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Novell Proclaims 'We're Not SCO' and We Won't Sue

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-thank-goodness-for-all-that-then dept.

E5Rebel writes "Novell has promised not to sue anybody over the Unix copyrights that a US court last week ruled it owned. They said there was no Unix in Linux and now they are sticking by it. Perhaps they had no option, but Novell deserve praise for taking on the fight with SCO...."

4 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Open sourced Unix? by stinerman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Then it wouldn't hurt to put any and all software they own the copyrights to under the BSD license or even release them to the public domain. If they aren't going to sue anyone who infringes on their copyrights, then they might as well release the code under a permissive license

  2. Summary unnecessarily condescending. by argent · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The summary includes a slam (or two, depending on how you count) against Novell.

    I have to say that despite my initial skepticism back when they bought it, I have come to believe that Novell has done a far better job throughout every part of their stewardship of the UNIX copyrights than anyone would have expected. Remember that when they acquired it the lawsuit over BSD was still ongoing... and the first thing that Novell said about it was that they would rather compete in the market than in court. Lawsuits have momentum, so it took a while to wind down, but the final settlement was remarkably positive: CSRG had to remove a token - three files - and Novell agreed not to sue anyone using the resulting code base.

    I also had the opportunity to use UNIXware from Novell, and it was a solid release of System V... far better than SCO's awful version.

    After their vigorous and aggressive response to SCO's actions, I think they deserve better than this.

  3. Re:heh. by jeevesbond · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What the hell are they going to do now, without this case to report on!?

    Oh come on! There's the Microsoft-shilling-ISO problem to report on yet, Groklaw is in the thick of that! Don't forget who funded the SCO attack, Microsoft are not yet defeated, that was just one maneuvre. Meaning there's the end-game of Microsoft's patent FUD attack on GNU+Linux to report, might even be a court case in it too.

    I think the site is well established, too many people like PJ's pithy analysis for Groklaw to disappear. Although I doubt your post was serious, it's still worth pointing out all the things the site could do in the weeks, months and years to come. :)

    --
    I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
  4. Re:no option? by kripkenstein · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I mean, I don't really have anything bad to say about Novell. But when they say "Oh, we're not going to sue Linux users for infringing UNIX because we're nice guys" you need to look through the transparent PR and translate that as "because we would lose horribly".
    If you read TFA, you will see that Novell do not say they won't sue 'because they are nice guys'. They say they can't because there is no Unix in Linux. They make that very clear in their statement.

    So why make the statement at all? Very simple. Say there is a gun held by someone (SCO) in a room full of people; the gun is used in a threatening way. Then the gun is moved to another person's control (Novell). To get everybody to calm down as quickly as possible, the second person shows that the gun isn't loaded anyhow, and then puts it away in some drawer. That is essentially what Novell did: tell people that there is no threat whatsoever, in the most direct way possible. This is necessary because the people in the room, on edge from the previous threats, are still worried by the gun.