[Am-info] Killing Linux, By John C. Dvorak

[Roy Bixler]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 05:52:54PM -0400, John J. Urbaniak wrote:
> "Fred A. Miller" wrote:
> 
> > John's been wrong before, and  I sure hope he is this time!!
> >
> > Fred
> >
> > http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1115156,00.asp
> 
> John's points are well thought out.

He is assuming that SCO's case is strong enough to go to trial, which
at this point is a dubious assumption.  SCO has 3 very serious
problems which are a) Novell has made a strong claim that they own the
copyrights or patents to Unix and that they see no infringements by
Linux, b) SCO's executives have a habit of trying the case in the
media, which indicates a weak legal case and is certain to help IBM's
counsel, c) SCO themselves have distributed Linux for years under the
GPL.  To emphasise the point, it was only a few weeks ago (or about 2
months after SCO filed their case against IBM) that SCO decided to
stop offering their Linux distribution for sale.  Under the GPL, all
code is available to any takers and SCO is not allowed to make further
restrictions on that code.  The fact that SCO continued to distribute
Linux under the GPL after they filed their case against IBM indicates
that they did this knowingly and therefore relinquished the rights to
any trade secrets in that code.  Also, see

http://opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html

for a detailed and well thought out rebuttal to SCO's claims.  Given
all this, it's easy to see many in the open source community are
heaping SCOrn on SCO's claims against IBM and Linux.

To try to bring this back on topic to Microsoft, here's an article I
saw recently about why Microsoft bought a Unix licence from SCO.

OK, So Why Did Microsoft Buy That SCO License?
http://www.sys-con.com/linux/articlenews.cfm?id=783

Summary: The claim here is that they needed it for some software they
have in the works and to reinforce their "respect for intellectual
property rights, but they did not get the licence to help fund SCO's
lawsuit aginst IBM.

R.