Impacts of the SCO Case Outside of the US?

Pecisk asks: "Maybe lot of you have already tired of discussing this, but I would like to know opinions (professional one would be very good) how much this case can have *legal* impact to Linux users/businesses in other regions like EU, Russia, Eastern Asia. I know that in many cases there's no effect of US court decisions to other countries, but how (for example) the EU patent law will take this, and in generally how much and do we have to be really worried about this case? This question is very important to me, and I guess, for other guys from non-US countries too. I want to know this also because when I have to speak about the using of Linux and free software in IT solutions and if someone argues about this case and it's impact to us, I would like to know what to answer (I'm from Latvia, Eastern Europe, we are going to vote for EU membership in September)."

Comments

It's bogus

[korpiq]

IBM is sure it won't stand the test of a real trial, and they are putting all their eggs in that basket, so they are pretty sure about it. Even if they aren't, and SCO wins, they'll just buy SCO out; that way, they'd only lose the real battle, that's about whether you can make money by forcing a bigger company to buy you by becoming enough of a hassle.

Got it? They got no case. Even if they did, it'd be solved by IBM buying them out.

Then again - like someone already pointed out ;) - you should be well advised to mention in your talks also the *BSD efforts and that whenever one free *nix path closes, there are several more open, and that's about as central a point of open source as there is. Think about it.

Even if there were some patented or otherwise somehow restricted code in some version of Linux, it doesn't hinder development at all. It'd be just dropped out and a new version without it released immediately. It's functionality would be reimplemented in other ways, pretty soon, and with pretty big wheels behind it, now that IBM et al are playing along.