An unholy alliance was forged in the last little while.
SCO was seduced by the dark side of the force and talked into some kind of pact with
Microsoft, in Gates' lastest crusade against Linux.
Troubled by the increasing popularly of the Linux operating system in its many incarnations, combined with a general hatred of everything that the Open Source Movement stands for, it looks like Microsoft talked SCO into some kind of legal action
after it was claimed by SCO that it is the only rightful owner of the Unix System V source code. This opens the door for a number of potential law suits, and more of the sorts of things that software giants like to fight about instead of shutting up and getting on with making less buggy software....
The word is that Microsoft are behind it, anyway. That would not surprise me.
Well, the plot thickens because now
"some members of the open-source community are claiming that the SCO Group may have violated the terms of the GNU GPL (General Public License) by incorporating source code from the Linux kernel into the Linux Kernel Personality feature found in SCO Unix without giving the changes back to the community or displaying copyright notices attributing the code to Linux." In fact, so stricking are the similarities in the source code that some wondered
"why even variable names were identical.... It looked very much like both codes had the same origin..."
Sounds a little like "you've pushed me, so now I'm gonna push you," type of thing. Who knows, maybe it will lead to an all out fight. More
here, and
here.
06-10-2003
