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What SCOsource was for, Part II

By Pamela Jones et al.

In the first part of this article on what SCOsource was for, I showed you the January 2003 version of the SCO press release announcing the new division to be called SCOsource, which said the first offering from SCOsource was a license for unbundled use of SCO OpenServer and UnixWare shared libraries.

However, there was an earlier press release a little more than a month earlier, also purporting to announce the new division to be called SCOsource but listing a different offering as the purported first offering from SCOsource. The December 11, 2002 press release is listed among the exhibits attached to the Hatch Declaration. It's not the first time we've seen it, though. We first saw it in the SCO v. Novell litigation in December, when Novell attached it as an exhibit in support of its Motion for Summary Judgment on its Fourth Claim for Relief. It's Exhibit 2 [PDF].

The December 2002 press release said that the first offering from SCOsource would be a two-part license, first for the unbundled shared libraries, with a quote from Darl McBride stating clearly that both OpenServer and UnixWare were "based on UNIX System V technology". And second, it said the license was to "protect" Linux "from UNIX IP issues that are associated with" it, and to fight against those using FUD to discourage the uptake of Linux. The license was to enable the use SCO's patents, copyrights, and "core technology" in Linux, to ensure the licensee that the "SCO UNIX source code in Linux is authentic and safe from IP patent issues." I know. Weird.

Although the wording of the two announcements was quite different, and the "first offering" each announced was not identical, both called the license a "SCO System V for Linux" license.

Of course, SCO had no UNIX patents, and the Utah court later ruled it had not received the UNIX or UnixWare copyrights from Novell in the 1995 deal either, so the offerings were based on a very shaky foundation. SCO didn't know what it owned, I gather, or what it was licensing. They probably should have just called it the "SCO Give Us Some Money" license, but you know marketing.

Let's take a look at these two announcements, though, because our interest is to try to figure out exactly what it was that Sun Microsystems and Microsoft paid for, as well as later licensees like EV1. Microsoft publicly announced in May of 2003 that it was licensing "SCO's Unix patents and the source code". Talk about a lack of due diligence. They paid for a license for patents that simply didn't exist. But the main point is that what it told us it was licensing was source code, not shared libraries. There was, as we'll see in a later section of this article, Part III, a still later license offered from SCOsource as well. It's the one we read about in the headlines back then and the one most people think of when they hear the word SCOsource. But before we get to it, we'll look at the two prior versions.

Full post as published by Groklaw on February 14, 2008 (boomark / email).