SCO after BSD settlement

[Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai]

Just to keep people informed:

from
http://www.newsforge.com/business/03/11/18/1742216.shtml?tid=2&tid=82&tid=85&tid=94

Officially, the "news" teleconference SCO held this morning was to
announce a new deal between SCO and the David Boies legal firm.
Confusion reigned as SCO attempted to clarify the details of its
payments to its legal counsel, Boies Boies, Schiller & Flexner. Is the
$1 million payment to Boies et al, and the transfer of 400,000 shares of
SCO stock to them a contingency payment? If so, what contingency was
met? Is it a legal slush fund to finance new rounds of lawsuits to keep
the circus alive a little longer? Who knows? We don't care how SCO pays
its counsel. But we do care about something new that came out of the
teleconference.

SCO is going to attack the 1994 AT&T/BSD settlement. That's a very
interesting item that the few favored analysts (and only a select few
journalists) who were allowed to ask questions failed to pick up on.
Here's our take on why SCO is embarking on this new course of action:

SCO has steadfastly refused to get specific about infringement of its
IP. That's probably not because they are coy, but rather because they
can't. The few snippets of code it dared to make public already have
been laughed

off the stage and quite thoroughly debunked. With both IBM and Red Hat
now demanding in court that SCO show its cards, the company came to
realization that it was either at the end of the trail or that it had to
broaden its horizons.

They've chosen the latter. CEO Darl McBride, in fact, used the term
"broad and deep" several times in his remarks, and that was no accident.
Since they cannot show infringement of SCO Unix code, SCO now plans to
challenge the 9-year-old settlement between AT&T and BSD. If it can
successfully do that, then its claims that Linux contains tainted code
can be substantiated. If it can't, SCO is dead meat. 

[end]

Am I glad I live in the Netherlands and that all this crap doesn't
influence me directly.  Because what SCO is doing would be called
blackmail and extortion here, not to mention slandering.

Not sure how it might impact you Matt.

-- 
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(at)wxs.nl> / asmodai / kita no mono
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http://www.tendra.org/   | http://www.in-nomine.org/~asmodai/diary/
Experience keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other.