IBM, Intel Set Up $10m SCO Defense Fund

An anonymous reader writes that the "NY Times reports that a group of companies, led by I.B.M. and Intel, plans to announce today that it is setting up a $10 million legal defense fund to help pay for the litigation costs of corporate users of the popular GNU/Linux operating system if they are sued. ZDnet also has a story on this." otisaardvark points out that "The fund is to be administered by OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) and so, amongst other things, could bankroll legal costs for Linus."

Comments

check your facts!

[Anonymous Coward]

OSDL hopes to raise $10 million, Cohen said. So far it's raised $3 million from a group of companies that includes IBM, MontaVista Software and Intel.

Zero Hour

[Xpilot]

On a related note, according to scocountdown.com, SCO should hand over whatever evidence they claim to have to the court....TODAY!

Re:timing

[!the!bad!fish!]

You need to calm down a bit. Over at Groklaw they "don't expect to know much until the next court date on the 23rd".

Re:Intel and IBM won't throw away that much money.

[pkaral]

IBM & Intel won't just throw all this money away would they.

For these companies, this is not a lot of money. What they really are putting on the line (and have been for a while) is their prestige and reputation.

Re:timing

[Zocalo]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but they only have to give documentation to IBM today, the chances of it being read and making Slashdot before the next court session on the 23rd are slim. The only way this *will* make Slashdot today is if SCO fails to deliver any documentation at all, in which case it's likely to be game over, insert coin.

Here's hoping.

Donate to groklaw

[Anonymous Coward]

Donate to groklaw - www.groklaw.net

PJ is doing some AWESOME unpaid work uncovering and collating all the information about the case and the history of unix, sco, novell, the copyrights etc. Many journalists are looking and linking to groklaw already. If there's one person working against SCO who needs support from the community, it's PJ.

Partner Link

[Anonymous Coward]

Partner link for the NYT article.

Re:Sued by RedHat Linux?

[DA-MAN]

I am not a lawyer, but I will try to answer this in that I have spoken with Red Hat directly before regarding most of this stuff.

Now that RedHat no longer offers a free desktop version of their product, would it be possible that a Linux-running site could be sued by RedHat for illegally running a 'pirated' copy of Red Hat Advanced Server?

Only if you actually purchased a license do you give Red Hat permission to audit your facilities for license violations. Installing Linux is allowed by the GPL, as many times over as you would like. But you are only entitled to Red Hat services on the machine you paid for. IE NO UPDATES/BUG FIXES.

Would this be any different to Microsoft calling in the BSA to investigate a site running unlicensed copies of Windows?

Not really, you can always get Red Hat workalikes built from the source code available to us all. For Free!
White box Linux
Tao Linux
CentOS
Just to name a few.

What if the RedHat site was running a hybrid type of installation, with portions of the distro taken from the unlicensed 'illegally obtained' version of RHAS, but others, such as package management (apt-get, for example), taken from the free GNU/Debian distro?

Depends on whether the machine is licensed or not. I assume a jacked up installation (debian packages on rh system) would void any warranty or compatability assurances that come with Red Hat.

Re:I wonder what Darl would have to say about this

[Schnitzel The Viper]

Darl says: 'No amount of money into a defense fund can protect somebody if they're the guilty party,' as you can read on Groklaw.

Re:SCO no longer shows up in Google searches

[SquareOfS]

Which just isn't true .

Why did this get modded interesting?

Re:Covers end users, too

[TopShelf]

In SCO's legal reasoning (take appropriate psychodelics to get into that state), the Unix license is an agreement that a given customer has entered into, and in their opinion the use of Linux somehow represents a breach of that agreement by using the same intellectual property without paying for it. It gives them a "gotcha" on the customer in question, at least in their view.

Of course, IANAL, and it is Monday morning...

OT: Re:Well

[I confirm I'm not a]

Hmmm, interesting. I suspect you're right, that corporations have different legal positions in the USA vs. the UK, but I don't know. To be honest, I tend to think of a corporation as being the sum of its employees (or at least its board members!) Thanks for the info.