According
to InfoWorld
That's pretty stunning. Even if SCO were right with their allegations that there
is SCO-owned IP in Linux (and I am not in the position to make any statement about
the rightfulness of that claim), $699 per processor is still well above and beyond
what would be their fair share †that pricing scheme looks more like this
is our OS, including everything that ships with it and that seems just plainly
wrong.
This reminds me of a similar high-profile case: the Unisys GIF license. They hold/held
the LZW patent and thatâ€s used in GIF. Of course, lots of developers found out
after theyâ€ve implemented and shipped GIF support and Unisys probably waited
for a critical mass to accumulate before they started enforcing licensing fees for
that patent in early 1995. (Side note from the Unisys
site: The U.S. LZW patent expires June 20, 2003, the counterpart Canadian patent
expires July 7, 2004, the counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany
and Italy expire June 18, 2004, and the Japanese counterpart patents expire June 20,
2004.). While Unisys certainly didnâ€t make too many friends with that move,
they were initially asking something like ten cents to at most ten dollars per distributed
copy of any software package using the GIF format, if I remember right (the pricing
information seems to have vanished). I would think that looking at the SCO case, this
all of a sudden becomes very fair and reasonable.
[Still, the web-site fee of $5000 per site if you were/are using unlicensed (as in:
Unisys LZW patent licensing) software to create your GIFs, remains outrageous]
[Clemens Vasters: Enterprise Development & Alien Abductions]
Sad reality I suppose. I fear that if this trend of enforcing (insane) software patents is allowed to grow in the mind of lawyers, it will not be long before we (as comuter pogrammers and the companies that employ us) will be treated by the lawyers much as doctors are. Pinned up by lawsuits, sued over insanely supid and assanine things and then put out of business due to the legal hurdles that will be too difficult/expensive to overcome. The SCO lawsuit does not even attempt to claim any software older then two years ago, and yet they are demanding 10 times the amount of money that Redhat charges per software copy for redhat.
On the other hand, I suspect that there are some real enronmatics going on behind the scenes with the recent merges.