“Software pioneer Mitch Kapor, co-founder of Lotus Development
Corp. and creator of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, is keeping busy
as chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation. Kapor sat down
at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore., this
month to share his views with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli.“What is your take on the lawsuit [The] SCO [Group] has
brought against IBM and its claims that Linux is an unauthorized
derivative of Unix?“My interpretation is that the suit was brought by a group of
people who are pursuing litigation in the absence of a business
strategy. The sad thing is that history has proven they don’t need
the facts on their side and that in many cases your opponent will
ultimately settle with you in a profitable way. That’s what this is
about. I really believe that if there is a problem–and I’m not
saying that there is–that it can’t be rapidly fixed, given the
10,000 developers working on open source. This litigation technique
has been used by the management of the company before…”
Do you think IBM will settle or fight it in court?