As part of an ongoing legal action against Linux suppliers and users, the SCO Group last week said it wants to collect royalties of $32 from OEMs for each of the potentially millions of embedded systems using the open-source operating system.
Red Hat Inc. spearheaded a countercharge by the embedded-Linux community at LinuxWorld here, saying SCO's moves could strangle a movement that promises to breathe new life into the maturing computer industry. The open-source movement represents "an opportunity to change the structure of an industry that is dying, where collaboration, not extermination, is the model," said Matthew J. Szulik, chairman, chief executive officer and president of Red Hat (Raleigh, N.C.), in his keynote address last Tuesday during LinuxWorld. Developers with transparent access to source code can speed new technologies to market and lower their costs, Szulik said.
A day earlier, Red Hat filed a complaint against SCO in federal court, maintaining that the company's popular version of Linux does not infringe SCO's Unix code. If SCO is successful in establishing its claims, "Linux would die," said Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at Illuminata (Nashua, N.H.). But Haff doesn't expect that will be the case. "It's hard to say what will happen in a complicated legal case, but from my perspective this is a Hail Mary pass from a company that the market has passed by," he said.
Source:
http://www.eet.com/sys/news/OEG20030811S0032