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Open Source Group Victoria v. SCO, Part II
Following up on last July's complaint, Elektroschock writes that "The Open Source Group Victoria (OSV) made a second complaint to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). In a similar case in Germany SCO Group received an injunction from the court, so SCO never sold Linux licenses in Germany (tarent vs. SCO, district court Munich). Competition police seems to be a strong weapon against SCO-like action."
Funny but also insightful! They haven't sold any because they can go to prison for selling something they don't own. You won't get a license even if you beg for it.
Competition police seems to be a strong weapon against SCO-like action. ... IN countries that have applicable laws
NO SIG
It is sad that there are businesses that will so easily pay the extortion money. This only encourages others to adopt similar extortion techniques where they make bogus claims and want you to pay up *before* any of their claims have been proven. Maybe if I was as corrupt as SCO management I would also make a claim against your Linux installations and you'd pay me too. Oh well.
And please tell me that you at least got a T-shirt.
Darl also said that SCO would sue a Linux user by now.
Darl also said that millions of lines of code were their property.
However, I do think the old Mac OS was crap. And it was a fusion of NeXT and *BSD unixes that created the core of OS X.
I'll calmly ignore the Linux remark. But my roommate's seven year old daughter hasn't had any problems with my Debian box. And debian is solid, flexible, powerful... well, it was more solid before I upgraded to testing.
The only upside I see to OS X is that Mac users aren't being subjected to frivolous litigation by a nervous company.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
Taken directly from
http://www.thescogroup.com/scosource/eula.html
You may not assign, sublicense, rent, lend, lease, pledge or otherwise transfer or encumber the SCO IP, this Agreement or Your rights or obligations hereunder
The SCO group is now distrubuting the kernel with additional restrictions, and thus are violating the GPL. They are truely now in violation of all the kernel developer's copyright on the code.
Molog
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
They claim to have sold a handful to unnamed companies.
In which case they have claimed to being in breech of the GPL and so have no licence to distribute the contributions of the other kernel hackers and so have claimed to have comitted copyright infringement - surely?
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
Competition police seems to be a strong weapon against SCO-like action.
The most salient observation I have seen for some time on Slashdot. You nailed the point.
Intellectual Property, be it trademark, copyright, patent, trade secret, and the related non-IP causes of action such as anti-circumvention, create limitations and monopolies. Ideally, the monopolies are carefully limited against social needs to yield a net societal benefit, but as with all law, horrifying results can occur. IP is a core source these days of examples of unintended consequences.
While IP and pseudo-IP create monopolies sponsored by the government, the government likewise has another body of law, a different kind of trade regulation, antitrust, to keep enterprises from abusing even fairly obtained competitive advantages to the detriment of society. Like IP, the application of these laws must be careful, because fear of antitrust liability can actually result in highly anticompettive consequences to the detriment of society.
Combine that with the corpus of law governing unfair competition and deceptive trade practices more generally, and it is no surprise that when a company really goes out there, there are a kazillion conflicting policies and issues.
That is why some uses of IP can be so "out there" as to rise to anticompetitive conduct, even though the monopoly given was government-blessed. And why some anticompetitive conduct can preclude a right to assert iP.
Look for that whenever: (i) a company with significant market share throws IP weight around; (ii) a company with a fairly fought ownership of a marketplace governed by IP tries to extend their rights to non-controlled markets; and (iii) a company, though not a market leader or innovator, really stretches some IP rights they do have to control a market beyond any reasonable threshold.
"They've made a Unix-based desktop operating system that is solid, flexible, and powerful enough for real Unix work, while still being pleasent to work with and easy enough for novices. That's far more that the Linux developers have done."
You're probably right - I wouldn't know, I'm still stuck with my x86 system(s) - I'm having a hard time justifying the price tag to check the Apple stuff out [I have plenty of systems for a try out, just no apple stuff]. So I guess I am stuck with the inferior stuff the Linux Developers provide for you and me for free.
ymmv