SCO extends Linux licence offer

The SCO Group has extended by two weeks the introductory pricing offer for the licences that it claims commercial Linux customers must buy, and has dropped plans to send invoices to 1,000 users.

The company unveiled its offer in August, giving companies until 15 October to buy a UnixWare licence for a special introductory price. This deadline has now been extended to 31 October.

SCO claims that its Unix code was added to Linux without its consent, and that as a result Linux users must pay it for a licence.

A spokesman said the offer had been extended because the deal had not been available on its price list until early September, "and we hadn't gone to all the regions of the world we wanted to".

Licensing is on a per-processor basis, costing from $699 (£418) for a single processor Linux server to $4,999 for an eight-processor server. After 31 October the fee will double.

SCO also said it would delay indefinitely its plans to send bills to 1,000 Linux users, which it was due to begin in mid-October. The company now says it is pleased with progress on licences and so does not need to make such an aggressive step.

The first UnixWare licence customer under the controversial scheme was a Fortune 500 company, but several more licenses have been signed since.

SCO has not named which companies have signed, or given firm numbers of how many. But it has previously claimed to have received at least 300 enquiries from companies serious about purchasing a licence.

But analyst predictions that companies would not buy a licence have largely proved correct.

Neil Macehiter, research director at Ovum, said the analyst organisation has always maintained that SCO had no right to charge a fee.

"Reality is dawning on SCO. They've yet to release details of exactly what is the subject of the case; no litigation has gone ahead as yet and, in the meantime, Hewlett Packard has said it will indemnify HP Linux users against any litigation with SCO," he said.

"Apart from a handful of enterprises, businesses aren't playing ball with SCO, which is not seeing the success it anticipated with the legal case against IBM."

Meanwhile, SCO has said it will suspend indefinitely its demand that Silicon Graphics pays Unix royalties, and has also announced a $50m equity investment from BayStar Capital Management.

Get the latest news, views and technology updates in a weekly round up of the Penguin's unstoppable march by signing up to vnunet.com's FREE Linux newsletter here.