IBM Responds To SCO With Countersuit
from the sue-and-get-sued dept
IBM took their time (even waiting for Red Hat to come into the battle), but now they've responded to the SCO lawsuit and filed a countersuit. In the countersuit they make a few different claims. First, they turn the whole thing around, and say that SCO is violating their intellectual property. I find intellectual property lawsuits, like this, to be pointless anyway, but if one side is going to sue over it, then why not the other side? Basically, it's just an argument of "that was my idea!" "No, it was mine!" - which I don't think does anything to push the industry forward. More interestingly, they've picked up on the defense that many people have suggested: since SCO has been selling Linux under the GPL, it would seem that they had clearly given up any proprietary rights to whatever was in the code. The only way for them to say they hadn't, wouldn't be for them to admit they didn't even know what they were selling, which is not a particularly believable argument. Finally, they also continue to assert that SCO cannot withdraw their AIX license, and that, in saying they did, SCO is interfering with IBM's business. All this really is, of course, is positioning for a potential settlement. IBM is basically trying to show SCO's position as being weak, so that should a settlement happen, IBM has the upper hand.
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Settlement?
Between IBM's counter-suit, Red Hat's suit and the likelihood of other suits (inevitable shareholder suits after SCOX shares drop below the price they were at when they announced the suit) SCO is going to get run out of business.
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