NEW YORK — SCO Group’s legal moves over Linux will fizzle, but the IT world may soon feel a new chill in the form of patent lawsuits from other vendors, open-source advocate Bruce Perens predicted Wednesday.
“SCO is not the real threat,” he said during the LinuxWorld Expo here. In a limited-invite talk billed as
an “Open Source State of the Union,” Perens, who currently serves as executive director of the Desktop Linux Consortium, said Linux and open source are increasingly threatened by software patents.
That’s shorthand for Perens’ thesis that companies are building up huge patent portfolios which they’ll use as legal bludgeons to extract licensing fees, filing lawsuits if such fees aren’t forthcoming. That’s what happened
in a recent case involving Microsoft, in which the software giant’s
Internet
Explorer browser was found to have infringed on technology patented by the University of California and Eolas Technology. (Microsoft was fined $521
million. It is currently appealing the verdict.)
But Perens, who comes down on the side of Microsoft in the case,
said he believes
that, in the case of software, the patent system is broken. “In the
United States, at least 50 percent of software patents–some experts say 95
percent–should never be granted.”
Such patents should have been bounced because they cover
technology that’s already been invented; and many patents that are
granted have overly broad claims, which extends their reach even further, he continued. As a result, he said, “everyone who writes software is on a daily basis engaging in patent infringement, which they’re not even aware of.”
The long-term implication could be suits aimed at Linux vendors, said Perens, who was instrumental in developing the Debian Linux distribution and is a leader of the UserLinux enterprise support project. He said he believes prospective actions won’t focus on technologies related to the kernel
He warned that additional litigation relating to Web-browser technology could also take flight and that many large-scale businesses running browsers could be negatively impacted.
Rather than wait until such suits emerge in force to cast a pall over the IT industry, the open-source community should recognize the looming threat and come up with countermeasures, he said. “We need organizations that set Web standards to protect their implementers better than they do.”
If patent problems do materialize, he predicted they would happen after SCO’s Linux lawsuits have worked their way through the legal system. (SCO is currently involved in legal battles over Linux with IBM and Novell, and is seeking licensing fees from European users.)
During his LinuxWorld remarks, Perens restated his view on the case –which he contends has no legs. “SCO is essentially claiming that a one-line header file is theirs,” he said, referring to code SCO recently showed a court regarding its intellectual property right challenges related to its $3 billion lawsuit against IBM.
But Perens said the copyrights for header code SCO has shown have been freely assigned by either AT&T, Novell, or the Open Group, and therefore
have not been used illegally.
“What we’ve seen to date is obfuscation, delay, half-truthful responses and a theory that SCO puts forward, to say, ‘anything that’s connected with Unix
is ours,'” Perens said. “This is so far from what a reasonable person
would
conclude. I don’t think it’s going anywhere in court.”
Reached for a response, SCO spokesman Marc Modersitzski told
internetnews.com: “We respectfully disagree. We aren’t trying the case in
the court of public opinion–we’re trying it in a courtroom. That’s why
we’re not showing everything. The Linux community may think that the
small
amount they’ve seen is the basis of our case. It’s not. Nothing could
be
further from the truth. The header files illustrate that there’s a
problem.
As far as that being the extent of what we have, we’re not showcasing
it in
the public forum.”
Concluding his talk, Perens called 2004 the year of serious large-scale deployments of Linux on the desktop, with many pilot programs already underway.
