OSDL Says SCO Suit Was Good for Linux

sebFlyte notes a zdnet story thats says "Speaking at Queen Mary, University of London, on Monday night, Open Source Developer Labs chief executive Stuart Cohen said the lawsuits [SCO suing everyone in sight over supposed issues with Linux] were "the best thing that ever happened to Linux"'

Comments

Everybody likes a good underdog

[J Barnes]

I've got to say that as a dumb windoze user, I paid a lot more attention to the developments in the linux community once I learned of the SCO lawsuits. I'm still sitting in a windows environment, but after being enthralled with the underdog publicity generated by the legal manuverings, I'm taking alternate operating systems a lot more seriously.

Free PR is definitely good

[breakbeatninja]

SCO basically created a situation where they were the nemesis of open source software and everything it stands for. Through their frivelous claims and litigation, they hoped to boost their stock value enough for many of the bigwigs to cash out before the enevitable end (see: delisting) transpired. In the midst of all this, they obviously did not count of the amazing amount of good press and support the open source community garnered. The looming threat now is the ridiculous patent law in Europe which could potentially hinder OSS development.

Linux passed the test?

[tji]

I don't know if he is just making lemonade from the SCO lemons, or if he really has a point..

The negative way to look at the SCO thing is that it's just the beginning of a huge wave of patent infringement lawsuits that all the big boys and many little patent leaches are positioning themselves for.

The positive spin would be that Linux withstood a well funded / backed instance of that strategy, and people didn't stop moving to Linux while the lawsuit was active. So, this would imply that Linux can survive and even flourish in the face of the inevitable lawsuits.

I'm not sure which I actually believe. I think our porous patent system is transferring all the burden they should be taking unto the court system (which has been ill equipped to handle complex technical cases in the past).

it was even better for the bsd's

[Anonymous Coward]

freeBSD has picked up quite a fair bit of steam over the last two years. I know of a few companies that ditched linux for bsd specifically due to the sco case.

Linux license refund from SCO?

[3770]

Some companies bought the $699 linux license that SCO was selling.

If (or when) SCO loses this lawsuit I would argue that they didn't have the right to sell those licenses. They were selling something they didn't own.

Will the companies that bought those licenses be refunded (yeah, sure)? But could they sue SCO to get that money back? And can they win?

Did SCO protect themselves somehow in the license agreements they sold for this very scenario. They could have done that by not really selling them licenses to use Linux, but to use Caldera Linux and telling the customers that this will give them the rights to use whatever other version of Linux that they are using too.

I don't know how many that bought those licenses but I've heard some rather large numbers. We could easily be talking about _real_ money here.

Could SCO could risk a fast and swift death if they lose their lawsauit against IBM et al?

GPL is next

[selectspec]

The suit was a big help in Linux because the impending failure of SCO has boosted confidence in the Linux platform from Enterprise community.

The next real challenge will be the GPL. The GPL has yet to have its "day in court". Such suits clarify the unclear, and let's face it: there are some unclear issues in the original GPL.

I disagree

[bogaboga]

The best thing that happened to Linux in my opinion is the fact that Linus and his early lietenants agreed on what kind of license to use. If I were Linus, I doubt that I'd have given away all my work "for free." The GPL as a new form of licensing is the best thing that happened to Linux. It is also good to hear that it's a living document, i.e., it's being modified here and there to reflect the "hostile" environments FOSS programmers are forced to operate in.

If it were not for that license, slashdot would not have had Linux as a sub-topic and Apache would not be having the standing it has on the web. This applies to many other software that I even do not know about.

Only if McBride and crew end up serving time

[NZheretic]

This will only be good for Linux if the SEC get off their arse and lay criminal charges.

Not so sure

[sad_]

Perhaps long term, but remember the trail is not over yet, it has hardly begun it seems.
Anyway, why would i make this statement? Because right now in the company i work for there is a full OSS stop, to the extreme! It is not only Linux that is infected, but all project using bits of OSS. We already had unfinished web apps rewritten from PHP/MySQL to Java/Oracle (for no other reason then to move away from OSS). Next my colleagues courses for Perl got cancelled because Perl is OSS. No use trying to explain that if we would have to remove all OSS on our unix servers we would have almost nothing left, let alone we would have to redesign about 90% of our projects already in place.
At our company there is an OSS scare, perhaps it is not all SCO related and a lot probably has to do with Patents/IP but still, the SCO trail is doing no good right _now_! (ofcourse i tried to explain that closed software can also infringe patents but they believe they will be protected by the company backing the product, never mind that most high profile OSS these days has company backing as well).
allmost made me cry, but now i'm just angry instead, damn lawers!