What SCO wants...

[nmeyers at javalinux.net (nmeyers at javalinux.net)]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 05:10:22PM +0000, John Chambers wrote:
> Seth comments:
> |
> | If IBM settles, it undermines the business case for open source, since
> | MS salesmen can whisper, "who knows what *other* companies have had
> | their IP misappropriated by Linux...."
> 
> If you have a chance to get into such whispering campaigns, you might
> get  the  more  sensible  ones to listen to the salient point:  Since
> linux's code has been open and published on  the  Internet  from  the
> start,  while  most  companies'  code  is  kept secret, it's far more
> likely that any shared code was stolen from linux.

The law is not about sensibility or truth - it's about precedent,
intent, and interpretation, and how that is applied to (in this case)
contracts. SCO has a case if it can show that code protected by its
copyrights was leaked by others, in violation of contracts, into the
OSS codebase. It doesn't matter if SCO "stole" other parts of Linux
code. I haven't seen the SCO contract with IBM, but I'm pretty sure it
doesn't say "you can give away our copyrighted SMP code if we copy IDE
controller code from kernel.org".

Nathan Meyers
nmeyers at javalinux.net

> 
> It's much easier to plagiarize something that has been published than
> it is to plagiarize something that is kept secret. There have already
> been a lot of comments from people who understand  this  and  suspect
> that SCO is the thief.
> 
> There is a long history of publishers taking someone else's work  and
> publishing it as their own. This is especially common with texts that
> are public domain, but it can happen with any  publication.   It's  a
> cheap source of income if you can get away with it.
> 
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