[Joe Bonforte]

Only if it agrees, in effect, to be barred from the Linux business forevermore.

I must have missed that. The article just mentioned a non-disclosure agreement. How does that get people out of the Linux business?

[HiTech RedNeck]

For one thing, previously possessed knowledge that happens to be identical to what was seen is not exempted from the ban on disclosure (which most NDA's do exempt, but SCO's quite notably does not). Since UNIX and Linux are so similar, this would prevent the person from ever working on Linux code that does anything similar to what the viewed UNIX code did. SCO is playing games, pure and simple.

[Charles H. (The_r0nin)]

The SCO NDA has been posted here before. It is worded in such a way that a person who signs it would be precluded from ever "disclosing" to anyone the basic procedures and implementations that they see regardless of whether the code is actually infringing or not. So if SCO shows you a module dealing with multi-processor support, you wouldn't be allowed to "disclose" anything involving multi-processing code to anyone, meaning you couldn't write your own code to do the same thing (multi-processor support), even if multi-processing is an industry standard accomplished by multiple vendors in multiple ways. So basically, it restricts what code you can ever work on in the future...

[supercat]

The article just mentioned a non-disclosure agreement. How does that get people out of the Linux business?

The NDA would forbid anyone from ever disclosing knowledge on any subject SCO showed, even if they had that knowledge before SCO showed them, and even if SCO later made that knowledge public.

In other words, the only people who could sign such a license agreement would be those who had no interest in ever working with operating systems again. While this wouldn't affect reporters, it would strongly discourage anyone who had taken the time to familiarize themselves with the code at issue from attending. That, I suspect, was the real purpose of the NDA.