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 only IP claims that will hold up in court against Linux are instances where actual source code from UNIX are in the kernel, which is extrememly unlikely.
Remember when the BSD version of UNIX was under legal attack from AT&T and everyone abandoned it in droves?
This is one of the major reasons that Linux actually rose above the BSDs to dominate open source UNIX.
However, these lawsuits did not hold up in the end, and thus one can assume that the lawsuits against Linux will not hold up either.
Yes SCO will try to attack anyone they can, they are a technologically bankrupt company that has chosen the path of using their legal department as a revenue generator. (Remember when Caldara bought Digital Research so that they could sue Microsoft over unfair business practices regarding DR-DOS...that's the ONLY reason Caldara is still around today.)
Just some thoughts
-bytes256