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SCO Group Hires Boies After All

Posted by timothy on from the mendacity-mendacity-mendacity dept.

pitr256 writes "So it seems the SCO Group has decided to hire infamous Anti-Microsoft lawyer David Boies after all. This comes upon reversal of the SCO Group statement according to Chief Executive Darl McBride of having not engaged Mr. Boies to take legal action against our fellow Linux vendors. Now, CNet News is reporting that not only is SCO Group investigating the Linux vendors but that it is also going to investigate Windows, Mac OS X, and the BSD derivatives. So if your technology can't win on price and performance, break out the lawyers and sue everyone. Does anyone else see this as the end of SCO (Caldera) like I do? I certainly will never use anything from them ever again."

2 of 444 comments (clear)

  1. It is only about 2 libraries. by DaveV1.0 · · Score: 5, Informative
    According to the article I have read, SCO is only concerned about two libraries that they wrote that are not Free software. These libraries are ABI's used in UnixWare and OpenServer. The libraries are not integral to Linux or the X window system.

    SCO is not going after every Linux vendor, only those distributing the two libraries without SCO's permission.

    To me, this is all just FUD, and is being blown WAY out of proportion.

    --
    There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
  2. Re:From what I gather... by mlyle · · Score: 5, Informative

    You might be able to make some far-fetched trademark argument about Unix look-and-feel, but what a patent covers is a set of succinct (or sometimes not-so-succinct) claims. Ie, "A system, with provision for input and output to a terminal, that ...."

    I'm unsure of what exactly SCO's patents cover, but many of the fundamental characteristics of unix look and feel are more than 20 years old, e.g. the patents would be expired by now.

    We might have to worry about some things, like System V-style shared memory, possibly being infringing. But it's not really possible to get a patent on the concept of a "unix-like" OS.