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SCO May Countersue Red Hat, SuSE Joins The Fray
uninet writes "The SCO Group, Inc. today released a statement concerning the lawsuit filed against it yesterday by Red Hat, Inc. The release quotes Darl McBride, SCO's President and CEO, as being 'disappointed' with Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik for not being 'forthcoming' about Red Hat's intentions in a previous discussion."
Reader psykocrime adds "According to this SuSE press release, SuSE has publically announced their support for RedHat's actions against SCO. Quoting from the press release: 'SCO has already been halted in Germany and we applaud Red Hat's actions to help end their activities in the US -- and beyond. We applaud their efforts to restrict the rhetoric of the SCO group -- and the FUD they are trying to instill -- and will determine quickly what actions SuSE can take to support Red Hat in their efforts.'" Read on for a few more links.
Vladimir writes "What no one has really touched upon is that the SCO vs. IBM court date is in April 2005, which could mean that the resolution of this case could be somewhere in 2006-2007, by which time Linux or any other OS may be irrelevant. People please keep your wallets in your pocket. Also, this lawyer has a long analysis of SCO extortion attempts and debunks a lot of their FUD."
Besides which, Omega writes "VNUnet has a story on how the economic analysis firm The Butler Group predicts that even if SCO can demonstrate there is offending code in the Linux kernel, it could easily be replaced."
I'm hoping that Red Hat and those supporting them beat the utter legal tar out of SCO. It's not just a Linux thing, either.
If SCO comes out ahead, there will be imitators. If "Extortion Liscenses" work once, people will try it again. How many claims for "IP violations" will there be by hucksters offering to sell "insurance."
I don't think SCO's imitatable yet since all they've done so far is inflate their stock price and annoy people. There are plenty of ways to inflate your stock price.
I don't expect SCO to win. But it is something that struck me as important.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
"The very last company you want to enter into a contract with is SCO. You can see now how they operate."
Definitely good ammo if someone gets cold feet towards Linux.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Clearly SCO is not hopeful that it will win the lawsuit against IBM - if it were, it wouldn't care about how many "SCO Linux licensees" are out there, and it wouldn't be trying to collect hundreds or thousands of dollars from them.
Just think: If SCO thought it could win the IBM suit, SCO would be very successful financially. SCO could then take that financial success and license their technology in terms that are legally clear to their customers.
Instead, they're trying to force organizations to be their customers by threatening them with potential lawsuits. And unclear lawsuits at that.
SCO is merely looking for extremely high visibility in the short term - negative visibility which can damage it's ability to be a product OR IP property. Basically, they're pissing off potential customers of their technology (no matter WHO they license it to).
SCO is looking for some short term cash with this deal, likely because all other forms of cashflow have stopped or in the process of stopping. Again, they can only bite the hand that COULD feed it, as at this point they have no product of any value except the threat of lawsuits (which isn't really considered a product).
While you are correct, it is up to the courts to decide what damages to award, if any. SCO estimates the damages at 3 billion, but I'm sure a court would not agree. You see, a company must show that it tried to mitigate the damages as much as possible. Apparently, the alleged code in Linux is so damaging to SCO that they don't want it removed! Also, up until a few months ago SCO was selling Linux for money. Hard to say that Linux damaged SCO's business when they were making money off it. They also continue to distribute the code themselves to this day. Based on this utter lack of failure to mitigate any supposed damages, the damages could just be an order to remove the code. Besides, since when will Linux users have to pay damages? If anyone pays, it will be those who inserted the code, not those who used it in good faith.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
The fact that RedHat has to wait for months to get a possible injunction, while SCO & Co keep pumping their stocks and FUD - well.. this is a direct indictment on the way the justice system works(?) in the US.
It took all of 7 days fot LinuxTAG to shut up SCO in Germany, likewise in Poland and Australia. If SCO is yet to prove it's case, why is it possible for it to keep yelling everyday? The US justice system is too free, maybe
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Linus replacing the code would not have any impact on TSG's damages claim, even if they had one.
Let's make a stupid presumption and say that TSG's code claims are all 100% straight-up correct. Because they have not showed the code, the people they are threatening to sue cannot determine whether they are using it or not. The law requires them to be able to. This has axed any and all damages claims that TSG may have had. TSG is able to claim zero dollars in damages right now because they've massively contributed to the damage by their own acts.
It would also take a very unreasonable judge to disallow you time to bring your systems into compliance, and as you said, Linus and his troops would replace it so fast that TSG wouldn't even have time to print out the legal documents requiring them to stop using UnixWare-derived code, let alone serve those papers. Some of the bits would head out over the wire only half-compressed.
A Pyrric victory indeed for TSG. So instead they try extortion - and I think the wheels are about to come off that caper as well.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Who has the most to gain from SCO winning this lawsuit? Certainly not SCO, because they arent going to get money from Linux development. Not microsoft, because linux will not die.
Sure, SCO will get the money from the lawsuit itself, but nothing beyond that.
Sun.
Think about it. If major corporations are forced to switch away from linux, Solaris is the next viable product. SCO is not only a bad product, but they've sucessfully put the last nail in their own coffin with this lawsuit. They pissed off the majority of the industry.
Microsoft wouldnt take the market, because all the applications and development are designed around linux/unix environments.
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of what Sun is doing, but they're probably waiting with baited breath to see the outcome of this.
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Well I've been thinking alot about this, and I think it's funny that they give a blanket statement about it being in the 2.4 - 2.5 (now 2.6). If its in every 2.4 kernel, then it would had to have shown up in the 2.3 development cycle. Parts of the kernel dont magically appear at the beginning of a new production/stable cycle.
But telling us the exact release number would infringe on their IP, and we couldnt have that.
Darl, you need to put up, and then shut up when we've removed it from the kernel.