Penguin Suits

When a young Linus Torvalds was working on his now-famous Linux operating system back in the early 1990s, the Finnish programmer no doubt envisioned the dawning of a new tech era — one in which ideas would be shared freely and everybody got along. A Linux world would be a softer, gentler one, much like the penguin Torvalds chose to symbolize his revolutionary open-code OS.

Back in the real world, Torvalds’s penguin has been taking quite a pounding lately. The pounder: software maker SCO Group, which insists that Linux is taken, in part, from its proprietary Unix operating system. Based on that assertion — unproven as yet — SCO claims that companies using Linux owe the vendor a licensing fee.