SCO says it's time for Linux users to pay up. [The Register]

Ya gotta wonder what's going on at SCO Group. The company formerly known as Caldera, erstwhile Linux OS distributor, is clearly attempting to precipitate a crisis in open source land that, sadly, many could have predicted when Linux started to attract money a few years ago–a crisis that Caldera played an active part in until its sudden personality change as holder of the crown jewels of Unix System V.

BSD is looking better every minute–though I suppose SCO is looking for ways to sue anyone using the Mach kernel, too.

Did IBM and others dump intellectual property that didn't completely belong to them into the open source code of Linux? Did they, in fact, give Linus Torvalds a poison pill of multiprocessor code?

For most people, the question, as the linked article in The Register suggests, is moot. If you're only using single or dual processor systems in cluster to run Linux, the alleged infringed code may not be of any consequence. That means that the only people really impacted by SCO's claims may be those trying to run Linux on a mainframe or on IBM or HP mega-servers.

And there ain't a whole lot of those people out there.