On Mon, 2003-07-21 at 19:07, Edward Dekkers wrote: > > > SCO has a lot to prove. If they prove the case against IBM then that > > will affect IBM and its customers. But since this is a contract > > dispute, it can only affect parties involved in the contract. I never > > signed any agreement with SCO. Did you? > > No, I did not. My concern was the fact that in the company quotes to the > media - there's NO mention of IBM Linux customers - it seems to be > targetted at the "Linux User" in general. Mind you, the article could be > poorly quoted I guess.
Correct, but that is part of the FUD they are trying to spread. So far the only action SCO has taken, legally, is the lawsuit against IBM. The lawsuit filed is a contract breach allegation. But, SCO has waved their wand and made nebulous allegations that some of their IP, without specifying what it is, has leaked into Linux, including the kernel. They make statements that their IP rights have been violated, but refuse to show anyone what part of the code they believe they own. Ignoring for the moment that they may own nothing as far as any code is concerned (Novell's claim), they seem to be trying to get people to think that Linux is tainted and they either have to abandon Linux (and presumably by SCO Unix), or pay licensing fees to SCO. Until they come clean and designate what they believe is in Linux that violates "their" IP, there is no basis for anyone to believe their claim, hence their licensing program amounts to not much more than an extortion attempt, or a poker bluff if you prefer. *IF* someone knew what parts of Linux are in dispute, those sections could be rewritten in a 'clean room' environment and the dispute for on-going claims would be nil. But you cannot target those sections if you do not know what they are. To go back a decade, that is what happened with BSD. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD,etc. are all based on BSD 4.4 Lite, which is the cleaned up version of BSD to satisfy USL's claim of infringement by BSD in the previous attempt at an OpenSource release, Net2. - rick warner -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
