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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The problem for Red Hat and other Linux firms is that IBM may settle without a buyout of SCO/Caldera, thus barring Red Hat (and OSS generally) from a proper and logical defense. The 100 day altimatum from SCO provides IBM with a plausible excuse to end the matter quickly, which presumably would be desirable to IBM's customers. If IBM really was a supporter of Linux, they would quickly buyout SCO at a premium, and get on with their business. If IBM goes to trial, it would look really bad if they lost, and a computer illiterate jury could easily screw-up and make the wrong interpretation of the elements of evidence presented by the opposing parties. It may well be that IBM placed a big bunch of dynamite under the Linux bridge, donned the white hat as an apparent victim, then threw the plunger switch over to SCO to blow it up after they got clear (settled). The Wincartel monopoly (standing in the distance, watching, grinning, doing nothing) would be even furthur empowered to dominate the consumer PC market space while the other *nix firms (Sun, HP) have secured perpetual licenses for their software distributions and are thus protected. I predict that SCO/Caldera will attack Red Hat and others in the very near future. I hope that I'm dead wrong, but I don't think so.