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SCO "Disappointed" by Red Hat Lawsuit
schmidt349 writes "SCO has issued a preliminary response to Red Hat's lawsuit, in which President and CEO Darl McBride advises that SCO will prepare a "legal response" to Red Hat's requests for injunctive relief. In addition, he promises that the countersuit that SCO will file may include "counterclaims for copyright infringement and conspiracy." His final statement-- that Red Hat's "decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux--" is chilling in light of the business strategy that SCO has adopted in its sales of UnixWare licenses to actual and potential users of the Linux kernel."
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Secondly, the code was released by SCO under the GPL, negating the claim.
This argument gets thrown around a lot but it can only be correct of SCO knowingly injected the code in question into Linux. However, that's not the argument. Even before SCO started selling distributions, the alleged code existed in the codebase. If this is true, than that code is not legitimately GPL'd.
For example: I write some commercial code. You get the code under a license for internal modification. Later I decided to create a distribution for a cool project on Sourceforge. However, you took some of the code I licensed to you and contributed it to that project without my knowledge. Because you don't have ownership of that code, you do not have the right to GPL it. I distribute that project with no knowledge that my commercial code exists within it. This does not mean that I explicitly GPL'd my commercial code. Therefore, no one with the right to GPL said code GPL'd the code.
Keep in mind that I'm not arguing that SCO's claims are valid, I'm simply pointing out the fallacy in this commonly used argument.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
-- Robert Bench, Chief Financial Officer, The SCO Group, Inc.
Take notice, all you that still believe that this is just a simple contract dispute between SCO and IBM. SCO's CFO is clearly stating that they have IP claims against the Linux kernel!
There should be no doubt of their intents after this...
Why doesn't RedHat just buy them?
People keep asking this question, so it seems like it deserves a "OK, once and for all, this is why" answer.
Your question is based on the (common) misconception that all of a company's shares (or even a majority of them) are necessarily publicly traded. A company, when it "goes public," may make 95% of all its shares available to the public, or it may make only 5% of those shares public.
If the case is the latter, you could go to the NYSE or NASDAQ and buy every share there that someone is selling, and you would still only own 5% of the company. Ownership percentage = the percentage of votes you can cast on shareholder questions like kicking out the board of directors, etc.
I don't have figures, but I believe that SCO is more than 51% privately held. So buying all the publicly traded shares of SCO still isn't going to let you dictate the course of the company, it would just give you a bunch of (hopefully soon worthless) shares. The only way to gain control of the company would be to buy out the private owners ... who, I'm guessing, will make that price VERY steep if they think they have any chance at winning.
"95% of all Slashdot