Now that The SCO Group's Linux lawsuit has been gutted due to a ruling that says Novell owns the Unix copyrights, I bet the companies that paid protection money to SCO for proprietary Linux licenses and Unix rights (Sun Microsystems, EV1Servers) have that "I've been robbed" feeling right now.

The first and only name that comes to mind when considering the topic of buying SCO's Linux licenses is EV1Servers. Here's the official SCO press release on the matter. In short, EV1Servers bought Linux licenses for its Linux servers. The immediate reaction from EV1's clients was disgust, and several of them cancelled their hosting agreements and moved to other service providers. The EV1Servers CEO, Robert Marsh, publicly regretted the deal soon after he finalized it, though it's likely that he was more concerned with losing customers than with saying no to SCO's baseless request for license fees.

If SCO did not own the Unix copyrights and there was no Unix code in Linux, then is EV1Servers entitled to a refund? Sadly, no, because the license agreement stated that refunds are no possible under any conditions -- including the possibility that SCO doesn't own any code in Linux. That wouldn't necessarily stop EV1 from suing to get their money back, being that the deal was made under false pretenses, but somehow I doubt Robert Marsh will pursue it.

A few years ago I interviewed Scott McNealy, then-CEO of Sun Microsystems, at the Solaris 10 launch event in San Francisco. Though the article I wrote was long and covered many subjects, here's a passage from it that is relevant to today's discussion:

"What proprietary code had to be taken out of Solaris in preparation for open sourcing it?" McNealy responded by saying that the process of open sourcing Solaris actually started five years ago. "There were hundreds of encumbrances to open sourcing Solaris. Some of them we had to buy out, others we had to eliminate. We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code -- I couldn't say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code," he said, referring to the February 2003 multimillion-dollar purchase of expanded Unix SVR4 license rights from the SCO Group.

If SCO did not own the Unix copyrights, then what did Sun pay for? Will Sun get its money back from SCO, and then pay it to Novell for the same rights? What will become of Solaris if it contains code that was licensed under the OpenSolaris CDDL when in fact it actually belongs to Novell?

The longer the SCO debacle continues, the more of a mess it becomes.

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Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.