Linked by Roberto J. Dohnert on Tue 10th Jun 2003 01:06 UTC
On March 7th 2003, the SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM for misappropriation of tradesecrets and contractual agreements. The scope of SCOs complaint is that IBM introduced parts of Unix System V and Project Monterey into the Linux kernel. Project Monterey was a effort to port IBM's AIX 5L onto the Intel Itanium platform, IBM withdrew from that project for reasons unknown according to the press, I believe that it was because the Itanium is a bomb. 
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At least somebody has some vague idea of what is really happening here.
A $1B judgement against IBM would certainly be felt by IBM. Not only financially, but possibly in their desire to continue working on/using Linux. SCO would also have the legal ammo to go after SUSE, RedHat, etc... and all of the companies using Linux. SCO would want their pound of flesh for patent infringements and would have legal precident to get it. The Linux community would most definately suffer if SCO wins. Just because the offending code could be replaced it doesn't mean that SCO won't bother going after monetary damages for the time that the offending code was used.
The key point here is that if SCO wins, in which case IBM no doubt will appeal, but nevertheless, if SCO wins it casts a VAST cloud over the entire commercial Linux community. The cloud it casts is that should SCO prevail, it will have cause, and a much easier case, against the commercial providers.
At that point the commercial providers essentially have a black hole of liability. Even once the code base is made clean, that liability does not instantly vanish. SCO will be going over and start knocking on doors with settlement offers. Should those be met with resistance, then they'll be followed up with lawsuits to get their remedy.
The even WORSE case scenario is the potential issue that the distributors (Red Hat, SuSE, etc) were "passing the liablility along" to their customers. This implies that Red Hat is not liable, but whoever purchased the product IS responsible and liable. SCO need only approach a few large customers to send a real ugly ripple through the entire Linux customer base.
Then, once it's all settled, it'll take a couple of years for the distributors to sell Linux again to a shakey customer base. Red Hat will have to accept liablity for what they distribute (otherwise why should a company take that risk again?). Should Red Hat do that, THAT will be a very solid striking blow to OSS in general. Then they have to be "picky". "Where did this code come from? Who wrote it? How safe is it?" Look at Red Hat and MP3.