An Unlikely Champion; Why the anticorporate advocates of free software have come to embrace one of the industry's biggest players.

Byline: John Ness

Open-source geeks are devout in their belief that software should be free to all, and hold as their icon the Linux alternative to the Microsoft commercial empire. As unpaid volunteers who collaborate to develop open source code, they tend to be anti-corporate types. So they watched with some trepidation as a capitalist giant, IBM, began pouring money into Linux, capped by a $1 billion investment in 2001. Yet in the past year, the corporation known as Big Blue has seen its reputation in the global open-source community shift from suspect sugar daddy to knight in shining armor.

IBM is now the giant standing between Linux and what the open-source community sees as a Microsoft front company bent on destroying their free paradise. The drama is playing out in a U.S. federal court, where IBM is fighting a Utah company named SCO (formerly Santa Cruz Operations). Once a quiet member of the Linux community, SCO is a software provider for small to medium-size businesses, with $79 million in revenue last year. But after his company was delisted from the NASDAQ in 2002, CEO Darl McBride decided it was time for a new business model. Starting early last year, SCO began demanding payments for its intellectual property in lawsuits filed against at least three major corporate customers of Linux: DaimlerChrysler, AutoZone and IBM.

All the suits have gone to court, but the $3 billion claim against IBM is the largest and is expected to be the most decisive. SCO's case is built on its copyright to UNIX, the operating system from which Linux was derived in the early '90s. SCO sent out a bevy of lawyers--notably David Boies of United States v. Microsoft fame--demanding that users of Linux pay a fee for the use of SCO's intellectual property. "It's time to step up and claim the ownership rights that are rightly ours," McBride said in September 2003.

This was sacrilege to the free Linux community and a direct threat to IBM, which makes money on Linux not by selling software but by providing support services and hardware. IBM claimed more than $2 billion in Linux-related revenue in 2003. Though it would have been cheaper to settle, IBM fought back and is now pushing for summary judgment.

SCO's case looks as if it's close to collapse. After spending last year publicly accusing IBM of stealing hundreds of thousands of lines of code, SCO has scaled back its case to a simple contract dispute. In the meantime, IBM has countersued by arguing that an as-yet-untested ...