SCO is absolutely crazy. Now it claims that every single *nix (including BSD) is a derivative of their crappy codebase, and wants to extort 3 billion from Big Blue. It also threatens to sue linux vendors, and basically everyone in the world who uttered the name unix.
It claims that linux could not reach the performance, scalability and enterprise readiness it currently has without IBM disclosing trade secrets related to their (SCO's) System V code. Enterprise scalability depends on:
Quote:
symmetric multi-processing (SMP)
The ability to allocate work in a computer among multiple processor chips in such a way that all are as efficiently utilized as possible, leading to completion of programs in the shortest possible time.
journaling file systems
Construction of an operating system's code for managing hard drives and other storage devices in such a way that data cannot be lost or garbled by power outages or most categories of hardware failure.
logical volume management (LVM)
The ability to make multiple physical disk storage devices appear to be a single large disk volume, incorporating redundant storage and error checking such that the failure of any one of the physical volumes still allows all the data to be recovered.
non-uniform memory access (NUMA)
A method of configuring a cluster of microprocessors in a multiprocessing system so that they can share memory locally, improving performance and the ability of the system to be expanded.
hot-swappable hardware
The capability to add and remove hardware while the system is running, without interrupting processing.
support for large memory address spaces via 64-bit processors
Large database
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Now the fun part:
Linux had SMP support
before SCO's own products, UnixWare and OpenServer.
Linux had 64 bit support 5 years before IBM's involvement.
Journalling filesystem: linux supports not one, but 4 journalling filesystems I know of, and the one that became the de facto standard was developed by RedHat (ext3). It also has JFS (from IBM, that was developed by IBM not for unix, but for OS/2), ReiserFS, a completely independent filesystem (something that Microsoft wanted WinFS to be by 2005, which won't happen anyway), XFS (donated by Silicon Graphics - I presume SCO would sue them as well).
They likened linux to a bicycle and unix to a luxury car before IBM's involvement, claiming that Unix could scale up to 64 processors, while LInux (the 2.4.x series) could scale up to 8 processors. It is interesting, however, that their own UnixWare product scales well only on 2-4 processors. The best summary in OSI's position paper:
Quote:
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SCO/Caldera's claim to own the scalability techniques certainly cannot be supported from the feature list of its own SCO OpenServer, a genetic Unix. The latest version[40] advertises SMP up to only 4 processors (a level which SCO's complaint dismisses as inadequate), no LVM, no NUMA, and no hot-swapping. That is, SCO/Caldera is alleging that IBM misappropriated from SCO technologies which do not appear in SCO's own product.
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The most disgusting part is this line of reasoning: since Linux is free, its available for terrorirsts worldwide, in Libia and Syria and so on, so IBM broke export laws of US by providing the terrorist world with a powerful OS. Well, the terrorist part might be true after all, since Pentagon uses Linux, and so does NSA, and guess what: they submit changes to the linux kernel back to the community in compliance with the GPL. Bravo SCO - I believe they are going down in flames after this. Hiring Al Gore's lawyer might no bode very well for them in the White House either.
Read OSI's (Open Source Initiative) paper on this if you're interested:
http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html