And here we have, in a nutshell, why SCO has NO intention of making public the purported Linux IP violations. The key sentence is the following:
What is still unclear is the exact scope of SCO’s intellectual property violation claims. “Once we know what the problem is, the Linux community will rally and develop new software that gets around the problem,” says one Linux programmer.
It becomes quite difficult to convince any individual or company to pay licenses if, once making your allegations public, the developer community develops its way around your claims. No doubt SCO realizes this and has been playing up the FUD factor (Fear, Uncertainity and Doubt) while providing no factual information whatsoever. My only hope is that, should the IBM – SCO and SCO – Redhat lawsuits proceed to trial, SCO fails in what are likely to be attempts to restrict access to its evidence regarding the violations. No doubt they will argue that they will suffer “irreparable harm” if the evidence is made public.
A quick lowdown on the pricing strategy: A server with a single CPU would incur licence costs of $US699, a two-CPU server $US1149, a four-CPU server $US2499 and an eight-processor box $US4499. An additional single processor beyond this would cost $US749. Embedded devices cost $32 per device.