Lawyers out of control

Lawyers out of control

Posted Jun 1, 2003 5:50 UTC (Sun) by ttraub (guest, #2950)
Parent article: SCO's conference call

This is another example of the American legal system run amuck. A superstar lawyer is hired by a sleazy holding company which purchased some sort of licensing agreement to someone else's code; they put their slimy heads together and come up with one of the most outrageous, disruptive, and destructive lawsuits in recent history.

Leaving aside the questionable basis of the lawsuit--clearly, lawyer Boiyes is a technical lightweight who got dollar signs in his eyes when McBride explained the scope of his twisted scheme--it is so at odds with everything the Unix community has stood for that it's laughable. Unix has always been an open, sharing environment; Linux is the natural inheritor of the mantle (if not the actual source code) and great achievements have been made because of this.

SCO's lawyers and executives have to be in this for a very short term gain. For, after they have destroyed Linux, it will be SCO Unix versus Microsoft from here on in. Who'd place a nickel on SCO to win that contest? Absolutely nobody. Linux can only beat Microsoft because of GPL, and by suing GPL into oblivion SCO will kill MS's biggest competitor.

I sincerely hope SCO is sued into the ground by as many parties as possible, and that Mr. McBride and Mr. Boiyes are dealt the ignominious defeat they so richly deserve. This entire sorry affair is one big lesson in the superiority of open source licensing over closed source IP.

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