Sun plays on indemnity fears

As analysts start to advise enterprises to seek indemnity from potential intellectual property claims against software they deploy, Sun Microsystems is looking to use those warnings as a way to boost business.

Sun is convinced that corporate users face lawsuits for using unlicensed intellectual property in their operating systems.

"Just like mothers of kids that are downloading music illegally, a whole bunch of chief technology officers will soon be getting letters demanding they compensate the owners of intellectual property," said Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president at Sun Software.

Extending the reach of its contract case against IBM, SCO recently launched an attempt to get individual enterprises to pay a licensing fee for its Unix System V operating system which it maintains has been illegally included in the Linux kernel.

The case has brought the issue of user indemnity against such action to the fore, and Sun is convinced that gives it an advantage in the marketplace.

"Vendors have to be able to indemnify enterprises for the intellectual property that they are using," said Schwartz.

"We can indemnify our products because we have paid SCO for the licence. Meanwhile, IBM is telling its customers not to worry while it refuses to indemnify them."

Analyst agree that companies should be looking for indemnity from their vendors, but believe that Sun's response is a long way short of helping to solve the problem.

"This is a marketing effort from Sun. It may or may not help them but, if Sun is the only vendor to offer that, then it is of limited use to the Linux community," said George Weiss, research director at analyst Gartner.

Nevertheless Sun's actions are a start and could be a further wake-up call for enterprise users.

"Most other vendors are not responding in any way. Hopefully vendors can start to be more proactive to ease user concerns even though customers have yet to really start demanding indemnity," explained Weiss.

But while Sun indemnifies its own Solaris operating system, it does not do the same for its current Linux offering.

The vendor no longer makes its own Linux, opting instead for Red Hat distribution on servers.

That, according to Sun, means it can only guarantee indemnification for Linux customers if similar indemnification is offered from Red Hat.

For its part, Red Hat indicated that it does not offer indemnity to customers and that to do so would not be part of its open source software model.

In addition, it believes that customers are unwilling to pay the additional expense that any indemnity offering would require.

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