SCO is expanding its campaign to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about open source software to Congress. The excessive hyperbole and “the sky is falling rhetoric” underlines the failure SCO has had in advancing its apparently frivolous claims against other companies which still create technology products and innovate.

The company has been spreading FUD through past letters and lawsuits, and now SCO executives are telling Congress that Linux, open source software in general, and specifically, the General Public License (GPL), which protects most open source software is:

a threat to the U.S. information technology industry;
a threat to U.S.’ competitive position; and
a threat to national security.
All of these assertions are outrageous and false.

SCO, which long ago abandoned a business model of creating innovative and exciting software, has placed all its corporate eggs in the licensing and litigation basket. Without providing any demonstrable evidence, SCO is claiming that vast amounts of its UNIX based code has made its way into Linux.

Over the past year, leading industry experts including those intimately involved in developing Linux have successfully rebutted every assertion made by SCO. The only thing SCO has been able to show for its efforts is a string of excessive claims and threats written in letters to software developers, Linux users, stockholders, and now, Congress.

This latest missive from SCO, again, provides no evidence.

SCO continues to be unable to prove any of its allegations of intellectual property infringement. Instead, it argues that Linux users undermine the economy by not purchasing more expensive products from others such as SCO.

Ed Black, President and CEO of OSAIA responds by saying: “A company that is being out-innovated by the open source community wants us to accept a bizarre notion: that top of the line, enterprise grade software produced at a low cost is a threat to the economy. Software adopted by hundreds of the nation's largest tech and non-tech companies is a threat to no one except those who can’t innovate and compete. Software embraced by the likes of Novell, Oracle, IBM, HP, Gateway, Sun and tens of thousands of companies worldwide represents a sea change in our industry. It will spur even greater value added innovation, which will ride upon open source products, and is a hallmark of competition that should be driving the nation."

SCO claims Linux is a threat to national security because it is freely available to any dictator. But the plain fact is all U.S. software developers are bound by the same export controls that restrict licensing of SCO’s products. The only way to bind all software by U.S. export controls is to prevent foreign developers from creating software. “Perhaps SCO believes that only U.S. developers have the ‘right’ to develop software,” OSAIA's Black said. “They should understand that it is a big world, and developers outside the U.S. have helped make the tech industry what it is today.”

In short, SCO is continuing its campaign of distortion and attack. Considering this campaign has been the only “product” they have been able to create that has helped its stock price, it may be an understandable, while not laudable position. However, when they take this campaign to Congress, OSAIA can no longer stand by. OSAIA will actively engage Congress to explain the full benefits of open source software to the economy, how the GPL relies upon and is consistent with U.S. copyright law, and refute SCO’s baseless claims of IP theft.

These issues will be a primary topic at a session hosted by OSAIA at LinuxWorld New York, in the Javits Center, Room BOF 10 at 5:45 PM, on January 22.

OSAIA is an association of a number of the world's most prominent high-tech companies, including those that use and develop both proprietary and open source software. OSAIA, an organization affiliated with the Computer & Communications Industry Association, promotes the understanding and adoption of open standards and open source software worldwide.

The letter from SCO can be read at http://www.osaia.org/letters/sco_hill.pdf.