[Luni]-understanding the Linux/SCO court case

[SqrFolkDnc at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/6/2003 3:15:41 AM Central Standard Time, mbl at lelnet.com 
writes:

> But "shutting down LINUX" is both impossible in a practical sense
> and outside the realm of the court's authority in this case even if it WERE
> theoretically possible. Nor is any company not in possession of a Unix(tm)
> source license from AT&T/Novell/SCO/Caldera/SCO even theoretically at risk
> of finding themselves defending against a similar case, whether they use
> LINUX (or even contribute to LINUX) or not.

I agree, shutting down LINUX as in 'causing it to disappear from the world' 
is probably impossible.  But couldn't they nitpick away at it, i.e. fine a new 
module every 3 months that "violates" their copywrite?  OK, the LINUX crowd 
would rewrite the module and everything would be OK for a while.  But wouldn't 
that cause IBM and COMPAQ and all other vendors to not offer LINUX as an 
option, not wanting to have to support their user base with all the module 
replacements, and wouldn't that scare nearly all businesses away from using as their 
operating system for desktops or servers?  So, wouldn't that, relegate LINUX to 
something for the geeks to play with on their home machines and nothing else?

Or, perhaps worse yet, lead to a world where LINUX is used EVERYWHERE except 
in the USA (since foreign court systems are unlikely so support such an 
extreme view of property rights), and only MS is used in the USA, causing US 
companies to have a higher cost of operation than foreign ones, making US companies 
non competitive.

If you want to paint worse scenarios, maybe George Bush IV would invade 
France, Britain, etc. to enforce the MS monopoly and eliminate the terrorist LINUX 
operating system?  Hmmm, and LINUX developers would be aiding and abetting 
those foreigners violating copywrites, so they could be arrested for that.  I 
hope I'm kidding......

On another issue

Why are companies running Unix other than SCO (or IBM) Unix not at risk of 
being sued for not being "properly" licensed?  That's how copywrite violators 
have always been pursued in the past, go after one or two big companies, get a 
judgment, then use that to threaten everybody else, and perhaps go after those 
who don't agree to pay up.

--Carey Tyler Schug
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