LinuxPlanet: SCO: 'Joke' Or Food for Thought?
Nov 24, 2003, 21:00 (8 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Jacqueline Emigh)
"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..."
Complete
Story
Related Story:
CNET
News: Panel: Shared Work, Not Suits, Key to Open Source(Nov 22,
2003)
