Troubled software maker SCO's chief executive has claimed the Linux operating system includes Unix source code, during a court case in which Novell is suing SCO for royalties on Unix.
In the hearing, which concludes on Friday, SCO chief executive Darl McBride made claims — including that "Linux is a copy of Unix" — which are directly contradicted by the open-source community and apparently run counter to other SCO testimony, according to trial watchers, including Ars Technica.
SCO sued IBM in 2003, claiming that the IT giant had used copyright code from the Unix operating system which SCO sold, and later extended this suit to other Linux vendors. However, last August, judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns Unix. A four-day court case is now determining Novell's claim for up to $20m (£10m) in royalties from SCO, which declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year.
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This court case could be the end of the line for SCO, though some online commentators have suggested the company will find yet another legal avenue of appeal. More interestingly, some observers have predicted that victory for Novell would open the door for it to sue other vendors, including Sun: "I am still going through the Novell financial filings but they could have a claim to a lot more than the value of the SCOsource licences from Sun alone," said one commentator on Groklaw.
SCOsource is a SCO business division that manages its intellectual property around the Unix operating system.
Talkback
More on this on theinquirer.net
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/02/darl-mcbride-clueless
Somebody must be paying McBride to parrot that same lie, as it always seems to make headlines.
Clueless headlines like the zdnet headline.
Incredible how a CEO can totally destroy a company.
SCO has not been a software maker for years.
I have to confess I'm flummoxed by all this. Mr McB is obviously not a complete moron, he is after all the gaffer of a large company. So unless he knows something that the creators of Linux didn't know when they were writing it .. ie that they were actually just cloning the exact code for Unix .. then there must be a story behind the story.
Maybe he really is being paid off by Big Bill and the Seattle Massif ... I just hope it's a VERY large chunk of change. After all this, he's going to be all but unemployable by anyone else.
If something is repeated often enough it tends, like propoganda, to start to become convincing if not believable, at least in some quarters. Either way it casts doubt. Mind you, not being that technical, I did think that SCO's assertions had been roundly debunked. However, I have always wondered how Linux could be a clone of Unix without infringing.
Nevertheless, I am rather puzzled how Darl McBride can continue with his assertions (testify) in court when all the evidence, already presented in court, seems to contradict him. Isn't this verging on perjury?
I do not believe that our friends in Redmond have given up the war of attrition on Linux and there is a very plausible article in the pick of latest news on Groklaw explaining how their plans for interoperabilty and management tools are not exactly the friendly activity M$ would have us believe but, in part, a part of a another strategy to attempt to marginalise Linux.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/server/interoperability_first_benefit_microsoft.html?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535
Then there's also the (O)OXML saga (debacle) adding further confusion and doubt, mudying the water so to speak and in effect restoring the status quo whereby M$ proprietry formats are the De Facto standard, whilst at the same time not achieving the objective of safe universal access to archived documents unless, of course, you pay M$ (again) for the necessary tools and support