What of SCO’s position in UnitedLinux?

Many things remain unclear about the SCO Linux lawsuit. One of the murkiest issues has been the future of the SCO Group’s membership of UnitedLinux.

It was little more than a year ago when SCO (then known as Caldera), TuboLinux, SuSE and Connectiva launched UnitedLinux LLC – an effort to create a common Linux distribution for enterprises. There was much buzz around this movement through the summer, as executives from the four companies touted the future of the platform. The effort culminated with the first release of UnitedLinux 1.0 last fall.

But since January, you might say SCO has become the La Toya Jackson of the UnitedLinux family.

But even as SCO executives accuse Linux users of possible licensing violations involved with running the open-source operating system, the company is still listed as a member of UnitedLinux. When I contacted UnitedLinux recently to ask about the status of SCO’s membership, UnitedLinux general manager Paula Hunter replied with this e-mail.

“The four partner companies in UnitedLinux LLC – Conectiva, the SCO Group, SuSE Linux and Turbolinux – continue to support products powered by UnitedLinux Version 1.0 and customers deploying these products.  UnitedLinux LLC is a private company equally owned by the four partners. The partners make all decisions regarding the future of UnitedLinux and the UnitedLinux product and will issue announcements from time to time, as appropriate.”

SCO has told its Linux customer that they will not be affected by any repercussions of its legal action against IBM, since they are paying customers of SCO’s intellectual property. But where does this leave customer of UnitedLinux, which shares a common code base among Connectiva, TurboLinux and SuSE, which has worked closely on the development of Linux for IBM’s various server platforms. Will UnitedLinux soon be a three-member act?