SCO's new offensive [LWN.net]

SCO's new offensive

Posted Jul 22, 2003 2:33 UTC (Tue) by DaveK (subscriber, #2531)
Parent article: SCO's new offensive

The thought that crosses my mind now is that SCO has landed itself in an interresting position, on the one hand they refuse to state specifically which part(s) of the Kernel they claim to own, however, they wish to enforce a license on people to run the Linux Kernel. Surely at this point they have to identity which part(s) they are offering a license to, since they cannot claim the rights to anything BSD derived, nor to anything owned/developed by individual Kernel Hackers.
Also, with such a modular Kernel as Linux, it is possible that people can build and run kernels that do not contain the disputed code, would they need a license too? Methinks not.
Have SCO now put themselves in a position wherein they will be forced to identify exactly which part(s) they lay claim to?

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SCO's new offensive

Posted Jul 22, 2003 14:28 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

...SCO has landed itself in an interresting position, on the one hand they refuse to state specifically which part(s) of the Kernel they claim to own, however, they wish to enforce a license on people to run the Linux Kernel.

These two points taken together may result in SCO being convicted of extortion. I think they really slipped up by trying to collect "protection money" without even saying what it's for. That looks real bad.

SCO's new offensive

Posted Jul 23, 2003 18:56 UTC (Wed) by ken (subscriber, #625) [Link]

> These two points taken together may result in SCO being convicted of extortion. I think they really slipped up by trying to collect "protection money" without even saying what it's for. That looks real bad.

I think the binary only thing they claim is so that they would not have to identify any source as they would not actually license the source just the right to run a binary.

The sad thing is that there probably is people that will pay but long term what they are doing is going to fail it just is to many smart people on the opposit side for SCO to win this. But the legal system in US seems to reward this kind of behaviour. :(