Journal AB3A's Journal: SCO 1
The more silly cases like this go before the courts, the more we nerds will just shrug our shoulders, turn our backs on these folks, and just do what we were going to do anyway.
And this attitude is nothing new. Armstrong, inventor of the Superheterodyne receiver, and frequency modulation, was famous for pointing out that (and I'm paraphrasing here) "Ours is a legal system in which deeds are converted to words, and then men sit and argue over the words."
The actual claim on the original base of Unix code by SCO is tenuous at best. Further, since so many parallel versions have been written, once the claim becomes known, it will be isolated and turned to a pariah, just as the patent on famous GIF/LZW compression was.
What this really highlights is that the legal system and more specifically the entire intellectual property rights application toward computer software needs to be rethought from the ground up. It's really not fish, fowl, cattle, or anything of the sort. It's an entity all on its own.
The reason Open Source exists is in large part because today's licenses, copyrights, and patents have had their definitions stretched beyond the breaking point. It's actually easier and cheaper to go open source than it is to defend intellectual property rights of the other three kinds.
SCO's rabid days in court will merely be the straw that breaks the camel's back. When this is done, their assets will be so radioactive that nobody will be willing to pay one penny for them. I wish their company leaders well and I thank them for providing such a wonderful object lesson as to why this sort of intellectual property defense is so ignorant, silly, pointless, and expensive.
Well, as long as I'm going to watch the train wreck in slow mo, anyone got the popcorn?
no popcorn here (Score:2)