How concerned are customers about the intellectual property and patent threats raised against Linux by SCO and others?
Stallings: Customers have gotten very smart about this situation since [SCO’s multibillion dollar suit] was launched against IBM last year. Thousands of CEOs got the letter threatening them with a lawsuit. It forced them to do due diligence. They are very current on this, and business is actually accelerating. Businesses are realizing that open source is a collaborative model, which is obviously real different from the commercial software model. Businesses get the benefits of this collaboration and are moving more classes of workloads onto what has become a reliable alternative. We hear questions about IP and we share what we know with them. The Linux community has also stepped forward with Linus Torvalds’ Developer’s Certificate of Origin that certifies contributors know the origin of their code and that it’s not stolen. The community voluntarily addressed these concerns, and customers are very aware of what’s going on. Red Hat, SuSE and the OSDL [Open Source Development Lab], meanwhi
Related Questions
- How concerned are customers about the intellectual property and patent threats raised against Linux by SCO and others?
- Why is SCO asking Linux customers to purchase a SCO Intellectual Property License in order to continue running Linux?
- Why do Linux communities maintain so many different desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, X Window System?
