A brief look at IBM's counterclaims

Posted Aug 8, 2003 4:58 UTC (Fri) by mbp (subscriber, #2737)
In reply to: A brief look at IBM's counterclaims by leandro
Parent article: A brief look at IBM's counterclaims

> when is Linus going to cease-and-desist SCO from distributing Linux as per
> their GNU GPL violations?

I doubt if Linus is going to do that himself; it would only increase the media feeding frenzy and presumably he has more useful things to do with his time.

However it doesn't have to be Linus: unlike Apache or GNU projects, copyright in the kernel is widely held. Anyone with copyrighted code in the kernel can potentially tell SCO to stop distributing it. Indeed, a German hacker (currently unnamed) did so a few months ago.

Unfortunately SCO, in their current death-agony mode, are unlikely to respond to a cease-and-desist letter. I suspect you would need enough legal firepower to get an injunction against them, and that doesn't go cheap. The organizations with enough at stake to fund it (RedHat, IBM, OSDL, etc) are already acting. Note that OSDL includes many other major companies.

Perhaps some kernel hacker who got rich off LNUX shares will decide to put a few thousands into suing SCO... unfortunately by the time IBM are done with them, there probably won't be enough left for anyone else to recover their costs. (Think rotten.com gunshot wounds....)