What's The Deal With The SCO?

[beezlebubsbum]

Everybody knows about the whole SCO going after Linux thing. I haven't heard of anything about for a while, so I was wondering what happened. Did they lose?

[maccorin]

they have had quite a few blows, but haven't 'lost' yet. linux.com has a section devoted to following the case IIRC.

[jro]

Hey maccorin, this is completely off the subject, but what does 'IIRC' mean. There are a couple of other developers here that use it and I would catch endless heck if I asked them. Just curious...

As for SCO, I haven't heard much either, which I am assuming is a good thing. I am guessing that there got to be so many holes poked in their intellectual property theory that it couldn't hold even the slightest amount of water. From what I have read just about every judge has thrown out their case.

[kungfuramone9]

jro, not true, unfortunately. The case is still chugging along. My understanding, however, is that it remains a more or less exclusive battle between SCO and IBM which will take *years* since both teams have the kind of lawyers that would make any sane person sleep under their bed with a shotgun close at hand. In a way, it's a good thing that SCO went straight for big blue...it's like taking on the nastiest 8' convict in the yard in prison in a fistfight.

[jro]

ah ha! IIRC = If I recall correctly!

I found a jargon dictionary, heh, now I just feel dumb. Enlightened, but ultimately not any smarter...

[maccorin]

lol, jargon dictionaries rule... i use them all the time

check out the program called 'wtf' too, you can just type 'wtf is <some acronym>' at the cli and it tells you

[maccorin]

it's not _just_ against big blue, they have also filed suit against chrysler and autozone, and the FSF has filed a suit against SCO. There have also been actions from a couple developers to revoke SCO's right to distribute their GPL software because SCO is violating it. One of the first and more prolific and first being the developer of nmap.

[Mr_Sfstk8d]

Last week all but one of SCO's complaints against Daimler-Chrysler were summarily dismissed, with prejudice, I believe, by the judge overseeing that case. The only one not dismissed was a complaint about D-C not certifying withing 30 days of the opening of discovery proceedings that it was indeed free of any infringing code. Oh, and, IIRC with prejudice means roughly "I'm throwing it out because you can't prove it && you're wrong. So there." There is a substantial section following these proceedings on Groklaw. Even have reports from observers in the court rooms.

Cheers!

[kungfuramone9]

There was a recent Wired article that pointed out that no matter what happens with the SCO case, Linux itself will ultimately benefit because it's forced the kernel to be better documented. Going forward, the legitimacy of the kernel code will not only be spotless, but it will be well documented and well protected by OSDL's legal team.

Not that a more concise solution wouldn't be to have SCO's entire executive staff and all of their lawyers trapped in a burning whorehouse, but it's nice to think *something* positive will come out of the whole debacle.

[beezlebubsbum]

Yeah. You can't get rid of linux. I reckon even if the world was completely destroyed, there would be a copy of Knoppix or SUSE or whatever distro, floating around where the world used to be. Gotta love it!