...and if SCO is right...? [LWN.net]

...and if SCO is right...?

Posted May 18, 2003 19:40 UTC (Sun) by MathFox (guest, #6104)
In reply to: ...and if SCO is right...? by flux
Parent article: ...and if SCO is right...?

I must tell you that I live in Europe and that intellectual property law here is differing significantly from that in the USA. We could save Linux for most of the world by inviting Linus and RMS. (political asylum for open source software developers)

You can not review code on violation of Trade Secrets (hey, it's a secret) and it is better not to try that because you need to knowingly infringe to be punishable. IBM can be caught for it, because they have Non Disclosure Agreements in their source licenses from SCO; but that doesn't extend to you (unless you have downloaded one of the "free" SCO UNIX distributions).

For copyright infringement the playing field seems skewed such that the closed source companies stand a better chance of proving infringement in open source programs than the other way around. Despite that, there are more closed source companies caught red-handed than open source projects. I think that is due to the fact that closed source is (usually) unavailable to open source programmers; while copying open source into a closed source project is easy to do.

Software patents are a big pain (blame the USPO); I am glad they are not (yet) valid in Europe.

I have the feeling that for the Linux community this case will end the same way as the USL vs. BSDI case ended. SCO's allegations are less supported by evidence than USL's allegations were and this "billion dolar case" is bound to collapse. It could be that Linus is asked to remove a few dozen lines of code... The possibility that SCO is asked to open source its "very valuable" UNIX sources because of GPL inclusion isn't zero either!

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