News Comment All comments on news story: SCO to File Lawsuit Against DaimlerChrysler Corporation It's a reply to comment: With Linux suits, a question: is it possible to buy software? by: Mike S.  The news stories I see seem to treat the suits against Linux users as a special case. After all, since Linux allows people to run a computer without secret software monitoring their activities and putting a hundred backdoors in their system, it will forever remain an intrinsically un-American product. But I still have to wonder: if this precedent succeeds, will anyone actually be able to buy software? Any $29 video game you buy out of a software store will include software distributions from three or four different companies as components, after all --- and every $29 video game will include a disclaimer against it being merchantable for any purpose at all. So you have no guarantee that a company won't present you with a $700 or $25,000 fee for using a few lines of code buried in the program somewhere, that the soon-to-be-defunct gaming company arguably may have used without permission. And I suppose that the situation for a company spending $10 million on software isn't really much better, because how many vendors could promise that it couldn't happen to them? What lunatic would issue an insurance policy to protect against such unforseeable fees? In the future, some dishonest entity (like whoever wrote the Netsky virus?), might even come up with the notion of sending "provocateurs", planted programmers sent to a competitor armed with a few pages of stolen code on a piece of paper in their shoe, to create such situations. Perhaps it's time for the folks running these automobile companies to realize that they built perfectly serviceable cars before the first computer was ever wired together, and they will continue to build fine automobiles long after people afraid of lawsuits and idiots have smashed the last computer back into the worthless junk from which it came. Because the promise of computers was that communication would bring a universal language of peace, but the only universal language mankind will ever have is that of violence. At the very least, such companies might put an absolute moratorium on purchasing or upgrading any computer equipment or software within the boundaries of the United States, and if they need something computed, farm it out to labor in India.
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