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Yes, it appears that SCO is continuing to embark on a reckless course of action in a high-stakes bid where they will likely either triumph and break the bank (and destroy or cripple the open source movement) or destroy the company. They don't seem to have left themselves much wiggle room for when (if) they are later proven to be wrong.

It would be interesting to know whether that aggressive strategy was decided upon entirely by the SCO board and executives or whether they were goaded into it by their high-profile law firm. I'm wondering whether there are any contingency fees in the arrangement with the law firm, or whether the law firm will just pump up their billable hours through engaging in interminable litigation, which seems to be the direction in which they are headed at the moment.

I read on a computer-related website that SCO's revenues are $21,000,000 of which 39% or $8,000,000 are from licensing Unix TO MICROSOFT. I would think that this entire morality play (SCO pretending to preserve the copyright on something (Unix) it didn't write in the first place and acquired FROM SOMEONE ELSE) is MS's way of sowing FUD. I think that is the entire story, and whether SCO even exists several years from now (independently or as acquired by MS) is irrelevant to the main story.

I'm not an attorney, but I cannot recall any business lawsuit in any industry in which the plaintiff was so apparently reckless. I believed when they had filed the suit with IBM that they had a case. I didn't agree with it, but I thought they might have grounds from with to pursue a lawsuit. I can't recall anything in the news like it, in which a plaintiff made such sweeping statements about the ownership of the products of a compeditor, and about the business community and the government owing them royalties. These two claims would seem to mesh perfectly with part of the definition of deceptive trade practices.

SCO has made (as yet) unproved statements about the ownership of IBM's products as well claiming that a broad segment of the industry owes them money. In my opinion, these are the kinds of thing that SCO should only say after a successful verdict has been reached. The standard for determining deceptive trade practices is not even that statements need to be proven as false -- only that the company had the capacity to make false statements.

On the other hand the standard for dertimining whether a work is a derivative work is rather easy. Copyright infringement is based on whether the defendant had some legitimate interest in the copyright work, and whether the work constitutes a derivative work. When considering whether a work that includes the copywrighted work of others is an infringement or a derivative work, there is a standard used to determine how much effort was put into a work before it is considered an infringement. This standard, as with the standard for determining deceptince trade practices, is low.

So as I see it, SCO has several hurdles to overcome if it wants to prevail. Burden of proof is on them to prove: that IBM has absolutely no intellectual property rights to derivative UNIX works under its contracts with AT&T USL; that IBM has absolutely no intellectual property rights to NUMA, JFS, SMP, and copy-on-write; that if IBM did have intellectual property rights to NUMA, and etc that their rights to publish them was greatly restricted.

Even if they are able to prove all that, they still haven't proven that Linux isn't a derivative work. They must show that no minimal amount of effort was put into Linux to make it and isntead proprietary code is used throughout. They must show that Linux is actually a fraudulent copy of UNIX, that minimal effort was not put in it to make it work differently that proprietary UNIX.

Even if all this has been proven to be true, that Linux is simply a AT&T System V UNIX with open source window dressing, they still must face the FTC to prove that they did not have the capacity to make a false statement against IBM, Linux, and others.

Personally, I think SCO is in an uphill battle, and everything they have done has been to raise the stakes. If we were playing Texas Hold-em, I would say SCO has been dealt a pair of nines, but a pair of tens is showing on the flop.

What I want to know is, does this high-stakes game really in the best interests of Caldera/SCO's stockholders?