On May 15, 2003 11:10 pm, Curtis Rey wrote:
On Thursday 15 May 2003 06:26, Fred A. Miller wrote:
SCO SUSPENDS LINUX SALES, TORVALDS REACTS
(Source: LinuxWorld.com) SCO CEO and President Darl McBride said the company is 'alerting commercial users to the fact that legal liability for the use of Linux by businesses may extend to end users.'
Now this takes on a two fold aspect.
A) The 1st aspect it about the present allegations of IP infringement by IBM that SCO is now inferring may extend to Linux in general.
I thought that would always be the case. A small piece of code used in one section intially gets reused.
B) The 2nd aspect seems to be wrought from the implications of the 1st, namely a legal challenge to the validity of the GPL and/or the extent to which is is binding and enforcible.
It strikes me that SCO developed, distributed, and entered in to partnerships involved and intrinsically part of Linux. Therefore one assumes that SCO was aware of the implications of the GPL when entering into it. As Linus points out "...as long as they distribute Linux, they are themselves bound by the GPL. Which (among other things) clearly states that you can't limit recipients rights, including the right to further distribute it (without any limitations further down the chain either). "
I'm guessing the software they are claiming is something they didn't give to the Linux world themselves. I'm also getting the impression they'll claim that IBM gave something that was heavily reworked before it got to the Linux world. Nick