That, in turn, will remove one of the two important legal threats to the relentless rise of Linux in the corporate IT world.
The other, of course, is Microsoft's threat of action in the US courts against Linux distributors who refuse to partner with it, by enforcing its ownership of patents claimed to cover critical features or technologies used in the Linux operating system.
With the SCO case suddenly all but over, open source protagonists this week shifted their focus back to this ominous but never fully articulated warning from Redmond and, perhaps emboldened by the SCO triumph, they basically dismissed it.
Although there is a fairly strong likelihood that Microsoft does own at least some patents that a case against Linux distributors could be based upon, the vagueness of the language used in its complaints so far (and the company's refusal to provide any specific instances of its property rights being breached) make it doubtful any case will ever be filed.
Instead, Microsoft was probably simply trying to kindle enough fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of C-level executives at big organisations to slow down the headlong rush toward deployment of commodity servers on Linux.
Even a remote possibility of future litigation over the ownership of the Linux operating systems underlying technologies is enough to deter conservative firms from general deployment of the free operating system.
If this is indeed Microsoft's objective, the real patent litigation threat to Linux end users is barely a shadow of the broad and well-funded SCO campaign, which both Microsoft and Sun (at the time still a proponent of proprietary Solaris) bankrolled through those licence agreements.
Even if there is a more complex or concrete side to the patent claims, Microsoft's scope for action appears limited given recent changes to the GPL licence under which Linux and much of other open source software is distributed.
These bind all distributors of Linux (now including Microsoft, via its Novell deal) to treat all other distributors equally when it comes to patent protection. If perceived legal impediments to the broader use of Linux in enterprises seem to be falling away, will there be a resulting acceleration in its use and market share?
Probably not much more than the acceleration under way already.
Perhaps the most surprising emerging consensus among those following the legal battles is a feeling, with the benefit of hindsight, that Microsoft, perhaps beaten down by its late 1990s US antitrust battles, took too long to launch counterattacks against Linux, which had strong backing from IBM and Hewlett-Packard by the time Microsoft moved.
A spin supporting that notion can be put on the server market.
Although IDC data suggests only 12 per cent of servers are shipped with Linux, against 39 per cent with Windows (the rest run Unix variants or IBM's mainframe software), in reality this underestimates Linux since it excludes commodity servers almost always running Linux that resellers or firms such as Google build in-house. (By most reckonings Google is the world's fourth largest server company, moving volumes that trail only IBM, HP and Sun).
Once the latter are counted, the market split between Linux and Windows is much closer and Linux server volumes may even have recently pulled ahead of Windows, according to some market watchers.
That makes stabilisation of the legal issues both more and less important - more because, say, a SCO win would have touched a broader group of users, and less because in the end adoption means Microsoft's customers are usually going to be Linux customers, too, and suing your customers is seldom an effective business tactic.-Novell
