The code analysis dominated the conference as a result of an ongoing legal battle between SCO, owner of rights in the UNIX operating system, and parts of the Linux community. The dispute began in March when SCO filed a $1 billion court action against IBM – later upping its claim to $3 billion – alleging that IBM gave UNIX rights away to Linux in breach of a contract between SCO and IBM.
In May, SCO went further, claiming that Linux is an unauthorised derivative of UNIX and that legal liability for the use of Linux may extend to commercial users. SCO suspended all of its future sales of the Linux operating system until further notice – and terminated IBM's license to sell AIX, IBM's version of UNIX.
Early this month Linux distributor Red Hat joined the fray, lodging a pre-emptive court action against SCO. The claim argued that Red Hat's technologies do not infringe any intellectual property of SCO and seeking to hold SCO accountable for "unfair and deceptive" actions.
SCO made light of the allegations and announced a licensing package for all Linux users – with a hefty price tag attached. According to ComputerWeekly.com the company has now confirmed that it will not refund license fees, even if it loses the ongoing legal battles.
Two weeks ago the dispute intensified as IBM lodged a counterclaim against SCO, arguing that SCO cannot sue over patents that may have been used in Linux, because it was distributing Linux products itself under the GPL (General Public License - an open source license set up in the 1980s).
The SCO has since responded by saying that the GPL is invalid, with the result that what started out as a 'simple' patent case has snowballed into an action that could decide the legitimacy of open source software as a whole.
Tensions surrounding the allegedly infringing code are high.
According to CNet News.com, at the conference SCO's CEO Darl McBride showed slides of coding from the two operating systems. Much of the UNIX coding was obscured, for security purposes, but observers were allowed to analyse the coding themselves later, provided they signed a non-disclosure agreement.
However one slide was photographed by a reporter and later analysed by Bruce Perens, an open source advocate. In his opinion, although the code seems to be part of that transferred to SCO, it was also made available under the Berkeley Software Distribution license, and is therefore legitimately in Linux.