SCO Thread that will never die (was Re: Maddog at work.)

[Jason Stephenson]

Bruce Dawson mentions BSD in his previous message in the context of 
saying that it will be up to the European Union to continue free 
software development.

I want to mention that all the currently extant BSDs are pretty much 
immune to SCO as a result of the AT&T lawsuit. ESR even cites, and I 
think he does a good job here, the decision by saying that it may even a 
priori nullify SCO's claims against Linux.

BSD is a whole different kettle of fish.

I do think Bruce is right on when he mentions all the books having been 
published about UNIX internals and so on. I definitely don't think that 
SCO could stand on "trade secrets" for a second.

Along the same lines, I'm going to followup on something that just 
struck me about Novell's claims.

The SCO that is suing IBM today is not the same SCO that "acquired" UNIX 
or whatever rights they acquired from Novell. The current management of 
SCO, AFAIK, are basically Caldera. We all know that Caldera bought part 
of SCO including the name and after about a year, switched names from 
Caldera to SCO.

The current management may very well be mistaken about the terms of the 
deal that previous management made with Novell. They may think that they 
actually own more than they do. It could be that they were misled when 
working out the deal to buy SCO, or that previous management simply 
didn't explain the terms of the deal in a way that was understood by 
Caldera.

If the above is true, and SCO management truly are confused on what they 
own and Novell are correct in their assertions, they are going to have 
some serious explaining to do, particularly to shareholders who will 
likely slap management with a class action lawsuit for failure to do due 
diligence. I wouldn't be surprised if this is how it all plays out in 
the end.

It could also be that they know what they acquired from Novell, and that 
their role is to pass along licensing revenue to Novell, as stated in 
their 10Q. If so, then they are misrepresenting themselves as copyright 
owners when they more like copyright administrators. They may or may not 
have the right to pursue legal action in this case, but obviously they, 
and David Boies, think they do. Of course, what big cases has David 
Boies won, lately?

Bruce also aked:
 > BTW: Does anyone know how the Dutch stand with respect to IP rights?
 > Especially software patents.

I know only that the EU gov't is or was considering software patents, 
and that there was a big to-do on Slashdot with lots of people posting 
how to get in touch with EU representatives to voice opinions on the 
matter. With the majority of us on the list not being citizens of EU 
member nations, it wouldn't do much good for us to contact them. Though, 
as I recall, Richard Stallman among others had been invited to speak 
before a committee in the EU parliament that is considering the legislation.