Slashdot Mirror
New Survey Finds No Linux 'Chill' From SCO Suit
daddywonka writes "According to this article at internetnews.com, an upcoming survey from the Robert Frances Group shows that 'cost-savings and the General Public License, or GPL, are trumping any concerns about SCO Group's claim of copyright infringement within parts of Linux.' The survey only covers 15 companies. That doesn't seem very reassuring to me. Do any slashdotters have experience with their companies pulling the plug on Linux projects due to the SCO trial or is it business as usual?"
If this ever comes up at work, I'll give my legal team a copy of SCO's motion to dismiss the Redhat case where they state in a legal filing that Redhat has not violated their copyrights (hence, so how could we?) and then follow it up with the slam dunk of pointing out how Novell owns those same copyrights, so the entire matter is in dispute. Finally top it off with a "linux is not unix" and hasn't been proven in a court of law to be anyway.
I work as sysadmin in a webhosting company and while we had some initial concerns it soon became obvious that this is a pump 'n dump scam - nothing else. We're deploying new Linux servers all the time and has actually increased the deployment rate since the lawsuit was made.
We use and sell SCO to run progress db apps.
We have made plans to switch away from it.
"/Dread"
There were two more articles on SCO yesterday (Tuesday Dec 23, 2003) in Investor's Business Daily - one an interview (http://www.investors.com/editorial/tech01.asp?v=1 2/23) and one a new article (http://www.investors.com/editorial/tech.asp?v=12/ 23) are in Investor's Business Daily today. The interview has some interesting quotations from McBride, including "we don't deny that right [to give away their work through the GPL-he mentions it] at all. Anybody that wants to develop their work and give it away, God bless them." The interesting part about that is it seems at odds with previous statements he has made/implied regarding the GPL.
The follow-up question *should* have been:
"Given that you support the right to give away software under the GPL, once someone has done so, thereby accepting the terms of the GPL, how can one take the opposing position, after all, the terms don't allow one to 'un-release' under the GPL?"
I had submitted this yesterday, and no doubt 3 or 4 copies of it will show up in the next week, but it is relevant now!
I work for a large, fairly conservative insurance company. We got "the letter" from SCO back in (March?), and legal had us draw up a list of mission-critical servers running Linux, so we'd know our level of exposure.
While legal and management seem to understand that it's a frivolous claim, they also correctly understand that being frivolous has never stopped the legal system from making dumb rulings. For reasons which are quite annoying, we are currently "on hold until this gets worked out" for several very interesting projects. This is real, folks. You know that SCO's claims are bullshit. I know that they're bullshit. Legal and management know they're bullshit, but one bad ruling and the waters get muddier for that much longer.
Remember - if SCO gets bought out without being legally slapped down first, they still win in their mission to spread FUD about Linux and the GPL. I firmly believe this is their real goal, because Linux and the GPL threaten certain people who stand to lose a whole lot because of it.
Bottom line, until SCO gets slapped down, my large employer isn't doing any more Linux projects. Solaris is an easy choice here, since we're using it widely already, but the cost savings to be realized are huge, if only we could put aside SCO's asinine behavior and get on with business.