[NCLUG] Organizing against SCO?

[jbass at dmsd.com]

Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com>
> You seem pretty confident that IBM is clearly in the wrong here.
> What is it that has so convinced you?

Just direct experience that courts generally dismiss claims without
merit during pre-trial motions, thus it takes some convincing evidence
for the judge to grant the case to advance to discovery stage which
opens the company up internally to the defense team and experts.

It could be that SCO was in error and court is allowing a sham to
proceed, but even that has ramifications.

The copyright law is not available as a back door into an arbitrary
competitors internal communications. Any laywer pressing such a
frivolous claim risks contempt of court for themselves and their
clients, plus the risk of damages in a counter suit.

So, at least from my experience, the odds are that SCO has a case
that will resulting in a ruling against IBM, otherwise the IBM lawyers
would have had it blocked by now. Probably the only question at the
end of discovery is if the SCO legal team can present enough evidence
to justify a substantial damage award, which may include legally getting
all areas of the Linux kernel that IBM has contributed code to ruled
as tainted. Since SCO appears to pressing the failure of clean room reverse
engineering practice (and is likely to do so at HP, Sun, SGI, and other
genetic UNIX licensed companies as well should they prevail) this raises
serious questions for all areas of Linux (and open software in general)
where contributors had access to licensed code and engineering standards
are weak.

I'm not personally happy about this, as UNIX is replaced with Linux
that pretty much means the end of my livelyhood as a kernel engineer
if those of us with long UNIX track records are unable to participate.

Hopefully the outcome will be some large damage awards, and negotiations
to keep Linux free.

John