On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 05:07:31PM -0400, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > On Wednesday, Aug 27, 2003, at 12:35 US/Eastern, Steve Langasek wrote: > >Are you saying that the Sun code should be regarded as infringing > >solely because SCO is a company controlled by litigious, > >opportunistic bastards who have no qualms about filing suits with no > >legal basis for no other reason than to jack up their stock price and > >give themselves an out from a company with no marketable assets? > No, I'm saying that companies change. SCO didn't use to be like that. > SCO used to be Caldera, which had bought the original SCO. The original > SCO used, AFAIK, reputable tactics to sell its version of Unix. > Companies will do what best suites their share holders. We shouldn't > rely on corporate goodwill to protect us; instead, we should rely on > legal documents like licenses. [IANAL; TINLA.] I don't believe the current lawsuits initiated by SCO have any legal merit; so if the danger from Sun is analogous, I believe the threat of Sun going berzerk and filing frivolous lawsuits is out of scope for this mailing list. We most definitely *should* rely on legal documents like licenses, and ignore the spectre of being sued for something we didn't do, or that wasn't against the law. If Sun, like SCO, is a party to the GPL or the LGPL by virtue of having distributed code they received under that very license, we have a good reason to think we have a valid license from them for any code they own which has been distributed in this fashion, and we also have a good reason to think that if they decided to become sue-happy, they would quickly be met with a countersuit. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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