It is no surprise that the open source software community has been shaken by the litigation begun by SCO. To begin with, Caldera Systems, the corporate entity now doing business as SCO, originated as an open source company whose only product was based on Linux. Therefore, the open source software community feels betrayed by a company whose interests it once shared and supported.
If SCO wins it fundamental claim that it owns the underlying source code to UNIX, the open source software community will lose control over one of its most used programs. To the open source software community, the loss comes not only in the UNIX source code but the many man-hours invested by subsequent developers in customizations and derivations built on the original UNIX source code.
Because the open source software community depends on the free exchange of intellectual property within the source code, a system that works only if each developer that contributes to the whole has sufficient access to the intellectual property, a win for SCO could threaten the very model of open source software. The open source software model breaks when one developer contributes an infringing work, because as SCO has claimed, every user thereafter is infringing.
What does this mean for a company using or developing open source software? First, a company must know that it may be liable for copyright infringement even without knowledge that a work was subject to copyright infringement. Like any other software the company uses, the company must know where the software originated from. However, unlike most software programs where the company has assurance from a license that the vendor owns the copyright in the source code and the company, through the license, is allowed to use the software, with open source software the SCO litigation means that a company must complete some due diligence regarding the chain of title of the source code of the open source software to ensure that there are no other intellectual property claims to the source code.