OpenSourceLegal.org

The Israeli government has reportedly stopped buying Microsoft software and turned to open source in protest over Microsoft’s sales policies.

SCO has reportedly sent letters to Unix licensees demanding proof that they aren’t contributing Unix code to the open-source OS. The letters apparently state if they don’t comply within 30 days they face the loss of their Unix licenses.

Novell reportedly registered copyrights on parts of the Unix System V source code that are part of the SCO’s claims on the Linux operating system.

Surprisingly, there are ongoing questions as to what exactly Novell sold to SCO in 1995.

As a reminder that open-source software does not necessarily result in the licensee getting all rights to use the code in questions, you should review the article in The Register about Microsoft’s plans to assert patent rights in various technologies which can be used in open source software.

You can find it on the SCO site.

This contains a summary of SCO’s arguments on the unconstitutionality of the GPL. Unfortunately, it is really impossible to understand (and, at least to me, impossible to believe as stated). Hopefully, more details will be provided in court filings.

The Open Source Development Lab has released several legal commentaries on the SCO-Linux controversy detailing their pro-open source positions: Q&A re: SCO vs. IBM by Lawrence Rosen General Counsel, Open Source Initiative, SCO: Without Fear and Without Research and Questioning SCO: A Hard Look at Nebulous Claims by Eben Moglen of Columbia University Law School, who serves as general counsel of the Free Software Foundation.

According to an Infoworld report, SCO says Novell’s acquisition of SUSE violates a non-compete between SCO and Novell.

Darryl McBride, SCO’s CEO, is quoted in the article as stating “The non-compete agreement prohibits Novell from directly competing with SCO’s Unix-on-Intel business . . . When (The Santa Cruz Operation) sold us the property, included in the property was a non-compete. . . . Last time I checked, Linux was intended to compete with our core products.”

Later articles on Yahoo quote spokespersons from each company as disputing the existence of any non-compete.

According to the Yahoo article, SCO spokesman Blake Stowell told eWEEK that the non-compete claim comes from wording that provides “Seller [Novell] agrees that it shall use the Licensed Technology only (i) for internal purposes without restriction or (ii) for resale in bundled or integrated products sold by Seller which are not directly competitive with the core products of Buyer [SCO] and in which the Licensed Technology does not constitute a primary portion of the value of the total bundled or integrated product.”

The “non-compete” identified in the article is a restriction on use rather than classic non-compete, and accordingly, like the generalized SCO claims, depends on whether or not copyrighted code from Unix was indeed illegally copied into Linux.

Speaking at an industry conference, SCO CEO Darl McBride reportedly said that the GPL that governs Linux and open source software will not survive — and that the blame for that lies with IBM. See the article at McBride: Don’t blame us, blame IBM on searchenterpriselinux.com. There is also a good summary of current developments in SCO Escalates Legal Battle on Three Fronts on searchenterpriselinux.com.

According to SearchEnterpriseLinux.com JBoss Group LLC, developer of the open source JBoss application server, announced today that it will indemnify its app server customers against potential legal action stemming from any intellectual property infringement.

Each side in the IBM-SCO lawsuit are sending subpoenas to various parties. See the C|net article for details.