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ZDNet Examines SCO Indemnity Options
Ursus Maximus writes "David Berlind of ZD NET has posted a major opinion/research piece. What do you all think? I don't like the story at all, but he does seem to have made more of an effort to try to find reasons to back up SCO's claims than any of their other supporters have."
from Berlind's Bio ...
... Prior to that, he served as editor-in-chief of Windows Sources, where he led the magazine's push for exclusive coverage of Windows NT for business users.
o si um/speakers/DavidBerlindBio.shtml
http://www.wirelessenterprisesymposium.com/symp
Sounds like permanent brain damage to me.
Ziff-Davis is a Microsoft shill. Their bias
is pretty transparent.
Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.
Same. Old. Story.
Take a look at this article from a week or two ago on Groklaw.
PJ compares SCO's worst case scenarios with those of RedHat, IBM & co.
It makes for much more interesting reading than many of the other legal filings I've read... Note how in that article, SCO describes quite a few ways in which its business could fold, compared to rather bland statements that something bad might happen in the off chance SCO ever actually prevailed with some bit of their case.
It's kind of fun to read all the various ways in which SCO might be liquidated, though. I wonder which of them will happen?
Correct. IANAL (but I do have a couple of friend who are, and this is how they explained it to me). YMMV/VWPBL etc. etc.:
As long as the ownership of any property (in this case the UNIX IP) is under dispute between two parties in a court of law, then the end user of that property is under no legal obligation to listen to or believe in the claims of either of the parties. The end user is only obligated to the contract she entered into with the original party at the time she started using the property, until directed to do otherwise by the court.
E.g., A rents B a house, and B, in good faith, signs a contract with A to pay a certain monthly rent, gets the keys to the house and starts using it. A couple of years later, C shows up and tells B that the house actually belongs to C, and B should be paying rent to C and not to A. Then, A and C sue/counter-sue each other re. the ownership of the house, and a court starts to look at the matter. While the matter is sub-judice, (and without any clear directive from the court to put the rent in an escrow fund etc.), B is only obligated to follow the contract with A.
This is true especially if the matter is sub-judice. So the issue of indemnity is moot.
cheers- raga
2. The fact that it took them MONTHS to produce, even for the court, any evidence supporting their claims -- and even admitted that they didn't have all of the evidence they'd claimed to have,
The real issue is that what evidence they have produced in court is simply pointing out a well-known fact: that IBM contributed code that IBM itself wrote into Linux. SCO doesn't even claim ownership of the code; they are just claiming that IBM was supposed to ask SCO before contributing it. SCO does not claim and cannot support that there is any System V code in Linux.
So, regardless of whether IBM contributed code improperly or not, there is no code in Linux that is a "derivative work" of any SCO property. The asking permission thing is a contract dispute between SCO and IBM and end users can't be held liable for that; nobody but IBM can. And it looks very much like SCO has no control over IBMs actions since (1) Novell has retained the control rights for existing Unix licensees, and (2) the AT&T license gave it no rights over licensees own code anyway.