Microsoft Not Underwriting SCO's Legal Fees?

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "Linux Business Week carries this morning a claim that Microsoft only bought a Unix license from SCO Group because there's been a prior development project underway at Redmond that warranted it. "The license was not seen as a way to underwrite SCO's legal fees," says a source within the company. "The idea of getting a SCO license had been under consideration prior to the IBM lawsuit." "

Comments

Not surprising

[SamBC]

For one, do you really expect Microsoft to admit publicly to any underhand tactics - unless you count halloween documents.

For two, it's been a reasonably popular view that SCO are a Microsoft Puppet for some time. I can't say whether it's true or not - I don't know. All I can say is that it seems to fit the evidence quite well.

Re:speaking of OSX

[rot26]

From what I understand, Apple already has a license (someone please correct me if I'm wrong...) Also, SCO claims that IBM took SCO code and put it in the Linux kernel, which would not affect BSD at all. Of course, there is nothing stoping SCO from claiming that (for example) Apple did the same thing - releasing SCO IP back into the BSD tree.

SCO's predecessors already tried this same thing with BSD a long time ago, and got smacked down HARD (although the details are sealed by court order for some reason.) BSD is totally immune in this action, no license (from SCO) required.