"Once documents in the lawsuits started to pile up, it was possible to draw hard conclusions based on the evidence presented to the court, rather than public-relations bluster. Which explains why so many analysts were able to tell their clients there wasn't much legal risk to worry about with Linux — and tell them that literally years before the hammer finally fell on the litigation. All thanks to the Groklaw crowd's desire to pile up every suit-related document they could find. Did Groklaw really have an impact on those court cases? Naaah. The impact was on the rest of us. That collection of documents gave SCO's suits a transparency that's impossible to come by with most IT industry litigation.
McBride says SCO is looking at filing an interlocutory appeal, which would deliver an immediate ruling even as the trial proceeds.
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Seems to me that some of you have just come out blatantly admitting you are reverse engineering the firmware — or trying to. How should we handle this?
As responses have indicated, the methods used to determine the violation do not seem to constitute reverse-engineering. Moreover, the initial friendliness of the rep is severely marred by the apparent hostility of the later message, as forum members have indicated. The overall message seems to be "we have not lived up to our obligations under the license of the software which we are using, but we'll get to it... sometime. Meanwhile, do not attempt to poke around our code yourself or things will get ugly."
The owners of BusyBox have been notified of this violation, however the response is still troubling. Is this the response we should come to expect as more and more commercial software uses and misuses GPL'ed components?"
Systems programmers are the high priests of a low cult. -- R.S. Barton