On Monday, June 16, 2003, at 03:17 AM, Robert Benjamin Johnston wrote:
I have not used IE 5 for consistently except at work for the past six months
and haven't missed it at all. I've been using Camino (formerly Chimera) for
the past six months and am wildly pleased. iCab works extremely well on
9.x. By the way, in regards to the evil empire there was an outstanding
article in Salon about a intellectual property lawsuit from a company
claiming that they owned the copy right to the Unix. They were demanding
licensing fees from everyone to which everyone laughed except for one
company...yes you guessed it. Microsoft paid them a ten million dollar
licensing fee and supported their claim.
That would be the SCO lawsuit. SCO claims that IBM, who is their original target, incorporated parts of SCO's version of Unix into IBM's Linux while they had access to SCO's Unix source code, and those changes have been incorporated into all Linux distributions. Microsoft has had a relationship with SCO unix for decades, way back when it really was the Santa Cruz Operation, selling Unix for PC's at a steep price; iirc Microsoft has made more than one product that ran on SCO and even sold it for a while. (Note, this was back around the era of Apple's first foray into unix, A/UX)
Moreover SCO is running around telling companies that merely use any distro of Linux that they will be liable for infringement penalties.
However SCO has refused to show what, if any, evidence they have of this, except under strict NDA.
All of this is contrary to how IP law, in general, works.
1) You cannot sue the end-user of an infringing product sold by the infringing party.
2) You cannot collect damages *after* you complain about infringement unless you inform the infringing company of exactly what has been stolen. If SCO announced what the infringing code is, I'd wager at least one distro of Linux would have a patch out within hours.
3) IBM said to SCO "Stuff it! See you in court boyo!", which means they certainly feel they have a valid court case, or at least more money that SCO to spend on lawyers.
IAC, since OSX is based on an entirely different (and long ago legally declared open and free) version of Unix it's not got a lot to do with us here. Now, for that we take you to Apple's suit/countersuit versus the Open Group over what, indeed gets to be called Unix, already in progress...<http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/06/12/ HNappleunixsuit_1.html?platforms>
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