What SCO wants...

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

>Forbes take on the SCO lawsuit:
>
>  http://www.forbes.com/2003/06/18/cz_dl_0618linux.html
>
>is titled "What SCO Wants, SCO Gets".
>
>Their bottom line: all the righteous whining in the world won't change
>the fact that Caldera/SCO Group is using a strategy that has worked very
>well for them. One of their past victims was the Evil Empire itself,
>which settled with Caldera after Caldera obtained rights to "a decrepit
>version of the DOS operating system" and sued Microsoft for infringement.

M$ settled their case for a lot less then SCO is now asking for from
IBM.  The article is interesting because all of the 'wins' that SCO
has gotten in the past do not appear to have come in the courtroom.
They came from making themselves enough of a pest that someone was
willing to buy them off.  It's possible that IBM might be willing to
do this, but I see a bit of a problem.  SCO seems to want to make
'open source/GPL' go away as a concept.  I don't see that it's in
IBM's best interest to agree to anything like this.  Perhaps I'm
naive, but I think that IBM actually wants open source to be
successful.  If it isn't, IBM will be stuck dancing to M$'s tune
forever.  I'd think that getting out from underneath that would be
worth a lot of time/money to them.  I see this as the flaw in Forbe's
analysis.

The only leverage that SCO has is to scare off IBM's AIX customers.
Frankly, I think that is the only way that SCO is going to 'win' this
one.  They probably don't have the funding to survive long enough to
get their day in court otherwise.  This is one case where I'm almost
happy about 'money buying justice'.

Bill Bogstad
bogstad at pobox.com