[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
[Editor’s Note: This story is part of a collection of
articles in ZDNet’s special report,
“Managing the Legal Risks of Linux” -BKP]
“To the outsider, and even to me for some time, the various
lawsuits involving the SCO Group follow a relatively simple story
line. I’m not a lawyer, but after many interviews with the involved
parties and lawyers, the case boils down to divergent
interpretations of the subject matter.“The Linux operating system was coming on strong. A group of
individuals, some with a history of using litigation to extract
wealth from other parties, started to behave like pit bulls. They
clamped onto the Linux ecosystem in hopes of exploiting it for
riches that for the most part have not accrued to anyone. Recall
that Linux and open source are a free ‘David’ in a world of
‘Goliaths.’“The basis of entitlement for those rocking the open source
ecosystem is a handful of copyrighted lines of source code. To the
untrained eye, it seems like a bit of a stretch considering what
percentage of the overall code in Linux the alleged offending code
constitutes. Confirming that cynicism are legal experts, vendors,
and some of the open source community’s squeakiest wheels, who in
their writings, speeches, and interviews are making the original
claims seem all the more implausible. The common view is that SCO
picked the wrong fight and will probably lose…”