Story: SCO wants to undermine Linux foundation

Posted by: Alan Campbell (Thursday 30 October 2003, 6:03 PM)

How pathetic. SCO are shooting themselves in teh foot, if not the head, every time they open their corporate mouth. Some of their statements make me question their sanity. Suggesting that the GPL is about controlling copyright, for example. Copyright EXISTS, or not, as decided by the author of something. It is ENFORCED by the courts. The laws governing it are SET by governments. The word CONTROL does not apply anywhere, not have the FSF or anyone else tried to control anything. They have in fact LICENSED the use of COPYRIGHT software under certain SPECIFIED conditions, which is all any licence agreement does. The GPL is not a COPYRIGHT (that is what is stated in the source code, for example, by the named authors), ibut rather it is a LICENCE AGREEMENT (and a good one IMHO). So nowhere does the FSF or anyone else who supports the GPL have in the proper meaning of the word, any way to CONTROL COPYRIGHT. Nor does any government anywhere, although they may be able to control COPYRIGHT LAW, not the same thing at all.

They clearly have no understanding at all of what it is all about. They should drop this and beg forgivness of IBM, Red Hat and everyone else, before it destroys them.

Of course as others have speculated elsewhere, there may be more sinister motives concerning a mediocre software company in Redmond, or stock manipulation aka fraud, or....... They have no case where the apparent issue is concerned, and will lose. Meanwhile the annoyance and damage caused to the innocent is out of all proportion to the importance of SCO to the human race. Sadly the US legal system (like any other?) seems to have no way of killing off this stupid and irrelevant case. maybe they should give Darl McBride his own TV comedy show, he might get 2 or 3 viewers.