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IBM files another summary judgment motion

Posted Aug 19, 2004 18:55 UTC (Thu) by danw6144 (guest, #14336)
Parent article: IBM files another summary judgment motion

SCO will raise a valid defense to this Motion for Summary Judgement.
SCO and SCO's in house counsel relied on the GPL in "good faith"
between 2000 and 2003 after IBM donated their code.

Upon re-evaluation by "new" outside counsel in 2003 SCO discovered that
the GPL was "invalid". All SCO did was plead what "new" counsel "discovered"
as the "truth". They (SCO) are still entitled to promissory estoppel concerning IBM code since they relied upon the GPL for three years in "good faith" to their detriment.

IBM can take nothing by way of this motion... what IBM wants is adjudication of the GPL and IBM knows SCO will raise its claims about GPL preemption.

Daniel Wallace

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Daniel Wallace's crackpot theories on the GPL

Posted Aug 19, 2004 21:11 UTC (Thu) by NZheretic (guest, #409) [Link]

Daniel Wallace's crackpot theories on the GPL have been utterly refuted many times by lawyers such as Michael C. Berch, Member of the California Bar, Celia Santander Esq, Adjunct Professor at Duquesne University School of Law teaching upper-level intellectual property law and even the FSF own General Counsel Eben Moglen, rofessor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School.

Dispite all the evidence to the contrary, Mr Wallace and the SCO Group itself keep producing these outlandish legal theories and unsubstantiated factual claims.

IBM files another summary judgment motion

Posted Aug 19, 2004 23:50 UTC (Thu) by rriggs (subscriber, #11598) [Link]

What you posit is a fair defence -- for distributing the kernel between 2000 and 2003. After that, your argument falls flat.

The simplicity of the GPL tends to throw a lot of people off. They wish to make it more complicated than it really is. Abide by the GPL and you have a right to distribute. Otherwise, one has no such right.

SCO/Caldera should have stopped distributing software licensed under the GPL in 2003 when they decided they no longer wished to abide by the GPL. You can't have it both ways. The GPL is the only license by which SCO Group is permitted to distribute the Linux kernel.

What IBM is asking for judgement on, and for which SCO has no defence, is that SCO Group distributed (and continues to distribute) IBM's copyrighted works without a license after SCO Group annulled their only license to do so through their other actions.

IBM files another summary judgment motion

Posted Aug 20, 2004 7:04 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Upon re-evaluation by "new" outside counsel in 2003 SCO discovered that the GPL was "invalid".

So, they are shipping this now:

ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/vols/

On what grounds exactly? If the licence is in fact invalid, unlawful, unconstitutional and what not, why is the company that is all about the law (SCO) using it for distribution of software that is copyrighted material of FSF and from their own FTP site? Wouldn't you say that using a licence that you know is unlawful is an unlawful act in itself?

BTW, I have personally downloaded Linux kernel from SCO FTP site, covered under the GPL (had the same MD5 as vanilla kernel) *after* they discovered the licence was invalid. So, where did the advice of this "new" counsel go?

> SCO will raise its claims about GPL preemption

Like they presented millions of lines of System V code in Linux? I'm holding my breath...