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SCO: Customers Bear Linux Legal Risks

Legal Issues

from the say-what? dept

Wed, May 14th 2003 3:59pm — Mike Masnick
Well, you can say one thing for SCO. When they decide to go lawsuit crazy, they put the emphasis on the "crazy". Their latest move in their bizarre case to say that IBM violated their intellectual property in its work with Linux is to claim that any company using Linux may be liable for the alleged intellectual property violations - and have sent letters to 1,500 of the world's largest companies telling them so. People are still saying this is a last ditch move to get IBM to simply acquire the company. It appears they don't have many other options, because they probably just pissed off most of the most lucrative potential customers they could find.
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  • identicon
    phoenix, 15 May 2003 @ 2:03am

    No Subject Given

    With IBM they were shooting themselves in the foot. Now they're shooting themselves in the head. Perhaps we should introduce corporate Darwin awards...

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Cyberscribe, 15 May 2003 @ 5:46am

    SCO Madness

    If the Intellectual property laws allow this company to claim ownership of all the effort by thousands of people then there is a serious problem with Intellectual property laws and their very existence is called into question. This is a VERY DANGEROUS precedent. Even if they sell themselves to IBM the problem wont go away: will IBM try to leverage IP law against open source software? It needs to be fought out in court and we will just have to accept the draconian or open world that follows. The war has begun!

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      cshark, 15 May 2003 @ 10:36am

      Re: SCO Madness

      Here's a thought. If SCO's problem is wanting to be bought out. Why don't we as a community get organized and buy them out? It wouldn't be hard. If everyone in the open source community contributes five dollars, we could buy SCO, put unix in public domain once and for all, and dismantle the comapny itself. If we don't, this is just going to keep coming up.

      [ link to this | view in chronology ]


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