Silly Corporate Obnoxiousness

[Posted May 7, 2003 by corbet]

The latest bit of amusement in the SCO suit comes from this talk with SCO CEO Darl McBride on News.com. Mr. McBride is now making direct claims that Unix source code has been copied into the Linux kernel. But don't hold your breath while waiting to see where this copying has happened:

"We feel very good about the evidence that is going to show up in court. We will be happy to show the evidence we have at the appropriate time in a court setting," McBride said. "The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go."

Mr. McBride's contempt for the Linux developer community is, it would seem, exceeded only by his contempt for the public as a whole. It takes little thought to realize that his claims makes no sense whatsoever.

The Linux community, of course, would be incapable of "laundering" the code, since it is, according to SCO, incapable of implementing (or reimplementing) anything so advanced without stealing it. Of course, perhaps this band of thieves could rip off replacement code from somewhere else. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the code in question is "laundered" with a replacement stolen from, say, CP/M. The resulting kernel would be bizarre, but it would no longer infringe upon SCO's copyrights.

Such a series of events would not change SCO's case in any way, however. If IBM truly misappropriated SCO's code, that act remains. And it is an act that cannot be hidden; the evidence is distributed, beyond recall, all over the Internet. And all over the physical world as well. So even if the Kernel Janitors do an especially effective cleanup job, SCO could certainly manage to send one of its brand-name lawyers down to a local computer store to pick up a boxed set of the distribution of their choice. "Exhibit A" should not be that hard to find.

Indeed, the company could simply submit one of its own products to the court. SCO is, with full knowledge now, distributing the disputed source licensed under the GPL. There are two possible conclusions that can be reached from this action:

SCO has agreed that the code which - it claims - was taken from Unix can now be distributed under the GPL. This would not necessarily make the case moot - SCO might not have agreed to the initial disclosure - but it certainly removes the need to "launder" anything.
SCO is knowingly distributing a derived product from a GPL-licensed program (the kernel) which is not, itself, licensed under the GPL. If SCO is claiming proprietary rights on the kernel that it is shipping, then SCO is in violation of the GPL, and loses the right to distribute the kernel at all.

Either way, the implications are interesting. If it looks like SCO is in violation of the GPL, the development community is unlikely to adopt a forgiving attitude. The first big Linux lawsuit could end up giving birth to the first big GPL case.

[As a postscript: SCO's veiled hints that the free software community is behind the denial of service attack on its web site border on libel. As Eric Raymond has pointed out, Linux hackers have better things to do. Criminal attacks do not help us in any way, and are not the free software way of doing things.]