Less than a month after becoming the first publicly announced buyer of The SCO Group Inc."s controversial intellectual property license for Linux, Houston-based Internet service provider Everyones Internet Ltd. is reconsidering the benefits of doing business with the Linux community"s No. 1 enemy.
EV1Servers.Net, the hosting division of Everyones Internet, announced March 1 that it had licensed SCO"s intellectual property, saying that it was looking to offer its customers stability in the wake of SCO"s protracted battle with the open-source community. Lindon, Utah-based SCO claims that the Linux operating system violates its intellectual property and that Linux users could be sued over these claims unless they purchase its Linux license.
The deal with SCO would not only prevent EV1"s Linux hosting customers from being sued, it would also take both EV1 and its users "out of the current fray," said Everyones Internet CEO Robert Marsh on the day of the announcement.
As it happened, the licensing deal placed Marsh"s company in the very center of the SCO-Linux dispute. SCO portrayed EV1 as a model client for its licensing plan -- a company that had recognized the "importance of SCO"s valuable [intellectual property] asset," according to SCO CEO Darl McBride.