Torvalds Sounds Off On SCO Lawsuit

Waltham, Mass. -- Linus Torvalds won't render his own verdict on SCO Group's legal case against IBM until the Unix code in question is revealed in court.

In an e-mail response to CRN, Torvalds, widely considered the father of Linux, said he is awaiting judgment until SCO identifies the Unix code IBM allegedly misappropriated and handed over to the open-source community.

"SCO isn't even telling what they have, and I'm not a lawyer anyway," Torvalds wrote. "The people I've spoken to seem to think the merit of the case lies in whatever details, and since SCO hasn't disclosed any of those details, they can't say."

Torvalds compared the situation to Clonaid's debunked claim earlier this year that it had cloned a human infant.

"SCO is playing it like the Raelians the organization backed by Clonaid's founder, known as Rael, saying, 'We'll show you proof in a few weeks, through an expert panel that we trust.' Let's see if there is any baby or not."

SCO must be in real trouble. They've chosen to cut their ties forever to the Open Source Movement and the Linux community, and those who are not part of it but appreciate it. They've also made threats that they might sue corporations using Linux which hurts those companies, those companies are future potential customers. Corporations would also probably think twice about entering agreements with SCO to cooperate or share research in the future.

I'm sure Microsoft is happy as can be and has new scary stories for their salespeople to pass on to potential corporate Linux users.

Its interesting that SCO has been dealing with lawyer David Boies on this. Y'all remember him don't you?

MozillaQuest Magazine: It sounds as though this lawsuit is not a suit alleging copyright infringement, patent infringement, or trademark infringement (the standard three prongs of the intellectual property complex). Rather, it appears the Caldera v IBM action is more in the nature of a contract or tort action.
Linus Torvalds: Yeah, I don't personally think they have any IP rights on Linux, and I agree, it looks more like a suit over the contract rather than over Linux itself.
I don't think they are going to win it (very very weak arguments, since at least from a technical perspective I don't think the IBM involvement has been that significant, and SCO was losing out _long_ before IBM started pushing Linux). However, my personal (maybe overly cynical) suspicion is that even _they_ don't think they'll win the suit, and it may be nothing more than a way to force IBM back into license discussions over UNIX itself....
MozillaQuest Magazine: What sort of impact do you believe this sort of lawsuit filed by SCO-Caldera has on the Linux kernel, GNU/Linux, UNIX, and the Linux and free-software communities?
Linus Torvalds: None, really. The people I work with couldn't care less.
MozillaQuest Magazine: Did the Linux kernel and GNU/Linux developers and groups lack the technological capability of producing an enterprise level Linux without being bailed-out by IBM as SCO-Caldera claims?
Linus Torvalds: "Bailed-out by IBM"? Hardly. Oh, IBM has certainly been very helpful, and I like the IBM engineers I work with, but Linux was running on 16-cpu Sun sparc computers long before IBM really got into it.

Now, Linus approved everything that went into the kernel, and he knows all of the contributors. If he thinks the IP bs is without merit, I would tend to agree with him.

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