SCO's new offensive

Posted Jul 22, 2003 12:38 UTC (Tue) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

Actually, I think it is fair. What they're doing is threatening people and companies using nothing other than the US legal system. In a just world, nobody would pay them any attention, let alone give them enough credence to boost their stock and enable serious profits from stock sales. Just imagine how much good the total legal bills in this fiasco could do if they were embezzled towards the free software community instead.

Yes, thank you.

And, it's not just the courts and the legal system I'm complaining about. It's the whole damn ball of wax. I will grant you that if you look at history, you can't find a system that's done better than our capitalistic mess (or, perhaps, than other versions of it-- I don't really believe that the USA has the highest standard of living for all of its citizens any more, although the true degree of personal freedom is debatable) when it comes to preserving human rights and individual freedom with large governments. But just because everything else that has been tried is worse doesn't mean that our system isn't a travesty... as this SCO business points out. I don't know the answer, but the whole thing makes me throw my hands up in frusturation. The fact that they might have a case and that people give them credence, the fact that according to the paper trail the people who are running SCO now and never contributed a damn thing (in contrast to the engineers and such from Caldera and SCO of years past-- it's not the same company any more), the fact that these parasites may actually "legally" have the intellectual property rights either to specific bits of code, or even to some more amorphously defined thing that could, under our system, make much of Linux a "derived work"-- well, it's plainly ridiculous on the face of it. Whatever you think about intellectual property in general, it's difficult to think that there is any justice in these particular SCO jokers being able to make the claim that they're making. And yet, our whole legal and economic system with its buying and selling of rights does allow a paper trail that makes that claim ostensively credible.

If they are laughed at by everybody else, and if they eventually get laughed out of court, I'll feel a lot better. But it's almost already too late for that; the media has given them far too much credence, and analysists and such haven't come out and said that SCO should just be ignored. And there is a possibility that eventually the courts will say that the current implementation of Linux is derived from SCO's ill-gotten intellectual property. That will put a huge kink in Linux from which it may never recover. Sure, as soon as they're told what it actually is that SCO is bitching about, and as soon as they're given reason to believe that there might be something behind SCO's bitching (according to the potential opinion of the courts, even though it's almost certainly bullshit in reality), the Linux kernel developers will rip it out and replace it. But the damage will be done. Future versions of Linux, even without the infringing code, will always carry with them the doubt that there might be an SCO tie, and no corporate purchaser with any sense is going to allow it at his company. Linux will return in status to where it was in 1995 or thereabouts-- used by the hobbiest only, and with any driver support it has coming years after the support for proprietary operating systems. I sure as hell hope I'll still be able to use it in an academic setting, but we've all got our lawyers and such as well who will probably tell us to buy something proprietary "for safety".

The fact that this is even a reasonable possibility just makes me sick thinking about our screwed up system. The whole idea of patents and copyrights and such is to encourage and reward creators, and the whole idea of civil law is to prevent people from taking advantage of each other. But the marriage of those two has spanwed this foul beast which is the SCO legal team making their intellectual property claims, despite the fact that they've never contributed a damn thing to society, despite the fact that they're the ones who would destroy one of the greatest movements of intellectual freedom in history for their own personal monetary gain, despite the fact that they never created the tiniest piece of Unix and as such are not the ones that copyright and patent laws in this country are theoretically supposed to be "protecting". That our system allows them even to try, even to be given the slightest bit of credence by those who listen, indicate that our system is fundamentally flawed and poorly motivated. And, yes, no other system is better, but as I said, not being worse doesn't make you good.

-Rob

Posted Jul 22, 2003 14:20 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Yes they are, but that's entirely SCO's transgression, not the US court systems.

One of the foundations of the US legal system is the concept of "due process." I would be very concerned if this principle were set aside. Now that would be something worth complaining about.

In other words, SCO can't be found guilty before they are found guilty. You may think this would be fine, but what if the circumstances were different? Say, for example, that you or I were punished for some crime before we had been tried in court, based soley on public opinion? This is the case in some parts of the world; places that I'm glad I don't live.

It may be evident that SCO is in the wrong to you and I, but this has not yet been tried in court.