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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>>>this is also why i think redhat is going to be a survivor for quite a while, they have a well thought out distribution, unlike some others
>>>redhat tries very hard to avoid these (no mp3, no mplayer, no ntfs, ...)
This SCO/IBM lawsuit is a good lesson for everybody who sells or uses linux solutions.
Investors is going to start to question whether they should invest any money at all on linux distributors like RedHat and SuSE, which takes all the legal risks. Sure it's easy to exclude the obvious mp3 player or dvd player from a linux distro because of IP risks, BUT 99% of the legal risks will be hidden away in some little known patent. Why invest in RedHat/SuSE when IBM/Dell/HP takes 99% of the linux revenue and IBM/Dell/HP assumes 0% of the legal risks.
Embedded linux is DEAD. If you read the old IBM interview above, the IBM guy equates embedding linux as "sit on a bomb where someone can sue them and then they cannot ship their product any longer." IBM isn't selling actual hardware products with linux embedded. Sure IBM is busy doing their PR on their PowerPC/linux PDA reference design. But IBM is only trying to sell you their powerpc chips. If you have used embedded linux on their PDA reference design and then later on you encountered legal problems, IBM already sold you all those CPU's --- they ain't going to care whether you have GPL problem or not.