[luau] Red Hat vs. SCO

[Hawaii Linux Institute]

A friend of mine faxed me a copy of Red Hat's complaint against SCO filed at Delaware Federal District Court today.  I am sure this document will soon be readily available on the web if not already so. Red Hat's Complaint contains a very concise summary of the history of Linux and GPL.  In addition to a plead for a "declaratory judgement" (asking the Court to declare that Linux does not infringe any of SCO's intellectual property rights so we can all get on with our businesses), Red Hat also claims that SCO violated Delaware's Deceptive Trade Practice Act because SCO's action has "Disparaged the goods, services, or business of another by false or misleading representation of fact". The significance of Red Hat's DTPA claim, of course, is that it will entitle Red Hat for treble damages as well as recovery of attorney's fees when Red Hat wins the case in court.  At the present time, Red Hat has not named SCO's holding company, The Canopy Group, as a co-defendent.  But this is believed to be simply a matter of strategy, Red Hat can always amend its Complaint to add other defendents when there is evidence justifying so. Since this subject will be extensively discussed in the Linux as well as the legal communities, I will not post any further comment, but just to mention that Hawaii has a similar disparaging-type deceptive trade practice provision (Uniform Deceptive Trade Practice Act Section 481A-3(8)).  I doubt SCO has caused any actual damage, but if it does, we may expect an explosion of law suits similar to Red Hat's, against SCO and perhaps those deeper pockets behind this shamelessly outrageous and fradulent activity. Wayne