SCO V. IBM - The GPL Issue

The GPL Issue

Within a few months of the filing of the lawsuit, Eben Moglen, the Free Software Foundation's legal counsel, stated that SCO's suit should not concern Linux users other than IBM. In an interview with internetnews.com, he was reported as saying:

There is absolute difficulty with this line of argument which ought to make everybody in the world aware that the letters that SCO has put out can be safely put in the wastebasket...

From the moment that SCO distributed that code under the GNU General Public License, they would have given everybody in the world the right to copy, modify and distribute that code freely...

From the moment SCO distributed the Linux kernel under GPL, they licensed the use. Always. That's what our license says.

Apparently noticing the incongruity of their selling a Linux distribution while suing IBM for stealing their intellectual property and giving it to the developers of that operating system, the SCO Group then announced on May 14, 2003 that they would no longer distribute Linux. According to their press release, "SCO will continue to support existing SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux customers and hold them harmless from any SCO intellectual property issues regarding SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux products."

SCO currently claims:

• Any code belonging to SCO that might have been GPL'd was done by SCO employees without proper legal authorization, and thus is not legally GPL'd.
• That for code to be GPL'd, the code's copyright owner must put a GPL notice before the code, but since SCO itself was not the one to add the notices, the code was never GPL'd.