You could interpret "fully paid up" in a couple of different ways I suppose. I think that IBM still pays royalties. At least one statement by SCO indicates that only SUN has a royalty free agreement. They also indicated that SUN has the only clean distribution. Sounds like HP may be the next target.
I think that the liability is one reason that IBM stayed out of the distribution business. On the griping hand, it didn't work, did it. -----Original Message----- From: Phil Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 2:05 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: SCO ups the ante (this is getting interesting) > It occurs to me that I may have been wrong when I speculated that SCO wants to be > bought by IBM. I am starting to think that SCO just wants IBM to support AIX (and pay more royalties). It sounds a lot like IBM is planning to drop AIX, which would hurt SCO. IBM has described its UNIX license as "fully paid up" - sounds like a lump sum deal. What they would REALLY like are license revenues from IBM's Linux operations. Of course, IBM doesn't actually _distribute_ Linux itself. The comments made by and about Linus Torvalds regarding the difficulty of ensuring that contributed code is free of IP restrictions highlight this. I wonder if this explains why IBM stayed out of the distribution business? -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.com +44 7785 302 803
