Is Linux even Legitimate? (Score 3, Insightful)

Having just spoken with a corporate attorney about this (said attorney happens to be my father), I was told that only one thing really matters in this case:

What is the dimension of copyrightability or of patentability, as it applies to computer software?

This is to say, what can SCO claim it had patented or copyrighted. Narrowly, one could say that SCO's protection applies only to the letter of its source code, not to any ancillary ideas. But SCO could counter this claim, saying that its protections extended to the UNIX "user experience." Such things as the command syntax of the Bourne shell, the Shell/Kernel design, the presence of standard utilities like awk and make, or even the something as nebulous as the "shape of the integrated whole" (the experiential architecture of a UNIX system and what it "feels" like when it is operated) could, in fact, be claimed as intellectual property.

One should realize, in defense of SCO, that all essentially all early UNIX and UNIX-like technology was developed by a small team at AT&T Bell Labs, and clearly AT&T didn't pay and fund that team simply to write code. No, that team was funded by-and-large to craft an operating system, a "user-experience," "application programming interface experience" and "overall system architecture." Indeed, these latter ideas were far more important (and valuable) than the UNIX source code itself. AT&T forced Novell, as Novell later forced SCO, to pay good money for the rights to these ideas, so if I were SCO and had paid some $500 million for the rights to such ideas, I too would be rather perturbed should an individual and an organization (Linus and the FSF) come along with the vision of creating "a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software" (source: FSF website, GNU project homepage), this is to say, creating a product that uses all of my policy, interface specification, and design ideas, without rightfully paying for them.

Everyone here should realize that Linus, RMS, and their ilk simply wrote programs that implemented policy, architecture, and user-experience specifications and ideas developed, at the cost of millions of dollars, some twenty-years before at AT&T Bell Labs. That SCO later paid millions for those ideas, something that people here seem to laugh at, should not, in my mind, be taken lightly.