Gunning For Linux

In the ascetic waiting room of the SCO Group's Lindon, Utah, headquarters, the only reading matter is a stack of beige, telephone-book-sized binders. They are volumes I, II, III, and IV of the company's press clippings. For the previous month. SCO is already notorious in three insular communities. The first to appreciate its significance were countercultural software developers, at least a few of whom would like to transform society by reordering our approach to the protection of intellectual property. Next to catch on were the pragmatic information technology officers and risk-averse in-house lawyers who work for every company this magazine writes about. Now the ripple effects are about to touch the rest of us, and we need to know about SCO too.

SCO became infamous in March 2003, when it sued IBM alleging that the IT giant had improperly dumped parts of SCO's confidential, enterprise-grade, proprietary software code, called Unix, into Linux. Linux (rhymes with "cynics") is a "free" or open-source operating system that can be downloaded off the Internet for no charge. Such software is called free not because of its price (there is no prohibition on charging for it, though most people don't) but rather because its source code—the specialized language in which it is written—is kept open to public view, enabling developers to freely comprehend it, modify it, debug it, customize it, and distribute it. With proprietary software, like Microsoft Windows, developers can typically do none of those things, because of both legal prohibitions and technological barriers.

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