Tony Westbrook

There is something about the dragging out and dusting down of old patents for profit that always reeks of desperation. Remember when BT claimed it had invented and owned the concept of hyperlinks and so should be recompensed for every hyperlink on the web? I know it got thrown out of at least one US court and I haven't heard much since, so I presume BT has given up or is resting its case in a pub somewhere off Goodge Street.

When Rodime was struggling and needed cash it took Seagate and Western Digital to court for using its patents. Then when Western Digital needed money it too turned to lawyers for income, using old patents to have a go at Conner. Fired up by this experience, it later went for Cirrus.

All these cases share one common thread: they are examples of companies that have moved from their core business of building stuff for us to use to a new model based on paying lawyers. And I think it stinks.

Latest in this line is SCO, which a couple of weeks ago decided that as it owned Unix - a clarification of what that actually means is still awaited - it was about time it looked for someone big and rich for the payback. So SCO has looked for contractual breaches in IBM's use of Unix within AIX and presumably thinks it has found some. SCO has now threatened IBM with removal of its Unix licence, which would of course be catastrophic for IBM's AIX customers were it to happen.

I'm not a lawyer, but I find it highly unlikely that IBM deliberately built a core plank of its enterprise offering on a blagged bit of software. Surely a discussion between mature individuals, perhaps using some kind of arbitration, could find a satisfactory solution to this dispute. I know the US is a litigious society, but is this really the best way to solve such a squabble?

Meanwhile, Novell asserts that Unix is not SCO's to defend because it remains the owner of the relevant System V copyrights anyway - SCO counters by saying its claim against IBM is a breach-of-contract case, not a copyright one. And within the past few weeks Microsoft has dutifully signed up for a full licence from SCO for Unix.

As the facts are so clouded in confusion I'll resist the powerful temptation to guess at the outcome of all these shenanigans. But whatever happens, I reckon SCO has gone too far by widening the scope of its legal assault by going for the open-source Linux community as well as the high-rolling Unix one. SCO is telling distributors and users of Linux that elements of the same System V Unix software exist in various distributions of the Linux kernel as well.

Maybe Linux was the real target all along. If so, I think SCO has taken on more than it bargained for. I know that every time I've written or edited an article about Linux I get a lot of email - not all of it entirely complimentary. So I can only image the kind of lively user feedback SCO is enjoying at the moment. I hope the firm has upgraded its mail servers.

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