On Friday 16 May 2003 6:05 pm, Nick Zentena wrote:
On May 16, 2003 12:43 pm, Vince Littler wrote:
How is it anti-competitive? Like this:
If SCO sold Linux now [while indemnifying their own customers, but threatening others], they would in effect be saying "We will sue you if you buy anyone else's Linux.". That's anti-competitive [ie a dirty trick which is sufficiently obvious that they might not get away with it]. Roll forward to a point where they threaten end-users - would you not find that to be coercive against buying anyone else's Linux?
No. Think of it like this.
I'm willing to sell you my car. I also tell you if you buy **MY** car from anybody else you'll be risking breaking the law. I'm the only lawfull seller of my car.
That's what they are doing. Telling you that the other people selling Linux don't have the right to sell it because it belongs to them.
Nick
Well, sticking with the analogy [and we are really talking about IP which is infinitely replicable rather than your car which is not]. Your position is very different from that of SCO. If you claim that car X which Y is trying to sell is actually your car, the claim is sufficiently specific to be verifiable. What SCO [a reputable second hand car dealer] are saying is that _some_ of the spark plugs in _some_ of the cars on _some_ other dealers frontages actually belong to SCO, while sueing only one other dealer and being totally non-specific about which cars, which other dealers and which sparkplugs [and even whether its sparkplugs or another component], but saying they might sue anyone who buys a car with SCO's sparkplugs. This deters all the buyers from all of the cars in all of the dealers, except for SCO. If SCO continued to sell cars, this would be anti-competitive against all the dealers they were _not_ sueing, because they could maintain the threat for several years and then drop it without starting proceedings against any of the other dealers and without ever having made a specific claim. Come to think of it some more, if SCO carried on selling diesel cars, without spark plugs, it would still be anti-competitive, because they would have thwarted a large segment of the competition, without facing the obligation to be specific and provide evidence. And if SCO carry on selling UNIX, they are still being anticompetitive, despite having dropped Linux. Now think on that... Vince