SCO's Big Lie

[Nikos Charonitakis]

By Bruce Perens

This morning, Novell announced some of the terms of
the company's 1995 agreement to sell its Unix business
to SCO. The shocking news is that Novell did not sell
the Unix intellectual property to SCO. Instead, they
sold SCO a license to develop, sell, and sub-license
Unix. The title to Unix copyrights and patents remains
with Novell. To back up this assertion, Novell refers
to public records at the Library of Congress Copyright
Office and the U.S. Patent Office.

In their announcement, Novell refers to recent letters
from SCO asking Novell to assign the Unix copyrights
to SCO. So, apparently SCO's management team knew that
they did not own Unix while pursuing their sham
campaign against Linux.

Along with this revelation, Novell is reiterating its
support of the Linux and Open Source developer
community, and its status as a partner in that
community. Novell rejects SCO's accusations of
plagarism. Novell management says they do not intend
to stand in the way of the development of the Linux
kernel, its companion GNU system, and other Free
Software.

It would be an understatement to say that this leaves
SCO in a bad position. The company has loudly and
repeatedly asserted that they were the owner of the
Unix intellectual property, all of the way back to
AT&T's original development of the system 30 years
ago. They've lied to their stockholders, their
customers and partners, the 1500 companies that they
threatened, the press, and the public. Their
untruthful campaign caused the loss of sales and jobs,
and damaged Linux companies and developers in a myriad
of ways. And now, SCO will be the lawsuit target.
SCO's first quarterly earnings conference call is this
morning, at 9 AM MST (11 AM EST, 8 AM PST). Call
800-406-5356, toll-free, to participate. You might
even get to ask a question. It should be fun to watch
them try to weasel out of this one.

Microsoft executives also have egg on their faces. The
company self-servingly rushed to buy an SCO license
one business day after the threat letter, bringing a
senior attorney to the office on a Sunday to tell the
press how much Microsoft "values intellectual
property." Microsoft's management could have taken the
time to analyze SCO's claims, if the company had
wanted this license for practical and technical
reasons. Their decision to buy when they did must have
been motivated by a desire to add to SCO's fear
campaign. Of course they'll grab any opportunity to
spread fear about Linux, but this time Microsoft
bought a pig in a poke.

SCO management, if they insist on standing in the way
of a train, could still claim that software they
developed in the years since 1995 is being infringed
by the Open Source developers. That claim, always a
dubious one, will be difficult to take seriously now
that their prevarication throughout this campaign has
come to light. SCO would be well advised to drop their
suit against IBM in exchange for IBM's agreement not
to counter-sue. But IBM might not feel that charitable
toward SCO.

In contrast to SCO, Novell's made a friend among the
Free Software developers. We're always happy to see
people using our software. But a real partnership
between an IT vendor and our community is an equal
partnership, with the company donating services and
new software in exchange for the value it receives.
Novell has already placed important software under
Open Source licenses. Today, the company has done us a
tremendous service, by stomping upon an obnoxious parasite

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