A Big Test for Linux
Eric Hellweg,
Business 2.0,
Jan 29, 2003
You need to read between the lines of this story. It's not so much that SCO Group (formerly Caldera) is seeking to obtain royalties for work it feels it ownes, and which may have found its way into open source software. Rather, it's the shift in tactics against the open source movement, a shift from trying to compete against it in terms of quality and support toward trying to litigate it out of existence. SCO is a good candidate for such initiative, sitting as it does on a number of unix patents it inherited from AT&T's Bell Labs. You may say that SCO is only seeking a fair return on its investment. But in reality it is seeking to cash in on decades of free software development undertaken by the Linux community after sitting quietly in the sidelines, saying nothing about its supposed ownership of parts of the operating system. And worse, it is being used as a shill to support the commodification of all of that development.
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