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

Here is another artical

[SirJaxalot]

SCO Attempts to Have GPL Declared Void here

Re:The Madness of King Darl

[dreamchaser]

The exit strategy isn't for the company, it's for the execs who plan to make a ton of money with this pump and dump scheme. They could care less what happens to the company long term.

Whether the GPL applies or not...

[mark-t]

Copyrighted code is STILL copyrighted...

A person publishing source code does not relenquish the author's legal rights over that source code any more than a book author, by having a book published, relenquishes copyright control over the content of *HIS* work.

Without the GPL, no code that is currently GPL'd can ever be legally distributed by anyone (except those expressly permitted by the copyright holder), until such time that the copyright expires (which given the inane extensions given to copyright recently, could be an *AWFULLY* long time).

As for getting permission from the copyright holder... well if a person had wanted to use the GPL in the first place, they'd just come up with their own licensing system which still maintains the copyright holder's ownership and control on the work, and has simple enough requirements for getting permission that absolutely *ZERO* paperwork is necessary (ie... a GPL-ish license).