Eben Moglen, the general counsel for the FSF why SCO doesn’t have a case.
Moglen’s opinions come close to what I already know about the case, things I had mentioned over at Cleverhack’s. I am not what you call, a Linux zealot. I believe that basically all developers are relatively rational people who do the job because they need to do the job and because they love the challenge of solving problems, whether that’s on the Windows platform or on the Linux platform. Anyways:
1. How can you threaten individuals without having shown any evidence?
Moglen: “Legal theories aren’t secrets; if SCO’s lawyers had anything to offer in support of this novel proposition, they would offer it. Not one case decided in the long history of US copyright affords support to this ridiculous conception of an unconstitutional copyright license.”
2. IBM kindly reminded SCO that they were violating the GPL by forcing users to sign new licenses. Hence, why SCO is (recently) claiming that the GPL is unenforcable and void. The ironic part is that SCO did support the GPL until… well, last May.
Moglen: “Unless SCO can show that the GPL is a valid form of permission, and that it has never violated that permission’s terms, it loses the counterclaim, and should be answerable in damages not only to IBM but to all kernel contributors.”
3. Some people say that the millions of dollars of cash infusion after SCO ‘showcased’ their findings should be telling. It doesn’t as many people already point out.
Moglen: “But SCO’s research went no farther than discovering a supposed instance of “copying,” without asking whether SCO had any rights in what had been copied, and certainly without providing the audience to whom it was speaking any indication that the “Linux” it was talking about was a variant for rare computers from which the supposedly-offending code had already been removed.”
So basically SCO chose the ‘Wrong business model’. That’s pretty sad, but it’s pretty ‘Business as usual’.