SCO Announces Intellectual Property License for Linux
LINDON, Utah, Aug. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX - News), the owner and licensor of the core UNIX® operating system source code, today announced the availability of the SCO Intellectual Property License for Linux®. The run-time license permits the use of SCO's intellectual property, in binary form only, as contained in Linux distributions. By purchasing a SCO Intellectual Property License, customers avoid infringement of SCO's intellectual property rights in Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.5 kernels. Because the SCO license authorizes run-time use only, customers also comply with the General Public License, under which Linux is distributed.
SCO announced in July that it had registered the copyrights to its software releases of UNIX System V and UnixWare® with the U.S. Copyright office and that it would offer licenses to cure the SCO IP infringement issues for Linux operating systems. Beginning this week, SCO will start meeting with commercial Linux customers to present the details of this right to use SCO intellectual property binary licensing program."We have identified numerous files of unlicensed UNIX System V code and UNIX System V derivative code in the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels," said Chris Sontag, senior vice president and general manager of SCOsource, the intellectual property licensing division of SCO. "We believe it is necessary for Linux customers to properly license SCO's IP if they are running Linux 2.4 kernel and later versions for commercial purposes. The license insures that customers can continue their use of binary deployments of Linux without violating SCO's intellectual property rights."
Pricing and Availability
SCO will be offering an introductory license price of $699 for a single CPU system through October 15th, 2003. Pricing for multiple CPU systems, single CPU add-ons, desktop systems and embedded systems will also be available. Linux users who are interested in additional information or purchasing an IP License for Linux should contact their local SCO sales representative or call SCO at 1-800-726-8649 or visit our web site at http://www.sco.com/scosource .
So does it mean that Linux is not anymore a free OS ? It seems so regarding this news.