* SCO shows Linux and Unix code to analysts
The SCO Group turned up the heat on IBM last week, as it began showing what it claims is proof of the allegations behind its licensing agreement lawsuit against IBM. It also threatened to pull IBM’s license to sell Unix, which SCO claims to own.
SCO last week began showing to analysts Linux and Unix code, which SCO claims proves its case that IBM is in violation of its Unix licensing contract with SCO. The company claims that several contributions by IBM to the Linux kernel – including enterprise-level symmetric multiprocessing, file system and memory management technologies – were gleamed from IBM’s AIX operating system, which is a derivative of Unix. AIX runs on IBM’s RISC processor-based RS6000 – now called the pSeries – servers, which can scale to dozens of SMP nodes, and operate in some of the largest enterprise networks.
While SCO is showing to analysts some examples of code it says were copied into Linux, it is not revealing specific code in the areas of SMP, memory or file system enhancements, which it claims IBM lifted from AIX.
SCO also said if IBM did not comply to its demands by Friday, June 13, it would pull its Unix license from IBM, thus essentially making any IBM AIX user in violation of SCO licensing. (It pulled a similar move recently, when SCO warned Linux users that they may be violation of licensing agreements by running Linux servers).
IBM shrugged off SCO’s claims last week, saying that the company’s AIX license is nonrevocable, and that IBM did not break any rules regarding its contributions to Linux.
