Novell Challenges SCO's Linux Claims
from the whoops dept
Folks over at Novell have apparently been watching the "SCO vs. every Linux user" situation carefully because, as far as they knew, they still own the copyrights for Unix. Novell, of course, is one of the companies in the string of companies that have owned Unix. They say, when they sold it off, they kept the copyrights - and for the last few months SCO has been bugging Novell to transfer the copyrights to them. SCO, of course, denies this, and claims that Novell has it all wrong, claiming SCO has "all the rights and control of all copyrights and contracts." Clearly, one party is right in this and one is wrong - and it should be as simple as producing the original sale contract to figure out who is who. In the meantime, SCO's new licensing strategy has netted them a small profit, though that could be from the Microsoft licensing agreement, which many think was done just to fund SCO's anti-Linux tirade.
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The many faces of SCO
On one hand they claim that the copyright issue with Novell is a 'contractual technicality', and that when Novell made the deal they had intended to transfer ownership of the copyrights. They also claim that they could easily win against Novell if the dispute were to go to court.
At the same time that they're saying these things in their quarterly financial conference call they also issued a press release stating that "SCO's lawsuit against IBM does not involve patents or copyrights."
These statements taken together seem a little odd, and seem to serve more to obscure SCO's position than to illuminate it.
So the question is, if this is a contractual dissagreement with IBM then why did SCO send out 1500 threatening letters to promiment Linux using companies?
And, why won't SCO reveal the infracting code? Maybe because it would get cleaned out of the next version of the Linux kernel and then SCO wouldn't be able to lean on anyone for licensing fees?
The whole thing smells even fishier now than it did when SCO first made their claims.
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Re: The many faces of SCO
- Mr McBride has now threatened to sue Linux Thorvalds if more companies don't pay SCO to license their intellectual property
- when you think about it...when you purchase a product that unknown to you, the company that sold it to you is guilty of copyright infringment, how are YOU liable? You aren't distributing it...Notice they sent the letters to companies USING linux..not companies DISTRIBUTING linux, its a clear attempt at sowing fear in the marketplace.
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