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Links: SCO Suits Make Companies Cautious About Linux
Posted by Steven Wu on Monday, March 29 @ 17:53:04 EST OpenSource
The San Francisco Chronicle reports how the SCO lawsuits have made companies much more cautious about proclaiming their reliance on Linux.
It used to be that companies couldn't talk enough about using the free Linux operating system, and how much money it was saving them.

No more.

Silence fell when Utah's SCO Group, a small company that claims parts of Linux are derived from software it owns, sued IBM, other vendors that sell Linux packaged with support and, most recently, Linux users DaimlerChrysler AG and AutoZone Inc. . . .

Because dozens of other companies have similar copyright claims to various versions of Unix, experts expect more suits like SCO's to come along, especially if SCO is successful.

The article also discusses indemnification/insurance and the other ways companies are responding to SCO lawsuits.
 
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Groklaw and Microsoft (Score: 1)
by NZheretic on Tuesday, March 30 @ 07:59:33 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) http://itheresies.blogspot.com/
If you bother to follow Groklaw [www.groklaw.net] to any extent, you can begin to watch the SCO Group's Tapestry of Lies [east.perens.com] rapidly unwind. As I wrote in my plea for relief from Microsoft's escalating anti-competitive tactics.
The SCO Group has entered into a series of essentially inherently flawed lawsuits and fraudulent license claims against users of the Linux operating system. Since 1994, Caldera International and the Santa Cruz Operation have been accepting, profiting from and distributing software developed by hundreds of independent developers under the terms of the GPL and LGPL license. The SCO Group has failed to put forward any sustainable legal theory why it should not abide by the terms of the GPL license. Detailed investigation into other facts and evidence which regularly conflict with the SCO Group's various legal claims, filing, press and public statements, raises serous questions which can no longer be explained away by a lack of competence in either the SCO Group's CEOs or the SCO Group's legal representation.
From the recent fileing of Novell, it is obvious that the SCO Group even filed for copyright for works that The SCO Group did not hold the title. [www.groklaw.net] The SCO Group is now threating the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, both federal institutions.
Since the SCO Group has already granted all downstream recipiants the right to use the Linux kernel under the terms of the GPL, any additional license costs the SCO charges the federal govenment, defence contractor, or medicaid provider is an unnecessary expense to the taxpayers. Any such additional license costs should be a clear violation of the USA False claims act [www4.law.cornell.edu]. See The False Claims Act Resource Center [www.falseclaimsact.com] and Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund [www.taf.org]


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