay obeisance even before Microsoft did so! And thereby, Sun has now given Novell an easy way to make some money.

Will Sun get back any of the money it used to buy what it thought were rights to use Unix code from SCO? If some of that code has been released under Sun's Community Development and Distribution Licence, as part of its OpenSolaris project, will it now have to pay Novell royalties?

The same question of payments applies to Microsoft - will it now have to pay Novell for whatever it got from SCO? Or did Novell factor this in when it was signing its infamous patents deal last year?

There's much that we don't know yet but it is reasonable to conclude even this early on that the whole SCO episode could well mean salvation for Novell.