joegratz.net

Best comment yet on the SCO v. IBM fiasco, in which SCO has refused to tell anyone precisely what code is alleged to be infringing, said by Linus Torvalds:

“SCO is playing it like the Raelians, saying, ‘We’ll show you proof in a few weeks, through an expert panel that we trust.’ Let’s see if there is any baby or not.”

I have my doubts about the strength of SCO’s case. It would be rather unlike IBM to have failed to wall off the programmers touching the Unixware source from the programmers touching the Linux source, and my limited knowledge of trade secret law leads me to think that SCO may have messed up their trade secret claim by releasing the “ancient UNIX” System V source for free on the Internet, no NDA required. (For instance, I’m an SCO licensee for the System V source. And no, I’ve never hacked on the Linux kernel.) So perhaps this will all go away. Or perhaps IBM will buy SCO. At least Microsoft hasn’t bought SCO yet; that could lead to armageddon. Then again, Microsoft and SCO’s attorney David Boies haven’t gotten along so well in the past, and he’s probably advising SCO to avoid being bought by Microsoft because the FTC would have a fit, complicating matters further.