“Now that the tide has turned, and SCO is facing the dissolution
of its legal position, claiming to ‘enforce its intellectual
property rights’ while actually massively infringing the rights of
others, the company and its lawyers have jettisoned even the
appearance of legal responsibility. Last week’s Wall Street Journal
carried statements by Mark Heise, outside counsel for SCO,
challenging the ‘legality’ of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU
General Public License (GPL). The GPL both protects against the
baseless claims made by SCO for license fees to be paid by users of
free software, and also prohibits SCO from its ongoing distribution
of the Linux kernel, a distribution which infringes the copyrights
of thousands of contributors to the kernel throughout the world. As
IBM’s recently-filed counterclaim for copyright infringement and
violation of the GPL shows, the GPL is the bulwark of the
community’s legal defense against SCO’s misbehavior. So naturally,
one would expect SCO to bring forward the best possible arguments
against the GPL and its application to the current situation. But
there aren’t any best arguments; there aren’t even any good
arguments, and what SCO’s lawyer actually said was arrant,
unprofessional nonsense…“This argument is frivolous, by which I mean that it would be a
violation of professional obligation for Mr Heise or any other
lawyer to submit it to a court. If it were true, no copyright
license could permit the licensee to make multiple copies of the
licensed program. That would make not just the GPL ‘illegal.’ Mr
Heise’s supposed theory would also invalidate the BSD, Apache, AFL,
OSL, MIT/X11, and all other free software licenses. It would
invalidate the Microsoft Shared Source license. It would also
eliminate Microsoft’s method for the distribution of the Windows
operating system, which is pre-loaded by hard drive manufacturers
onto disk drives they deliver by the hundreds of thousands to PC
manufacturers. The licenses under which the disk drive and PC
manufacturers make multiple copies of Microsoft’s OS would also,
according to Mr Heise, violate the law. Redmond will be
surprised…”