SCO Revokes AIX License; IBM And Angry Open Sourcers Respond

from the getting-messier dept

Certainly no surprise here, but in the interest of completeness, I'll include the entirely expected news that SCO is saying they've revoked IBM's AIX license, and that the company (and anyone using AIX) is now in violation. They've gone to a judge to get an injunction telling IBM to destroy all copies of their code. Hopefully, no judge would be so confused in this matter to agree to that injunction. IBM, not surprisingly, put out a very short reply to the expected news, repeating the same mantra they've stated since this threat was first announced: "IBM's Unix license is irrevocable, perpetual and fully paid up. It cannot be terminated." Clearly, this is going to end up in court - though, there may be more participants than expected. Wired News is talking about how more and more folks in the open source/Linux world are looking at filing their own lawsuits against SCO. Either way, one thing is clear, there are very few people who are on SCO's side in this battle. It's as if they're taking exactly the wrong lesson from the entertainment industry - calling all of their potential customers crooks and expecting that's going to help them improve their business prospects. Update: Because they're realizing just how much of a longshot this is, SCO has decided to up their "expected value", by increasing the "damages" they're seeking to $3 billion. Of course, when multiplied by their chances of actually prevailing in this case, they're still not looking at much.

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