| By Linux News Desk |
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| July 28, 2003 12:00 AM EDT |
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At the end of last week IBM went on the counter-offensive against
SCO Group when Bob Samson, vice president of IBM's systems sales, told IBM’s sales force that for SCO to demand license payments for Unix makes no sense given that SCO itself has very recently been shipping an open-source product, a version of Linux that the Lindon, Utah-based company was selling until as recently as May.
This goes a great deal further than the somewhat mild IBM statement, reported earlier at LinuxWorld, that it would “stand by” its customers and defend its name and actions vigorously in any legal action.
Ever since SCO filed its $1 billion lawsuit against Big Blue, the Linux community has been up in arms. After its attempt last week to start making all Linux users pay for a Unix license or face possible legal action, things got massively worse.
Already back in June, the general manager of IBM's Linux unit, Jim Stallings, was asserting that IBM's license was "irrevocable" but now Samson is going a step further, saying that he can see now way SCO can possibly hope to make its case stick, given that it has itself been a party to distributing Linux under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL grants a free copyright license and requires that users be granted the right to freely redistribute the code free of claims.
SCO, in other words, has never deliberately released the code as open source.
But IBM isn’t going to be dissuaded from its vehement defense, characterizing SCO’s position as ”another desperate, unfair and unsupported attack on Linux in an attempt to wring money from customers without providing any factual basis as to why they should pay."
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