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Linus Speaks Out, Calls SCO 'Cornered Rat'
dexterpexter writes "In an interview with Business Week, Linux founder and guardian Linus Torvalds had, in his usual brand of blunt humor, the following to say about SCO: 'They're a cornered rat, and quite frankly, I think they have rabies to boot. I'd rather not get too close to them,' and 'There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong.'" In the same issue, there's also an interview with Darl McBride where he admits that the company was failing and the Linux-related lawsuits were a last-ditch effort to prevent bankruptcy.
Did anybody else notice how Linus never uses the term "intellectual property"? Everytime it appears in the interview it is in square brackets, meaning the editor replaced such coneceptually hard words as "source code" by "intellectual property". Darl OTOH employs this stupid term several times throughout his interview. Maybe he and the editors should try to understand this.
In the end, I think we'll all look back on this as the time where Linux went from sort of a fringe software in the minds of a lot of people to a mainstream player, where corporations learned they shouldn't mess with the OSS community and when the idea of open-source really started to make people ask "Why *am* I paying for this software?"
/. much, they read the Times and CNN.
The problem with this is sometimes a few bad apples make the OSS community look like a bunch of crazy lunatics. Take the nice worm that is going around now... CNN already has an article which pretty much blames the OSS community for the worm. In fact, a quote like this: "Virus experts suggested MyDoom's author was a fan of the Linux open source community..." can be damaging to getting Linux and OSS recognized in a good light.
It is too bad that this has to happen because PHBs do not read message boards or surf
...except that a fundamental concept of copyright law is that infringers can remedy the situation to mitigate damages.
That's why website owners get cease and desist letters instead of being dragged immediately into court. Someone unintentionally infringing who makes a timely and good faith effort to stop infringing will likely not be liable for any damages at all, and certainly cannot be compelled to purchase a license for a product they are not using.
In other words, if any code even exists, once SCO shows it and it's expunged from the kernel, there's no more infringement. And no reason to buy a license.
To put it even more bluntly, SCO's licensing theory is invented out of whole cloth, and completely without precedent.