SCO Madness Reigns Supreme

Sri Lumpa writes "It will come as little surprise for those of you that followed the SCO stories and read their latest filing that an IP attorney, Douglas Steele, Esq., thinks that 'SCO is trying to get the judge to declare all works released under the GPL for the last 3 years put into the public domain.' Meanwhile, more lawyers give their opinions, with Eben Moglen saying 'It's just rubbish,' while another says of SCO's defense: 'From the outside, it appears so bizarre and so ridiculous that I fear their argument is being misstated,' while Blake Stowell of SCO believes Congress has drawn a boundary between proprietary and open source and still insists that IBM should indemnify its Linux users while refusing to indemnify SCO's Samba users against a potential MS lawsuit. More links to related news stories continue to appear in the comment section of the first link, thanks to the Groklaw readers." Read on for another handful of updates in SCO vs. The World.

Roblimo knows good, honest Constitutional argumentation when he sees it, and over on NewsForge amplifies SCO's claims that the GPL is unconstitutional.

Dopey Panda writes "Looks like SCO has become just a bit worried about their liabilities for distributing the Linux kernel. Starting November 1 you will have to be a registered SCO customer to be able to access their FTP site. So that leaves just a couple days for you to download your own genuine SCO-approved GPL code!"

And perhaps today's most interesting SCO submission: 1HandClapping writes "In alwayson-network.com, Mark F. Radcliffe (HIAL) writes about a little-reported aspect of the SCO vs IBM case: 'Novell, as part of its sale of the UNIX licenses to SCO, retained the right to require SCO to "amend, supplement, modify or waive any right" under the license agreements (and if SCO did not comply, Novell could exercise those rights itself on SCO's behalf). At IBM's request, Novell employed this right and demanded that SCO waive IBM's purported violations. When SCO did not do so, Novell exercised its right to waive the violations on SCO's behalf. Basically, this defense destroys the core of the SCO case: IBM's violation of its UNIX license with SCO.'"

Comments

Noorda's revenge?

[Anonymous Coward]

One crazy thought that keeps popping into my mind is that the entire SCO mess might be Ray Noorda's final revenge on Microsoft.

Consider that Noorda has been around the tech industry a LONG time, that he has been involved in a lot of companys, he presumably knows who the A-team and B-team players are, and that he appears to dislike Microsoft a little bit.

So - he takes one of the organizations under his control. He fills it with C-team players. He fills (or prompts someone to fill) the C-team with truthful but misleading information about SCO's purported "intellectual property". He advises them to go after the biggest target first.

Then he sits back and watches while SCO leads a hopeless charge against IBM. This has the dual effect of (a) laying down case law _supporting_ the GPL that Microsoft will have a very hard time overturning (b) smoking out various linkages and anti-competitive behaviour on Microsoft's part.

Crazy, but I have a hard time seeing why else SCO is being so incompetent.