"It's a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company," said Jonathan Eunice, an Illuminata analyst. "Really what beat SCO is not any problem with what IBM did; it's what the market decided. This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can't get by winning in the marketplace."-- Jonathan Eunice, 2003-03-07

"Companies that switch from competing in the marketplace to trying to enforce their basic patents and intellectual is a style of conducting business that isn't very conducive to getting a lot of business partners," Eunice said.-- Jonathan Eunice, 2003-03-07

"If there's any impact on Linux, it'll be principally through fear, uncertainty and doubt," he said. "The principal winners in that would not be SCO, but Microsoft and potentially Sun."-- Jonathan Eunice, 2003-03-07

Eunice said IBM was unhappy with the performance of Unix kept only the interfaces higher-level software used to communicate with it.

"The AIX kernel...was not principally based on the Unix source code. It was based on their (IBM's) own development," Eunice said.-- Jonathan Eunice, 2003-03-07

"What SCO is doing raises a bunch of questions," Mills said. "Instead of building customer value, they're chasing people saying, 'License technology from us.' To me it's an odd strategy."-- Steven Mills, 2003-03-07

"They are full members of UnitedLinux. We expect them to stick to the rules. They signed up as an open source (company). They buy into the GPL philosophy,"-- Richard Seibt, 2003-03-07

"They have the right to make money off their intellectual property. The problem is, they should have done this six years before," Seibt said. And SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride, by raising questions about Linux, would "hurt himself more than anybody else," Seibt said.-- Richard Seibt, 2003-03-07

"Those that purchase our Linux product have nothing to fear. They have our full license to our Unix intellectual property when they're purchasing our Linux products,"-- Chris Sontag, 2003-03-07

"When they (IBM) started utilizing the same engineers that worked on the Unix System V source code and the ultimate derivative of it in the form of AIX, they have effectively been applying our methods and concepts, even if there isn't a single explicit line of code" that shows up in Linux.

Asked if there was no possibility such features could have been independently developed, Sontag responded, "On such short order, it seems highly improbable."-- Chris Sontag, 2003-03-07