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SCO says it has made no decision on Unix "IP" (NewsForge)

[Posted January 13, 2003 by corbet]

For those of you who have been wondering about the reports that SCO plans to attempt to enforce Unix patents against Linux users: this NewsForge article contains a statement from the company saying that no such action is planned - for now. "SCO has significant UNIX intellectual property dating back to the company's purchase of AT&T's Bell Labs UNIX technology. Our UNIX IP is a significant asset and for several months we have been holding internal discussions, exploring a wide range of possible strategies concerning this asset. We've reached no final decisions on any course of action."

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Posted Jan 14, 2003 9:59 UTC (Tue) by jjdoran (guest, #2329) [Link]

If Sco does enforce Patent's against Linux it would be shooting itself in the Head. It would be one way of committing SCO to the IT trove forever. I for one would boycott such a move.

SCO says it has made no decision on Unix "IP" (NewsForge)

Posted Jan 14, 2003 15:13 UTC (Tue) by ttraub (guest, #2950) [Link]

IP lawsuits are the last refuge of the incompetent. What moronic lawyers are advising these jerks? Like, millions of Linux users are going to fork over $96? If Red Hat had to pay $96 or even $20 per distribution they'd probably go out of business; they're barely profitable as it is, and the other Linux distributors are not even that.

Besides, what exactly is stolen from Unix? Linux is completely new code. I mean sure, commands like "ls" work similarly to Unix but how is that a patent violation? MS-DOS "dir" command is similar in concept if not name, and they're not suing MS.

This software patent stuff is way outta control. Software patents should be suspended until we can figure out how to make IP work without destroying the whole industry.