Orginal thread from my old forum
This is an interesting court case, and it is only made more interesting by trying to guess what is going on in SCO’s offices. Here is my latest atttempt, which was spurred by this qoute:
A SCO Suit wrote:
SCO spokesman Blake Stowell says his company’s lawsuit will not put an end to Linux.
“Linux could still be used; it just wouldn’t be free,” Stowell said. “These people are upset because they’ve been enjoying a free ride for some time. They’re upset their free ride will potentially be gone.”
This coupled with the fact that SCO seems to not want to let anyone see the code and continue to work on Linux leads me to this:
SCO wants to be able to License Linux.
Here is how I see it going down, if SCO gets what they want:
SCO goes to court and wins that it is their code in the Linux kernel. They then get the judge to seal the court docs and evidence. Now no one that works on the kernel can see the code considered SCO’s and so they cannot remove it from the kernel. Their choices are either to rewrite entire sections of the kernel, or give up. SCO takes the body of the kernel and since no one can use it without using their code they sell licenses to use their code in Linux, effectively licensing Linux. SCO effectively garners an entire OS/kernel which has already outshined and beaten their work, which they control.
If this is true they are using IP rights to work around the GPL and turn it into something more BSD License like. They would practically be doing something like Mac OS X, in that they would be taking a large body of other peoples work and tacking a couple things on top and selling it. The difference is that there would be no “regular BSD” for Linux since all kernels would contain the “SCO Code” or be missing large chunks of the kernel.
This is very not good. Of course it all hinges upon SCO winning their court case, which I do not think is going to happen.