SCO Warns Linux Users of Legal Liability - ' Page 3 ' (
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SCO also pointed commercial Linux customers and the media to a recent research note by Gartner analyst George Weiss, which said that IS departments using Linux or other open-source code should have an internal process, possibly with advice from their legal departments, to perform due diligence on the nature and origin of open-source code for possible infringement of patents.
"System administrators must be admonished to submit open-source code to inspection for potential violation of patents. An open-source quality assurance process should determine and approve allowable code for production systems. Such efforts may slow adoption of Linux in high-end production systems of critical applications," the note said.
Regardless of the outcome of the suit, SCO has already lost significant goodwill in the Linux community. "SCOs lawsuit can be construed as an attempt to raise shareholder value through claims of intellectual-property infringement or to pressure IBM into an acquisition. If the SCO lawsuit is not upheld, the SCO installed base would face a potentially weakened SCO and should then plan for migration from OpenServer and UnixWare within the next five years," the note said.
SCO has already come under fire from the Linux and open-source communities. Open-source-community activists and consultants expressed anger about what they saw as SCOs baseless legal action.
Bruce Perens, in Berkeley, Calif., an open-source consultant and activist who is a former senior global strategist for Linux at Hewlett-Packard Co., said at that time that SCO was "playing both sides: It is pointing out that its action is not against Linux or the open-source community, yet on the other hand, it is suing one of the largest players in the Linux and open-source communities.
"The Linux and open-source community are not deceived by this. We ... will now never recommend any products created by SCO or Caldera [International Inc.]," Perens said then.
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