Legal Issues

Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick




SCO: Customers Bear Linux Legal Risks

from the say-what? dept

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.

5 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments

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    May 15th, 2003 @ 2:03am
  • No Subject Given

    by phoenix

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

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  • May 15th, 2003 @ 5:46am
  • SCO Madness

    by Cyberscribe

    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!

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

    • May 15th, 2003 @ 10:36am
    • Re: SCO Madness

      by cshark

      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.

      (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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