Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 12th Mar 2003 20:31 UTC
SCO's lawsuit filed in Utah last week claims that IBM integrated computer code belonging to another company into the Linux operating system, touching off speculation that the lawsuit could hurt other Linux companies, including Red Hat, the country's largest distributor of the software. Red Hat isn't involved in the dispute, but some analysts say that the Raleigh-based company won't be able to escape the fallout. "It's kind of irrelevant who wins the lawsuit," said Victor Raisys, analyst with Soundview Technology Group in San Francisco. "You can't take back the fact that someone has tried to claim intellectual property on Linux. The genie is out of the bottle."
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bman, I think you're right. From what I've read about the suit (including interviews with SCO people), the suit's about contracts between IBM and SCO. IP plays into it, but it's not the focus. Also, many are of the opinion that Linux is safe because, technically, it isn't UNIX: it's a clone, or a UNIX-alike, which works just like UNIX in general (with certain optimizations, of course) but doesn't have a single line of SCO-owned UNIX code. I don't know how this would stand up in court...that's just what I've heard.
"This is why, I've heard, that Microsoft forbids its developers from even looking at open source software's code. They are worried that if there's any similarity between a future MS product's functionality and that of some open source software that the OSS people would be able to sue them."
Yes, David Adams, MS does this. In fact, many entities forbid such things. In Hollywood, for example, if I write a "treatment" (try-out script, basically) for Frasier, I can't send it to the production staff at that show. They legally can't read it, because if something even remotely similar ends up in a future episode and they have read my script, they've opened themselves to a lawsuit. Therefore, there does seem to be some weakness in IBM's legal position here in this respect. Again, however, how this will play out in court (and whether it will affect other distros) has yet to be seen. Interesting, though.