The ether has been strangely quiet about SCO’s recent defeat at the hands of a jury, on the issue of suing IBM for copyright infringement. After 2 judges and 1 jury decision, it was found comprehensively, that Novell never sold the copyrights to UNIX as part of its sale of UnixWare to SCO in 2003. Therefore SCO could not sue anyone for copyright infringement when it did not own the copyrights.
The 1st big fact here is that SCO ( Caldera at the time ) was using GPL’d code in its Linux product, and under that license you forgo the option to sue someone for copyright infringement because any GPL source code has to be made freely available. No other license can exceed the use of GPL if GPL is applied to those works. When you use Linux or FOSS, you can’t sue for copyright infringement – period. If you adopt the GPL license, you are telling everyone that they are allowed to use your work and derive it, if you want. The only situation under which someone can sue under the GPL, is where the GPL and copyright notices are not distributed along with the code ( something that happens more often than you’d imagine – don’t people learn? ).
By selling and using a GPL’d product, SCO in effect shot itself in the foot – it would be just as guilty under this lawsuit as IBM if SCO won the suit. Which is a paradox. Which means SCO could not win the lawsuit under any circumstance.
The 2nd big fact is of course that SCO never showed any infringing code in Linux. Not a thing. In 7 years. Nada, nil, nothing!!! If they had such a watertight case, why keep the reason for suing, from everyone?
SCO has essentially wasted 7 years of time and countless millions of dollars for a lawsuit which had no foundation to begin with. In retrospect, it can only be seen as a pure money-making scheme on the back of nothing. And yes, many a stock was sold between 2003 ( when the suit was started ) and 2004. The SCO Group wanted billions of dollars from IBM for work that, assuming all of the SCO Group’s claims had been accurate, SCO only spent a few million dollars developing and were only able to realize a few million from its own products.
Finally, we have to listen to SCO shills like Paul Murphy and Maureen O Gara espouse theories on why SCO was right and the rest of the world wrong. Huh? Are they that ignorant of the facts or just stuck so far up SCO’s arse that the rest of the world no longer exists. Half and half methinks. Paul says “Overall this is a case in which the next surprise has almost always seemed a red herring to those judging on the basis of the underlying issues – and red meat to those using any available means or information to attack SCO.” SCO has been attacking Linux for 7 years and wasting everyone’s time – does it expect anything less in return?
So is SCO dead? Well it should be. But somehow I think Darl and friends will be hovering in a corner trying to make a quick buck. Good luck to them in the meantime, the rest of us will get on with our lives.