Copyright action galvanises global Linux army

Wired on Friday: Seven months ago, SCO, a small Utah firm, surprised everyone by claiming ownership over parts of the free operating system Linux, the communally developed program underlying much of the modern internet.

A lawsuit initiated by the company against computing giant IBM claimed it had illicitly inserted SCO intellectual property into Linux during a period when it had partnership access to the internals of SCO's software products.

IBM offers support for Linux with many of its customers, and often contributes to the program through its research and development efforts. SCO demanded $1 billion (€920 million) in damages, and retained celebrity lawyer David Boies (who represented the US against Microsoft in the 1997 anti-trust case, and Al Gore during the 2000 Florida recount) to defend the case.

Industry opinion was that the SCO was taking a high-risk gamble to save itself.

The case had little chance of succeeding, but the smaller firm was attempting to annoy IBM to the point where IBM would buy the firm from its remaining shareholders, simply to be rid of the irritation.

If an IBM buy-out was the plan, it did not work. IBM barely deigned to acknowledge the suit.

Since then, SCO's corporate behaviour has grown increasingly weird. Not a day passes without the firm hitting the headlines with some new claim or another.

It recently announced a licensing scheme whereby Linux users, who previously downloaded and ran the community-written operating system for free, can pay SCO for the privilege of using what they now describe as a "tainted" OS.

Licences start at $200 for a desktop machine, or $699 for a network server. The server price, SCO said, would jump to $1,399 after October 15th. This compares to a price of exactly zero for using Linux before the SCO announcement.

And the amount of code within the free operating system that SCO lays claim to has grown with every press release. Its threats of litigation have enlarged to include individual coders on Linux - including Linus Torvalds, founder of the operating system.

In pursuing these claims, however, SCO has a problem. Linux development takes place in public, on the internet, with lines added, edited and removed daily.

While it is theoretically possible that lines of SCO's version of Unix may have been inserted into Linux, removing them is simple. SCO only has to announce which parts of the public codebase are suspected to be its own, and the problem will be solved. It can still pursue its case against IBM for the damage caused by breaching their non-disclosure contract, but the continuing hurt to SCO from its IP being misused globally will be removed.

SCO continues to refuse to say what has been plagiarised. Occasionally it reveals a tidbit to its dealers or a journalist, publishing a fragment of its internal codebase matched to a similar fragment in the public Linux code listings - but whenever it does so, the vast army of Linux developers online locate the source of the code outside of SCO's intellectual property.

That the two programs are similiar is no surprise: they have a shared and confused history, dating back to the original Unix program designed at AT&T in the early 1970s.

Some descendants of that program are proprietary and privately owned, as SCO's codebase is. Others are written with licences that allow them to be freely shared.

So far, all of SCO's examples have proven to be so old as to be from the original AT&T code (now so widely distributed as to dilute any intellectual property claims) or, ironically, examples of SCO using someone else's free code to improve its software.

SCO's refusal to clarify its claims has driven the Linux community crazy.

While most are confident that SCO's claims are groundless, the firm's press coverage has scared some firms into freezing or abandoning their Linux adoption plans. Others have chosen to pay SCO's licence (SCO plans to invoice all the Fortune 500 firms that use Linux).

And some have noted that one of the more generous purchasers of a SCO-sanctioned licence is Microsoft, which has a vested interest in the confusion over Linux continuing.

The problem is: what should the Linux community do? In the normal run of corporate spats, the opposing firm would counter-sue. But there is no company here - just a disparate community, spread over dozens of countries. IBM is preparing its defence and has already begun its countersuit, but as many Linux developers have noted, IBM's interests diverge from the Linux community's.

Some larger Linux firms, such as RedHat, have begun a fund to defend Linux, but SCO's delaying tactics could frustrate a large counterattack.

So instead, individual users are taking matters into their own hands. In Ireland, several hundred members of the Irish Linux User Group are threatening to report SCO to the advertising standards authority if it does not reveal exactly what its "Linux" licence includes.

The fight started with SCO taking a gamble and attacking the largest computer company in the world; but it may find its downfall in being nibbled to death by millions of individual - and angry - users.