Notes from the SCO conference call - re: Lawyer [LWN.net]

Notes from the SCO conference call - re: Lawyer

Posted Jun 7, 2003 12:12 UTC (Sat) by wweber (guest, #11678)
Parent article: Notes from the SCO conference call

# On what Linux users should do: they should be talking to their lawyers.

My conversation with will be very short. It will begin with, "I went to my
local MicroCenter and bought Mandrake PowerPack 9.0. I didn't know it was stolen!"

Once SCO gets their $1 billion, are they going to make an Ashcroft-style sweep of all MicroCenters, CompUSA's, and the like to locate every last Linux customer? Oh, and that thick book of Linux source I saw in the MicroCenter Books Department: are they going to send out secret agents to storm every buyer of THAT tome? After all, it IS a book of Trade Secrets!

This could be a BIG opportunity for the FreeBSD people to polish up their distribution, get some more documentation out, and help replace all those cute penguins out there with cute red daemons.

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Notes from the SCO conference call - re: Lawyer

Posted Jun 7, 2003 20:25 UTC (Sat) by dmomara (guest, #11454) [Link]

SCO, call your lawyer.
Aren't these the people who as Caldera were "integrating Linux and UNIX for business" or some such nonsense for years?
What is "Linux kernel personality" and how was it implemented?
Why is IBM the only party that could have stirred up a mess of source code between FOSS and a proprietary operating system which Caldera now SCO "owns?"
This is a nasty pile.

UNIX is a registered trademark of the Open Group in the united states and other countries.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds, a really nice guy.

Mongolian-cluster-fsck is a trade and service mark of lawyers everywhere.

Notes from the SCO conference call - re: Lawyer

Posted Jun 7, 2003 20:25 UTC (Sat) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

This could be a BIG opportunity for the FreeBSD people to polish up their distribution, get some more documentation out, and help replace all those cute penguins out there with cute red daemons.

Well, in a worse case senario I don't see that there's anything that would prevent Linux from using BSD code. The respective licenses seem to allow code to flow from BSD to Linux, but not vise-vera. But it seems unlikely that it will ever come to this, unless some judge makes a particularly bone-headed ruling.

I think that the worse that could happen is that a court rules that SCO owns certain aspects of SVR4, whether covered by POSIX/FIPS or no, and Linux has to reimplement certain things such as IPC and syncronization, for example. It's hard to see even this happening, but there's this little voice that keeps telling me that SCO can't be as dumb as they look. :-)