SCO charges $699 a pop for a Linux licence

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 6 Aug 2003 at 10:50

SCO has announced an introductory price of $699 per single-CPU system for its Intellectual Property License for Linux, valid until 15 October.

After this the price rises to $1,399 per server chip. And a licence for a desktop system will set you back $199. SuSE's Linux Professional 8.1 currently costs £50 ($80), without SCO's licence.

The licence is for the runtime use of SCO's Unix binaries, source code of which it claims has been illegally misappropriated into Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.5. This gets around any issues with the GPL (General Public Licence) under which Linux is distributed.

Chris Sontag, senior vice president and general manager of SCOsource, the intellectual property licensing division of SCO, said: 'We believe it is necessary for Linux customers to properly license SCO's IP if they are running Linux 2.4 kernel and later versions for commercial purposes.

'The license insures that customers can continue their use of binary deployments of Linux without violating SCO's intellectual property rights.'

Pricing for multiple processor systems, desktop and embedded systems will be announced later.

For more information, visit http://www.sco.com/scosource.

See also:

Red Hat fires salvo to unite Linux against SCO

SCO announces umbrella licence for Linux users

SCO shows its hand on Unix code violations