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.

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?