[tt] NYT: Link by Link - This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix (more)

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Link by Link - This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/business/media/26link.html
[Related material appended.]

By NOAM COHEN

FOR a certain subset of Internet users, "Sudo make me a sandwich"
may as well be "Take my wife ... please."

Perhaps some explanation is in order. Before giving up the goods,
however, we should heed the warning of Randall Munroe, the
23-year-old creator of xkcd, a hugely popular online comic strip (at
least among computer programmers) where the sandwich line appeared.
Mr. Munroe believes that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog
-- it can be done, but the frog dies.

Still, he plays along, explaining that "sudo" is a command in the
Unix operating system that temporarily grants godlike powers: "The
humor comes from people who have encountered typing a command and
having the computer say `No,' and they say, `Oh, yeah, sudo says,'
and the computer does it. Kind of like `Simon says.' "

Hence the set-up: one stick figure says to another, "Make me a
sandwich," only to be told, "No." Thinking quickly, stick figure No.
1 says, "Sudo make me a sandwich," and the once-recalcitrant stick
figure No. 2 must comply.

Mr. Munroe, a physics major and a programmer by trade, is good for
jokes like this three times a week, informed by computing and the
Internet. By speaking the language of geeks -- many a strip hinges
on crucial differences between the C and Python programming
languages -- while dealing with relationships and the meaning of a
computer-centric life, xkcd has become required reading for techies
across the world.

The site, which began publishing regularly in January 2006, has
500,000 unique visitors a day, he said, and 80 million page views a
month. (Why "xkcd"? "It's just a word with no phonetic
pronunciation," his Web site, xkcd.com, answers.)

Mr. Munroe has become something of a cult hero. He counts himself as
among the fewer than two dozen creators of comic strips on the Web
who make a living at it.

At Google headquarters, a required stop on the geek-cult-hero
speaking tour, he recently addressed hundreds of engineers, some of
whom dutifully waited for him to sign their laptops. He said he had
only wanted a tour of the place but had instead been invited to
speak. The real thrill, he said, was that a hero of his, Donald
Knuth, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford and a
programming pioneer, was in the front row.

"It's comparable to Bill Gates's being in the front row," he said.
"I got to have lunch with him. He's in his 70s, but people he is in
touch with must have told him about it."

While the comics play on the peculiarities of code, they are as much
about escaping the clear, orderly world of commands to engage a
chaotic sphere known as real life, or perhaps merely adulthood.

So one comic has a graph showing "my overall health" entering a
steep decline "the day I realized I could cook bacon whenever I
wanted." Or, in one of Mr. Munroe's favorites, a stick-figure couple
revel in an apartment filled to the brim with playpen balls,
"because we are grownups now, and it's our turn to decide what that
means."

And, in a rare lapse from his plain-and-simple drawing style, a pair
of stick figures walk in an increasingly beautiful landscape after
first declaring: "I feel like I'm wasting my life on the Internet.
Let's walk around the world." At the foot of a gorgeous mountain,
however, one turns to the other and says, "And yet, all I can think
is that this will make for a great LiveJournal entry."

Mr. Munroe is clearly still getting used to his celebrity and to
running a business. He and his roommate, Derek Radtke, work on the
Web site out of their Somerville, Mass., apartment, and they
recently hired an employee to handle e-mail.

"People are generally surprised that we make a living from it," Mr.
Munroe said. Without being specific, he said that the sales of xkcd
merchandise support the two of them "reasonably well." He said they
sell thousands of T-shirts a month, either of panels from his strip
or in their style, as well as posters.

"We've been getting a lot more efficient," he said. "We were losing
money on every T-shirt sold overseas for a while." (But you can make
it up in volume, I helpfully suggested. He moved on.)

A fan of newspaper comic strips since childhood, Mr. Munroe can
simultaneously call himself an heir to "Peanuts" while recognizing
that his quirky and technical humor would never have made it in
newspapers.

On the Internet, he said, "You can draw something that appeals to 1
percent of the audience -- 1 percent of United States, that is three
million people, that is more readers than small cartoons can have."

In that way, and many others, the Web has been a salvation. "People
doing comics on the Internet are free of all the baggage that goes
with being with a syndicate," he said, "the editorial control, the
space limits, the no control over what can be done with your
cartoon."

The Internet has also created a bond between Mr. Munroe and his
readers that is exceptional. They re-enact in real life the odd
ideas he puts forward in his strip. A case in point was the strip
called "Dream Girl." It recounted a dream in which a girl (stick
figure with flowing hair) recites a bunch of numbers into the
narrator's ear.

"The xkcd person is the kind of person who would take that and run
with it," he said. The numbers were coordinates and a date months in
the future.

The strip's narrator says he went there and no one came. "It turns
out that wanting something doesn't make it real," the strip
concludes.

But on that day in real life, hundreds of fans met in a park in
Cambridge.

And then they all ordered sandwiches.


Judge Says Unix Copyrights Rightfully Belong to Novell
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/technology/11novell.html

By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 10 -- In a decision that may finally settle one
of the most bitter legal battles surrounding software widely used in
corporate data centers, a federal district court judge in Utah ruled
Friday afternoon that Novell, not the SCO Group, is the rightful
owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system.

In the 102-page ruling, the judge, Dale A. Kimball, also said Novell
could force SCO to abandon its claims against I.B.M., which SCO had
sued. Judge Kimball's decision in favor of Novell could almost
entirely undermine SCO's 2003 lawsuit against I.B.M.

The ruling could remove the cloud over open-source software like
Linux, an operating system loosely modeled on the proprietary Unix.
The unresolved ownership has been seen as a limiting factor in the
willingness of computing managers for businesses large and small to
adopt open-source software, which can be adapted freely by software
developers and can be legally shared or modified by end users.

"It was argued that this was supposed to suggest riskiness in open
source, but it turns out that the open-source world was rock solid
from the beginning," said Eben Moglen, a professor of law at
Columbia University and the founding director of the Software
Freedom Law Center, which advocates open-source software.

SCO's shares declined by 1 cent, to $1.55, in after-hours trading.
The company's stock reached $19.41 after the lawsuit against I.B.M.
was filed in 2003.

In that suit, SCO said I.B.M. had violated a contract by copying
code from the Unix operating system to Linux, an open-source
operating system that is distributed free and that I.B.M. uses on
some of its computers.

SCO had said that Linux was an unauthorized derivative of Unix,
which it said it had purchased from Novell in 1995.

"The court's ruling has cut out the core of SCO's case and, as a
result, eliminates SCO's threat to the Linux community based upon
allegations of copyright infringement of Unix," said Joe LaSala,
Novell's senior vice president and general counsel.

Executives for SCO did not immediately return phone calls on Friday
evening.

The Unix operating system, which has become popular with some
independent-minded PC users as well as in the corporate world, was
developed by AT&T researchers at Bell Labs beginning in 1969. During
the 1970s, the operating system became highly influential in
academic computing and in computer science departments.

In the '80s, it had a significant impact in the computer workstation
and minicomputer markets, although it never gained a significant
foothold in the personal computer business until Steven P. Jobs
brought a version of Unix with him when he returned to Apple
Computer in 1997. Some PC makers have begun to offer versions of
Linux instead of Microsoft's Windows operating systems.

Open-source software advocates said the ruling vindicated the
open-source approach to software development.

"This is a meaningful message in terms of people adopting
open-source software," said James Zemlin, executive director of the
Linux Foundation, a nonprofit consortium formed to foster the
operating system. "This says that Linux is a safe solution and
people can choose it with that in mind."

Several legal experts said that minor legal questions might still
remain in SCO's suit against I.B.M., related to promises that I.B.M.
may have made in a failed joint development effort.


Software Company's Battle Over Unix Produces Profit
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F07E4D81E31F93AA15756C0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
May 29, 2003

By STEVE LOHR

A recent campaign of litigation and warnings by a Utah software
marketer against companies that use Linux has helped make the
company profitable for the first time ever, it said yesterday.

Less than three months ago, the company, the SCO Group, started what
has become an escalating skirmish in the software industry by
asserting that its rights to the Unix operating system were being
widely violated by computer companies that back Linux, and perhaps
by the thousands of companies that use Linux.

The latest volleys came yesterday. Novell, which sold the Unix
business to SCO in 1995, contended that it had not passed on the
intellectual property rights to the system in the sale to SCO, a
contention SCO disputes. And a German software group, Linuxtag,
threatened to sue SCO unless it stopped its anti-Linux campaign.

Linux, which is distributed free, is a close relative of Unix, which
was originally developed at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1960's. But
the commercial rights to Unix, after a series of transactions, are
now held by SCO, which has licensed that underlying technology to
other companies, including I.B.M., Sun Microsystems and
Hewlett-Packard, to develop their own flavors of Unix.

There was good news yesterday for SCO, as well. The company reported
a quarterly profit of $4.5 million on revenue of $21.4 million. SCO
said it collected $8.8 million in cash from its new division set up
to enforce the company's rights to Unix.

One company that refused to pay under SCO's tough new enforcement
regime was I.B.M., an early and ardent supporter of Linux; I.B.M.
offers its own version of Unix, called AIX. SCO sued I.B.M. in
March, seeking damages of at least $1 billion, contending that
I.B.M. violated its contract with SCO by putting Unix code into
Linux.

With deep pockets and a wealth of legal expertise, I.B.M. would be a
formidable courtroom foe for SCO, a small company based in Lindon,
Utah. But SCO insists it has a long-term strategy. "If it takes a
couple of years, we're geared to do that," Darl McBride, SCO's
president and chief executive, said yesterday.

SCO has some formidable legal talent in its corner. The company is
represented by Boies, Schiller & Flexner, a firm led by David Boies,
the renowned litigator who was part of the team that defended I.B.M.
in a long-running federal antitrust suit the government eventually
dropped in 1982. And Mr. Boies represented the government in its
successful antitrust prosecution of Microsoft.

Mr. McBride became chief executive of SCO, which was then called
Caldera Systems, last June and sought out Mr. Boies at the end of
last year. "We went for the biggest gun we could find," he said.

Mr. Boies was in court on another case yesterday, but a partner,
Mark A. Heise, said the SCO suit against I.B.M. was the kind of case
that appealed to his firm. The suit, according to Mr. Heise, pointed
to a larger issue. "Here," he said, "the issue is, Are we going
to enforce people's contract obligations? Or in the arena of
computer software, are we going to toss that out?"

To its critics, SCO is simply engaged in a mercenary program to
extract royalty payments from other companies and slow the advance
of Linux. Earlier this month, SCO sent letters to 1,500 companies
warning them that using Linux -- a collection of contributions from
many programmers -- could be legally risky. "We believe," the
letter stated, "that Linux is, in material part, an unauthorized
derivative of Unix."

Yesterday, Jack L. Messman, the chairman and chief executive of
Novell, called on SCO to substantiate that contention. Unless it
does, Mr. Messman wrote in a letter to Mr. McBride, "it will be
apparent to all that SCO's true intent is to sow fear, uncertainty
and doubt about Linux in order to extort payments from Linux
distributors and users."

Mr. Messman also said that the 1995 sale of Unix to SCO did not
include the software copyrights, raising doubts about SCO's ability
to enforce the intellectual property rights claims.

Mr. McBride replied that while Novell might have retained some
intellectual property rights, SCO did have the legal right to
enforce most of the copyright and patents for the Unix technology.
Earlier this year, SCO did try to obtain all copyright and patent
rights from Novell. But Mr. McBride said he abandoned that after
SCO's lawyers decided the stronger legal claim was to pursue I.B.M.
on the grounds that it violated its contract obligations.

I.B.M. denies the accusations in the SCO suit.

Still, if the SCO claim to intellectual property is undermined, the
concerns of most Linux users will be eased. The SCO letter to Linux
users on May 12 repeatedly asserted SCO's contention that Linux
infringes the company's Unix intellectual property rights.

Software companies, like I.B.M., whose programmers contribute to
Linux, often have contracts with SCO. But most corporate users of
Linux do not.


Microsoft To Buy Unix Licenses From Caldera
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9506E6DA103EF933A15756C0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
May 20, 2003

Microsoft will buy some rights to use the Unix computer operating
system from Caldera International Inc., bolstering Caldera's legal
challenge to the rival Linux software. Microsoft bought the licenses
to ensure its Windows-based programs would work with Unix software,
the companies said in a statement. The value of the deal was not
disclosed. Caldera has said the low-cost Linux operating system
contains some of its Unix code and companies that use or promote
Linux might owe it royalties. Caldera, which is changing its name to
SCO Group, is suing I.B.M. and has warned 1,500 other companies.
Microsoft, which calls Linux the chief threat to its Windows
software, is endorsing a legal challenge that may raise the price of
Linux, analysts said.


I.B.M. Ads Give Starring Role To Its Unix Computer Servers
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E3D7123BF934A25754C0A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
July 17, 2000

By LAURIE J. FLYNN

Who cares that most consumers wouldn't know a midrange Unix server
from a refrigerator?

That hasn't stopped I.B.M. from embarking on a big advertising
campaign this week to proclaim the superiority of its Unix server
computers over those made by its rival, Sun Microsystems. The
campaign will play out on TV spots, Web banner ads, billboards and
guerrilla-style sidewalk posters. The ads began appearing earlier
this month.

Departing from I.B.M.'s traditionally restrained approach to
advertising, the ads proclaim that "It's easy to eclipse a Sun,"
then go on to offer side-by-side comparisons of I.B.M. and Sun
systems.

"We're in a leapfrog game and we want to seize this opportunity,"
said Lauren Flaherty, I.B.M.'s vice president for integrated
advertising. Unix servers, machines that run the Unix operating
system and enable many users to share data on a network, are in
particularly hot demand these days by Internet companies involved in
e-commerce.

What gives I.B.M. bragging rights? The company's confidence got a
huge boost in April, when the Internet domain-name registration
company Network Solutions announced it was replacing its aging Sun
servers with I.B.M. Unix servers. Since then, I.B.M. has racked up
several other high-profile corporate customers at Sun's expense,
including FedEx, Budget Rent-a-Car and Credit Suisse.

An I.B.M. spokesman attributed the gains in part to delays in
shipments of Sun's next-generation Unix processor.

Sun still has a big lead in the $30 billion market for Unix servers
of all sizes, and Hewlett-Packard is in second place. But in the
midrange market, where systems sell for $100,000 to $1 million, Sun
is in third place behind Hewlett and I.B.M., according to the market
research firm IDC.

Sun doesn't find I.B.M.'s campaign very amusing and accuses it of
mixing apples and oranges. "When you're a scared animal in the
corner, you do everything to fight back," said John Loiacono, chief
marketing officer at Sun. LAURIE J. FLYNN


Red Hat Sues SCO Over Claim to Unix Code
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D03E7DE1E3EF936A3575BC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
August 5, 2003

Red Hat Inc., a large publisher of the Linux operating system, filed
a lawsuit today accusing the SCO Group of making inaccurate
statements that Red Hat software infringed the SCO rights to Unix, a
related operating system.

SCO, a small concern in Lindon, Utah, has been asserting that its
rights to the Unix operating system are being violated by computer
companies that back Linux.

The Red Hat suit, filed in United States District Court in Delaware,
charges that SCO has waged an "unfair and deceptive" campaign
against Red Hat.

SCO has warned a number of computer makers and software publishers
that by using Linux they probably are violating the rights it
contends to hold on the Unix system. In May, the company sent about
1,500 letters to Linux users suggesting that they might be liable to
SCO for using Linux.

Linux, which is distributed free, is a close relative of Unix, which
was originally developed at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1960's. Linux
has been developed more recently by a worldwide group of volunteers.

In its suit challenging SCO, Red Hat asserts that SCO has refused to
publicly identify the portions of Unix that it contends are used
illegally in the Linux system. SCO has sued I.B.M., asking for $3
billion in damages it says I.B.M. caused by improperly contributing
Unix software code trade secrets to Linux.

Red Hat is based in Raleigh, N.C., and has almost 600 employees. Red
Hat also announced today that it was establishing a legal defense
fund for companies and organizations that are developing Linux. Red
Hat contributed $1 million to the fund.


Novell Registers Disputed Copyrights on Unix
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9504EEDC113FF930A15751C1A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
December 23, 2003

By LAURIE J. FLYNN

Novell Inc. has quietly registered for the copyrights on many
versions of the Unix computer operating system that the SCO Group
already says it owns, further muddying the water surrounding a
dispute that has embroiled the Linux open source world for almost a
year.

SCO, which has sued in an effort to capture hundreds of millions of
dollars in licensing fees and damages from I.B.M. and other
companies, said it owned the rights to the Unix operating system
through a transfer from Novell dating back to 1995. SCO asserts that
Linux, a variant of Unix that is distributed free and has been
making significant gains in corporate computing, violates SCO's
license and copyright.

SCO reacted on Monday to Novell's decision to register for the Unix
copyrights by calling the move a backdoor act to claim code that is
rightfully SCO's. "We see this as a fraudulent attempt by Novell to
get something they don't have," said Darl C. McBride, president and
chief executive of SCO. "It's fraudulent to now go and say they
have these" copyright registrations.

Mr. McBride contended that Novell was acting as a stalking horse for
I.B.M., the biggest seller of Linux to corporations. "It's not just
Novell," Mr. McBride said. "It's an attack by I.B.M."

An I.B.M. spokesman declined to comment, noting that the company is
in litigation with SCO. SCO filed a breach of contract and trade
secrets lawsuit against I.B.M. last March, accusing I.B.M. of
illegally incorporating Unix code in Linux. In that suit, SCO is
asking for $1 billion in damages. I.B.M. has denied the charges,
saying that SCO has not shown that the Linux software violates any
copyrights.

On Dec. 5, a Utah court told SCO that it had 30 days to demonstrate
to the court exactly what parts of the Linux code I.B.M. is using
that infringe on its rights.

Novell executives confirmed that the company filed for copyright
registrations this fall, but declined to provide details. "Novell
believes it owns the copyrights in Unix, and has applied for and
received copyright registrations pertaining to Unix consistent with
that position," Novell said in a statement. "SCO has been well
aware that Novell continues to assert ownership of the Unix
copyrights."

Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property lawyer with Gray Cary in
Palo Alto, Calif., said the development suggested that the dispute
over Linux's origins would probably drag on even longer until the
courts sorted out who owned what. "What you have," he said, "is
two companies that say they own the same copyright."

The revelation that Novell had filed for copyright registration on
Unix came as SCO announced its losses narrowed for its
fourth-quarter. In the quarter ended Oct. 31, SCO Group had a net
loss of $1.6 million, or 12 cents a share, compared with a loss of
$2.7 million, or 26 cents a year ago. Revenue was $24.3 million, up
from $15.5 million a year ago. Shares of SCO closed down 5.7
percent, to $17.73, with the news.

During the quarter, company executives said in a conference call on
Monday with financial analysts, SCO paid its legal team $9 million
related to its licensing battle, a figure the company said it
expected to fluctuate from $2 million to $5 million a quarter over
the coming year.

SCO is not only hoping to collect damages in court, it was also
stepping up its efforts to garner licensing fees from corporate
customers that use Linux. In doing so, SCO is threatening to file
additional lawsuits against users of Linux that have not agreed to
buy licenses from SCO. Yesterday, the company sent out letters to
Linux customers detailing what it said was its evidence of copyright
infringement and giving them until the end of January to respond.

Correction: December 24, 2003, Wednesday Because of an editing
error, an article in Business Day yesterday about a dispute between
Novell Inc. and the SCO Group over ownership of the copyright to the
Unix computer operating system referred incorrectly to I.B.M.'s
involvement with Linux, a variant of Unix that is distributed free.
While I.B.M. is a leading supporter of Linux and ships its server
computers loaded with the system, it does not sell commercial
versions of Linux.


The legal waters grow muddy in a dispute over a company's rights to Unix.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DEEDD1539F93AA35755C0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
June 9, 2003

By STEVE LOHR

FOR the true believers in free software, Bill Gates, the chairman of
Microsoft, has long been the figurative devil. Yet suddenly, Mr.
Gates has a rival for their animosity. The unlikely challenger is
Darl C. McBride, the 43-year-old chief executive of the SCO Group, a
little company in Lindon, Utah.

Mr. McBride is engaged in an escalating legal fight with I.B.M., and
its ripples are prompting concern in much of the computer industry
and among the industry's corporate customers. The worries center on
whether SCO can hobble the advance of a fast-emerging force in
computing, the GNU Linux operating system.

This high-technology soap opera is complex, but here is a simplified
version of events so far: SCO, which bought the licensing rights to
the Unix operating system and its source code in 1995, sued I.B.M.
in March, contending that it breached its contract with SCO by
shoveling Unix code into Linux, an operating system that is closely
related to Unix. Linux is the leading example of open-source
software development, where the code is distributed free and is then
improved and debugged by a loose-knit network of far-flung
programmers. I.B.M. has been the foremost champion of Linux among
big companies.

A legal spat between two companies is a parochial matter, but SCO
broadened its campaign last month. It sent warning letters to 1,500
large corporations that said, "We believe that Linux is, in
material part, an unauthorized derivative of Unix." Later, the
letter stated: "We believe that Linux infringes on our Unix
intellectual property and other rights. We intend to aggressively
protect and enforce these rights."

The move by SCO raised the stakes and sent many companies calling
for their lawyers. Last week, there were further developments. Mr.
McBride and his lawyers met on Monday with I.B.M. executives and
their counsel in White Plains. Copies of the contract for SCO's
purchase of the Unix business from Novell in 1995 began circulating,
and a few days later so did a 1996 amendment to the original
contract. Together, they present a somewhat murky picture of the
breadth of SCO's rights, according to lawyers who have seen the
papers. And an important deadline in the confrontation between SCO
and I.B.M. looms on Friday. SCO has said it will revoke the license
for AIX, the I.B.M. version of Unix, unless a settlement is reached.

As the SCO story moves ahead, the most important question is: do
Linux customers have a real cause for concern? The best answer,
according to lawyers who have looked at the documents made public to
date, is that as a legal matter it may be debatable, but as a
practical matter almost certainly not.

First, the SCO suit against I.B.M. is essentially a contract
dispute. That is, the accusation is that I.B.M. breached its
contract with SCO by taking code covered by the Unix contract and
putting it into Linux. The end users of Linux -- like the 1,500
industrial, financial and other corporations that received the
warning letters from SCO -- typically do not have contracts with
SCO.

But there is a complicating wrinkle. Contracts spell out acceptable
behavior between companies that have formal business relationships.
Yet intellectual property rights extend to strangers, corporate or
individual, as well. Though this is not part of the I.B.M. suit, SCO
asserts that it has the intellectual property rights -- trademark,
copyright and patents -- on Unix. Its intellectual property claim
was the basis for its warning letters to corporate users.

The documents that came out last week rendered a mixed verdict on
SCO's intellectual property rights. The 1995 contract with Novell
appears to exclude them, whereas the 1996 amendment says SCO does
have the trademark and copyrights to Unix, though it does not
mention patents.

Legal experts say that if SCO thought it had strong intellectual
property claims, it would probably have included those assertions in
the I.B.M. suit. But they add that the 1996 amendment may give SCO
the basis for some intellectual property claims.

"It doesn't cover patents, but it muddies the water," said Jeffrey
D. Neuburger, a technology lawyer at the firm of Brown Raysman
Millstein Felder & Steiner. "But you have to see those 1,500
letters to companies mainly as a great way to put pressure on the
real target, I.B.M."

SCO is coy on what it might do about the end users of Linux. Mr.
McBride speaks in threatening tones of companies running their
operations on software tainted with "stolen property." And SCO is
engaged in a pitched battle with the many supporters of Linux.
"They call us an extortion racket, and we call them thieves," Mr.
McBride said. Yet pressed a bit about how he really wants this
confrontation to play out, he said, "We're fine as long as there is
some justice."

For I.B.M., the options now are fight, settle or perhaps buy out
SCO. SCO's total market value is about $111 million, nearly eight
times that in February, before SCO sued I.B.M.

In recent weeks, two technology companies have signed new deals with
SCO. One has not been identified; Microsoft is the other. Microsoft
says the deal was intended to make sure its products could
interoperate with Unix systems without intellectual property
violations, though the company's critics regard it as a cynical ploy
to support SCO's anti-Linux campaign.

Regardless of the outcome of the SCO-I.B.M. dispute, the case does
point to the potentially thorny issue of how to handle the meeting
of the two worlds of software: traditional proprietary software,
guarded by strict intellectual property laws of copyright and
patent; and the fast-growing realm of open-source software like
Linux, which has thrived by freely sharing code and shunning the
constraints of intellectual property.

"It's a real problem for the future," said George Weiss, an
analyst at Gartner. "The open-source community has been pretty
cavalier about this. You've got to respect intellectual property."

No company has more at stake in managing this issue than I.B.M.,
which holds the world's largest portfolio of patents. I.B.M. has not
commented on the SCO case, other than to deny the accusations. But
Ken King, director of technical strategy at I.B.M.'s software group,
said that with care, which I.B.M. insists it has exercised, working
with open-source software is not a problem.

"Software patents basically provide incentives to encourage
innovation," Mr. King said. "Open-source approach also encourages
innovation, but in a more informal way."