Sun Sees Opportunity in IBM-SCO Showdown

SCO has said it will revoke IBMs license to ship AIX as it claims Big Blue has violated the terms and conditions of that license by giving its customers unauthorized access to Unix source code and for "giving away" parts of the code to the open-source community and Linux.

The 100-day notice period that SCO was contractually required to give IBM before revoking its Unix license passes this Friday.

Sun, meanwhile, is preparing to launch a campaign known as the AIX to Solaris Migration Program. The program and advertising campaign around it, due to be launched next week once SCO has announced that it is going to pull IBMs AIX license, is designed to offer concerned AIX customers a migration path to Suns Solaris version of Unix—for which it has a paid license with SCO.

"We will offer an initial consultation and evaluation assessment, which will be free. We are also looking at a shared risk migration model where we agree with the customer what a successful migration model looks like. They dont pay for it until we get there," Larry Singer, the vice president of Suns global information office in Menlo Park, Calif., told eWEEK on Thursday.

An IBM spokeswoman told eWEEK the company believed its AIX license is "irrevocable and perpetual. We intend to try this case in the courts, and we intend to defend this vigorously," she said.

A SCO spokesman declined to comment on what the company plans to do about IBMs AIX license once the 100-day notice period expires tomorrow.

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