SCO after BSD settlement

[Gary Thorpe]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
>:Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai <asmodai at xxxxxx> wrote:
> :Does sco even have any legal grounds to do this? After all, they
> weren't :party to teh out of court settlement and supposedly
> inherited some  :atatched strings when they became the unix
> licencer about this? :
I suppose its the same way they (Caldera) reopened the DR-DOS
litigation. If they now own the property they can revisit legal matters
surrounding it.
> :--  :	Sander
>
> No, they don't, but that hasn't stopped them so far.  They have no legal
>  standing for probably 90% of their claims and they are on  shaky
> ground for the remaining 10%.
I have heard a lot of self-righteous indignation on this subject. Now 
its time to add my share :-)

Given that SCO is suing multi-billion dollars companies (have they sent 
any subpoenas to Linux Torvalds or Alan Cox?), I don't see what everyone 
is crying about. If IBM put UNIX code into Linux, then tough for them. 
Of course, we don't know whether they did or not.

Is it so impossible to believe that they could have 
accidentally/intentionally done this? Accidentally because people are 
not perfect and if you have UNIX kernel developers contributing to 
Linux, you are asking for trouble with regards to intellectual property. 
Intentionally is also certainly possible: who has not heard of the many 
companies (including IBM) expressing interest in developing Linux to 
replace UNIX? Don't fool yourselves about IBM et. all's altruism: they 
would love to stop paying SCO's licensing fees. Thus, there is some 
motivation for them to help improve Linux for a free alternative. What 
possible motivation could there be otherwise: why improve Linux to make 
it do what your UNIX software _already_ does well? Money is one possible 
answer, after all these are businesses in the business to make money. 
Whether it would mean they would add code to Linux they shouldn't have 
. ...hopefully a court case will shed some light.

By the way, how would Linux/BSD zealots feel if SCO ripped out parts of 
Linux/BSD and put it into SVRx and relicensed it and claimed it as their 
own? If, _if_ this is what happened except with the players reversed 
there is certainly nothing defensible about it.

Since no one actually has any real information besides wild speculation, 
I would rather not people make predictions about anything. Why aren't 
they suing Sun, HP/Compaq (HP/UX and Tru64) though? Is it just that IBM 
is the biggest target (and paradoxically the hardest to attack)? 
However, I have seen someone claim they never use SCO software again! If 
people will never use SCO software again, but continue to support 
companies such as Microsoft by buying their products, then they are 
hypocrites. Microsoft has done far more devious, immoral things and made 
far more money doing them than SCO can dream of approaching.