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

Nice

[michaelhood]

Kudos to IBM/Intel for "doing the Right Thing (TM)". Also found it interesting how the ZDnet article words it "Anti-SCO". Harsh. I like it.

Covers end users, too

[kennykb]

As Groklaw points out, one significant item with Intel's defense fund is that it covers end users. That means that it is not redundant with Red Hat's, which covers only developers.

This announcement should add a new dimension to SCO's nonsense about indemnification.

Smart business move: Ring fence the bastards!

[Anonymous Coward]

What this may do is set the stage for killing SCO by bleeding them by laywers...

The idea is simple: Ring fence SCO from accessing customer license fees. Meanwhile, bleed them to death by keeping them entangled in the SCO/IBM, RedHat/SCO suits.

If SCO cannot extract a single license fee because it ends up in another court case, their business model is effectively dead, thus (hopefully!) devaluing their stock!

Re:timing

[Anonymous Coward]

What I find amazing is the big stink that SCO brought up about indemnification, and protecting your customers against legal action. Even Laura DiDio, our favorite shill, brings up the indemnification issue time and time again.

Now look what's happening here. OSDL is indemnifying linux users against legal action (more than an MS EULA can do, by the way), and SCO is... what's that? they're making noises about suing their own UNIX licensees?

Hypocrites!

Re:So what will it be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Megacorps are neither all good nor all evil. They are just human institutions that plug along and do their thing. What they do often depends on circumstances and who is running them. Often when they do seemingly "evil" things it's out of stupidity and shortsightedness rather than malice.

As for why IBM is doing this, that's obvious. Intel and the others? I'd say that being on the list of contributors for that is probably the best PR money can buy with the hacker community. If you are a tech company, the hacker community are your customers. They probably just redirected a few mil from advertising. Intel needs good PR right now with the hacker community to help them compete with the AMD Opteron.

This may be one of the last nails in the SCO coffin, since $10 mil can buy a lot of legal representation and SCO likely can't match that. SCO does not have the cash to bankroll fifty lawsuits. If the legal battle really got ugly, I'm sure the fund could solicit at least another few mil from Linux users.

Re:Produced any evidence yet ?

[Eluding Reality]

It ends today and SCO has stated they are handing it over today, but no one knows what it will be yet.
It may just be evidence they give to IBM so that they can then look at the code themselves, in which case we don't get to find out anything yet, but they may also submit evidence to the court, in which case we do get to find out today or soon after

I guess this means indemnification

[emtboy9]

Well, so much for that.

This begs a couple thoughts/questions though.

First, $10M US is not that big a pinch really. IBM could throw that kind of cash around without even a blink (kinda like MS throwing $6M to SCO for a "License",) so $10M really shouldn't be too hard to come up with.

In fact, I would like to see a list of people who are contributing to this, and would like to see some big names on that list (hello Red Hat!)

Also, this would be an EXCELLENT time for Novell to step up and put their money where their acquisition is, and back their SuSE purchase by getting in on this as well.

And someone earlier made an excellent comment: where can someone in the general OSS community donate to such a fund? I mean, its one thing for "We the People" to piss and moan about SCO, and then rely on major corps to handle the legal stuff for us (Which is fine for now, but with the way SCO has acted over the last few months, who knows WHO they are gonna sue next), but it would be a much better show of solidarity if we also contributed to this fund, or sone like it, above and beyond the usual contributions to groups like EFF and such.