Re: M$ licenses Unix
> wha? non metaphor version please :-)
>
they are trying to give SCO more "ammo" that SCO can use against
linux by trying to set an example. and they are doing so before SCO
(to my knowledge) has released a shred of evidence to the public
as to what their claims are based upon. I think of it as those many
patent fights, person A has some patent, goes after a buncha companies/people,
some don't want the headache of a court fight so they license it outright,
the more that license it the more legitimate the claim by the patent holder
becomes and usually makes it easier to win in court later, then the patent
holder, once they have built up enough victories goes after the big fish.
I probably didn't do a good job of explaining, but I think this would be
some of the cheapest anti-linux stuff MS has done for a while. And perhaps
some of the most cost effective, since they get rights at least parts of
the unix codebase from SCO, at the same time as indirectly making linux
look "bad".
being that debian is one of the(if not the) most legally stringent(?)
distributions, I am most curious to see the results of any legal
discussions that the debian legal people have once more information
on this comes to light.
I do watch a lot of CNBC(not an investor just find the corporate scandals
entertaining), IBM had an investor conference call recently and there was
no mention on the news about the lawsuit. I don't think it's a big deal,
only SCO is talking about it, by having MS do a press release this may
get significantly more coverage(I'll see what happens when I get home
and watch my tivo tonight..).
MS is in a similar situation, though they have already had a legal verdict
handed down against them. They licensed some code for their SQL server
product, negotiated poorly(they went the cheap route). The other company
offered many times to give them the extra freedom with the licensed code
for additional fees but MS turned them down. Then MS went and broke
the agreement, and continud to refuse to pay the extra fees, ended up
being something like a 3 year long court case and a few months ago the
final verdict was handed down against them. The court opened the doors to
the other company to go after MS's customers. MS released several(?)
press releases during the court case(which were checked by something like
19 internal lawyers before release) re-assuring their customers that there
was no threat to them, basically outright lying to their customers. And
now the customers may get sued directly. Fortunately for MS only a small
subset of customers are affected(those that modified the code and built
stuff that integrated SQL server(I think) rather then just generic users
that used SQL server as a generic database).
nate
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