From: Mike '/m' 


http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/08/08/1246245.shtml?tid=3

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The SCO Group picked a bad week to try to give up their addiction to news
conferences, especially those regarding their lawsuit against IBM. Red Hat
filed a lawsuit against The SCO Group on Monday and IBM did the same on
Wednesday. Both filings appeared to catch SCO by surprise.

Darl McBride, CEO of The SCO Group and apparent architect of the
"litigation for FUD and profit" business plan they are now
following, tried to raise support for their stand from the enterprise,
framing the battles as being one between law and order on the one side and
intellectual property pirates on the other. Never mind that there is
considerable debate about which side of that line The SCO Group is standing
on, especially after they announced their Linux license. Marketing for the
SCO Linux license consists of a threat to sue commercial users of Linux 2.4
or later who don't buy one.

In the newsconference on Tuesday, McBride said "What is at issue here
is whether intellectual property rights will have any value in the age of
the Internet, where intellectual property rights can be simply taken
without regard for rightful ownership." He added that "Linux
companies seem to encourage that and have even made a business model around
selling unwarranted software code around a "don't ask don't tell"
policy." McBride summed up his arguments by claiming "Our society
is engaged in an important debate to decide whether intellectual property
will remain proprietary or whether it will all become communal property
according to Richard Stallman's vision for all software distributed under
the General Public License, such as Linux."

IBM added insult and irony to the situation late Wednesday afternoon by
filing a countersuit against SCO for four separate instances of patent
infringement. Don't forget that behind all the rhetoric, The SCO Group's
suit against IBM is a contract dispute. Unlike SCO's smoke and mirror
campaign, IBM's complaint stated implicitly which patents SCO has
infringed.

SCO's press release yesterday in response to the IBM lawsuit continued the
theme they began earlier in the week of attacking the Linux business model
and its license rather than focusing on the issues at hand. ...
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  /m

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