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SCO analysis

eWeek (dec. 1) has an excellent article by Peter Galli that summarizes a paper by Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia U Law School, that describes the logical cleft stick SCO’s law suit has placed the company in.

I’m sure not to get this right, but the basic contradiction Moglen sees in SCO’s position stems from (1) SCO’s proclaiming that Linux contains material copyrighted by SCO while (2) simultaneously suing IBM for donating to the Linux kernel materials covered by non-disclosure agreements with SCO. Further (3) SCO distributes Linux under the GPL. According to Moglen, (3) means that SCO has already published its trade secrets and thus must lose against IBM. If SCO argues that the GPL isn’t valid, then SCO has been distributing Linux contributions to which it doesn’t own the copyright.

Further, SCO is violating the GPL (section 6) by adding terms to the license, which means (according to section 4) that it loses the right to distribute the works. Therefore (IBM rightly claims, according to Moglen), SCO is infringing on IBM’s copyrights by distributing IBM’s kernel contributions.

Concludes Moglen:

Not only the facts but also the law are now fundamentally against SCO’s increasingly desperate position.

Please don’t ask me to explain any of the above. I’ve already forgotten what I meant when I wrote it and I never really understood it anyway.

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2 Responses to “SCO analysis”

  1. This is another example of big corporation trying to make a quick buck off consumers. There is another site like this: Northwestern Mutual does the same thing to policy-owners. The site linked to gives the dirt that they have found. Modern corporations make me sick.

  2. SCO is obtaining and attempting to obtain money by deception. So whats the problem? we should just report SCO to the Law enforcement agencies. FBI seems a reasonable option as they are reasonably apolitical and definitely cannot be bribed or coerced.

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