[ Thanks to Jim Dossey
for this link. ]
“I have written before about my sister and how she worked at
EsMark, the old food conglomerate, at a time when the company was
trying to trademark the word ‘soup.’ That story and the audacity
behind it came to mind again this week as further developments took
place in the bizarre saga of SCO versus most of the rest of the
computing world. As you’ll recall, SCO has sued IBM for $1 billion,
claiming Big Blue stole bits of Unix System V and tucked them into
Linux, thus decreasing the value of SCO’s property as the rightful
owner of Unix. SCO then went on to drop its own Linux product line,
and sent a threatening letter to 1,500 big companies claiming they
might be held liable if they continue using Linux. Oh, and in the
middle of all this SCO sold a Unix license to Microsoft. That was
all last week.“This week, Novell–which sold the Unix rights to SCO back in
1995–claimed that while it may have sold rights, it never sold
Unix, and that all patents and trademarks still reside with Novell.
This may not matter all that much given the fact that SCO did buy
from Novell the right to license Unix, something the patent and
copyright holder has not done in eight years. But Novell made a
good point, which was that SCO had been asking for the copyrights
for some time, and Novell had refused. If being the copyright
holder didn’t matter, why did SCO want that role so badly?“Let’s try to make some sense of all this…”