| How SCO helped Linux |
Aug. 29, 2007
By drawing so much attention to Linux, and failing so spectacularly to find any legal flaw in it, SCO has actually helped Linux's business acceptance.
In 2003, Linux was an important operating system... if you were in love with technology. IBM continued to be the one major company that wholeheartedly supported Linux. The rest of the business world was keeping its distance. Linux businesses, along with most dot-com companies, had crashed and burned in 2000/2001, and only a handful -- most notably Red Hat -- had made it out the other side. Besides wondering if Linux businesses were going to be around for the long haul, CIOs continued to wonder about Linux's legal foundations. Then, along came SCO.
I'm not going to rehash SCO's story here. For that you can see Groklaw or our own collection of stories on SCO's fruitless legal battles against Linux and the companies that supported it. SCO's attack on Linux, however, had two immediate effects that would work to Linux's long term benefit.
First, it reunified the Linux community and businesses against a common enemy. Red Hat and SUSE, and the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, may not have become bosom buddies, but everyone could agree that SCO was threatening everyone.
Second, and perhaps even more important, Linux was once more in the public spotlight. Yes, Linux was slowly, but surely, devouring the x86 Unix market, but frankly few business people cared about it. When they thought about the x86 server market, they debated Windows 2003 vs. 2000. They asked if there was any hope left for NetWare. Unix or Linux on x86? Only die-hard Unix/Linux techies cared. The CTO might give a hoot, but the CIO and the CFO? Forget about it.
But, when SCO made it a fight, when SCO made those outrageous claims against IBM and Linux, suddenly everyone started paying attention to Linux. From my own experience, I know that when I wrote Linux business stories in 2002, they might get as many as 10,000 page views. Post the SCO lawsuit, Linux business stories, especially if they were concerned in any way with SCO, averaged over 100,000 page views.
It wasn't just my stories. Pamela Jones's Groklaw site became a vitally important technology law site by focusing on the endless flood of SCO threats and the shaky legal logic behind it. Everyone was suddenly covering SCO... and at the same time they were giving Linux coverage a giant boost.
At the same time, Linux was making great strides forward. For example, 2003 was also the year that Linux 2.6 came out. This was the Linux kernel that gave big business the features they wanted for serious servers. These included up to 32 processor support, the ability to address 64GB of memory with 32-bit processors, NUMA (non-uniform memory access) support, and journaling file systems such as IBM's JFS (Journaling File System).
All great news, but now, instead of only Linux supporters seeing the potential, business executives were paying attention to Linux and saw the possibilities as well. Without the SCO case piquing their interest, I doubt anyone in the executive suite would have even heard the news.
In the same year, Red Hat decided to give up on its business model built around users buying shrink-wrapped boxes. So, Red Hat closed that line after its Red Hat 9 release and moved to what proved to be its far more successful subscription-based server model, with RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 3. Individual Red Hat users hated this move, but businesses loved it and Red Hat became a billion-dollar company.
Novell also answered the question of what it would do about the growing presence of Linux combined with NetWare's decline. Novell bought SUSE and became a Linux company with a migration path for its NetWare customers. While Novell hasn't done as well as Red Hat with its Linux offerings, it's been far more successful as a Linux company than it was as a NetWare company in NetWare's waning years.
Before this move, Novell, when anyone thought of it at all, was seen as a declining giant. It was perceived as being either destined for computing's trash heap along with the likes of MicroPro/WordStar and Ashton-Tate, or at best, to be bought out like Lotus or WordPerfect. Instead, Novell became important again.
Why? It wasn't just that its purchase of SUSE was a smart move, although it was that too. It was also because, once more, SCO's frantic attacks on Linux had drawn everyone's attention to Linux. Thus, a move that might have only gotten a shrug from corporate buyers in 2002, was noticed by the C-level executives that make companies' buying decisions.
All these short-term effects benefited Linux and the companies that embraced it, but the best news of all was still to come. And that news was that, as SCO continued to try again and again to show how Linux's IP (intellectual property) was compromised, what they really ended up doing was showing even someone who couldn't tell a patent from a copyright that Linux was legally safe.
All those questions about open source's legality were brought out into the open and answered. And, in every example, Linux came out the winner.
Recently, SCO was dealt a crushing blow when the U.S. District Court ruled that Novell, not SCO, owned Unix's IP. Even before that, though, SCO's arguments that Unix code was somehow hidden inside the open Linux system had been dismissed over and over again.
If this had been reported in some obscure legal journal, no one would know. Thanks to SCO, however, everyone who pays any attention to operating systems knows that Linux is legally clean. Microsoft's more recent attempts to tar Linux and open-source software with vague complaints of Linux patent violations are continuing SCO's good work.
So it is that I want to give thanks to both SCO and Microsoft, its financial backer. If it wasn't for you two, Linux would have had a much harder time getting the attention it deserved. By putting Linux in the spotlight, you've helped Linux far more than you've hurt it.
Let's give them a big round of applause, folks. Without SCO and Microsoft and their half-baked anti-Linux legal claims, Linux would never have grown as quickly as it has over the past five years. Thanks, guys!
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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