carpe decorum

Bits

Yesterday: SCO claims commercial use of Linux may infringe upon the company's Unix intellectual property rights. The company finds Linux is an “unauthorized derivative” of UNIX, which SCO owns. (It filed suit in March against IBM for violations.) No one apparently has identified the infringement outside of SCO in its suit, according to the news.

Today, in an interview, an SCO senior official says an independent panel will convene to evaluate the SCO claim that Linux is riddled with post-BSD UNIX code, but provided no specifics.

The dust up should be humorous: SCO wants to protect its intellectual property from alleged infringement all the while it committed the same infringement: SCO distributes open-source Caldera Linux under the same GPL as all those other distributions. And if SCO released Linux under the GPL, did this affect the — allegedly — more strictly protected code? Evidently, two distinct bodies of law could come into play in the case, intellectual property (copyright) and trade secrets, which take into account very different and often contradictory arguments. So I look forward to seeing the violations. And I want to hear the argument that while the company knowingly and freely gave away its trade secret, it should be able to sue others using that secret, even when they were doing so under the company's own license.