SCO's McBride: IT world backs SCO, Aug 15, 2003

Webmaster's note: To put a little historical perspective on this statement, US President Richard Nixon first coined the term "Silent Majority"

"I believe that the silent majority is actually behind SCO in this case," he said. "Others with [intellectual property] they want to protect, they are hoping that SCO is going to prevail. We've been called into the fight, and we're not backing down. We continue to gain in credibility."

McBride also criticized the GNU General Public License (GPL) that's the basis for much of the open-source software marketplace, calling it a "beast" that leaves corporate intellectual property unprotected

2.4.22-rc2-ac2 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 327
Files changed: 850
Files removed: 22

SCO will attempt to win its $3 billion case against IBM by arguing that the General Public Licence (GPL) is invalid.

That's what a pleader at legal practice Boies Schiller and Flexner is telling the Wall Street Journal today.

The GPL licence allows software and work derived from it to be copied by anyone at no charge.

But according to today's WSJ, quoting lawyer Mark Heise, the GPL is pre-empted by US federal copyright law.

To me, the solution is simple. Make sure you have a copy of Knoppix handy. Of course, if you can't get to the Internet, this advice won't help ... but for those of you who read and then heeded my July 18th advice entitled "Knoppix - Delightfully Distracting" ... by downloading and then burninating a CD ... you're all set.

Webmaster's note: My apologies for the alphabet soup headline

In his paper, Rosen identifies some of the legal issues raised by the SCO Group's claims as they relate to Linux development and usage. He does not offer legal advice, but rather frames some of the key questions that companies should ask their own counsel about their use of Linux. He points out that SCO has a long way to go before it can assert broad intellectual property claims against an operating system that was written by thousands of open source programmers worldwide.

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