What SCO wants...

[Seth Gordon]

On Wed, 2003-06-18 at 18:06, Bill Bogstad wrote:
> 
> SCO seems to want to make
> 'open source/GPL' go away as a concept.

A more conservative explanation is that SCO is continuing its strategy
of using lawsuits to maximize the value of its intellectual property,
but they're running out of targets worth suing.  If they left IBM and
Linux alone, who else would they go after?  The other Unix licensees,
presumably, are all paying their bills on time.  The BSD descendants
were freed of Unix copyright claims years ago.  Maybe some original Unix
source code has crept into a closed-source Unix product, just because so
many hackers have seen original Unix sources, but SCO would never know
which closed-source Unix was guilty of the crime.

>  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.

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...."

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// seth gordon // sethg at ropine.com // http://ropine.com/sethg/cv.html //