SCO vs. IBM :: Businesses Microsoft Essays

SCO vs. IBM AbstractOn March 6, 2003, The SCO Group filed a $1 billion guinea pig 1 against IBM. The lawsuit alleges, among other things, that IBM has violated contractual obligations it has with SCO by incorporating rives of AIX (IBMs UNIX derived operating system) into Linux the pass on source random variable of UNIX. The lawsuit has not gone to court and, when it finally does, may abridge upwards of a year to settle. Nevertheless, a preliminary look is worthwhile. Since the quantify of the initial filing, the rhetoric has escalated and it has become clear that the ramifications of the suit are oftentimes broader than just IBM vs. SCO. SCOs chooses, should they be proven, would not exclusively have a major impact on Linux, exactly could also claim other casualties chief among them the Open Source movement. After some introductory material, this root examines the potential effects and provides an ethical evaluation. If one assumes that SCOs claims are valid, Linux is in serious trouble, and a black-eye will be placed on the slope of the Open Source community that will not quickly heal. But, scour if SCO prevails, its far from clear that theyve done the right thing accessionOn March 6, 2003, The SCO Group filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM. Central to the lawsuit is the claim that IBM has violated contractual obligations it has with SCO by psychotherapeutic into the public domain AIX source code as part of enhancements the company has made to the Linux operating system. Why does SCO care? Because SCO claims to hold the secure to the UNIX operating system 2. AIX is a derivative of UNIX not only is UNIX source code used as the basis for AIX but IBM (and a host of other UNIX vendors) readily admits this and pays licensing feeds to SCO. Linux, on the other hand, is open source. Its source code is freely available for usage, viewing and modification. SCOs claim is simple IBM is illegally distributing its intellectual propert y by placing it into Linux and thereby diluting the cling to of UNIX.Over the last few months, there have been a turning of key developments that are beyond SCO and IBMs current spat. Of particular worrySCO stopped releasing its Linux distribution asserting that the Linux is derived from code that is copyrighted by SCO 3.