"Just for the record a fair few (redhat 8/9) rpms continued to work in fedora but some did break and needed recompiling"
I am sure I can find binary rpms on a Red Hat Linux 4.1 CD that will work on Fedora, and there are binaries compiled for RHL 8.0 that won't run on RHL 9. What matters is the probability of breakage. It is expected that a binary for RHL X.n will run on X.n+1, and if it doesn't, it is a bug. There is no legitimate expectation that a binary from RHL X.n will run on RHL (X+1).0.
Does this matter? It matters a lot. Linux systems I see people using for their jobs include some proprietary software (with no source code). If this is going to break every four months, then these people will drop Red Hat and the Fedora Project completely (these people should be using RH Enterprise Linux, but they are not going to). Personally, I have a reasonable amount of stuff I downloaded and installed from tarballs, as well as lots of stuff that can't just be "make install"-ed, like fonts and extra TeX packages. I am not going to reinstall all this every four months either.
I suppose anyone who uses the vanilla install with no customization can be happy with a major upgrade several times a year. The rest of us will not be. (Customization is a main reason I use Linux.)
"They'll break binary compatibility if the upstream packages do."
Er, upstream packages don't usually contain binaries. Binary breakage mostly has to do with libraries and compilers and linking. Binaries of complicated programs are going to depend on specific versions of libraries, for example. Certain changes in libraries mean binaries have to be rebuilt.
If the Fedora Project is going to break binaries every 4 months, no one will use it except for testing and development.
"Apparently many people rely on Red Hat's security and bugfixes to where they will be missed if absent. But at the same time, people don't value them enough to pay (virtually anyone) for them, hence they would rather switch distributions than pay for the software improvements they've come to rely on."
In personal communications I have had about this, the theme of "I want support without paying for it" seemed to dominate. I have no sympathy for this point of view at all.
But I realized that there was something hidden underneath it, which is more legitimate. There are people whose jobs include supporting a bunch of Red Hat Linux installations. The boss will not pay for RHEnterprise. The boss will not hire more people to support the boxes. The employees have to figure out how to upgrade, migrate, deal with Fedora or whatever while still doing everything else the boss wants them to do. These people are screwed. It is not Red Hat's fault or responsibility, but they are nevertheless screwed and angry at RH. You can say they should either quit their jobs or shut up and lump it, but they doesn't make it any easier.
I have not been able to find an explanation of what a Fedora "release" will be. Will each release break binary compatibility with the previous one, like a jump from RHL 8.0 to RHL 9? Will the releases be more like snapshots, so a completely updated X.1 is identical to X.2?
Lastly, how can Red Hat expect anyone to treat the Fedora Project seriously unless these questions are answered?
I have corresponded with people with various personal and professional interests in RHL, and truth be told they are in a panic. They are angry at RH (which is unreasonable) and they feel they have to figure out now how to migrate their systems without enough information to make an informed decision (true). RH needs to start giving better answers.
"you can't even file before it's actually being used in connection with the sale of goods or services."
Is the collaboration between Cornell University and University of Virginia engaging in trade? I don't see any evidence of it. If they aren't selling it, it isn't trade. If there is no trade, there is no trademark, from what I have read. If they had burned a few CDs and sold them, it would be completely different.
Whether Red Hat can stop them from using the Fedora name, I don't know. This may be a relatively untested issue. Before the web, there were not many ways a named project could gain an international audience without engaging in trade.
"What Darl wants, and I will fight to the end of my days to prevent, is a return to the hugely inefficient days when every Tom, Dick and Harry company could build their own unique, incompatible-with-the-universe, expensive custom OSes."
Some of the first writings I read by RMS about the GPL and GNU made exactly this point, which I paraphrase: It seems like every time you move to a different company, or even a different computer, you have to relearn everything about system utilities, text editors, compilers, and so on, or worse, have to rewrite them from scratch yourself. What a complete waste of time for people who could instead be getting something useful accomplished! If we had e.g. a smashingly good free editor that anyone can use anywhere, then you can save yourself a world of pain by learning it once and always using it. Wouldn't that be nice?
End of paraphrasing. So nowadays, the computer needs of a lot of people can be satisfied by buying an intel box and slapping GNU/Linux on it. You can have everything from firewalls to desktops to servers to number crunching beasts all running the same system. Linux may not be the best solution for every problem, but think of the advantage of having to know just one distro of GNU/Linux instead of Solaris and Tru64 and MSWindows 2k and Mac OS 10 and... This is all consistent with RMS's early visions of the power of GNU.
"SCO's argument, as I understand it, is that US copyright law states that you cannot lose control of your work by accident. The GPL states that you cannot revoke the rights it grants: any code which has ever been released under the GPL must always be available under the GPL."
Read the GPL. Part of SCO's argument falls apart immediately. Let's say I find an old tape of sysV code, figure out how to read it, add some code from there to my personal copy of the kernel, and put it up on a website. Has the sysV code I copied been GPLed? No. I don't have the legal right to do so, because I cannot convey to others the legal permission to copy the stolen code. This code has therefore not been released under the GPL.
It would be the same if I were IBM. Say hypothetically that IBM added sysV code to the Linux kernel illegally. Any kernel that contains that code is not under the GPL and cannot be copied or distributed. (Whether or not the code can legally be run is questionable.)
This is not what SCO is arguing, anyway. They are claiming that the GPL is invalid by nature, and, more unbelievable, that all of Linus's and Alan's work is in the public domain (completely free in every sense) but the aspects that are derivative of sysV code are owned by SCO. This is farcical. I wouldn't be surprised if Boies were disbarred (though I wouldn't be surprised if he isn't).
"The problem is that nobody gave SCO the right to distribute Linux except under the GPL."
SCO will need to find a judge who will unilaterally reinterpret nearly the entire body of US copyright law. They are telling their investors that this is likely to happen.
In the same area of the interview:
We're not actually shutting down the flow of Linux, just cleaning it up at the end user level. [When I came aboard at SCO I looked at this issue of code and asked:] 'Why don't you guys do this?' They said, 'Because the Linux community will get mad at us.'
So he is saying that they knowingly and intentionally continued to sell and distribute the Linux kernel to the world under the GPL at a time when they believed there was SCO "intellectual property" in it illegally. Selling copies of the kernel with the GPL on it while believing that the GPL is not valid and that the kernel is not legally licensed is certainly fraud.
Is a court going to let a company collect damages based partly on their own fraudulant acts?
"Do you think there is a neccessary deep hidden meaning in every detail of his writing, or is it possible that Tolkien wrote so much because it amused him to do so?"
I can't rule it out. But over the time it took him to write Lord of the Rings he could have popped out a dozen Adventures in Middle Earth novels if he had wanted to. That suggests (but does not prove) he wrote carefully and deliberately. We know he did write a lot of history and mythology of Middle Earth to amuse himself, but he didn't publish it.
Sure, there may be a lot of unimportant bits, but I won't dismiss something as unimportant without first considering that it may be there for a reason.
"Book 6 (Second half of ROTK) would be difficult for the movie, as it's after the climax."
You almost grasp it. So close.
It is after the climax of the physical action. It is not after the climax of the story.
Tolkien knew more about literature than any 300,000 registered slashdot readers combined. I used to think that the Scouring of the Shire seemed out of place in the Lord of the Rings, but I eventually realized that Tolkien must have put it there for a reason, and if I wanted to understand the book, one place to start was figuring out why he thought that section was worth including.
This makes me think that other pieces that were easily excised for the movie must in some way be some of the most important, for Tolkien could have just as easily left them out, but chose not to.
"I can't imagine anything useful he could say in relation to a contract dispute between IBM and SCO"
Especially since the alleged code at issue is in the Linux kernel, one of the few parts of a GNU/Linux system that the FSF doesn't have anything to do with. Is SCO going to subpoena the KDE team too?
"Once you've published something on the internet, it's very hard to remove it."
That is true, but it is only part of the issue. I want the information, but I also want a reliable way to point other people to the information.
As an example, I had a link on my web site to a technical note written by Adobe. They took it down, leaving me with a dead link. There are many copies of this note on the web, but they are I presume in violation of copyright, and as these are on random personal web pages, they could change or disappear at any time. In the end, I linked to a google search for specific phrases in the article, figuring that would be the most stable way to guide people to the information. An ugly hack.
Veering way off topic here, but this is a situation where the power of the net is obvious. If you wanted a different view of the war, you could read news written in any part of the world from every view point. Myself, I read the BBC site.
This access is in a way dangerous, because it means you can always find a source that agrees with your preconceived ideas, but it also means that those who wish to explore the diversity of opinion have the best opportunity in human history to do so.
"You can get a RedHat machine to run on a 32-64MB machine if you run the right software. You can't run Mozilla. You can't run a full GNOME or KDE desktop."
Almost true. I used to run the Mozilla milestones on a 32MB machine, and current Mozilla runs adequately on a 64MB machine. Gnome and KDE desktops aren't very usable, but they don't do anything for me anyway.
I am thankful that twm comes with XFree86; it has saved me more than once installing Red Hat.
"let's treat this jig not as a tool, but as a pattern. What would seem reasonable with a pattern?
A pattern could be protected under copyright law (like the plot of a book or the structure of a computer program). If the pattern in essence embodies a process, then protection might be available under patent law. If the pattern cannot be protected under either of these, then the user should not be restricted. You are basically arguing that intellectual property should be expanded from copyrights, patents, and trade secrets to include anything someone ever thinks, writes, says, or does.
The author seriously refers to the next major-version release as "Mac OS X 11". I cried in my coffee when I read that. This is the level of journalism in what is supposed to be one of the best papers in the world. I think I am going to cry again.
Besides, writing "Mac OS XI" might have almost made his joke funny.
" You just can't beat the economics of many cheap x86 boxes running some free OS."
I don't think this applies much to the demise of the alphas. One place alphas are popular is in scientific computing, and many of these tasks can't be split this way. If I have some code doing ugly computations on 50 MB data sets, I can't split this over a bunch of cheap boxes. The "many cheap x86 boxes" works when you have a server on which 100 people are trying to do small things simultaneously, but when you have one person doing one big job, he needs a good computer it.
"Does anyone really think they'd be stupid enough to really send those invoices and risk being bombarded with lawsuits?"
Does anyone really think that they'd be so stupid as to not realize that merely threatening to send invoices also violates the law and puts them at risk of lawsuits? Apparently, they are that stupid.
"a derivative, of code that was placed in SVR4, such as IBM made a journalizing files system for SVR4 unix such as AIX, released the code as in distributing AIX then took that code out and made minor mods and released it in LINUX."
Don't be a FUD victim. There is a specific legal definition of "derivative" with respect to copyrights. It doesn't matter whether the file system was originally written for AIX or not. For it to be a derivative, it must contain material copyrighted by SCO, in other words something taken from SCO's SysV codebase. If IBM took file system drivers from SCO's SysV code and modified it to add journaling, that would be a derivative. A journaling file system written from scratch without referring to SysV code cannot be a derivative.
"2. Some code has been misappropriated into Linux and SCO gets full damages."
Don't know about all the code they are finding, but the first example was only used on non-Intel hardware. Thus, damages to SCO based on Linux on Intel: $0. For damages, SCO would have to argue the number of users of Linux on SGI hardware who would otherwise have used UNIX(R) from SCO on some other hardware. That's got to be worth about 57 cents.
"You did, however, licence your linux software from the developers who wrote it and if they stole code, you, as a licencee, may be responsible, not for damages, but for payment of licencing fees on the code that was misappropriated."
You understand the GPL about as well as SCO's lawyers do. The GPL is not a user license. It only applies when modification and distribution are involved. As a mere user of a 2.4 kernel, the GPL does not affect me in any way, and there is no licensing involved between me and the authors of the software.
It is easy to become a FUD victim from reading SCO's press releases. Take away the ambiguities and their case turns to tissue paper. It sounds reasonable to say that you need a license to use their "intellectual property", but "intellectual property" is only a general description of copyrights, patents, and trade secrets. If you try to state SCO's position using one of these more accurate terms, it can't be made to even sound reasonable (I am not copying, they don't own patents, and nothing in the kernel is secret).
"If SCO can get all of the major Linux players offering indemnification then they can really cramp the growth and development of the operating system."
I don't think indemnification is that strong an issue. If I get indemnification from HP and too many people start getting sued, HP declares bankruptcy and I am once again liable. No one will really trust any third party to protect them from litigation.
It is better to focus attention on the addition of code to the kernel. SGI says all the code it donated was legit. There should be more openness and publicity about this. This will help people trust that the development process protects Linux from illegal additions.
I suppose SGI may be limited in what they say because SCO will probably sue them, or at least threaten to. But there should be more focus on the protections in the development process, in whatever way is possible.
From SCO's "open letter": "The GPL has never faced a full legal test, and SCO believes that it will not stand up in court."
In other words, SCO is saying, "We believe we have no legal right to distribute a huge amount of the software that we are in fact distributing." Which member of their legal brain trust thought that one up?
This is much different from simply encumbering the Linux kernel, which is what would happen if there really were one million billion gazillion lines of modern copyrighted SysV code copied directly into Linux. They want to sell UNIX(R), so killing the kernel would be fine to them. But a lot of their business depends on GPLed code. They can't kill the GPL and have a surviving product line. The only way to get around this is to claim that all GPLed code has really been put in the public domain (against the specific written intent of the copyright holders). This is a legal theory almost too bizarre to put into words.
I am happy to entertain any explanation of SCO's behavior as something other than fraudulent stock manipulation, but I haven't heard any that can explain their actions.
"SCO's stock price took a little 5% dive at the end of the day yesterday. This must have been the news."
I wonder what effect this story has had as it leaked into mainstream news over the weekend.
It seems that there has been a lot of news coverage which is sympathetic to SCO. So, imagine a day trader who thinks maybe SCO has a 10% chance of getting $3billion from IBM; SCO should then be worth $300million. These people do not understand that the chance of SCO coming out of this with $3billion is not 50%, or 10%, or 2%. It in fact an amount indistinguishable from 0%. As people start to realize this, SCOX is going to go down. Certainly groups with an interest in SCO's lawsuit can sell the stock back and forth to each other and keep the price up, but they can't do it forever.
Merely by proposing their license on their web site they are threatening to sue. If they tell you, "Buy this license," "or we'll sue" is implicitly there.
If a someone comes up to you on the street, points a gun at you, and says "give me your wallet," he doesn't need to say the words "or I'll shoot you." SCO is waving a gun around (i.e. suing IBM about Linux) and demanding your wallet (i.e. demanding your wallet for a "run time license").
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I am sure I can find binary rpms on a Red Hat Linux 4.1 CD that will work on Fedora, and there are binaries compiled for RHL 8.0 that won't run on RHL 9. What matters is the probability of breakage. It is expected that a binary for RHL X.n will run on X.n+1, and if it doesn't, it is a bug. There is no legitimate expectation that a binary from RHL X.n will run on RHL (X+1).0.
Does this matter? It matters a lot. Linux systems I see people using for their jobs include some proprietary software (with no source code). If this is going to break every four months, then these people will drop Red Hat and the Fedora Project completely (these people should be using RH Enterprise Linux, but they are not going to). Personally, I have a reasonable amount of stuff I downloaded and installed from tarballs, as well as lots of stuff that can't just be "make install"-ed, like fonts and extra TeX packages. I am not going to reinstall all this every four months either.
I suppose anyone who uses the vanilla install with no customization can be happy with a major upgrade several times a year. The rest of us will not be. (Customization is a main reason I use Linux.)
Er, upstream packages don't usually contain binaries. Binary breakage mostly has to do with libraries and compilers and linking. Binaries of complicated programs are going to depend on specific versions of libraries, for example. Certain changes in libraries mean binaries have to be rebuilt.
If the Fedora Project is going to break binaries every 4 months, no one will use it except for testing and development.
In personal communications I have had about this, the theme of "I want support without paying for it" seemed to dominate. I have no sympathy for this point of view at all.
But I realized that there was something hidden underneath it, which is more legitimate. There are people whose jobs include supporting a bunch of Red Hat Linux installations. The boss will not pay for RHEnterprise. The boss will not hire more people to support the boxes. The employees have to figure out how to upgrade, migrate, deal with Fedora or whatever while still doing everything else the boss wants them to do. These people are screwed. It is not Red Hat's fault or responsibility, but they are nevertheless screwed and angry at RH. You can say they should either quit their jobs or shut up and lump it, but they doesn't make it any easier.
I have not been able to find an explanation of what a Fedora "release" will be. Will each release break binary compatibility with the previous one, like a jump from RHL 8.0 to RHL 9? Will the releases be more like snapshots, so a completely updated X.1 is identical to X.2?
Lastly, how can Red Hat expect anyone to treat the Fedora Project seriously unless these questions are answered?
I have corresponded with people with various personal and professional interests in RHL, and truth be told they are in a panic. They are angry at RH (which is unreasonable) and they feel they have to figure out now how to migrate their systems without enough information to make an informed decision (true). RH needs to start giving better answers.
Is the collaboration between Cornell University and University of Virginia engaging in trade? I don't see any evidence of it. If they aren't selling it, it isn't trade. If there is no trade, there is no trademark, from what I have read. If they had burned a few CDs and sold them, it would be completely different.
Whether Red Hat can stop them from using the Fedora name, I don't know. This may be a relatively untested issue. Before the web, there were not many ways a named project could gain an international audience without engaging in trade.
Some of the first writings I read by RMS about the GPL and GNU made exactly this point, which I paraphrase: It seems like every time you move to a different company, or even a different computer, you have to relearn everything about system utilities, text editors, compilers, and so on, or worse, have to rewrite them from scratch yourself. What a complete waste of time for people who could instead be getting something useful accomplished! If we had e.g. a smashingly good free editor that anyone can use anywhere, then you can save yourself a world of pain by learning it once and always using it. Wouldn't that be nice?
End of paraphrasing. So nowadays, the computer needs of a lot of people can be satisfied by buying an intel box and slapping GNU/Linux on it. You can have everything from firewalls to desktops to servers to number crunching beasts all running the same system. Linux may not be the best solution for every problem, but think of the advantage of having to know just one distro of GNU/Linux instead of Solaris and Tru64 and MSWindows 2k and Mac OS 10 and... This is all consistent with RMS's early visions of the power of GNU.
Read the GPL. Part of SCO's argument falls apart immediately. Let's say I find an old tape of sysV code, figure out how to read it, add some code from there to my personal copy of the kernel, and put it up on a website. Has the sysV code I copied been GPLed? No. I don't have the legal right to do so, because I cannot convey to others the legal permission to copy the stolen code. This code has therefore not been released under the GPL.
It would be the same if I were IBM. Say hypothetically that IBM added sysV code to the Linux kernel illegally. Any kernel that contains that code is not under the GPL and cannot be copied or distributed. (Whether or not the code can legally be run is questionable.)
This is not what SCO is arguing, anyway. They are claiming that the GPL is invalid by nature, and, more unbelievable, that all of Linus's and Alan's work is in the public domain (completely free in every sense) but the aspects that are derivative of sysV code are owned by SCO. This is farcical. I wouldn't be surprised if Boies were disbarred (though I wouldn't be surprised if he isn't).
SCO will need to find a judge who will unilaterally reinterpret nearly the entire body of US copyright law. They are telling their investors that this is likely to happen.
In the same area of the interview:
So he is saying that they knowingly and intentionally continued to sell and distribute the Linux kernel to the world under the GPL at a time when they believed there was SCO "intellectual property" in it illegally. Selling copies of the kernel with the GPL on it while believing that the GPL is not valid and that the kernel is not legally licensed is certainly fraud.Is a court going to let a company collect damages based partly on their own fraudulant acts?
I can't rule it out. But over the time it took him to write Lord of the Rings he could have popped out a dozen Adventures in Middle Earth novels if he had wanted to. That suggests (but does not prove) he wrote carefully and deliberately. We know he did write a lot of history and mythology of Middle Earth to amuse himself, but he didn't publish it.
Sure, there may be a lot of unimportant bits, but I won't dismiss something as unimportant without first considering that it may be there for a reason.
You almost grasp it. So close.
It is after the climax of the physical action. It is not after the climax of the story.
Tolkien knew more about literature than any 300,000 registered slashdot readers combined. I used to think that the Scouring of the Shire seemed out of place in the Lord of the Rings, but I eventually realized that Tolkien must have put it there for a reason, and if I wanted to understand the book, one place to start was figuring out why he thought that section was worth including.
This makes me think that other pieces that were easily excised for the movie must in some way be some of the most important, for Tolkien could have just as easily left them out, but chose not to.
Especially since the alleged code at issue is in the Linux kernel, one of the few parts of a GNU/Linux system that the FSF doesn't have anything to do with. Is SCO going to subpoena the KDE team too?
That is true, but it is only part of the issue. I want the information, but I also want a reliable way to point other people to the information.
As an example, I had a link on my web site to a technical note written by Adobe. They took it down, leaving me with a dead link. There are many copies of this note on the web, but they are I presume in violation of copyright, and as these are on random personal web pages, they could change or disappear at any time. In the end, I linked to a google search for specific phrases in the article, figuring that would be the most stable way to guide people to the information. An ugly hack.
This access is in a way dangerous, because it means you can always find a source that agrees with your preconceived ideas, but it also means that those who wish to explore the diversity of opinion have the best opportunity in human history to do so.
Almost true. I used to run the Mozilla milestones on a 32MB machine, and current Mozilla runs adequately on a 64MB machine. Gnome and KDE desktops aren't very usable, but they don't do anything for me anyway.
I am thankful that twm comes with XFree86; it has saved me more than once installing Red Hat.
A pattern could be protected under copyright law (like the plot of a book or the structure of a computer program). If the pattern in essence embodies a process, then protection might be available under patent law. If the pattern cannot be protected under either of these, then the user should not be restricted. You are basically arguing that intellectual property should be expanded from copyrights, patents, and trade secrets to include anything someone ever thinks, writes, says, or does.
Besides, writing "Mac OS XI" might have almost made his joke funny.
I don't think this applies much to the demise of the alphas. One place alphas are popular is in scientific computing, and many of these tasks can't be split this way. If I have some code doing ugly computations on 50 MB data sets, I can't split this over a bunch of cheap boxes. The "many cheap x86 boxes" works when you have a server on which 100 people are trying to do small things simultaneously, but when you have one person doing one big job, he needs a good computer it.
Does anyone really think that they'd be so stupid as to not realize that merely threatening to send invoices also violates the law and puts them at risk of lawsuits? Apparently, they are that stupid.
Don't be a FUD victim. There is a specific legal definition of "derivative" with respect to copyrights. It doesn't matter whether the file system was originally written for AIX or not. For it to be a derivative, it must contain material copyrighted by SCO, in other words something taken from SCO's SysV codebase. If IBM took file system drivers from SCO's SysV code and modified it to add journaling, that would be a derivative. A journaling file system written from scratch without referring to SysV code cannot be a derivative.
Don't know about all the code they are finding, but the first example was only used on non-Intel hardware. Thus, damages to SCO based on Linux on Intel: $0. For damages, SCO would have to argue the number of users of Linux on SGI hardware who would otherwise have used UNIX(R) from SCO on some other hardware. That's got to be worth about 57 cents.
You understand the GPL about as well as SCO's lawyers do. The GPL is not a user license. It only applies when modification and distribution are involved. As a mere user of a 2.4 kernel, the GPL does not affect me in any way, and there is no licensing involved between me and the authors of the software.
It is easy to become a FUD victim from reading SCO's press releases. Take away the ambiguities and their case turns to tissue paper. It sounds reasonable to say that you need a license to use their "intellectual property", but "intellectual property" is only a general description of copyrights, patents, and trade secrets. If you try to state SCO's position using one of these more accurate terms, it can't be made to even sound reasonable (I am not copying, they don't own patents, and nothing in the kernel is secret).
I don't think indemnification is that strong an issue. If I get indemnification from HP and too many people start getting sued, HP declares bankruptcy and I am once again liable. No one will really trust any third party to protect them from litigation.
It is better to focus attention on the addition of code to the kernel. SGI says all the code it donated was legit. There should be more openness and publicity about this. This will help people trust that the development process protects Linux from illegal additions.
I suppose SGI may be limited in what they say because SCO will probably sue them, or at least threaten to. But there should be more focus on the protections in the development process, in whatever way is possible.
In other words, SCO is saying, "We believe we have no legal right to distribute a huge amount of the software that we are in fact distributing." Which member of their legal brain trust thought that one up?
This is much different from simply encumbering the Linux kernel, which is what would happen if there really were one million billion gazillion lines of modern copyrighted SysV code copied directly into Linux. They want to sell UNIX(R), so killing the kernel would be fine to them. But a lot of their business depends on GPLed code. They can't kill the GPL and have a surviving product line. The only way to get around this is to claim that all GPLed code has really been put in the public domain (against the specific written intent of the copyright holders). This is a legal theory almost too bizarre to put into words.
I am happy to entertain any explanation of SCO's behavior as something other than fraudulent stock manipulation, but I haven't heard any that can explain their actions.
I wonder what effect this story has had as it leaked into mainstream news over the weekend.
It seems that there has been a lot of news coverage which is sympathetic to SCO. So, imagine a day trader who thinks maybe SCO has a 10% chance of getting $3billion from IBM; SCO should then be worth $300million. These people do not understand that the chance of SCO coming out of this with $3billion is not 50%, or 10%, or 2%. It in fact an amount indistinguishable from 0%. As people start to realize this, SCOX is going to go down. Certainly groups with an interest in SCO's lawsuit can sell the stock back and forth to each other and keep the price up, but they can't do it forever.
Merely by proposing their license on their web site they are threatening to sue. If they tell you, "Buy this license," "or we'll sue" is implicitly there.
If a someone comes up to you on the street, points a gun at you, and says "give me your wallet," he doesn't need to say the words "or I'll shoot you." SCO is waving a gun around (i.e. suing IBM about Linux) and demanding your wallet (i.e. demanding your wallet for a "run time license").