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SCO Fined in Munich For Linux Claims

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the can-we-do-that-here-too dept.

nordi writes "heise.de reports (in German) that SCO Germany has to pay a fine of 10,000 Euros (~10,800 US$) because they kept on saying that Linux contains stolen intellectual property of SCO. In May a German court had decided that SCO Germany must not continue making those claims." Yes, it's auf Deutsch, so break out babelfish.

2 of 436 comments (clear)

  1. There is some justice in this world, by pair-a-noyd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What's it going to take to get a similar ruling here in the US??

    Making these insane claims like they do is damaging Linux and the reputation of a lot of good people.

    SCO needs to put up or shut up.

    I hope to see a slew of counter suits filed against SCO and I hope a judge will order SCO to STFU until this is resolved. Anyone that loses money over this should personally sue SCO..

  2. pcmag gives undeserved credibility to SCO by asv108 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    One item of note on the topic of SCO is that the latest PC magazine has a opinion column by editor-in-chief Michael J. Miller that is completely biased against Linux.

    From the Article

    I was initially quite skeptical about these claims, but after talking with several of the principals in the case, I'm not so sure anymore. The history of SCO and Unix is complex.

    That's when the copyright controversy emerged. Chris Sontag, a VP at SCO, recently visited PC Magazine's offices with a stack of documents he claims proves SCO's case. Some of these documents are compelling. Sontag explained that SCO owns the copyright to Unix System V. He said that through kernel 2.2, Linux was progressing fine under the GPL. But in the transition to kernel 2.4, code was added that violates SCO's copyrights.

    Some of the evidence Sontag showed us is straightforward: Sections of the Linux kernel code relating to the journaling file system and multiprocessor support are identical to the Unix System V code. He offered to show us specific sections of the Unix code, but only under a nondisclosure agreement, which we refused. He said this code was not added to Linux by IBM but by someone else, and that it's a violation of SCO's copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but his argument seems convincing.

    PC magazine may not be as relevant as it was a few years ago, but it is still where a lot of people get most of their computer news. I was pretty shocked to read this crap as the first story. I would encourage people to leave some feedback for Mr. Miller.