EV1Servers Underestimated Reaction

• By theWHIR.com , March 05, 2004

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by Karen Snider, theWHIR.com

March 5, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting firm EV1Servers' (ev1servers.net) decision to pay the SCO licensing fee has been misinterpreted, and EV1 would never intentionally harm the open source movement, EV1Servers CEO Robert Marsh told theWHIR yesterday.

"This is a very difficult issue for us," Marsh said. "It is a huge disappointment to us that we would be thrown in the same bucket, so to say, with the SCO Group. We didn't make any admission that their IP was used in Linux. Our public position is certainly not to support that, and our intent was simply to take us out of the loop, not to make us public enemy number one."

EV1 announced earlier this week that it had purchased UNIX licenses from the SCO Group, which claims that UNIX code found in Linux violates its intellectual property rights. This announcement was met with a rush of complaints from some of EV1's 42,000 customers and other industry insiders concerned that by paying the fees EV1 has potentially helped fund SCO lawsuits. Marsh admits that while EV1 was expecting "a few concerns," miscalculated what the reaction would be.

EV1's decision to pay the licensing fee was made after the Houston-based ISP and Web hosting company was led to believe by the SCO Group that lawsuits were imminent and that targets would be large well-known companies.

"They were overdue for their lawsuits," Marsh said. "We had largely ignored the issue in the beginning, and at some point we got on their radar screen from some perspective and that's when we became a target like some of the other companies.

"So we felt like we were doing the right thing for customers, the right thing for ourselves and the right thing for our shareholders. We felt (that paying the licensing fee) put our customers and ourselves in a position where we could concentrate on our business instead of a bunch of lawsuits."

Along with the PR backlash, Marsh said he is also disappointed that SCO officials have spoken to media outlets about the financial terms of the contract between SCO and EV1.

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