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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
A litigious blitzkrieg by the anti-Linux crusader the SCO Group has been enraging open-source developers for months. But SCO's attack has ignited its own counterreaction.
Apr 15, 2004 | In the summer of 2002, engineers at the Chrysler Corp.'s research and development facility in Auburn Hills, Mich., jumped on the Linux bandwagon. For several years, the company had been running computerized simulations of high-speed vehicle crashes on a network of expensive -- and, eventually, comparatively slow -- Unix mainframes; each crash test would take days to compute, eating into Chrysler's production cycle.
The company's IT department, with consultation from IBM, saw that a "cluster" of Linux machines could do the job faster, for less money. By replacing its Unix system with about 100 off-the-shelf IBM PCs running Red Hat Linux, Chrysler boosted the speed of each crash test by about 20 percent, while reducing maintenance costs by about 40 percent.
Chrysler's experience with Linux makes for a classic open-source software success story. By choosing the free, flexible operating system over a proprietary system, the company saved money and time; the story would make a good ad for Red Hat and IBM. And that's probably why the SCO Group -- the small software company in Linden, Utah, that has been Linux's biggest detractor during the last year -- decided to punish Chrysler.
SCO claims that Linux is actually an illegal derivative of the Unix operating system, which SCO says it owns. In a lawsuit filed on March 3, SCO accused DaimlerChrysler, Chrysler's corporate parent, of violating the terms of a Unix license Chrysler signed in the 1980s -- the violation, SCO suggested, stemmed from Chrysler's adoption of Linux in place of Unix. At the same time, SCO sued AutoZone, the giant car parts retailer, which uses Linux in each of its 3,000 stores; SCO claims that by using Linux, AutoZone is "willfully" infringing upon SCO's intellectual property.
To fans of Linux, SCO's latest moves are both silly and a little bit scary. The company's case is widely thought to be extremely weak. Of course, people say, SCO is never going to stop AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler from using Linux! But the scary part is that it might not matter much whether SCO's case is weak, because even frivolous lawsuits demand an (often expensive) defense. Consequently, some in the open-source community wonder whether SCO's case indicates a real cause for concern with free software.
"They sued AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler even though those companies didn't do anything wrong and acted in good faith," says Daniel Egger, a partner at the venture capital firm Eno River Capital. AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler simply purchased open-source software; they didn't write the code. But "because of a quirk in our legal system," Egger says, "you can be sued for using software when you did nothing wrong, just because some third party claims that they own part of that software or that the software infringes on their rights."
This is a problem, Egger says. Corporations take risks all the time, but they're not fans of unquantifiable risks. Companies don't want the free software they install today to become a hundred-million-dollar legal boondoggle five years from now. And that's why what the open-source world could really use, Egger says, is a financial mechanism to measure and eliminate the "risk" associated with using software like Linux. There's a word for such a complex-sounding system: "insurance." And if you're the IT manager at a big company and you're thinking of installing Linux, Daniel Egger would like to sell you some coverage.
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