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.

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?