SCO presses ahead with Linux billing
SCO presses ahead with Linux billing
The SCO Group is set to push ahead with its plan to issue invoices to Linux users in the next few weeks, with the company announcing that failure to pay for the highly controversial UnixWare licence would likely result in legal action.
Around 1000 commercial Linux users in the US will be the first to be billed, with corporate users in the UK and mainland Europe to be among the second wave targeted.
The licences, which SCO has set a price of US$699 for a single CPU server licence, are not to be issued to companies in Australia and New Zealand just yet, but a spokesman for SCO said they would be issued here in due course at a price equivalent to those in the States.
SCO began its push to grab a cut of the growing Linux market back in march when it sued IBM for allegedly using part of the Unix source code in its version of Linux. The SCO did not, however, identify exactly what part of the Linux code was lifted from Unix.
That was until recently, when they showed a group some of the Unix code it claims was copied into Linux illegally. This apparently resulted in embarrassment for SCO representatives when Linux users claimed the code in question came from a freeware Unix port of the 1970s. Linux founder Linus Torvalds was reported to have said: "If this is their best example, they are bound to lose (any court case)."
Following that episode, SCO were pressed to come up with more convincing evidence that it had a case but failed to do so, claiming that by making public any further pieces of code would prejudice its case and reveal trade secrets.
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