Tech world to end 2003 by laughing at SCO

2003, in many technology areas, will be known for a long time as the year the Linux war began. No one quite knows why SCO all of a sudden decided to taken on Linux in a clear effort to kill the OS that threatened it's business model so clearly, but the speculation is rampant and vivid. As the end of this year draws near, we see several critical battles in the war decided, the one over SCO showing the code, though only to a judge and IBM lawyers, and a few other things that have been repeated, like the second Linux letter sent to large corporations that laughed off the claims of ownership or at least licensing over Linux. In this round they are sending about 3,000 letters and this time it is asking the licensees of Unix to verify they have not been the source of code leaks.

Novell, who was a player in the war for a few days before going quiet, has recently become a voice again and asserting copyright ownership of the code that SCO is threatening lawsuits over. The question is, though, whether the copyright is over the code SCO says it sold to them, then Caldera, or if the copyrights are ones that Novell recently revealed they had applied for and received. This could be Novell's last big charge, though, as the next one would not likely be paid much attention to if they went quiet again. Recently there has been stories that point to two distinct sets of letters, though, the aforementioned ones to Unix licensees, and then another set sent to Linux using Fortune 1000 companies that supposedly points to verbatim copying of code.

As 2004 dawns a new day, there is no doubt that the war with SCO will go on, and while the two sides have differing views on the chances SCO has, most people will admit this is the final grasp of a dying company. In programming, as with web pages, there are only a small number of ways that something could be done, and this could account for the fact some of the code appears the same. I can hope some definitive decision is reached by the end of the year, but there is little doubt this was the story of 2003.