BYTE.com > Features > 2003
SCO Owns Your Computer
By Trevor Marshall
June 16, 2003
(SCO Owns Your Computer
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All Your Base Are Belong To Us
Fittingly, it was Friday the 13th. A sunny San Francisco morning. But my discussion with Chris Sontag, SCO's Senior Vice President, Operating Systems Division, was driving the sunshine from our room, creating an atmosphere appropriate for the 13th. Let me summarize in a parable…
In the beginning was AT&T Bell Labs, staffed by a benevolent team of PhDs and research scientists. AT&T produced this really neat operating system—System V—which computer manufacturers wanted to license and use. Everybody was happy to sign tough contracts with these benevolent scientists—licenses which deeded all derivative works back to AT&T, licenses that covered all "methods" and "concepts" of operating systems. But now those licenses are owned by SCO and its team of lawyers who are certain that AIX and all the other derivative IXs belong to SCO. And the company now wants royalties from users of all these operating systems—especially Linux.
Specifically, Sontag believes the "SCO technologies" which were misappropriated into AIX, IRIX, and the derivative UNIX-alikes (including Linux) are:
"But what about BSD?" I asked. Sontag responded that there "could be issues with the [BSD] settlement agreement," adding that Berkeley may not have lived up to all of its commitments under the settlement.
"So you want royalties from FreeBSD as well?" I asked. Sontag responded that "there may or may not be issues. We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO's intellectual property)."
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BYTE.com > Features > 2003
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