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The Power Behind the SCO Nuisance
akahige writes "Forbes has a fairly detailed story about the sordid history of The Canopy Group and all the various companies they've sued -- Microsoft (who they beat) and CA (this case is still pending), among them. Before joining Caldera, Darl McBride sued IKON Office Solutions, for whom he worked -- and won. And it also seems that a bunch of Canopy power players also sit on SCO's board of directors. The short summary is, 'these guys are professional litigious bastards -- be exceptionally wary.'" A local user's group is planning a protest for tomorrow. Reader myst564 writes: "After reading all of this SCO press I remembered that SCO once offered up all of their 'Ancient UNIX' (their words, not mine) source to the world while retaining all copyrights (i.e, no OSS license). Interestingly enough it WAS located here but isn't any longer: SCO's Ancient Unix. What's more you can read about the original release here at: Linux Today. I downloaded the source myself way back then but never did anything but delete it! Anyway, check out this comment. It's interesting that this was predicted in 2000!"
Can anyone please tell me what impact this has on europeans???
As I see it the americans can continue with their sillyness, but none of this would come far in an european court!
So feel free american society - Get rid of the opertunity of using linux - that might even make the IT industry in Europe a bit more competitive!
Desktop Linux users should also note this important fact: The Canopy Group also owns Trolltech, makers of the Qt library... which is the basis for KDE. Indeed, TrollTech employs many core KDE developers.
Over the last few years, one of the last resort arguments used by KDE developers faced with the unpleasant truth about Qt has been to claim that TrollTech can be trusted. Clearly this is not so.
Perhaps some explanation is in order. The Qt library is GPL -- which means that anyone wishing to write non-open source applications for the KDE desktop has to pay around $3500 per developer to TrollTech (this is far in excess of the cost of developing Microsoft applications)... not only that, but TrollTech violate the GPL in many ways. In effect, TrollTech (and Canopy/SCO) becomes the gatekeeper and tolltaker of the Linux desktop. And who knows what other litigation they have planned -- not least of which will be the joke of the century, the TrollTech's "promise" regarding the GPLed version of Qt... the Free Qt foundation.
Do not give these vipers anymore ammunition. Do not use software tainted by Qt and TrollTech.
RMS predicted it? Yeah, well even a hypochondriac is sometimes really sick.....