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The business and technology press has paid close attention to The SCO Group's lawsuit against IBM and its letters of warning to 1,500 other software vendors. But what is really going on?

SCO's predecessor bought some Unix rights from Novell in the mid-1990s, a few years after Novell bought the rights to AT&T Unix. Now SCO claims it owns the rights to all Unix, while Novell says SCO doesn't even own the rights to the intellectual property it's suing over.

Enter IBM. SCO claims that without IBM's infusion of proprietary Unix code into Linux, the Linux revolution would not have happened. SCO further claims that IBM performed this infusion to undermine commercial sales of Unix. As yet, SCO has failed to point out a single line of code that is proprietary.

Of course, Microsoft's dreams came true when SCO filed this suit. Its only chance at maintaining a major presence in the data center over the next few years is to convince us that Linux is not ready for prime time. So Microsoft offered a few million dollars and bought a license from SCO.

This helps SCO (and the lawsuit) stay solvent. And if SCO wins, Microsoft is licensed to use the intellectual property in question. Regardless, Microsoft is helping to fund activities against what Redmond officials have called the "open-source cancer," but Microsoft doesn't have to play the bad guy.

What does this mean to you? You may have to upgrade, but Linux isn't going anywhere. IBM may be forced to pay SCO something, but I doubt it. Claims that SCO doesn't own the intellectual property in question, combined with its failure to provide specific examples in the nearly three months since it filed suit, make this case seem weak.

Continue to make your buying decisions based on what's best for your organization. This suit will work itself out, and the result will not spell the demise of the open-source movement.

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