Re: [ox-en] Impaired - is it SCO? preliminary thoughts.
- From: Felix Stalder <felix openflows.org>
- Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 14:27:02 +0100
So up until now, the big claim by OSI against SCO having any property in
any UNIX has been the so called impairment by the USL litigation. You can
see from this I find that a hard one to accept at the moment.
I think this case is much more straight-forward and does not raise a lot of
general questions. Until the SCO shows the code it claims infringement on,
the claim is factually baseless. I presume that is the reason why a court in
Germany has forbidden SCO to claim CP infringement until the case has been
heard. SCO also knows that getting license fees for linux is not a valid
strategy since even if, and that's a big if, there is copyrighted code in the
kernel, it would be a matter of days, perhaps weeks, until it was rewritten
once it has been identified. After that, a simple upgrade would get would
suffice to counter SCO's attempt to collect money.
It all strikes me really a) an issue of some people (perhaps with some support
from M$?) trying to create uncertainty over Linux (and Free Software in
general, though that's factually not correct, but that's not what this case
is about anyway) or b) a company that is about to go out of business trying
to be bought out. Perhaps they are really sly and play a double strategy, ie
accept money to create uncertainty while working on being bought out. In this
case, they would get paid twice and make killing.
Nothing particularly interesting either way, except in terms of hard-nosed
cynical business strategy.
Felix
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