“CA Says It didn’t Pay SCO no stinking Linux tax”

“The Linux faithful have been hammering Computer Associates as a heretic since the British publication Computer Weekly quoting the SCO Group’s CFO Bob Bench identified CA Thursday as one of SCO’s rare Linux licensees.” So says an article on Davanum Srinivas’ weblog in which he denies that CA has purchased any actual Linux licenses from SCO, and he says SCO is not being entirely truthful when it claims that CA has. Srinivas is a senior architect in Computer Associates’ Web Services Group. One would think he knows what’s going on. (The headline above this story is direct from Srinivas’ weblog, BTW.)Srinivas continues:

CA senior VP of product development Mark Barrenechea says that Bench’s claim is nonsense. CA has not paid SCO any Linux taxes, he said.

Drawing up short of calling SCO a liar, Barrenechea claims that SCO has twisted a $40 million breach-of-contract settlement that CA paid last summer to the Canopy Group, SCO’s biggest stockholder, and Center 7, another Canopy company, and has turned it into a purported Linux license.

As a “small part†of that settlement, Barrenechea said, CA got a bunch of UnixWare licenses that it needed to support its UnixWare customers. SCO, he said, had just attached a transparent Linux indemnification to all UnixWare licenses and that is how SCO comes off calling CA a Linux licensee.