Irresponsible SCO

I haven't seen much discussion of this in the Linux
community, perhaps because the charges are so vague, but I
thought something meaningful could be said.

Andy


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http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2889

Reference: http://news.com.com/2100-1016-991622.html

   A lot of brickbats are coming the way of SCO since it launched a
   lawsuit against IBM on the grounds of trade secrets. What's scandalous
   is not the choice to resort to a lawsuit--because companies have to
   defend these sorts of things in court in order to preserve their
   meaning--but the disregard for the needs of Linux users, developers,
   vendors, and watchers everywhere. SCO chose a low road indeed, trying
   to maximize its legal flexibility instead of acting like a member of a
   community.

   Linux supporters are worried about this for good reason. The lawsuit
   inevitably recalls the suit AT&T brought against the Berkeley
   developers of BSD in the 1980s. Then as now, the issue was that
   developers had access to UNIX during the time they developed their own
   code. The AT&T complaint involved copyright rather than trade secrets,
   but the parallels are unmistakable.

   Although my memory may deceive me, I believe AT&T never demonstrated
   that a single line of BSD code originated in UNIX (which officially
   should be written in all-caps). The lawsuit was resolved after many
   years, but a lot of people blame the confusing around the suit for the
   stagnation of BSD and its inability to take off at the crucial moment
   when people were looking for a free software operating system. (I
   doubt that suit was the problem, but it did waste time and make a mess
   of things.

   AT&T sold its rights to UNIX long ago, apparently recognizing that it
   was managing every aspect of that valuable technology with the same
   incompetence that it had conducted the BSD lawsuit. As intellectual
   property, UNIX bounced around for a while and ended up at SCO. It's
   probably no coincidence that SCO decides to act the heavy around this
   period when many observers believe UNIX is dying and that Linux will
   take over where it stood.

   But they know very well what problems and bad feelings the BSD lawsuit
   reached. They know how many people (roughly) depend on Linux day by
   day. What would a responsible company do to uphold its rights while
   allowing the world to continue?

   SCO could have examined Linux code and determined where their
   purported trade secrets lay. They would then have widely publicized
   the disputed code. They'd say, "Don't use JFS" (or whatever it
   happened to be); "we're litigating it." Whatever components were in
   dispute could quickly be pulled out of the kernel; users could depend
   on other components for whatever functionality they needed.

   Of course, SCO's lawyers wouldn't tell them to do this. I'm sure the
   lawyers want as wide a field to play on as they can get. And it is not
   they who will be appalled when play is done and they discover the
   whole field has been turned into a desert.

   SCO can still overrule its narrow-minded lawyers and take a high road.
   If they've got a claim, make it clearly. That is what the public
   deserves. Judging from the scattered news reports I've read, they
   refused to be specific even in the legal complaint they sent the
   court.

   And this hand-waving is a tell-tale sign of weakness. We are all
   justified in assuming, till we have evidence to the contrary, that
   SCO's lawsuit will go the way of the evidence the Bush administration
   waved about excitedly for months concerning aluminum tubes purchased
   by Iraq, now revealed by weapons inspectors on the ground to bear no
   relation to weapons of mass destruction. But millions of users around
   the world are in limbo until we know for sure, and there is no reason
   for that except malice or hamfistedness on the part of SCO.

Andy Oram