On Friday 16 May 2003 12:29 pm, Nick Zentena wrote:
On May 15, 2003 05:29 pm, Vince Littler wrote:
"SCO will continue to support existing SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux customers and hold them harmless from any SCO intellectual property issues regarding SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux products."
If they indemnify their own customers in this way and then _continue_ to sell Linux, that is an anti-competitive practice, which I doubt would be
How? Every time you buy a CD the seller is agreeing to not sue you for stealing it. Doesn't mean they can't sue somebody else. You can always sell your own property.
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? All the debate later on this thread about the GPL might be valid, but as far as SCO stopping sales of Linux goes, I think that SCO not wishing to be caught as anti-competitive is at play, and it has some different implications from the GPL issue: As SCO are non-specific about what their complaint is, no other vendor [apart from IBM possibly] can evaluate their gripe or address the problem, so SCO selling Linux would be anti-competitive against anyone apart from IBM. If the complaint was specific on the IP involved and they were suing specific vendors and threatening the customers of only that vendor, that probably would not be anti-competitive. The conclusion I draw after more thought, is that the issue of whether SCO selling Linux is anti-competitive hinges on how specific they make their IP complaint in terms of what IP is involved and in terms of which vendor [and which vendors customers] they threaten. So, if SCO do not wish to be specific about the IP involved, or about the set of vendors and customers under threat, they must pay attention to the anti-competitive issue. The fact that they have dealt with it, suggests that the nature of the threat will remain vague for a good long time yet. The question is why? and what are they up to? regards Vince Littler