"News Weekly" pointed out that the blue giant is undoubtedly an open source community to resist the favorable barrier from Microsoft and SCO threats. With the blue giant, Linux has also achieved initial success, but as a company, IBM is not possible to accept open The free claim for the source code. A competition is inevitable.
In the faith of open source assistants, software products should be completely free, for this, they are trying to let the penguins enter Microsoft's commercial empire. As more and more volunteers have joined the source code software development, an anti-enterprise free software atmosphere is being formed.
However, when IBM has investive $ 1 billion in Linux, IBM, the supporters of these open source are trembled. The Blue Giant's role in the global open source community is also transformed from the respected "Daddy" image to a full armed knight.
Undoubtedly IBM is between Linux and open source communities, it is considered to be a favorable barrier from Microsoft Attack. However, dramatic scenes are happening, in the US federal court, IBM is playing with SCO on Linux intellectual property issues. The SCO Group from Utah is also a member of the Linux community. It mainly provides software products to SMEs, last year's revenue is $ 79 million. However, in 2002, SCO's share price in Nasdaq has fallen to a crisis for the wetkeck. The company's CEO Darl McBride realized that the company seems to have a business approach.
Just early last year, SCO began to sue the Linux business users including IBM, DAIMLERCHRYSLER, Autozone, requiring these users to pay for their intellectual property. In these lawsuits, the largest one is undoubtedly for IBM's $ 3 billion intellectual property compensation fee. Moreover, this litigation of IBM plays a considerable impact on the future development of open source software. The focus of the SCO prosecution is its UNIX property rights, because some extent, the Linux system is UNIX's streamlined version. To this end, SCO invited the United States to have a fairly well-known lawyer David Boies, requiring Linux users to pay intellectual property costs to SCO.
SCO's head of the SCO said in September 2003, now we are asking for recovery of intellectual property rights. SCO's initiative is undoubtedly offends and provocation for the linux community that advocates freedom. IBM does not rely on the sale of Linux software to make money, which provides income around Linux system to obtain income. In 2003, the Blue Giants expressed more than $ 2 billion in related revenues around Linux systems.
For IBM, this lawsuit can actually costly solve the cost, but it is fighting for a counterattack, and promoting the federal court to make a final judgment as soon as possible. From the current situation, the SCO is in an unfavorable location. Just last year's SCO allegations IBM steals thousands of procedures, but this allegation does not set up, this year, the focus of this year's complaints retreats to the controversy about the contract. IBM Refutation The GPL protocol has denied the ownership of the SCO to Linux code.
Since Linux has threatened Microsoft's window system, many open source advocates think Bill-Gates are supporting SCO, although Microsoft and SCO denies this. However, SCO also accused the BLOKLAW of the company actually got IBM support. Of course, the BLOG's editor has denied this.
The Linux community pointed out that an email from the SCO consultant reveals Microsoft and SCO: October 2003 Microsoft-Rise Investment Agency Baystar injected $ 20 million in investment to SCO. One of the least one official from Baystar acknowledged that the only reason for investment SCO was to support its lawsuit. On this month, SCO announced that the company's revenue was 11 million US dollars, due to huge litigation expenses, the company lost $ 7 million in this quarter.
However, in addition to Linux from other positions, IBM still opens a competitor of the source code. In the field of email and data, the supporters of open source code are struggling with IBM from head to the intellectual property rights. (ENET / UTOO)
