"SCO's litigation plans around Linux and BSD Unix amount to 'a joke,' said Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Publishing. During an open source roundtable at Comdex, the panel moderator strongly criticized SCO's refusal to go public with more details about its intellectual property (IP) infringement claims. In the same session, however, a Microsoft exec said he sees the SCO case as food for thought among developers.
"Responding to a question from the audience, O'Reilly suggested that, if SCO's allegations really carried much weight, SCO would be willing to elaborate more. He predicted that the SCO beef will 'blow over.' SCO's complaint 'wouldn't matter,' he said, except that certain parties want it to matter. O'Reilly didn't specify which parties he meant.
"In answer to the same question, Microsoft's Jason Matusow predicted that the SCO case will stir up more thinking about the 'role of IP' in the development community. US IP law revolves around four types of protection: patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret, according to Matusow, who is manager of Micosoft's shared source projects. Matusow indicated that Microsoft tends to rely on trade secret protection with the 8,000 Microsoft engineers who have access to Windows code..."
