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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<<<<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.
<<<<....It may just mean that RedHat and SuSE can't sell any more Linux distributions.............The legal risks lie in the linux distributors (RedHat and SuSE), not on IBM.
>>>>You claim that there is some risks and doubt that exist based on you qutes above, then further down you disagree with my claim that this could might cause some doubt for some organizations considering adpotion of GNU/Linux. WTF?
>>>>You completely contradict yourself (just re-read your posts), so I think you are just arguing for argument sake.
I don't see any contradictions at all.
In the first quote, "Investors" are the people who bought stocks in RedHat and SuSE on the stock market. They have to re-evaluate whether investing in linux distributor is a good investment because sales growth is going to be much slower than the growth in linux revenue of IBM/HP/Dell. They have to re-evaluate because the redhat and suse gets 1% of the revenue while they get all the legal risks.
In the second quote, I am saying that in the event that there is a legal limbo that prevents everybody from selling linux OS --- it will only prevent redhat and suse from selling linux OS. IBM is not selling linux OS itself --- by its linux-on-demand --- so if there is a legal limbo, IBM won't be affected.
>>>>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 doesn't matter to IBM at all. IBM is a computer consulting company now. If there is chaos and everybody is in legal limbo over this potential nuclear fallout --- you still have to pay IBM consulting a princely sum to migrate to another platform.
>>>>while the other *nix firms (Sun, HP) have secured perpetual licenses for their software distributions and are thus protected.
"Perpetual" means absolutely nothing. IBM is saying that they have a "irrevocable" UNIX license as well. All legal contracts have "perpetual..., BUT IN THE EVENT" or "irrevocable..., BUT IN THE EVENT". Look at the tax code, "all income is taxable.... but the following exceptions", it's the exceptions fill the phonebook size tax code (or else the US tax code would be 1 page long).