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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Here's the danger: IBM developer works on Linux kernel or other major part of Linux. That work is good, gets blessed by Linus, ends up in the Linux kernel, gets integrated into all the Linux distros. Several years later, it turns out that that IBM developer had previously worked on Unix, had seen some of the proprietary code that now "belongs' to SCO. If SCO can prove in court that the developer in question has inadvertently used some of what he learned from the Unix code to make new code for the Linux kernel, then there's the danger that the court could require all versions of Linux to remove the code in question. That would be a problem for Linux, but I'm not sure it would be a major problem for anyone but IBM, who would be subject to damages.
First off this isn't what the suit is about. But lets assume it were, Linux would still be fine. Lets not forget those lines that Linus put in the kernel would have been distributed by Caldera under the GPL. Which means that Caldera would have given everyone the right to copy, redistribute and alter that code. In other words SCO's IP rights they had would have been invalidated.
A company can't say "you can freely use this" and then sue people who use it.