Less than one month after becoming the first publicly announced purchaser of  The SCO Group's controversial intellectual property license for Linux, Houston-based Internet service provider Everyones Internet is reconsidering the benefits of doing business with the Linux community's enemy No.1.

EV1Servers.Net (EV1), the hosting division of Everyones Internet, announced on March 1 that it had licensed SCO's intellectual property, saying that it was looking to offer its customers stability in the wake of SCO's protracted battle with the open source community. SCO claims that the Linux operating system violates its own intellectual property and that users of Linux could be sued over these claims unless they purchase the Lindon, Utah, company's Linux license.

The deal with SCO not only would prevent EV1's Linux hosting customers from being sued, it also would take both EV1 and its users "out of the current fray," said Everyones Internet CEO Robert Marsh on the day of the announcement.

As it happened, the licensing deal placed Marsh's company in the very center of the SCO Linux dispute. SCO portrayed EV1 as a model client for its licensing plan -- a company that had recognized the "importance of SCO's valuable IP asset," according to SCO CEO Darl McBride.

Reaction from Linux users, however, was negative, and deal was widely criticized on EV1's own online discussion boards. "Had you wanted to stay out of this, you'd not have agreed to go public and become SCO's poster child," wrote one member in EV1's user forums, the day after the deal with SCO was announced. "I am looking into other hosting alternatives specifically due to your stance with SCO," the member wrote.

"We got the hate mail, we got the group of people who interpreted our agreement as validating SCO or endorsing SCO or any number of things," said Marsh.

"All of a sudden we went from being reasonably good guys to being, in some people's eyes, akin to the devil. And that's certainly something that weighs heavy on our minds, because we always want to do the right thing," he said.

So how does Marsh feel about the deal nearly a month later? "Would I do it again? No. I'll go on the record as saying that," Marsh said. "I certainly know a lot more today than I knew a month ago, in a lot of respects."

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.